Before or after the Civil War? During the war, Judah P. Benjamin, a Jew, was the Confederate Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State. Before the war he was a Senator from Louisiana

I wrote my first seminar paper on Jews in the Confederacy, and I had access to some excellent primary sources, including a 4 volume, circa-bellum diary collection from my local Jewish Community Center library. I noticed the following:

• Jewish carpetbaggers (i.e. businessmen coming from the north to sell wares in Reconstruction South) were actually well-received given the circumstances. There were many shortages, and many Southerners didn't have supply lines or business networks to the north established yet. There was the initial mistrust in the xenophobic rural South, but Jews typically came to understand the needs of the local market better than (or at least as well as) Anglo-saxon carpetbaggers of the same time period. This was attributed in many secondary sources to Jews' ability throughout history to culturally assimilate to new territories.

• It seemed that Southern Catholics accepted Jews much more readily than other Christians. This was largely due to the fraternal bonding associated with both groups being religious outcasts in predominantly Protestant South, and the same diaspora connected to Judaism can be attributed to Catholics south of the Mason-Dixon. This also helps explain why Louisiana Jews were so much more successful (in business and population growth) than Jews in Dixie, since Franco-Spanish Catholicism was more prevalent in the bayou than the Black Belt. Remember, though, that Italians were not treated very well in Louisiana. Italian lynching occurred in LA throughout the 1890s, and I interpret the willingness of Jews to "mind their own business" to have played a role in their being left alone.

• Jewish women were particularly instrumental in the Confederate war effort, and if I were to follow my research up at all, it would be with a more in-depth look at that interest group.

• As has been mentioned, Judah P. Benjamin was a major figure in the Confederate government (also from LA), and there were plenty of other contributors (officers, enlisted men, politicians, rabbis and doctors). Read more on this in Robert N Rosen's "The Jewish Confederates."

Remember that while Jews were slaves in Egypt, they were never enslaved in America, and certainly not treated as badly as blacks were. Southern racism against blacks was a product of the owner-slave dynamic. Jews were effectively "white enough" for Southerners, so any negativity expressed toward them early on was purely for being different (celebrating the Sabbath, not working after dark on Fridays, eating kosher and/or selling only kosher things, etc).