from Josh Stein for North Carolina
This year’s North Carolina gubernatorial election—with Attorney General Josh Stein as the Democratic nominee—has spotlighted Jews and politics. While Stein cites membership in Raleigh’s Temple Beth Or, his Republican opponent Mark Robinson has been accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
From the State’s beginnings, Jews have loomed larger in politics than in numbers. Jews have been too few in North Carolina to constitute a significant vote. Even today, Jews are an estimated 2.2 percent of the national electorate, but only 0.5 of North Carolina’s.
At the time of the Revolution, the state’s Jews would have struggled to hold a minyan. Yet, in 1776 when a state constitutional convention convened, a third of its time was consumed by the question of a religious test for public office with the debate often focusing on the propriety of Jews serving. Although the federal constitution did not countenance religious qualifications, North Carolina was among 10 states to include such a test. The 32nd article stated that to serve in office one cannot deny “the truth of the Protestant religion or the “divinity” of the New Testament. In 1808 Jacob Henry of Beaufort was elected to the state legislature, but a year later his right to serve was challenged on the grounds that as a Jew he could not take the oath. After vigorous debate, he was seated. Although Jews and their supporters continued to protest, the constitutional convention of 1835 reaffirmed the test but broadened the qualification to “Christian.” In 1861 the Confederate state constitution seemed to have appeased the Jews by removing “Christian” but still required that the officeholder cannot deny “the divine authority of both the Old and New Testaments.” After the war, the question was still considered unresolved. The postwar constitution of 1868, still in effect, required only a belief in the “Being of Almighty God.”
The religious test was honored more in the breach. In the 1850s Michael Grausman, lay prayer leader of Raleigh’s fledgling Jewish community, held a post in the state treasury. Abram Weill of Charlotte in 1865 and Emil Rosenthal of Wilson in 1867 served on their town councils. Solomon Fishblate was elected a Wilmington alderman in 1873 and five years later was the city’s mayor. He would serve three terms. In 1878 Samuel Wittkowsky, a leading Charlotte entrepreneur, was a city alderman. In 1885 storekeeper Henry Morris, a synagogue officer, was mayor of Tarboro. Others with Jewish-sounding name also held various offices. After the war, Prussian immigrant Simon Meyer—“a genial descendant of God’s chosen people”—was Enfield’s fire chief, magistrate, mayor pro tem, town commissioner, bank director, and executive of the Democratic party. In 1887 state senator and Democratic boss Kope Elias, from a Charlotte Jewish family, nominated Grover Cleveland to the presidency. An assimilated Jew, he was nonetheless denounced as “anti-Christian” despite his membership in his wife’s church.
In the perilous postwar years there was no such thing as a Jewish politics. That was demonstrated in the racially tumultuous election of 1898 which climaxed in the notorious Wilmington race riot. Nathaniel Jacobi, a hardware dealer and synagogue leader, was co-author of the White Declaration of Independence, and S. H. Fishblate pushed for the removal of the elected government and marched at the front of the white-supremacist mob that burned the offices of the African-American newspaper. Contrarily, up the coast in New Bern the black vote elected Joseph Hahn sheriff and his uncle Meyer Hahn Register of Deeds on the Republican ticket. The Hahns campaigned before crowds of African Americans urging them to fight for their rights, and they handily won black voting precincts. Sheriff Hahn appointed black deputies and sparked outrage when he chained together black and white prisoners. White supremacists forced him to resign. The Hahns were leaders of the synagogue, cemetery society, and B’nai B’rith.
Typically across the South, Jewish commercial success was the stepping stone to political office. Jewish merchants remained prominent in local municipal politics. In Goldsboro business magnate Sol Weil who since 1881 had served as a Goldsboro alderman, was succeeded by his son Lionel who served from 1904-22, introducing city management reform to the state and writing a municipal manual that was adopted nationally. Jews were frequently elected to town councils including Julius Cone in Greensboro and Max Kahn in Charlotte. In city court one could appear before Judge Shapiro in Winston-Salem or Judge Bane in Durham.
Fourteen North Carolina municipalities have had Jewish mayors, not just urban Gastonia, Greensboro, Fayetteville, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Asheville but also rural places like Lumberton, Whiteville, and Hendersonville. Mayors Alfred Popkin of Holly Springs and Emanuel Leinwand of Elizabethtown were from virtually the only Jewish families in town. David Weinstein of Lumberton, later a state senator, won the mayorship, he felt, because voters thought that a Jew could mediate among black, white, and Native American constituencies.
Often Jews held sinecures on their posts. E.J. Evans was elected to six terms in Durham as was Don Michalove in Hendersonville. Mel Cohen served nine terms in Morganton. Durham has had two Jewish mayors and Asheville and Wilmington have had three, including brothers B. D. and Bill Schwartz. E. J. Evans’ brother Monroe was Fayetteville’s mayor and their brother in law Leo Schneider was Gastonia’s. In 1997 Hannah Block was the first woman to serve on Wilmington’s town council, later as mayor pro tem, and Leni Sitnick became the first woman to serve as Asheville’s mayor. Among the Jews currently holding the office of mayor are Terry Mann of Whiteville, now in his fifteenth year, and Esther Manheimer of Asheville, now in her eleventh.
Although electoral success suggests Jewish acceptance, frequently the candidacies provoked anti-Semitic reactions through whispering campaigns or inflammatory flyers. E. J. Evans was accused of being a pawn in the international Jewish conspiracy. When Saul Chase ran for reelection on the Boone town council in 1990, fliers accused him of wanting to remove Christian influence from the town. Often prominent clergy or citizens, responding to bias, publicly declared their intention to vote for the Jewish candidate. Jews advertised their synagogue affiliation in their campaigns. Mel Schwartz observed of his father, Wilmington’s mayor, “It was an easy step for him to go from the synagogue and the Jewish charities to the community charities and to city council and mayor.” E. J. Evans observed, that “people down here respect church work.” He publicly quipped that town council meetings were a pleasure after his synagogue board.
Municipal service often led to the state legislature. In the years before the governor had veto power Harriss Newman in the 1930s and Marshall Rauch in the 1970s as chairs of the Finance and Appropriation Committees were among the most powerful politicians in the state, deciding which bills would reach the floor. Ted Kaplan of Winston-Salem served as Senate Majority Leader from 1988-1992. Arthur Goodman served from Mecklenburg County and was followed by his son Arthur Goodman Jr. Dennis and Leslie Winner were the only brother and sister to serve simultaneously in the legislature.
A so-called “Jewish vote” nationally, which was Democratic and liberal, did not emerge until the election of 1928 when Al Smith ran for president. That vote consolidated in 1932 around Franklin Roosevelt. In what was a one-party Democratic state, several Jewish Republicans ran unsuccessfully for Congress, and Ada Fisher was a member of the Republican National Committee where she was distinctive as a woman, African American, and a Jew.
Only very recently have Jews succeeded to statewide or federal office. Not until Governor Jim Hunt appointed Muriel Offerman as Secretary of the Department of Revenue in 1996 did a Jew serve in the Council of State. Governor Roy Cooper’s appointment of Marc Davis brought the first Jew to the State Supreme Court. And Kathy Manning’s election to the House of Representatives from the Sixth District in 2020 was the first time that a Jew successfully ran for Congress in North Carolina. Josh Stein scored a historical first when in 2016, after eight years in the state senate, he became the first Jew to win a statewide election when he was elected Attorney General.
And if Josh Stein is elected governor, he will not be disqualified by a religious test.
