Beyond Synagogues and Cemeteries The Built Environment as an Aspect of Vernacular Jewish Material Culture in Charleston, South Carolina

• Published in: American Jewish history Vol. 101; no. 2; pp. 197 - 236
• Main Author: STIEFEL, BARRY L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.04.2017
• Subjects: Antebellum period; Architectural history; Architecture; Cemeteries; Colloquial language; Culture; Historic buildings & sites; Historic preservation; Holocaust; Jewish Americans; Jewish literature; Jewish people; Literature; Material culture; Museums; Novels; Religious orthodoxy; Synagogues; United States > US; South Carolina
• ISSN: 0164-0178; 1086-3141; 1086-3141
• DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2017.0027

For this reason, Charleston serves as an advantageous setting for an immovable material culture analysis regarding how Jews have left an impact on the buildings and urban fabric of the city, with an emphasis on Charleston's historic core. The Historic Charleston Foundation maintains an updated bibliography on researching historic properties within the city.3 The Southern Jewish Historical Society also keeps a bibliography on South Carolina's Jewish history, extensively focused on Charleston, at its website.4 Scholarly interest on both subjects began at the dawn of the twentieth century, coinciding with the emergence of the Charleston Renaissance, a time period when Charleston experienced a renewal of culture, art, literature, and an appreciation of the built environment, extending from about 1900 to 1941.5 This was the Charleston of American writer Edwin DuBose Heyward (1885-1940), author of the novel Porgy, which was subsequently turned into the opera Porgy and Bess by American Jewish composer George Gershwin (1898-1937) in 1935.6 A book by Barnett A. Elzas, The Old Jewish Cemeteries at Charleston, S.C.: A Transcript of the Inscriptions on Their Tombstones, 1762-1903 evinced the earliest interest in Charleston's built environment and history related to Jews.7 Two years later, Elzas completed a larger work, The Jews of South Carolina, which was printed in 1905 by J.B. Lippincott & Company, a firm located in Philadelphia.8 Both works by Elzas established a foundation for further scholarship on South Carolina's Jews. [...]other than research on individual buildings-specifically, the historic synagogues-scholarship on the overlapping subject of Charleston's built environment regarding...