jews felt at home in America's slave-holding South

[yankeedoodle]

The Irish Question
https://occidentaldissent.com/2025/03/27/the-irish-question/

Why wasn't there a "Jewish Question" in the South?

Why do White Southerners struggle so hard to understand this issue? I would say that to ask such a question is to answer it. Historically speaking, there wasn't a "Judenfrage" in the South because the American South was really nothing like the places Jews came from in Europe.

The American South was a slave society with a caste system that was based on race. This had the strange side effect of being "good for the Jews." It was also good for other European minorities. In the South, a Jewish merchant or an Irish Catholic planter was a White man. They were coded as belonging to the master caste and were automatically granted citizenship and higher social status than non-Whites. Jews always had all the same rights and liberties as other White people in the Southern states.

By the time of the Confederacy, Jews were getting elected to Congress in the South and had become part of the Southern establishment like Judah Benjamin. The same was true of other minorities. Sen. Pierre Soulé, for example, who represented Louisiana in the Senate was born in France. There were too many Scots-Irish Presbyterians to count who held elected office in the South alongside Southerners of English ancestry. Slavery gave all of them a stake in preserving the social and economic order.

Think of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind growing up on her bucolic plantation Tara on the outskirts of Atlanta in the Old South. Scarlett's character was of Irish Catholic and French Huguenot ancestry and her plantation was plopped smack in the middle of a vast sea of White people descended from Irish Protestants who came to this country from Ulster. The same was true of my ancestors from Dublin in Laurens County, GA who were Irish on one side and Scots-Irish on the other side. Those Old World hatreds faded away and became less relevant in the social context of the Georgia countryside.

The first English plantations were in Ireland. Ulster is a gigantic plantation. The Irish had been dispossessed of their land and sovereignty for generations by the English. Protestantism had been forced on Ireland. The great Irish Famine of 1845 to 1852 was within living memory, but here the Irish had been cut into and integrated into our social order. The Irish and Jews were treated as settlers like the Huguenots and Scots-Irish and were granted the rank of White. This is why neither group was problematic for us.

Slavery was a great integrationist. The most troublesome and disaffected parts of the South were the mountains of Appalachia and parts of Texas that were thinly enslaved. There was no need for antisemitism in the South because the Jews that came here easily assimilated into our social system and became invested in slavery. White supremacy was "good for the Jews" for centuries. That's why the ones who lived here and who were born here never attempted to overthrow that system.

In Ireland, there was an Irish Question because the people who lived there were sharply divided over ethnicity and religion. They identified as English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic. They didn't see themselves as White. Ireland is still divided. Similarly, a Jew in Germany or in the ghettoes of Poland, Ukraine and Russia was first and foremost a Jew. The Jewish Question existed because social conditions in southern, central and eastern Europe were totally different than they were here. Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century was a boiling cauldron of radical leftwing politics.

The same was true of our Free States.

By the time of the Civil War, it was becoming a problem there too due to the absence of slavery. The Irish never rioted against us in the South. The Irish also enthusiastically supported the Confederacy. The North has always been far more ethnically and religiously divided than the South. It has always been more of a hotbed of radical and revolutionary politics. It has a weaker sectional identity. Northerners just don't love their states and section like White Southerners of all backgrounds seem to do. https://www.amazon.com/Green-Gray-Confederate-States-America/dp/1469607565/ref=pd_lpo_d_sccl_1/134-1631273-0554033?pd_rd_w=mwANs&content-id=amzn1.sym.4c8c52db-06f8-4e42-8e56-912796f2ea6c&pf_rd_p=4c8c52db-06f8-4e42-8e56-912796f2ea6c&pf_rd_r=GWMDRWCXSQB68X180MPX&pd_rd_wg=vmjyq&pd_rd_r=1002c369-a430-455c-a81b-1c942d0af5a8&pd_rd_i=1469607565&psc=1

Eventually, we *did* get saddled with a Jewish Question, not the South, but America at large ... which thoughtlessly imported millions of Jews from the ghettos of southern, central and eastern Europe between the 1880s and 1920s, and millions of other people from all sorts of European backgrounds. Those people who came here fresh off the boat from Poland and Ukraine didn't stop nursing grudges that go back a thousand years after stepping foot on American soil. World War II made it worse. There was nothing like slavery to integrate them which was successful in integrating earlier waves of immigrants.

We talk about the "Jewish Question" or Judenfrage because the NS fandom prefers to use that ideological frame to understand our problems in early 21st century America. I think it is misleading for a number of reasons. It is a poor way of understanding education polarization. The elites aren't simply Jews. They come from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Jews are smart and overrepresented among this class of college graduates, but they all share the same worldview and preferences. Jews are also melting into this generic secular urbanite bugman class. A huge percentage of them already have mixed ancestry or children. I don't see it as being much like the problem facing the Nazis in mid-20th century Germany.

Trying to understand the American past through the lens of the Jewish Question is even more highly misleading. It is trying to force a round peg into a square hole. There was no Irish Question here either because we don't live in Ireland, but in a society that was fundamentally different.

Note: This tendency to strip out the historical context seems essential to "NS." If you can dispense with German ethnicity and culture, you can mislead yourself about anything

[yankeedoodle]

Related material that is excerpted from this article:
President McKinley's Assassination
https://occidentaldissent.com/2025/03/30/president-mckinleys-assassination/

William McKinley's assassination in 1901 and the attempted assassination of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick by the Jewish anarchist Alexander Berkman in 1892 during the Homestead Strike could be properly classified as Chapter 1 in a book on the Jewish Question in the United States.

As I have already explained, Jews had lived in America for centuries as a tiny minority and for the most part had assimilated, especially in the South. There is a qualitative difference between Jews like Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and Jewish revolutionaries like, say, Emma Goldman or Alexander Berkman. The former had assimilated into the American mainstream. Benjamin was part of the antebellum Southern establishment. The latter were radicals trying to topple the social order.

Leon Czolgosz was the son of Polish immigrants, but he had been radicalized by Emma Goldman. President McKinley's life was cut short as a direct result of our loose Gilded Age immigration policy which later caused us so many problems in the 20th century. Along with the thoughtless emancipation of millions of slaves and Reconstruction, it was the Original Sin of the victorious North.


[...]

One more thing.

If we zoom out from the focus on McKinley, Goldman and Czolgosz, we can see a larger problem. President James Garfield had been assassinated in 1881 by the crank Charles Guiteau. President Theodore Roosevelt had his own brush with death in 1912 when was nearly assassinated by the crank John Schrank. The term "crank" itself was popularized in the Gilded Age. It was an age of violent cranks.

Several generations earlier, George Fitzhugh had written at length in the 1850s about what he saw as this tendency of "Free Society" in the North and Europe to produce violent fanatics. Fitzhugh believed that the South had been spared this fate and was culturally conservative because of slavery. He saw Europe and our Northern states as being full of radicals. He lived to see the Paris Commune of 1871. There was no equivalent of this subculture of leftwing radicalism in the American South.