The Irish Question

Why wasn’t there a “Jewish Question” in the South?

Why do White Southerners struggle so hard to understand this issue? I would say that to ask such a question is to answer it. Historically speaking, there wasn’t a “Judenfrage” in the South because the American South was really nothing like the places Jews came from in Europe.

The American South was a slave society with a caste system that was based on race. This had the strange side effect of being “good for the Jews.” It was also good for other European minorities. In the South, a Jewish merchant or an Irish Catholic planter was a White man. They were coded as belonging to the master caste and were automatically granted citizenship and higher social status than non-Whites. Jews always had all the same rights and liberties as other White people in the Southern states.

By the time of the Confederacy, Jews were getting elected to Congress in the South and had become part of the Southern establishment like Judah Benjamin. The same was true of other minorities. Sen. Pierre Soulé, for example, who represented Louisiana in the Senate was born in France. There were too many Scots-Irish Presbyterians to count who held elected office in the South alongside Southerners of English ancestry. Slavery gave all of them a stake in preserving the social and economic order.

Think of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind growing up on her bucolic plantation Tara on the outskirts of Atlanta in the Old South. Scarlett’s character was of Irish Catholic and French Huguenot ancestry and her plantation was plopped smack in the middle of a vast sea of White people descended from Irish Protestants who came to this country from Ulster. The same was true of my ancestors from Dublin in Laurens County, GA who were Irish on one side and Scots-Irish on the other side. Those Old World hatreds faded away and became less relevant in the social context of the Georgia countryside.

Slavery was a great integrationist. The most troublesome and disaffected parts of the South were the mountains of Appalachia and parts of Texas that were thinly enslaved. There was no need for antisemitism in the South because the Jews that came here easily assimilated into our social system and became invested in slavery. White supremacy was “good for the Jews” for centuries. That’s why the ones who lived here and who were born here never attempted to overthrow that system.

In Ireland, there was an Irish Question because the people who lived there were sharply divided over ethnicity and religion. They identified as English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic. They didn’t see themselves as White. Ireland is still divided. Similarly, a Jew in Germany or in the ghettoes of Poland, Ukraine and Russia was first and foremost a Jew. The Jewish Question existed because social conditions in southern, central and eastern Europe were totally different than they were here. Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century was a boiling cauldron of radical leftwing politics.

The same was true of our Free States.

By the time of the Civil War, it was becoming a problem there too due to the absence of slavery. The Irish never rioted against us in the South. The Irish also enthusiastically supported the Confederacy. The North has always been far more ethnically and religiously divided than the South. It has always been more of a hotbed of radical and revolutionary politics. It has a weaker sectional identity. Northerners just don’t love their states and section like White Southerners of all backgrounds seem to do.

Eventually, we *did* get saddled with a Jewish Question, not the South, but America at large … which thoughtlessly imported millions of Jews from the ghettos of southern, central and eastern Europe between the 1880s and 1920s, and millions of other people from all sorts of European backgrounds. Those people who came here fresh off the boat from Poland and Ukraine didn’t stop nursing grudges that go back a thousand years after stepping foot on American soil. World War II made it worse.

We talk about the “Jewish Question” or Judenfrage because the NS fandom prefers to use that ideological frame to understand our problems in early 21st century America. I think it is misleading for a number of reasons. It is a poor way of understanding education polarization. The elites aren’t simply Jews. They come from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Jews are overrepresented among this class of people, but they all share the same worldview and preferences. Jews are also melting into this generic secular urbanite bugman class. A huge percentage of them already have mixed ancestry or children.

Trying to understand the American past through the lens of the Jewish Question is even more highly misleading. It is trying to force a round peg into a square hole.

Note: This tendency to strip out the historical context seems essential to “NS.” If you can dispense with German ethnicity and culture, you can mislead yourself about anything.

Source: https://occidentaldissent.com/2025/03/27/the-irish-question/