Jews

The Huguenot migration to South Carolina is part of a larger diaspora, traditionally known as le Refuge, which stretches from the late 1670s to the early 1710s.

In 1824 forty-eight members of Beth Elohim, led by Isaac Harby and Abraham Moise, whose requests for changes in worship services had been rejected by the adjunta (board of trustees), formed the Reform Society of Israelites. This was the first attempt to reform Judaism in the United States; it functioned for nine years. The synagogue, now the oldest surviving Reform synagogue in the world, became a National Historic Landmark in 1980.

In 1872, in spite of his notorious reputation for corruption, the Republican state convention nominated Moses for governor. About one-third of the Republican delegates bolted from the convention and instead supported the former Freedmen’s Bureau official Reuben Tomlinson.

An observant Jew, Moïse was an active member of Charleston’s Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim synagogue.

Moise opposed secession and publicly argued against it. Nevertheless, when the Civil War came he volunteered for Confederate service.

Harby’s journalistic career began with the publication of a short-lived literary magazine, the Quiver (1807), which was probably the first literary journal published by a Jew in the United States.

The Ku Klux Klan was a paramilitary organization formed during Reconstruction to oppose the Republican Party and restore white supremacy in the South. Another organization called the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915 after the success of the film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Reconstruction Klan.