 Hidden beneath the free and easy relationships between Jew and Gentile in the antebellum South was a layer of prejudice that derived from historic anti @-@ Semitism . The obverse of the picture of the Jew as the Biblical patriarch and apostle of freedom was the image of the Judas @-@ traitor and the Shylock @-@ materialist who preyed on the misfortunes of the country . But the high incidence of Jewish assimilation , the availability of the black as a scapegoat for social ills , and the relative absence of crises — economic and otherwise — were factors which repressed , at least temporarily , the latent anti @-@ Jewish feeling in the South . 
