Theodore Sidney
Moise's portrait of Caroline Agnes Moise Lopez (1854-1885) is one of the
heirloom art objects on view at McKissick Museum. Through portraits,
photographs, original documents, diaries, family memorabilia, military
uniforms, business records and Sabbath candlesticks, the long and eventful
history of Carolina's Jews is recounted in
A Portion
of the People
Three Hundred Years
of Southen Jewish Life
Absorb yourself in South
Carolina's Jewish heritage by reading some of the
museum's gallery handouts.
One Great Political Family
Francis Salvador
Late in 1773, Francis Salvador, a young Jewish Englishman of
Portuguese descent, set sail from London to Charleston, South Carolina.
His intention was to recoup the family fortunes by planting indigo on 7,000
acres of upcountry land purchased from his uncle. (The total family holdings
of 100,000 acres were known as the "Jew’s Land.")
Swept up in the excitement leading to the American Revolution, Salvador
identified at once with the patriot cause. In December 1774, at age 27,
he was elected to the First Provincial Congress of South Carolina as one
of ten deputies from Ninety Six, the colony’s second most populous district.
Thus Salvador became the first professing Jew in America to serve in a
legislative assembly.
He is also the first Jew known to have died in the Revolution. Before
daylight on August 1, 1776, his militia troop was ambushed by Indians and
Tories hidden behind a fence near the town of Seneca. Salvador was mortally
wounded and scalped. According to an eyewitness account, he remained conscious
long enough to ask whether his unit had achieved victory, shake hands with
the commander, and bid him farewell.
Abraham Mendes Seixas
New York-born Abraham Mendes Seixas came to Charleston in June 1774
and fought in the Revolution. Banished from the city for refusing to sign
an oath of loyalty to the British crown, he sailed to Philadelphia in May
1782. There he is listed as one of ten Charleston Jews among the founders
of Congregation Mikveh Israel. His brother, Gershom Mendes Seixas, was
the leader of New York’s Shearith Israel, America’s first synagogue.
Seixas returned to Charleston after the war and made a living as
a vendue master, or auctioneer. City directories describe him as a merchant,
tallow chandler (candle supplier), or broker. At the time of his death
in April 1799, he was city magistrate, warden of the work house, and president
of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim.
The oil painting of Captain Seixas, unsigned and undated, pictures
him in a patriot’s blue coat with the fringed epaulets of an officer, a
white waistcoat and white breeches. Holding his sword on his left hip,
his round face and portly dimensions suggest the passage of time. The painting
itself has disappeared, preserved only in the photographic plate made by
Barnett A. Elzas for his 1905 publication, The Jews of South Carolina.
Isaac Harby
Best known today as a pioneer of Reform Judaism, Isaac Harby was
born in Charleston in 1788, the oldest of seven children. He won respect
during his lifetime as a journalist, playwright, and teacher. In January
1810, he opened a private academy, offering instruction in reading, writing,
grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, history, geography, and the Latin and Greek
classics. By the end of July the academy had enrolled more than 50 pupils,
male and female, Christian and Jew. "His love of knowledge was extravagant,"
a friend of Harby recalled. "He might be said almost to devour books."
Harby’s educational philosophy was Socratic. He believed that teachers
should arouse students’ instinctive curiosity rather than focus on their
deficiencies. "No!" Harby scrawled in the margins of Dugald Stewart’s Elements
of the Philosophy of the Human Mind. "Develop & cherish those that
are strong and peculiar. Bring nature out."
Capital City
When Columbia was named the state capital in 1786, seven Jewish
men from Charleston were among the first to invest in town lots. Joseph
Myers, merchant and member of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, conducted the property
auction.
Most of Columbia’s Jewish pioneers, including ten of the eleven founders
of the Columbia Hebrew Benevolent Society, were involved in business and
trade. Individual fortunes rose and fell in the speculative atmosphere
of a frontier market town aspiring to be a capital city. In 1827, a year
after helping to found the Benevolent Society, Judah Barrett became the
first Jew in Columbia elected to public office. He served two terms as
a town warden, or city councilman, but within a few years had fallen into
debt and departed for New Orleans.
Henry Lyons made his mark in banking and politics. His parents Isaac
and Rebecca Cohen Lyons left Charleston in the early 1820s and opened a
grocery store in Columbia. There Henry became a director of the Commercial
Bank, a member of the Hebrew Benevolent Society, and for eight years a
warden of the city. In 1850 Lyons was elected mayor of Columbia, the second
Jewish man to attain this post.
In Pursuit of Gentility
Women and Property
Under South Carolina law, a married woman was a feme covert,
or "covered," by her husband, which meant she could not act legally in
her own name and had no property rights except to a dower. For a married
woman to conduct business independently, she had to be granted the status
of "sole trader" by her husband. This permitted her to own a business,
keep the profits, write a will, and, most important, avoid liability for
her husband’s debts.
