Jack,
You're ignoring what I previously wrote: that there were two very distinct waves of Jews into the South--the early Sephardic communities, and the much later Eastern European communities.
It was from the old Sephardic community that Jefferson Davis picked his Jewish cabinet members. It's an oversimplification. But the older Jews had surnames like Ben-Judah, Cohen, Pardo, Solis, Vidal, etc. The newer Jews who showed up in the 1890s were your Steins, Bergs, Lipschitz's, and so forth.
Two totally different communities. And you're kind of lumping them in together--to the mortification of the older Jewish community.
I saw a documentary about the Jews of the South--the original Jews, and how they hated to the new generation of obnoxious New York Jews who were coming into the South and stirring up trouble for them. Because you're right: On the whole, the tiny Sephardic Jewish community who had been in America since the 1700s was mortified when the liberal new generation of Polish and Russian Jews came down to "give Jews a bad name" and alienate them from the host-population.
The Klan's real flare-up against Jews happened with the second wave of Jews in the 1880s and '90s.
But even before then, the original Jews weren't wholly exempt. They were just smaller, quieter, less political--so they drew proportionally less attention.
But even then--before the Russian and Polish Jews showed up in America--Southern Jews enjoyed a delicate balance.
Remember: the Klan was an equal-opportunity hater. They harassed more poor whites than they did blacks. Read "The Gentleman from Indiana," by Booth Tarkington. It was published in 1900. Tarkington is as white and blue-blood as they come and he was nearly killed by the Klan, because he stood up to them.
In "To Kill A Mockingbird," Harper Lee also writes about poor Sam Green who was a Jewish grocer, and who was harassed by a mob of Klan-idiots in the middle of the night. He pointed out that he had sold them the very sheets they were wearing, and, embarrassed, they turned around and slumped back home.
As the older Jewish community would have pointed out, these instances took place AFTER the liberal Jews came in and aliented the older community. Like Leo Frank. That happened AFTER the second wave Jewish immigration.
But it's significant that the KKK was launched only after the Civil War, and right out of the box they lynched S.A. Bierfield and attacked Joseph Lowenheim.
So that implies that, from the start, the Jews were on watch.
* Footnote: Southern author Gore Vidal is descended from the famous Gore aristocracy on his mother's side, true; but he's also descended from the older Sephardic-Jewish community (on his dad's). "Vidal," his surname, is from Spain. His dad's family--after hundreds of years--forgot that they were even Jewish at all. At some point, they put on that they were Italian Gentiles. But Vidal was curious because "Vitale" is the Italian version of his name; Vidal is the Spanish. So he did some genealogical research and discovered that, yes: His dad's family has zero connection to Italy. They were from Spain. Vidal and Vitale are the Latin for "life". Jews, who assimilated, often changed their Hebrew names to their Latin equalivents. Hebrew for "life" is "Chaim" or "Haim". So, distantly, perhaps Gore Vidal is related to former child star Corey Haim, lol
But this is just mentioned to illustrate what I was telling you earlier: The original Jewish community in America was from Spain, Portugal and Spain's former colony the Netherlands. So they tended to have Spanish and Portuguese surnames--like Vidal, Pardo, Sassoon, Azaria--as well as the classical Hebrew surnames as Ben-Judah, Cohen, Levy, etc.
Not a Schwartz or Lipschitz among them.
