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In 1910 the Dixie Publishing Company of Moravian Falls, North Carolina, published The Jew a Negro, Being A Study of the Jewish Ancestry from an Impartial Standpoint by the Rev. Arthur T. Abernethy, A.M., Ph.D. Abernethy-a preacher, professor, and rustic journalist-sought to demonstrate through "ethnology" and "Scriptural proofs" how "the Jew of to-day, as well as his ancestors in other times, is the kinsman and descendant of the Negro." 1
Behind The Jew a Negro lay a century of transatlantic speculation on the racial status of the Jew. In the American South the problem of the Jew's racial identity was a footnote to the larger debate on white-black relations, a question pushed forward in the racially unsettled period between 1850 to 1915. Jews were accepted as white, but their precise racial place was not fixed. A long tradition of European folklore, reinforced by an emerging racial science, cast the Jew on the black side of the color line. Southern racial ideology was not distinctly regional but borrowed from the international debate. Ideologies born in the salons of European intellectuals and the academies of New England professors found their way into the sermons of backwoods Southern preachers like Abernethy. Such a work as The Jew a Negro is representative of texts that transmitted cosmopolitan racial ideologies into Southern popular culture.
Jews were a racial tabula rasa upon which anything could be written. Over the course of the nineteenth century, nationalists split races into increasingly discriminating categories. Whether racial theorists defined Jews as Semites or-as became more common later in the century-Orientals, the Jews' status as Europeans was questioned. The Jews' color was described variously as white, black, or mixed. The anthropological status of the Jews refiected their social standing. In the American South after Reconstruction, a new social line between Jew and white gentile followed the disengagement of white and black. This separation occurred at a time when the Jews' color was being questioned. The immigration of millions of "swarthy" East European Jews exacerbated these racial anxieties, although very few settled in the South.
The Jews who came South entered a bipolar racial society. Did Southern race thinking on the black affect the Jew's social status? What was the place of the Jew in the Southern...