On February 21, 1954, a distinguished group of scholars and laypeople gathered at Dropsie College in downtown Philadelphia for the fifty-second annual meeting of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS). As luminaries such as Salo W. Baron and Jacob Rader Marcus sat listening, a young speaker named Saul Viener delivered a paper on "The Political Career of Isidor Straus," distilled from a Master's thesis he completed seven years earlier at the University of West Virginia. (1) Few of the people in the room could have imagined the important role that relatively unknown speaker would come to play over the next half century in their organization and in the study and preservation of the American Jewish past. By the time of Saul Viener's death in Atlanta on July 25, 2006, he had not only become one of the major figures in the history of the AJHS, but was also considered the founding father of its daughter organization, the Southern Jewish Historical Society. Saul Viener was born on March 2, 1921, in Charles Town, West Virginia, where his Lithuanian immigrant parents were engaged in the scrap metal business. His hometown, where George Washington's brother had lived and where abolitionist John Brown had been tried for treason, provided a setting that encouraged Viener's early fascination with American history. At the same time, the rigors of maintaining Jewish customs and social ties in a small community like Charles Town impressed upon him the importance of preserving his Jewish heritage. (2)
