This icon represents "the Jew," the essentially stereotypical figure whom the narrative introduces 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 "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 includes him among the outsiders who move into the defeated South as parasites (277).
