PEOPLE CANNOT CHANGE TRUTH, BUT TRUTH CAN CHANGE PEOPLE.

Jews In The Confederacy

The book, by Charleston lawyer Robert Rosen, reveals what amounts to a de facto coverup of the 300-plus-year history of Jews in the South.

BOOK DETAILING 'SECRET' CHAPTER OF HISTORY STIRS CONTROVERSY

Bill Hendrick - Staff
Sunday, January 7, 2001

As a kid growing up in Atlanta's Druid Hills neighborhood in the mid-1950s, Reg Regenstein often went relic hunting with friends, hoping to find Civil War cannonballs and artillery shells that were being dug up with regularity.

"I'd find an old bullet sometimes, but never anything of significance," says Regenstein, a 57-year-old author and former CIA intelligence officer. "But it was pretty common for people to find Minie balls and shells, some still lodged in trees."

Unlike most of his Jewish friends, he didn't see the Civil War through an impersonal prism --- as somebody else's history. He vaguely knew it was his own, because many of his ancestors fought in what his mother, longtime civil rights supporter Helen Regenstein, still calls the "War of Northern Aggression."

Now, to his delight, he's learning much more than he ever dreamed he would, mostly because of a new book, "The Jewish Confederates" (University of South Carolina Press, $39.95), which is stirring controversy among Jews and attracting some scholarly praise. The book, by Charleston lawyer Robert Rosen, reveals what amounts to a de facto coverup of the 300-plus-year history of Jews in the South.

Historians have recorded that African-Americans and Indians fought in the Rebel army, but Rosen's is the first major work detailing the contribution of the South's Jewish community, then about 25,000 strong, to the Lost Cause.

"Many folks," says Rosen, 53, "are reluctant to admit that a people known for liberal views, and for annually celebrating their own freedom from slavery in Egypt during the Passover holiday, supported the Confederacy, which defended human bondage. It's not something many Jews want to hear."

Not only did thousands of Southern Jews fight in the Confederate army, but hundreds owned slaves, including an ancestor of the Regensteins. This is a paradox that many Jews --- long known for ardent support of the civil rights movement --- find hard to swallow.

"To Mother, it's horrifying," says Regenstein, whose father, Louis Regenstein, was a prominent lawyer who did free legal consulting for predominantly black Clark Atlanta University for years. "My ancestors have been in this country, in the South, since before the American Revolution. We were part of the culture, the country, so naturally, my ancestors fought for their country, and we're very proud of that."

Rosen, who is Jewish, reports in his meticulously documented 378-page book that up to 3,000 Jews donned Confederate gray. The proportion was much higher than in the North, where maybe 8,000 out of 200,000 Jews took up arms, says Mark Greenberg, chief historian for the Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Miss.

Contrary to popular belief, "Jews had found themselves very much at home in the South, much more so than elsewhere," says the University of Georgia's Emory Thomas, a historian and author of many Civil War books. "They were accepted members of the community, and therefore they cast their loyalties with this new Confederacy, bought bonds and did everything patriotic Southerners would do."

Many were so patriotic, he adds, that "there was a lively discussion in the Richmond papers pointing out that the Jewish population of the city had supplied more Confederate soldiers than the population as a whole, in terms of percentage."

But few even know that Judah Benjamin, a famous Louisiana lawyer, not only served in the U.S. Senate, he was Jefferson Davis' attorney general, secretary of war and secretary of state.

"As the years have gone on, having Confederate ancestors has become very politically incorrect," Rosen adds. "Academics who write the history, after all, are especially vulnerable to (political correctness) on college campuses, and they especially want to avoid the association with slavery."

Audiences have been, on occasion, angry.

"Many modern Jews reject the idea that Jews could ever have supported a cause or government which supported slavery," Rosen says. "That's not logical, considering how long Jews have been in the South. But it's how a lot of folks feel."

Because most Jews were merchants, small farmers, peddlers, doctors or lawyers, Rosen says, relatively few actually owned plantations --- or slaves. Still, the "paradox" that some "fought for the Confederacy" rankles many.

Regenstein's mother is ashamed that at least one ancestor owned slaves, but proud that her grandfather, Andrew Jackson Moses Jr., and four of his brothers served in the Confederate army. One of her great-uncles was killed in action, two were wounded and another captured.

"People need to remember there have been Jews in the South since the late 1600s," says Greenberg of Mississippi. "Not surprisingly, having been in the South for so long in many cases, they were steeped in all of the Southern mores. They were very sensitive to the fact that America had given them religious, economic and social freedom they didn't enjoy in Europe. And one of the requirements of American freedom and liberty is that you fight for the country when you are asked or required to do so. And the Confederacy, to them, was a country."

