AARON D. ANDERSON. Builders of a New South: Merchants, Capital, and the Remaking of Natchez, 1865-1914.

The "Theoretical Jew" Versus the "Southern Jew": Black Perceptions of Jewish Whiteness in the Nineteenth-Century American South

“…Of the ten most prominent merchant families in postbellum Natchez, Mississippi, for example, six were Jewish and controlled large tracts of farming and uncleared land in the decades after the war, one study found. 70 Traveling Jewish journalist Charles Wessolowsky made note of this when he visited the Mississippi River city in 1878, celebrating that "Our Israelites are drifting strongly toward being agriculturalists, and a great many of them have a plantation on their own, and are rentors [sic] [landlords]." 71 From the Black perspective, this phenomenon was more malicious: a writer for the Southern Workman reported that once Black laborers became indebted to Jewish merchants, it was "not long before they are working on that 'store-keeper's' land, at his own price."…”