After noting in 1853 that there was no chief rabbi in the United States and no national platform for Jews to discuss the crisis of the Union, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, a predominantly Christian organization based in New York, ended its annual report for that year with an appeal to Sons of Abraham:
“The objects of so much mean prejudice and unrighteous oppression as the Jews have been for ages, surely they, it would seem, more than any other denomination, ought to be enemies of caste and the friends of universal freedom.”
In his book Fear No Pharaoh, Richard Kreitner (author of Break It Up: Secession, Division and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union) tells the little-known story of the responses of American Jews to slavery and secession in the 1850s and 1860s.
How did US Jews view slavery and Confederate secession?
Resisting “easy answers and generalizations,” Kreitner reveals that Jews, “pretty much, like everyone else,” were “conflicted and divided, implicated and appalled” by what was called “the peculiar institution.”
He acknowledges that while some Jews denounced slavery “for the evil it was,” many more were “silent or complicit.” Their reluctance to speak out, he suggests, should be understood in light of the prejudice Jews faced in the United States.
To document these claims, Fear No Pharaoh examines the reactions of six Jewish Americans to slavery and the Civil War: Judah Benjamin, Ernestine Rose, August Bond, Rabbi Morris Jacob Raphall, Rabbi David Einhor, and Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise.
Born in the Danish West Indies and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, Judah Benjamin moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, became a successful lawyer, owned a plantation and 140 slaves, rarely mentioned his Jewish background, never joined a synagogue, and married a Catholic woman.
Arguing a case involving a slave revolt at sea early in his career, Benjamin echoed Shylock’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. A slave is a human being, he told the Louisiana Supreme Court, “his heart, like the heart of the white man, swells with love, burns with jealousy, aches with sorrow, pines under restraint and discomfort, boils with revenge, and ever cherishes the desire for liberty.”
However, eager to gain a foothold in southern society and politics, Benjamin never said anything remotely like this in public again.
After resigning from the US Senate when Louisiana seceded from the Union, Benjamin became president Jefferson Davis’s closest adviser in the Confederate States of America. Interestingly, as it became clear that the Confederacy was losing the war, Benjamin recommended offering to emancipate slaves if they enlisted in the army.
Polish émigré Ernestine Rose was a crusader for women’s rights, an atheist who dismissed the Bible as an obstacle to the progress of the human race, and a militant abolitionist. Three years before Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, she declared that “Freedom and slavery could no more exist together than truth and falsehood.”
Rose’s critique of slavery, Kreitner speculates, drew on centuries of oppression against Jews. Even Lucy Stone, a fellow abolitionist, claimed that Rose’s “face is so essentially Jewish that people remarked on the likeness and feared her.”
August Bondi immigrated to St. Louis after the 1848 revolutions in Europe, and briefly fought with abolitionist John Brown in “Bleeding Kansas,” a series of violent civil confrontations in Kansas Territory between 1854 and 1859 over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas.
Bondi opened his home to fugitive slaves and served in the Union Army during the Civil War. Two members of his company, Bondi discovered, refused to tell their comrades they were Jews, fearing perhaps that they would taunt or shun them. After one of these soldiers died, Bondi read a letter from his parents in Hebrew, reminding him of the dates of the High Holy Days.
Presiding over New York’s B’nai Jeshurun synagogue during the peak of the secession crisis in January 1861, Orthodox Rabbi Morris Jacob Raphall, America’s first “glamor rabbi,” maintained the claim that slavery was a “sin before God” was a “pernicious fallacy.”
Raphall acknowledged that in reducing the slave to “a thing” with no rights, human bondage in the United States did not meet the standards of Mosaic law. But he opposed forcing southern states to remain in the Union.
Responding directly to Raphall, Reform Rabbi David Einhorn told his congregation in Baltimore, Maryland, a slave state, that the Torah was a product of its time; enlisting it to defend slavery subverted foundational ethical principles in Judaism. When mob violence against Unionists erupted in Baltimore, Einhorn fled the city.
A few weeks later, as he prepared to return, members of his congregation asked him to refrain from public comments on “explosive questions.” Einhorn resigned and accepted a position at a “braver congregation” in Philadelphia.
A deeply respected Reform/Conservative Rabbi and celebrated orator, Isaac Mayer Wise derided Raphall’s citation of God’s “Curse of Ham” as perhaps the greatest of “all nonsense imposed on the Bible.” He also opposed allowing bondage to spread to Midwestern states. But Wise agreed that Blacks were inferior to whites, declined to criticize slavery, and blasted the anti-slavery Republican Party for its hostility toward immigrants.
During the Civil War, Wise excoriated general Ulysses S. Grant’s Order No. 11 expelling Jews from the military district he controlled, and he did not endorse Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Surprisingly, when the president, who had rescinded Grant’s order, was assassinated, Wise implied that Lincoln had been right about abolition and secession, and hailed him as “the greatest man that ever sprung from mortal loins.”
In the decades following the war, the antisemitism revealed in Grant’s Order did not go away, Kreitner indicates. Many northerners disparaged Jewish merchants as profiteers. Southerners, who had been more supportive of Jews, turned against them.
And then, as two million Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in the United States, things got worse before they got better.
- FEAR NO PHARAOH: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery
- By Richard Kreitner
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- 416 pages; $32
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.