Nuptial documents might secure a woman’s rights to property. Fanny
and Phebe Yates, two sisters from a wealthy family in Liverpool, both married
Jewish men from South Carolina. The story of their courtships is remarkable.
In 1817 Jacob Clavius Levy and Joshua Lazarus traveled to Europe to study.
The friends both fell in love with Fanny, the seventh and youngest daughter
of Samuel Yates. In deference to Levy, Lazarus withdrew his attentions.
Fanny and Jacob were married in Liverpool, then returned to live in South
Carolina where, according to family lore, "at her first appearance in the
dress circle of the Charleston Theatre in Broad Street, the whole house
rose in tribute to her matchless beauty."
Almost 20 years later, Joshua Lazarus married Fanny’s then 41-year-old
sister Phebe. A "postnuptial" agreement, signed in April 1836, put into
effect the terms of the "antenuptial" contract signed the previous October.
The groom paid $10,000 in trust for Phebe or her children and provided
that "notwithstanding her coveture," the bride could name her own trustees
or could act for herself.
Birth of Reform
Sabbath Schools
The first Jewish Sunday school in the South and the second in the
nation was founded in Charleston in 1838 by Sally Lopez. "The School of
Israel" was modeled on the Sabbath school begun by Rebecca Gratz in Philadelphia.
The two endeavors were closely allied. Gratz would write out lessons in
a copybook and forward them to Charleston every week. Lopez would make
copies and distribute them to the teachers.
In 1842 Penina Moïse succeeded Lopez as superintendent. With
50 pupils in four classes, Beth Elohim’s Sunday school was one of the largest
sectarian schools in the city. In 1855 it held its first confirmation exercises.
Five boys and one girl were "confirmed" in a ceremony described in a news
account as "a novelty" in Reform Judaism.
Columbia’s pioneer in Jewish education came from outside the state.
Boanna Wolff was a young Alabama woman who had lived in Philadelphia, where
her family knew traditionalist Rabbi Isaac Leeser. No doubt she also was
exposed to the work of Rebecca Gratz. Wolff went to Columbia in 1843 to
visit her sister Elizabeth, wife of city councilman and later mayor Henry
Lyons. She decided to stay and organize a Sunday school. Within a year
she had found a site, raised money, secured fuel, furniture, and books,
and opened the Columbia Israelite Sunday School with 30 students.
Plantation Life
The Oaks at Goose
Creek Isaiah Moses was born near Bremerhaven in the Kingdom of Hanover, on
March 18, 1772. Early in the 1790s, he moved to England, where his wife
gave birth to four boys. Upon her death, sometime before 1800, he came
to America with his brother Levi, initially leaving his sons behind. In
1807, at age 35, he married 15-year-old Rebecca Phillips, whose father
ran a cargo ship to the West Indies and owned a plantation in the South
Carolina upcountry.
Seven years later, Isaiah paid $6,000 dollars for 794 acres of land
in Goose Creek. The place was called The Oaks, and for 28 years Moses cultivated
rice, putting as many as 50 "hands" into the fields to grow the grain known
as "Carolina gold." For some if not all of this time, the family kept a
house and business in town. In 1837 Rebecca Moses was listed in the city
directory as running a dry-goods store at 248 King.
Eleanor Israel Solomon's Album Quilt
In the early 1850s, Eleanor Solomons moved from Georgetown, South
Carolina, to Savannah, Georgia, to join her son Lizar and his wife Perla,
who were living near another son, pharmacist Abraham Alexander Solomons.
On the occasion of this move, Eleanor’s younger sister Charlotte Joseph
orchestrated the making of an album quilt. Family and friends, women and
girls, Jews and gentiles, sewed 63 blocks, which were then pieced together.
The overall pattern is a checkerboard: floral chintz prints alternate with
geometric patterns in calico, the colored fabric stitched onto white muslin.
Some of the designs are trimmed with crocheted braid, some with embroidery.
Inscriptions, inked in black by Eleanor, identify the makers of the
blocks. Most of the sewers lived in South Carolina or Georgia, but cousins
from as far away as New York also contributed their needlework. The center
block, with peacock and eagles, is signed by "C," who might be Charlotte
Joseph.
Eleanor’s six-year-old granddaughter Cecilia Solomons, daughter of
Lizar and Perla, made one block. The black woman who nursed Eleanor’s children
sewed another. Inscribed "My servant Rinah," the seven-pointed blue-green
calico star testifies to the bonds of affection and servitude that sometimes
coexisted in the ante-bellum South.