Another reason this chapter in Southern history isn't known is that the great wave of Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe starting in the 1880s were too poor and too busy to think much about the Civil War, if they knew about it at all, Rosen says, and friction between old-time Jews and the newcomers helped keep the "secret."

"The educational systems in the South still don't emphasize it," says New York historian Eli Evans, author of several books on contemporary Southern Jewry. "That's why this book by Rosen is a revelation for everybody. The Jewish population in the South has quadrupled in the past 25 years, but few Jews know much about their history there.

"Jews have always taken on the culture around them, the food, accents, dress," Evans says. "And because of a modern 'Gone With the Wind' idea about the South before the Civil War, Jewish history in the region is simply not a part of the American memory."

And that's never bothered most Jews, Rosen says. They've learned over the past 1,000-plus years of persecution to not make waves --- wherever they lived.

Martin Perlmutter, director of Jewish studies at the College of Charleston, contends that many Jews fear Rosen's book will provide ammunition to African-American leaders like Louis Farrakhan, who has claimed that "Jews were disproportionate in their ownership of slaves and in the slave trade," which isn't true.

"Jewish people don't like to hear that Jews had any slaves at all, and Rosen found that, of course, some had slaves, just as many free blacks did," Perlmutter says. "Free blacks owned more slaves than Jews did. What Rosen lays out very convincingly is that Jews have been embraced by the South; the South has done well by them; they have always been patriots; and they have had it better here than they've ever had it before in other countries."

According to Greenberg, anti-Semitism in the South was mostly latent in the mid-19th century, in part because Jews were so widely dispersed. But as Jewish emigration to the region mushroomed in the last years of the 19th century, it became more virulent, contributing to such incidents as the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta. The Ku Klux Klan and its backers looked on Jews as carpetbaggers who'd moved South to exploit "real Southerners," Perlmutter says, and Jewish support for civil rights led to the bombing of The Temple on Peachtree Street in 1958.

"It was OK to be anti-Semitic in Boston in the 19th century," Rosen says. "Jewish immigrants were discriminated against in New York. There was less of this in New Orleans and Charleston, I think because of the diversity of religions in Southern cities, the lack of Puritanism, which was anti-Semitic generally."

In the North, Greenberg says, Jews "formed a larger percentage of the population and therefore were perceived as a greater economic and social threat."

History books gloss over the fact that Union generals like Ulysses Grant and William Sherman, who burned Atlanta, talked about "damned Jewish peddlers," while both Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee were known to have many Jewish friends.

Grant once issued an order expelling all Jews from Tennessee and nearby states. In the South, the only comparable incident involved an expulsion decree in Thomasville, Ga., but it was never enforced, Greenberg says.

Also, he adds, the Northern press was openly hostile to Jews, which wasn't as true in the South.

Though anti-Semitism is based on bigotry, Rosen suggests that in the South, it has mostly been less mean-spirited. For example, when veterans of the 12th Alabama infantry penned their regimental history, one member wrote this about Maj. Adolph Proskauer, who led the unit at Gettysburg: "Our gallant Jew major smoked his cigars calmly and cooly in the thickest of the fight."

The remark was meant as praise, Rosen says, not as an anti-Semitic slur.

No one knows how many of the South's Jews have rebel ancestors. But dozens, probably hundreds, of Atlanta's 100,000 Jews do.

Cecil Alexander, a prominent 81-year-old architect, jokes that his grandfather, Julius Alexander, left Atlanta for Savannah to fight. "The story in my family goes he jumped out of the trenches and waved the Confederate battle flag, and no one shot at him. My theory is, somebody that dumb, they must not have wanted to kill. My family evacuated the city when Sherman was approaching."

Atlantan Jacob Haas, 90, is the great-grandson of the first Jew to settle here, in 1845. His grandfather, also named Jacob, fought in the Battle of Atlanta.

"He was peddling goods in Tennessee when he was told to join the Confederate army or go back to Germany, so he stayed," Haas says with a laugh. "There are a lot of living descendants of the Haas Confederates who still live here."

Neither Alexander nor Haas nor the Regensteins think they have anything to apologize for.

"I'm very proud my grandfather and uncles fought for the Confederacy," Helen Regenstein says. "My grandmother was always an unreconstructed Rebel, proud that her son died in a glorious cause. My parents still had strong anti-Yankee sentiments. They destroyed everything, you know."

The family's culinary traditions are more reflective of Southern than Jewish heritage. Though they sometimes eat Jewish foods like matzo and potato latkes, their favorite staples have Deep South roots. Most honored guests in the Regensteins' elegant Buckhead home are served a healthy portion of Helen Regenstein's homemade "South Carolina Low Country Hot Pepper Jelly."

"The recipe has been passed down in my family forever, probably since before the Civil War," she says, smiling.

"We may be Southern through and through, but we're also Jewish," her son says. "I grew up on grits and country ham like any Southern boy."

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