Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Down Home: Jewish Life in North CarolinaCarolina in its early days was a polyglot immigrant society. Native Americans and African Americans added to the ethnic mix. A welter of religious sects - Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican, Quaker, and Moravian made it welcoming to religious diversity even as its Protestant character led it to suspect those who did not share the faith.North Carolina largely lacked the entrenched social hierarchies of its north ern and southern neighbors. North Carolina was the proverbial vale of humility between two mountains of conceit. For much of its history, its representative citizen was the yeoman farmer in contrast to the cavalier of Virginia or the Low Country aristocrat of South Carolina. The log cabin and the wood-framed farm house, not the plantation manse, are its iconic dwellings. North Carolina's motto is To be, rather than to seem. North Carolina has been a place of small towns. When historian Lee Shai Weissbach did a comparative study, Jewish Life in Small Town America: A History, he documented that North Carolina in 1927 was the most extreme of all states in its profile, with thirteen communities of more than 100 Jews but none with over North Carolina's small-town character explains much of its politics and social values - as well as the Jewish acculturation there. In contrast to most states, North Carolina lacked a Jewish urban capital, an Atlanta, Baltimore, or New York.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.