Although my own roots are not in the American South--my family is originally from Chicago, and I live in the Washington, D.C. area--I have noticed that my Southern Jewish friends always had interesting stories. They would tell me, for example, that as teenagers, they thought nothing of traveling five or six hours to a synagogue youth convention just to meet a couple of dozen kids from the next North Carolina town. That was simply what you did when you were one of only three Jews in your high school class. Then there were the locker-room debates with Christian fundamentalists who wanted to convert you and the uncomfortable feelings that came along every December. Somewhere in the stories there was also the recollection that, sooner than their neighbors, Southern Jews came to understand that black people should be treated with decency.

Eli Evans, who single-handedly jumpstarted popular interest in Southern Jews in 1973 with his extraordinary book The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, wrote in that book's preface that while doing his research thirty years ago, he was surprised to find a dearth of material on the subject. "The provincials -- 400,000 people scattered across eleven states -- just didn't seem to interest Jewish writers and historians." Since then, the 400,000 have increased to 1,000,000; the Jews have mostly left the small towns and flocked to the big commercial cities like Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina and interest in Southern Jewish life and history has taken a notable upturn. The Provincials, which I read with considerable pleasure in the mid-1970s, has quietly continued to sell and holds a place on the bookshelves of a good many literate Jews, certainly not all of them from the South. A new edition was issued in 1997 with an introduction by the late Willie Morris. And Evans, who in his full-time job serves as president of the Charles H. Revson Foundation, has written two other books on the Jews of the South -- The Lonely Days Were Sundays: Reflections of a Jewish Southerner a collection of essays, and a biography of Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate.

The Provincials begins with Eli Evans' childhood in the Durham, North Carolina of the 1940s and 1950s where his father owned a general store, "Evans United Dollar." As Evans points out, a good many Southern Jews started as wandering peddlers, taking advantage of an economic gap between "the genteel aristocrats and the groveling poor whites," and then settled down and became store owners. "Mutt" Evans went well beyond United Dollar, though. He served as mayor of Durham, was elected for six two-year terms, and guided the city through most of the civil rights storms of the period. A classic Southern liberal, Mutt Evans gained the respect of blacks and whites, of those who shared his views and of those who did not. Of course, he wanted his sons to go into the family business; of course, they chose not to; and of course, Mutt eventually sold out to a large chain.

A line from The Lonely Days Were Sundays, however, evokes for me another book of the Southern Jewish experience, this one written by a non-Jew. "Some critics believe," Evans writes, "that Pat Conroy, Willie Morris, William Styron, Thomas Wolfe, and other southern writers secretly want to experience Jewishness through their characters and are drawn to write about Jewish themes and Jewish women because of the fundamentalist atmosphere of their boyhood and the mixture of anti- and philo-Semitism they were raised with."

That brings me directly to Conroy's Beach Music a big, sprawling, intensely felt, and absolutely compelling Southern novel. It's probably a couple of hundred pages longer than it had to be, and yes, some of the characters don't transcend the stereotypes of boozing Southern men, scheming Southern belles with steel in their backbones, and sadistic Marine officers, but Conroy is an incredibly gifted storyteller. And he feels the horror of the Holocaust deeply. He knows that its victims weren't only the murdered but the survivors too, and often their children as well. Conroy understands the Southern Jew. Beach Music's Max Rusoff, fleeing from the Cossack's sword, buys a horse and wagon and peddles the roads of South Carolina. He eventually settles in the small town of Waterford. And in a chapter ending that still gives me the chills each time I read it, Conroy writes: "By this time, the townspeople referred to him as "the Great Jew," not for anything he had done in the universe, but for what they had seen him do in their town. When he traveled to Israel that first time, he went as mayor of Waterford."

Conroy, incidentally, has said that he used The Provincials as a source on Southern Jewry. So although Mutt Evans was American-born, he may have been a partial role model for the character of Max Rusoff.

