Plan B Forum

Wut?

The thriving cotton industry brought Jewish merchants to the southern states of the US in the 19th Century. Their synagogues once attracted hundreds of worshippers but now, many Deep South Jewish communities are preparing to shut up shop.

I didn't come to Mississippi to bury the Jews of the Delta. I did come to mourn them. But stories don't always turn out how you think.

Life is different in the Delta, a swathe of hugely fertile land on Mississippi's western border with Arkansas. Life is slower in the Delta. There's not a lot of hurrying - there's an awful lot of eating.

And the people are different too. There's the guitar-wielding rabbi. The 76-year-old bar mitzvah student. The southern belle in her 80s who goes to synagogue every Friday night.

Jews came to the Delta attracted by its wealth - they became the middlemen, serving both those who drew gold from the rich land, and those that had to pull it out of the soil. They became the merchants, selling clothes and groceries and medicines and cloth. Main Streets in small towns up and down the Delta are dotted with faded shop signs announcing Abraham's and Levy's, Goldberg's and Cohen's.


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Jesse Grant chose this unfortunate time to write to Sam to say he’d signed a contract with Mack, Stadler and Glazer to use his influence to wheedle his obliging boy into granting them permits to trade in cotton. Then he made it worse by coming down from Cincinnati to press his case. Grant tossed him out on his ear, which convinced the company to cancel the contract and Jesse to start a lawsuit against them. It also caused Sam to allow a document to be published that gave Abe Lincoln a near fit. Much of this came out after the war when Sam was running for President himself but the immediate effect upon me of Grant’s fury at Halleck and his own father was that Rawlins was unleashed.

The first I knew of it was when I was hauled up in front of Rawlins, sitting alone in front parlour of a house he’d temporarily taken possession of. I don’t think he knew it but it had been a rather high-class whorehouse and I’d enjoyed contemplating how fitting that was. That didn’t matter now. What did matter was my conviction that Grant was hiding on the other side of a partly opened door behind Rawlins who sat like a stick in a hard chair contemplating a document that he’d been writing. He made a great show of not knowing that I had been pushed into the room and so I made a great show of crossing to a comfortable chair beneath the window and plumping myself down noisily. The effect was somewhat spoiled by a tremendous wafting of face powder and perfume that escaped the cushions and stuck with me for the rest of the day. It was the last pleasant aroma that room would experience.

“Flashman,” said Rawlins with his usual lack of originality. He looked altogether too pleased with himself for my liking and I was sorry to note a certain rumbling in my guts, which in many ways have an intuition that my mind is slower to appreciate. “Do you know what this is?” He waved his hand over the document.

“Too much to hope that it’s your confession and suicide note?” I asked, still relying on Grant being in the next room and listening hard. Rawlins laugh was brief and involved no part of his face in empathetic good will.

“No, I think it’s more likely yours,” he replied. “It’s an order that General Grant will be issuing shortly. Let’s see... ah, here it is. ‘Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established to...’ and so on... ah, yes... ‘are hereby expelled from the Department within twenty-four hours...’ and some other things. Can that be clearer?”

Guinevere wrote:Judah Benjamin, he Attorney General and later Secretary of War of the Confederacy was a jew. The first jewish cabinet member of any "United States" government.

Rick wrote:No more subsidy for cotton Lib

There are abandoned cotton gins all over the countryside.

rubato wrote:

Guinevere wrote:Judah Benjamin, he Attorney General and later Secretary of War of the Confederacy was a jew. The first jewish cabinet member of any "United States" government.

Fritz Haber was an uber-patriotic German Jew. So ?

yrs,
rubato