This week in 1865, across Church Street and down a bit from Tribe and Play, Confederate raider Champ Ferguson pulled hemp without foothold.
Our Back Pages brings you tidbits of Nashville history from near and far, chronologically speaking. This inaugural weekly edition features the 1930 travelogue of a Nashville rabbi in the heart of soon-to-be-Nazi Germany, one of Willy Stern's fine investigative reports for the Scene from the 1990s, and the execution in Nashville of a Confederate hero, months after Appomattox.
79 years ago: Encountering an ancient hatred
Rabbi Julius Mark of Nashville's Congregation Ohabai Sholom — then better known as the Vine Street Temple and now simply as The Temple — recalled his recent visit to Germany in the Nashville Banner of Oct. 19, 1930.
Mark had attended the Oberammergau Passion Play, held every 10 years in a Bavarian town. There, three years before Hitler's rise to power, he observed the modern population's enthusiasm for a narrative based on a medieval image of the Jew as Christ-killer.
