(Jewish Group) The Deep South is changing, but Jews are still stuck in the middle

As usual, a Jew was in North Carolina before anyone thought to name it. In 1585, a Prague-born metallurgist named Joachim Ganz joined Sir Walter Raleigh’s second expedition to the Roanake colony. Ganz may have inspired the character of Joabin, the Jewish scientist in Francis Bacon’s utopian fiction New Atlantis (1626).

In 1669, the Fundamental Constitution of the Carolinas, written by John Locke, opened immigration to “Jews, heathens, and other dissenters”. The traditional sequence of merchants, peddlers, philanthropists and academics followed.

Then as now, Jews never quite fitted into America’s racial rubric. North Carolina’s Jews supported the Confederacy, and as late as the 1950s, the Jews of High Point, NC organised a statewide debutante cotillion (a Southern coming-out ball).

At Williamston, NC in 1925, a mob castrated a salesman named Joseph Needleman after accusing him of looking the wrong way at a white woman. During the Civil Rights era, bombs were planted at synagogues in Gastonia and Charlotte.


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