The Lost Cause
Moses Cohen Mordecai
M.C. Mordecai, importer of fruit, sugar, tobacco, and coffee, was
Charleston’s most prominent Jewish citizen in the decades before the Civil
War. Born in 1804, he served in several elected offices, and sat on more
boards and committees than seems humanly possible. At various times he
was vice-president of the Charleston Ancient Artillery Society, a member
of the board of health, captain of the Marion Artillery, a member of the
committee on civic improvements, warden of police, commissioner of markets,
a delegate to the Augusta Convention, a commissioner of pilotage, state
representative, state senator, and director of the Southwestern Railroad
Bank, the Gas Light Company, the South Carolina Insurance Company, and
the Farmers’ and Exchange Bank.
Mordecai and his wife, Isabel Lyons Mordecai, lived in a mansion
on Meeting Street near Saint Michael’s Church. He was a close friend of
Governor William Aiken. Aiken’s predecessor, James Henry Hammond had derided
Mordecai’s brother, Isaac, a Columbia merchant, as "a miserable Jew." Yet
even this notorious anti-Semite recognized M.C. as "a man of force and
influence." In the debate over installing an organ in Beth Elohim’s new
building, he sided with the reformers in favor of the innovation. Upon
the death of Joshua Lazarus in 1861, Mordecai became president of the congregation.
It was Mordecai’s steamer, The Isabel, which transferred U.S.
Army Major Robert Anderson and his men from Fort Sumter to the Union fleet
following the opening bombardment of the Civil War. The Isabel,
named for Mordecai’s wife, gained fame for breaking through the Yankee
blockade of the coast.
In February 1865, after Sherman’s troops left Columbia smoldering
behind them, the city council appointed Mordecai "food administrator" to
help feed the starving citizens. Blind and broken by the war, the reluctant
secessionist moved to Baltimore, leaving his son-in-law Edgar Marks Lazarus
in charge of his business affairs in South Carolina.
Octavia Harby
Moses
After the Civil War Jewish women took leading roles in memorializing
the Lost Cause. Octavia Harby Moses headed the campaign to erect a monument
to the Confederate war dead of Sumter County. In 1869 she was elected president
of the "Ladies Monumental Association" (all the other officers were men),
which purchased land on Washington Street between Liberty and Hampton and
laid a cornerstone in 1874. She was succeeded in the crusade by her daughter
Rebecca Moïse, whose daughter Dulce declared that she herself had
been "raised for the good of the Monument."
Octavia Harby was born in Charleston in 1823, daughter of Isaac and
Rachael Mordecai Harby. Orphaned at age six, she was raised by her father’s
sister, Caroline De Litchfield Harby. In 1839 she married Andrew Jackson
Moses, seven years her senior, by whom she bore 17 children. Octavia confessed
that it was her servants who made it possible (the family owned 16 slaves
in 1860) as she handed the babies over to a nurse who did everything for
them. Her son Perry recalled that a nurse slept in his room and would wake
him with a warm baked sweet potato.
Before South Carolina declared its independence, Octavia had advocated
secession while her husband stood for the Union. At the outbreak of war
he joined the home guard and, one by one, their five eldest sons went off
to battle. The day Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, the oldest,
Joshua, was killed in action at Fort Blakely near Mobile. His brother Horace
had been captured and his brother Perry wounded the day before.
When peace returned Octavia used the medium of poetry – she had been
writing since she was 12 – to express her grief over her personal losses
and the defeat of her homeland. In "An Exhortation" written in "the dark
days ‘After the War!’" she wrote:
Oh, Land of the South,
be thy soil ever sacred!
Enriched as it is by
the blood of the brave,
To thee our love, to
thy foes our hatred,
Thou birth-place of
Heroes! Of Martyrs, the grave!
Pheobe Pember
Phoebe Yates Levy Pember grew up on East Bay Street in Charleston,
the fourth of seven children of Jacob Clavius and Fanny Yates Levy. The
family was well-to-do. Her grandfather was a founder of Scottish Rite Masonry
and a president of Beth Elohim, her father treasurer of the congregation
and a leading member of its reform faction. In 1848 the family moved to
Savannah. There Phoebe married Thomas Pember of Boston and was widowed
at the age of 33.
During the war she got as close to the battle as a woman could. The
first female administrator of Chimborazo hospital, near Richmond, Virginia,
Pember daily had to fight the resentment army doctors and stewards felt
toward a woman in a position of authority. For three years she worked at
the hospital, the largest in the Western Hemisphere, during which time
76,000 wounded and sick soldiers passed through.
