Excerpt from Five Families and Eight Young Men: Nashville and Her Jewry 1850-1861 American Jewish history is fascinating, and, fortunately, it is possible to write it on this soil. Great masses of source materials are available, for - unlike the case in much of Europe - the few wars that have plagued us have barely touched the archival records. American Jewry - an integral part of the larger America - is worth writing about. The United States has become a land of destiny, and intelligent Americans have responded by developing a sense of history. Just as our republic has come to power in the twentieth century, just as it has emerged to exercise world influence and to meet the challenge of its being, its Jewish community, too, has grown until today it may well be deemed the most generous, the most responsible body of its kind the world has yet known - no small achievement. This book by Fedora S. Frank is an attempt to understand the American Jewish community by understanding the beginnings of American Jewish life in one locality, a Southern city distinguished for its stability, its dignity, its leadership, and its sense of noblesse oblige. If Nashville is the Athens of the South, its Jewish citizens have helped to make it so. The period under study here, however, is the period of Nashville Jewry's first decades of communal existence. The effort to recreate this history is particularly to be praised in view of the unfortunate fact that no congregational records, as such, have survived to document the course of this antebellum group. The 1840's, the 1850's, and the early 1860's were notable years in the life of the Jews of this land. By that time they had already established themselves in every town and city of importance. They had struck root even on the wide stretches of the prairies and on the sad wastes of the unending plains. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.