The Jewish Population of New Orleans

According to the article The Jews of New Orleans, only 1% of New Orleans' population is Jewish. Following Katrina 25% of the Jewish population did not return to the city.

This article states that the Jewish religion has this sense of "privilege and punishment in the same breath." This sense of duality is easily transferable to the New Orleans culture. Even in the introduction of this article the author touches on this duality. He does this by explaining how New Orleans is set up differently then most cities. In New Orleans, you can have a block of the beautiful best houses, and then two blocks away have the opposite end of the spectrum. This exemplifies the duality of privilege and punishment in such close ties. In less than 5 minutes you can see the best and the worst of New Orleans. So, although New Orleans didn't want to necessarily accept the Jewish people (earlier in history,) the two shared such a broad concept of duality that they became appropriate for each other.

Although the article has an interesting introduction exploring the culture of New Orleans (that I'd recommend reading) the meet of the article is toward the end.

And finally, New Orleans has its Jews, 1% Jewish, not many, but they constitute many of the lawyers, most of the doctors, and until the 70’s, virtually all of the department stores and merchants.

New Orleans and Jews have a real love/hate relationship with one another — always have. Here is a religion who metes out privilege and punishment in the same breath. Take for instance the story of the father of the first Jew of New Orleans, David Monsanto, a Dutch Sephardic Jew. He was apparently a rather prosperous man. He held important positions within his community in Holland. Eventually, however, he fell into hard times, and was forced to accept a monthly stipend from the same Jewish community in which he had once been a leader. His payment for his bad luck and for his state of need: he was required to serve as a minhanista, one of the guys who must attend religious services in order to assure the presence of a minyan, a mandatory quorum of ten men necessary for the performance of the religious service.

In other words, his punishment for being poor was that he had to pray. Interesting religion, one might say, to concoct such an idea. A religion with a twist, a kind of ironic twist. A rather generous religion too. A religion, perhaps, of meaningful morality.

New Orleans, from the beginning, wanted to hate the Jews and drive them out, like most of the rest of the world. But, in the end, it was a city that was, like the Jewish religion itself, a generous and moral. Too, it had a sense of irony. The city that care forgot actually cared.

Their history together begins in the mid-1700′s. In 1724 France passed a Code Noir (the Black Code), effectively banning all Jews from living in the French colony of Louisiana. Nevertheless, six brave Jews (one of them Issac Monsanto, David’s son) had apparently defied the edict, and settled in New Orleans. We know it was six because someone was counting. In 1759 the Commissaire Ordonnateur of New Orleans announced that

…Jews, who according to the edicts and ordinances must not remain in a colony more than three months, under penalty of imprisonment and confiscation of their property, are forming establishments here by the progress and the danger of which have been observed by the whole country. There are, at present, six of them here…

But that being said, for the record, so to speak, for the time that New Orleans remained under French rule, in their usual lax fashion, the French counted the Jews, and left them alone. When Louisiana was ceded to Spain, in 1769, the Monsanto family was expelled, and their monies and property were confiscated. They fled to Pensacola, then an English territory, and soon returned back to New Orleans. Even minus their possessions, the love affair between Jews and New Orleans had taken hold. For the rest of the history of the town, the Jews were left to prosper, which they did.

The town is proud of its lack of anti-Semitism. The Jews themselves will tell you that there is virtually no anti-Semitism in the town. They will tell you that the city is unique in how warmly the Jewish community has been embraced and treated respectfully. Yet, this is the town where the entire social calendar is built around Mardi Gras, one of the most anti-Semitic inventions of modern America. The local Mardi Gras, the Mardi Gras known only to New Orleanians, constitutes the debutante balls, the coming out place for New Orleans’ finest daughters who like lace and velvet. Word had it that my cousin, Amy, was the first Jew in New Orleans to make her debut. This, in spite of the fact that her father is an atheist who has never practiced a moment of religious Jewry, her mother was born and remains a practicing Catholic, and Amy herself has been raised Catholic. In the eyes of New Orleans society, in its long memory of family and ancestors as the only proper placement of an individual, she is considered a Jew.

The Jews, in fact, have been too busy creating their own place in New Orleans culture to worry much about who on the outside thinks what about them. They never needed to compete with Gentiles because there was plenty enough to contend with within their own community. As with the rest of New Orleans and its co-mingling of disparate groups, the Jews, too, had the high rollers and the low rollers.

