Re-negotiating Jewish Identity in the Bible Belt: Peddlers and Merchants in the Post-Civil War South

In 1900, Russian-born Joseph Miller began peddling goods in Charleston and a decade later was the proprietor of The Standard Cloak Company in downtown Spartanburg, a city in South Carolina’s upcountry. As a founding member and first Vice-President of Temple B’nai Israel, Miller generated Jewish identity among the community’s small but growing Jewish population. The experience of peddlers and merchants such as Joseph Miller reflects a larger history of Jewish migrants who came to the South in search of economic prosperity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While creating elaborate trade and mercantile connections and transnational networks, Jewish economic activity anchored the commercial life of many rural communities and growing cities in the South.

This paper examines Jewish peddlers and merchants in the Upcountry of South Carolina and western North Carolina following the Civil War through the early decades of the twentieth century. Lured to the South by a demand for goods in rural back-country regions and small mountain towns, Jewish peddlers sold their goods and Jewish merchants operated clothing and dry-goods stores from the peaks to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This study demonstrates how Jewish peddlers and merchants created the commercial foundation of many Southern towns and cities and in the process established their own communal institutions. While building synagogues and creating informal networks of financial support for their brethren, first generation Jews put down roots in conservative Protestant soil. In the process, Jewish identity was transformed and redefined according to southern norms.