Intensely loyal to the Confederacy, Pember rejoiced that as a Jew
she did not have to turn the other cheek. "I lifted my voice," she wrote
in her diary, "and congratulated myself at being born of a nation, and
religion that did not enjoin forgiveness on its enemies, that enjoyed the
blessed privilege of praying for an eye for an eye, and a life for a life,
and was not one of those for whom Christ died in vain, considering the
present state of feeling. I proposed that till the war was over [my Christian
friends] should all join the Jewish Church, let forgiveness and peace and
good will alone and put their trust in the sword of the Lord and Gideon."
Eleanor Cohen Seixas
Eleanor H. Cohen, daughter of Charleston pharmacist Philip Melvin
Cohen and Cordelia Moïse Cohen, moved to Columbia with her family
for safety during the war. Eleanor was engaged to be married, but as Sherman’s
army approached in February 1865 her betrothed, Benjamin Mendes Seixas,
was forced to flee. "Oh! God, can I ever forget that day," Eleanor wrote
in her diary. "Can time with Lethean draughts ever efface from my memory
the deep sorrow, the humiliation, the agony of knowing we were to be under
the Yankees, that our beloved flag was to be pulled down and the U.S.A.
flag wave over the city."
As the fires that engulfed the capital threatened their neighborhood,
the Cohens had to leave behind their dearest possessions, "letters of loved
absent ones, pictures of our precious relations, tokens and souvenirs of
childhood." In a single night, the family was "brought from comparative
wealth and luxury to abject poverty. . . . I never imagined I should be
so near actual starvation."
Eleanor lamented the changes brought about by the war. "Slavery is
done away with," she wrote. "I, who believe in the institution of slavery,
regret deeply its being abolished. I am accustomed to have them wait on
me, and I dislike white servants very much." She felt betrayed by the servants
who left but pleased by Rose and Helen, who "were true," and by Lavinia,
who gave them "cotton homespun and behaved like a friend."
Little Jerusalem
Things from the Old
Country By 1880, the Pale of Settlement was home to six million Jews. Stretching
from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, the Pale
was the sole area of the Russian domains where Jews were permitted to live.
The assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 set off a wave of persecution.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Russia for the West. People left for
many reasons. Conscription into the czar’s army meant years of hard labor,
discrimination, and pressures to convert. Overpopulation made earning a
living increasingly difficult. Laws barred Jews from schools and occupations,
limited their civil and property rights, and confined their movements.
Murderous attacks called "pogroms" threatened their physical safety.
America offered the promise of a better life. Typically, immigrants
gravitated toward family or countrymen who had come before. Charleston,
South Carolina, with its old and illustrious Orthodox congregation and
its warm climate, attracted substantial numbers of Russian Jews. These
poorly shod,Yiddish-speaking immigrants filled the time-honored trades
of peddler and shopkeeper and invigorated the Orthodox tradition. The things
they brought with them reflect what they valued most and regarded as essential
to a good life.
A carpenter’s tools and Sabbath candlesticks may retain their functions
and meanings in the New World. As immigrants become acculturated, objects
from the Old Country are transformed into symbols of the past and heirlooms
to bind the generations. A samovar that once made tea in Kaluszyn, Poland,
for instance, may occupy a purely sentimental place in a South Carolina
parlor where coffee is the drink of preference.
Keeping Kosher The laws of kashrut, which regulate what Jews are permitted to eat and
how certain foods must be prepared, require that animals be killed with
one quick stroke of the knife. A man trained in this skill is known as
a shohet.
In 1912, when he was 14, Jake Kalinsky left Trestina, Poland, with
his mother Ida and two sisters. His father, Meyer, had come ahead and opened
a little store in Holly Hill, South Carolina, 50 miles northwest of Charleston.
The new arrivals stayed for a time in Charleston, where Jake learned to
slaughter chickens in the ritually prescribed manner. The skill would stand
him in good stead in the frontier community of Eutawville where the Kalinskys
settled.
Jake and his father would drive a horse-drawn buggy seven miles to
Meyer’s shop in Holly Hill. Besides selling general merchandise, the Kalinskys
went into the fur trade. They bought raccoon skins from local hunters,
stretched them on the wall at the back of the store or in a shed behind
their house, and sold the pelts to New York furriers.
In 1920 Jake married Minnie Friedman, who had arrived in America
only months before. The young couple moved to Holly Hill and Jake went
into business for himself. Unable to depend on regular trips to Zalkin’s
meat market in Charleston, Jake used his shohet knife to provide the family
with kosher meat. Occasionally he traveled to St. George, 15 miles away,
to slaughter chickens for Minnie’s sister, Annie, who had married Louis
Lourie and was raising a family of six children.
Once the roads to Charleston were paved and the family acquired a
refrigerator and freezer, the Kalinskys started buying kosher meat in Charleston
and freezing it for later use. Sometime in the 1930s Jake’s stint as a
shohet came to an end.
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