Mattapan

Boston once had a thriving Jewish community with a population of nearly 100,000 located in the neighborhoods of Mattapan, Dorchester and Roxbury. Blue Hill Avenue could have been a street in any pre-war Jewish ghetto in Europe. A small cabal of Jewish mages regularly ignored the call of the magical orders to stay in their community and protected it with covert magic (only Rabbi Tzaddi remains of that cabal). This close-knit community was strong until the mid-1960s, when local banks, controlled largely by the Roman Catholic Church, decided that they didn’t want a unified Jewish community in the Boston area and took steps to rectify what they saw as a problem.

For several years, starting in 1965, the three Jewish neighborhoods — with their neatly kept houses and old synagogues — were quietly targeted by banks as the only area in the entire city where low-income blacks could get loans to buy homes. These loans required no assets and very little credit history, and, by 1974, 50% of those who had bought homes with such loans had abandoned them or lost them through foreclosure. By that time, violence and synagogue burnings had become common news as the black and Jewish communities turned on each other. The area rapidly transformed into a crime-ridden, rat-infested urban wasteland epitomizing all that was wrong with American cities.

It is strongly believed that the Talmudic Enchanter, Solomon ben-Cohen, placed a curse on the entire neighbor-hood (or possibly just on the black community) the night a band of thugs torched his synagogue, because the speed with which the neighborhood plummeted into decay was truly remarkable. The resonance of the neighborhoods remains somewhat tainted, although that’s starting to fade. Since the early ’90s, those three neighborhoods have been recovering from the blight they suffered, though at different rates. Prior to the ’90s, all three of these neighborhoods were populated almost entirely by blacks; although few Jews can even be found there any more, the burned-out shells of a couple of synagogues still stand, mute testimony to the destruction of a lively Jewish community and the urban disintegration that followed.

Today, Mattapan is a residential neighborhood largely composed of orderly houses and quiet streets. It is also exemplary of Boston’s extreme degree of segregation. Caucasian faces are rare here. Middle-class blacks predominate; there is little racial diversity. A few solitary mages, mostly unaffiliated with any order or cabal, sometimes reside here, usually associated with the large Haitian population.

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