Joining the White Club
Race is indeed a construct, and it's constructed on a rather evil foundation
History can take you down some interesting rabbit holes. Modern-day Confederates — and by this I mean Republicans — seem hell-bent on forcing Christianity down everybody's throat. So it’s only reasonable to ask about the original Confederates: how much separation of church and state existed in the Confederacy?
One answer comes straight from the Constitution of the C.S.A., which actually includes an Establishment Clause similar to the U.S. Constitution’s. Theoretically, at least, the Confederacy offered different religions equal footing not offered to different colors of humans.
Of course there is good reason the Bible Belt is known by that name. Much has to do with the First and Second Great Awakenings, which gained much more traction in the South, as well as the disproportionate political influence that religion played throughout America. In his travels in brand-new America as a French prison researcher, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that religion was, in fact, the first of American political institutions. The Constitution's Establishment Clause has been ignored and disrespected almost from the beginning.
But in practice how did different religions fare in the Confederate slave states? How, for example, were Jews tolerated?
A South Carolina lawyer-historian, Robert Rosen, actually wrote a book on the subject. Rosen's "Jewish Confederates" comes to the conclusion that, while Southern Jews (counter to some narratives) did not play an outsized role in the slave trade (they were only 0.2% of the population), they were nevertheless relatively well-accepted and enthusiastic members of Southern slave-based society — a fact that Rosen repeats with delight many times.
Jonathan Sarna, a professor at Brandeis University and arguably one of the finest scholars on American Jews, who also wrote two books about Jews during the Civil War, reviewed Rosen's book. Let us just say it is a mixed review.
While admiring Rosen's research, Sarna nevertheless deducts points for Rosen's blindness to the role that slavery played in Southern acceptance of Jews. Sarna reminds readers that Jews were invited to join the "white club" primarily because in the antebellum South whites were vastly outnumbered (4-1 in some cases) by the slaves they owned. Sarna also compares Jews' role in the South to other societies where they were a "tolerated" minority:
"Since Whites formed a minority of the population in many of the communities where Jews lived and feared the Black majority, Whites had every incentive to treat Jews well; Jews, in return, had every incentive to support the racial status quo. Very similar situations obtained in colonial Surinam and in twentieth-century South Africa. In all of these places, the tragic irony is that Jews achieved the social status and recognition that they did because of Black slavery and racial oppression. Of course, the situation of Blacks in the South would have been identical without the presence of Jews. But any honest analysis of the world of Jewish Confederates needs to begin with the realization, lacking here, that Jews benefited – enormously—from the very same system that kept Blacks in bondage."
There's obviously a lesson here for any white person. Two hundred years ago most of us — Jews, Portuguese, Italians, Germans, Poles, Greek, Irish, you name it — would never have been accepted as equals in America's dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant world.
It was only thanks to racism that we all became white enough to join the club.