The Southern Jewish merchant is also central to a book with the plain title of The Jew Store by Stella Suberman. Suberman, a retired publicist and book reviewer, wrote this homespun family history to keep her childhood memories alive. She noted that many people have forgotten that every town in the South in the early 20th century had what was called, with little or no trace of hostility, a "Jew store." Suberman was born in a small town in Northwest Tennessee in 1922 and lived there with her family, the first Jewish family in town, for her first eleven years. Her father owned "Bronson's Low Priced Store" and made a go of it, fending off the occasional anti-Semite, but the Depression and the desire to find appropriate Jewish friends for the children led them to return to New York in 1933. Suberman is not an accomplished writer, and some of the stories she tells fall flat. Still, in one memorable episode, the Jewish store owner does the unthinkable in 1920s Tennessee and hires a black clerk.

It's impossible to discuss the history of the South, or of Southern Jewry, without touching on race and the civil rights struggle. One notable book is Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Jewish Community by Rabbi Marc Schneier. Schneier, who has been active in interfaith work, draws mostly on secondary sources in writing this informative but somewhat wooden account of King's beliefs and accomplishments and his largely positive contacts with the Jewish Bible, Jewish prophetic thought, and the Jews of his time. He notes the dilemmas that successful Southern Jews faced as the civil rights movement advanced: By and large, Atlanta's Jews knew their place in the Southern scheme of things. They may have accumulated wealth and climbed up the social ladder, but no matter how well they did -- socially, politically, professionally -- as Jews, they were still considered outsiders. For example, Rich's department store's Jewish owner, Dick Rich, was in the same quandary faced by many Jewish merchants in the South: If he desegregated his store, he would lose many of his white clients; if he didn't, he would lose many of his black ones. In fact, he lost many of both.

Schneier also refers to the key role of Jacob Rothschild, the outspoken pro-civil rights rabbi of The Temple, Atlanta's best-known Reform congregation. This was the synagogue that was bombed in 1958 in a notorious expression of segregationist anger. Although no one was killed, the attack on a house of worship foreshadowed the deadly bombings and murders committed by white supremacists in the early 1960s. For some Jewish and non-Jewish Atlantans, it also brought back memories of the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank near a Georgia prison.

The 1958 act of terrorism is the subject of Melissa Fay Greene's The Temple Bombing which goes well beyond the bombing itself and its inconclusive outcome in the criminal courts to discuss the white supremacist subculture and Rothschild's remarkable personal courage. Not a born and bred Southerner -- he was born in Pittsburgh and came to Atlanta in his thirties -- Rothschild was, in ritual matters, a typical Reform rabbi of his time. Not only did he not put on tefillin; he had never seen anyone else do it. But Rothschild identified Judaism with social justice and held firm to those principles, which he drew directly from the book of Isaiah. In fact, when Isaiah referred to the downtrodden and the oppressed, Rothschild applied the prophet's words to the oppression of Southern blacks.

Memphis, like Atlanta, boasts a relatively large and stable Jewish community. Tova Mirvis's novel, The Ladies Auxiliary, takes a close but fictionalized look at the insular Orthodox circles in that city and explores their reactions to the arrival of a new resident, a convert to Judaism who shakes up the community's complacent ways. Although the novel is well structured and memorable, it really isn't about the South and its distinctive traditions. Unlike Beach Music, The Temple Bombing, and the other books I've mentioned, The Ladies Auxiliary is more universal; it could have taken place in any town and any synagogue of a certain size with a certain attitude to outsiders.

For a bit of comic relief, there is Ze'ev Chafets' Members of the Tribe: On the Road in Jewish America. Chafets, a Detroit native who made aliyah decades ago, spent six months in 1986 "traveling through Jewish America." His first chapter, "Macy B. and the Dixie Diaspora," is about the death and burial of Judaism in places like Donaldsonville, La., and Natchez, Miss., where Jewish communities once flourished. As the urbanization described by Eli Evans proceeds, someone has to pick up the pieces and dispose of the Torah scrolls that were once used by thriving congregations in the Mississippi Delta. These are the people that Chafets meets in this quirky travelogue. "We want to keep our religious articles out of Christian homes," one of these Jews says. "We want to keep the Jewish South in the South."

These days, a good deal of the Jewish South has migrated to the North and West and to large cities in the South. But the distinctive, sometimes quirky culture and history of Jewish Dixie will endure as long as people read these books.

Jonathan Groner, a Washington, DC-based free-lance writer, is a contributing editor to Jbooks.com.