This is the story of two silver bowls whose journeys since the decade of the American Civil War make interesting narratives in themselves because they follow closely what the late French historian Marc Bloch called "the vicissitudes of life." The tale is one of return, and of loss averted, reassuring to white southerners, Christians and Jews alike, who felt the world as they knew it had vanished. The bowls became shining emblems of the Lost Cause, a quasi-religious fervor grounded in a fictional version of the past, disregarding the system of enslavement and terror that created antebellum wealth. Sanctified by war, the vessels ascended to the status of sacred relics. The first bowl went missing sometime after February 17, 1865, the date Union forces occupied Columbia, South Carolina. The small silver object, property of Charleston's historic synagogue Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, had been sent for safekeeping to the state capital, along with the congregation's Torah, candelabra, pipe organ, and other valuables, to keep them out of the hands of the enemy. In one of the great miscalculations of the war, many South Carolinians believed the Yankees would come up the coast and attack Charleston. Instead, General William Tecumseh Sherman and his troops crossed the Savannah River and turned inland toward Columbia. In the conflagration and chaos that ensued, a great deal of property went up in smoke, or was carried off as spoils of war.