The Jew

Go Down, Moses introduces the character it calls "the Jew" into its account of the Reconstruction era in the South. According to that account, "the Jew" arrives in the post-Civil-War South "seeking some place to establish" for his "great-grandchildren"; he is the local type of the "pariah" who was wandered "about the face of the Western earth" for "twenty centuries" (277). The narrator credits him with "a sort of courage," but he remains an essentially stereotypical figure, one of the outsiders who move into the defeated South as parasites (277).