Dixie

Over at Counter-Currents, Andrew Hamilton has stumbled across something that we have discussed several times here at Occidental Dissent.

Historically speaking, there wasn’t a Jewish Question in the Deep South. Jews did not develop their present reputation as a threat to white supremacy until the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-twentieth century.

Jews in the South participated in the slave trade, owned slaves, profited off slavery as merchants (Lehman Brothers was founded in Montgomery), identified with the White majority, served in the Confederate government, fought for the Confederacy, and even crafted many of the segregation laws of the Jim Crow South.

I know it is hard to believe after everything that has happened since then. We’re used to thinking of Jews as an undigestable antagonistic element in our society, but Southerners traditionally haven’t thought of them this way because until recently they had no reason to do so.

A year ago, I posted a funny video of the Jews of Selma, AL reminiscing on the Civil Rights Movement – when MLK was marching in Selma in 1965, the local Jews were the business establishment in town, and it was their downtown stores that enforced segregation laws which the blacks were boycotting.

Thousands of Northern Jews, liberal Protestants, and Unitarians stirred up by the MSM came to Selma ranting about racism and segregation and anti-Semitism in Alabama. Some of the local Jews patiently explained to them that Jews had served as mayors of the town and had been involved in building the local country club and were some of its most prominent members.

As Andrew Hamilton explains, Jews were even members of the original Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction – Jews thought of themselves as White at the time or went along with being White because claiming whiteness worked heavily to their advantage.

The Southern Jewish experience (and the Southern Catholic experience) differs in many ways from the North because the presence of African slavery among us fostered a culture of white supremacy that muted ethnic, class, and religious divisions.

The Jews who immigrated to the North from the ghettos of Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century had been involved in the radical leftwing subculture that flourished in that region and brought that attitude with them to America.

Sephardic Jews who had lived for centuries in the Caribbean and the antebellum South were accustomed to racialism and white supremacy and actually played a key role in bringing plantation slavery from Portuguese Brazil to the English and French colonies in the Lesser Antilles.

I know that Jews were a huge number of the slaveowners in Jamaica which was the biggest and most profitable English sugar colony in the Caribbean. They were particularly active in the Dutch and Portuguese colonies in the Caribbean and South America.

It would be interesting to find out how involved Jews were in the Portuguese slave trade in West Central Africa because that region was the biggest supplier of slaves to the Americas in the eighteenth century at the height of the slave trade.

I know from my own research into the Caribbean slave colonies that Jews were involved in all aspects of the slave trade and that there is a lot of hidden truth to this subject which Jewish historians are silent on for understandable reasons.

Getting to the bottom of that story would be a good chapter for the book on the Caribbean that I eventually plan to write.