Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life on the Web

A new project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library opens a digital window onto Jewish history and life in the American South. A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life chronicles the story of Jewish settlers in the South and their descendents, from the late 1600's through the 21st century.

Jews were welcomed in colonial British Carolina as traders and merchants even when they faced persecution or discrimination elsewhere. A Portion of the People reflects this long history with portraits, maps, historical documents, and ritual books and objects from this early period through the present. The accompanying text provides context and explanation.

Oral history audio casts a personal light on history. "Scrambled eggs and lox-that's what I'd have every morning, with grits," recalls Sandra Garfinkel Shapiro, who was born in South Carolina in 1935. "You'd say it's Southern-Yiddish."

"A Portion of the People is a long-anticipated educational tool for those interested in American Jewish history," comments Marcie C. Ferris, Associate Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, praising the combination of "the best scholarship on the Jewish South" with vivid and engaging source materials.

The site has had its own odyssey, beginning with a traveling exhibit of the same name that was mounted in 2002 by the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina. It drew upon materials from more than a half-dozen museums, libraries, and historical societies.

Concerned that the dismantling of the exhibit would mean the loss of a unique and valuable record, Ferris contacted then-University Librarian Joe Hewitt.

"We had the knowledge and the staff in place," notes Hewitt. "This seemed like an important contribution to scholarship and a way to share an important aspect of southern history with anybody who is interested."

The library's web team programmed the website, advised on content by Dale Rosengarten, Curator of the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston. It was Rosengarten who curated the original exhibit and who wrote the text for the online version. The North Carolina Collection Gallery at the UNC Library also provided guidance and expertise.

The project has four segments divided chronologically:

First Families begins with the coming of Jewish settlers to Carolina in the late 1600s and ends circa 1820, on the brink of "The Birth of Reform."
This Happy Land portrays religious life in the antebellum period and culminates with the Confederate defeat.
Pledging Allegiance opens with the arrival of eastern European Jews at the turn of the twentieth century and spans the two World Wars.
Palmetto Jews, a portfolio of photographs by Bill Aron, moves the story into the twenty-first century, revealing the diversity and vitality of contemporary southern Jewish life. Taken one year before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the black and white photographs document a world that now strikes one as impossibly carefree, deeply rooted yet moving fast into the future.

The phrase "a portion of the people" comes from a letter written in 1816 by Charleston-born Isaac Harby to Secretary of State James Monroe. He reminded the future president that Jews "are by no means to be considered as a Religious sect, tolerated by government; they constitute a portion of the People."