The two groups came over on different boats in different influxes. The western European Jews, among them my mother’s great grandparents, were fleeing the violence and chaos of Alsace-Lorraine in the 1850′s as it passed from French to German hands. This violence, though, had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. They didn’t feel hated for their religion. They didn’t even care too much about their religion, except as a cultural grounding. These, then, were the first Jews of New Orleans, and they easily found a cultural homeland in a place where they already spoke the language. They fit right in. Some of them converted or married Gentiles without looking back, and within a short period of time they had established themselves as some of the city’s leading retailers and richest citizens.

The eastern European Jews, on the other hand, were being persecuted in Russia and Poland in the late 1880′s precisely because of their religion. When they left their homeland, they were running for their lives. If they were lucky, as were my father’s parents, they got rides from Poland/Russia/Latvia/Lithuania to Hamburg hidden in hay wagons, pulled by oxen or mules; the unlucky ones walked. When they had saved enough money to come to the New World, they brought over no precious heirlooms and no commonality of culture to their new home.

The western European Jews wanted to look indistinguishable from the community in which they were rapidly becoming acculturated. They embraced Reform Judaism: they threw off their yarmulkes and tallis; they sat through religious services conducted in English; organ music filled the rafters in the glorious synagogue (Touro) built in the best and most expensive Moorish tradition; and they did the unthinkable –they broke with strict tradition by having men and women sit together. Except for the small amount of Hebrew prayers, these services could have been in any Christian church in the land. Such was their aspiration: to look Christian; to stay Jewish, but look Christian.

The eastern European Jews kept their old-time religion. This was a religion of community and prayer. These were Jews who took life seriously because, with their history of persecution, they were, perhaps, never quite able to throw off their worries about which direction the next death threat was going to come from. Assimilation was the farthest thing from their minds. They stayed Orthodox; they didn’t wear fur coats (as the Reform Jews did) to Yom Kippur services because praying was serious business, not show-time. They didn’t send their children to private schools because it was unnecessarily elitist. They didn’t join the Jewish country club because Saturdays were for God.

Since Monsanto’s first settling, Jews have been an important part of the New Orleans heritage. Among the prominent Jews in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries were Isaac Delgado, who gave the city its art museum; Samuel Zemurray, president of the United Fruit Company; Captain Neville Levy, chairman of the Mississippi River Bridge Commission; Percival Stern, benefactor of Tulane and Loyola universities, Newman School, and the Touro Infirmary; Mr. and Mrs. Edgar B. Stern, who supported many institutions and schools and Sydney J. Besthoff III, whose extensive sculpture collection now graces the New Orleans Museum of Art. Jews have served as presidents and board members of practically all cultural, civic, and social-welfare agencies.

And then, in the 21^st century, came Katrina, and brought with her a bit of unexpected Lagniappe to the Jews of New Orleans. In 2005, there were about 10,000 Jews – the smallest Jewish population of any major city. The city lost 25% of the Jewish population post-Katrina – its own kind of New Orleans Diaspora. Jews from all over the country rallied: homes were opened for displaced families; monies were raised to replace ruined Torahs; and, most interestingly, a recruitment call went out to Jews everywhere: come down y’all and live with us; help us to revitalize our Jewish community. Over 2,000 Jews responded, and have now relocated to New Orleans. They form a vibrant and significant part of the contemporary New Orleans Jewish population, and include the new Provost at Tulane, the new Dean of Tulane Law School, the new head of Hillel, new rabbis at 3 of the 5 synagogues.

Zoe Oreck, who left New Orleans to go to school in Georgia, as so many college-bound kids do, comments about the unique aspect of the association between New Orleans and the Jews: “I mean, the hours of my Sunday School were changed to better accommodate Saints games. The Jews of New Orleans could not be the Jews of any other city.” And, Zoe’s grandmother, Carol Wise, comments that unlike other cities, “We have NEVER had one section of the city that is primarily Jewish–we are a Gumbo–each of the parts makes us better.”

In this reading the settlement of the jewish people is explained in a fashion that attaches them to the jewish people world wide.

In closing, although the jewish population isn't large it is prominent and helps create the overall gumbo of New Orleans.