The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  Yet the sanctity of Jewish law and teachings must not be disgraced in the interest of politics, Einhorn said. The principles of Judaism had served as a weapon for its people for thousands of years: “This weapon we cannot forfeit without pressing a mighty sword into the hands of our foes. This pride and renown, the only one which we possess, we will not and dare not allow ourselves to be robbed of. This would be unscrupulous, prove the greatest triumph of our adversaries and our own destruction, and would be paying too dearly for the fleeting, wavering favor of the moment.”

  Had Christians in Europe justified their oppression of Jews based on Scripture, Jews would have protested to the heavens, rightly declaring such actions blasphemy, Einhorn declared. They can do no less now. “And are we in America to ignore this mischief done by a Jewish preacher?” he asked. “Only such Jews, who prize the dollar more highly than their God and their religion, can demand or even approve of this!”28

  Einhorn acknowledged that he was “no politician,” which was certainly an understatement. As the war erupted, his antislavery sermons, delivered in German, proved to be his undoing in his adopted city of Baltimore. The city was a crucial staging area for Union troops, an essential line of defense for the nation’s capital, against what Lincoln feared would be attacks from the north and east as well as the west in Virginia. Baltimore was also a heavily Democratic city with strong sympathies to the South, stirring incessant fears on the Union side about keeping its loyalty to the North in tow.

  Like New York City, Baltimore had also become a major center for American Jews, with perhaps 5,000 to 7,000 families on the eve of the Civil War. Many if not most of them were Democrats who believed that the Constitution protected slavery. The first ordained rabbi in the United States, Abraham Rice, who was serving at Baltimore’s Congregation Nidche Israel, was a defender of slavery, as was Rabbi Bernard Illowy of Baltimore Hebrew Congregation. Illowy said one could not blame the South “for seceding from a society whose government cannot or will not protect the property, rights and privileges” of slaveholders. Like other traditionalists, Illowy cited the Bible’s several references to slaveholding by the patriarch Abraham.

  Caught in the center as sympathetic to both sides were Rabbis Henry Hochheimer of Baltimore Hebrew Congregation and Benjamin Szold of Temple Oheb Shalom. Both pleaded for reconciliation of North and South lest war destroy what they regarded as a new and secure refuge for Jews. Szold, a change-oriented rabbi who used a prayer book omitting references to the Messiah, spoke of America as a place where God “hast given us another home in place of that which we lost in the land of our fathers.” Szold explicitly shied away from the issue of whether the Bible countenanced slavery, acknowledging truth on both sides—and that “free reasoning” could find the ultimate truth.

  Einhorn’s refusal to mince words made him an outlier in his adopted city, and in its Jewish community. He was controversial not just for his fiery beliefs and withering attacks on Raphall and others, but also because of his argument that Jews should not hide their religious beliefs from public view, even if they ran counter to the beliefs of the majority outside the Jewish community. He thus challenged the long-held concern among Jewish leaders that their Judaism was their business and that they had better not speak out collectively as Jews and jeopardize their sense of belonging in the United States. His beliefs were a foreshadowing of the emerging doctrine that Jews were exponents of universal ethical precepts, and that it was their “mission,” their duty, to disseminate them to the world. “Jews for thousands of years consciously or unconsciously were fighting for freedom of conscience,” said Einhorn, adding that they must “fight for the whole world” and not their narrow interests.29

  Given the volatile situation in Baltimore—where mobs favoring secession attacked places believed to be sympathetic to the North, including abolitionist publications affiliated with Einhorn—concerns mounted for the rabbi’s safety. Fearing for his life, Einhorn asked his congregation for permission to leave the city and fled to Philadelphia. Because of threats of reprisals even after he left, Har Sinai asked him not to speak out even in his new redoubt, in another of the many instances of synagogue boards questioning the freedom of speech of their rabbis. In this case, inevitably, Einhorn refused and remained bitter about his experience with his board members and other slavery sympathizers in Baltimore. He never returned to his home city.

  LINCOLN AND THE JEWS: A LAST TESTAMENT

  On March 4, 1865, as the Union armies overran the South and moved closer to securing victory in a catastrophic war, Lincoln took the oath of office for a second term on the Capitol’s eastern steps. It was a blustery rain-drenched day that turned the entire area into a sea of mud. But the sun burst through the clouds as the beleaguered president stepped to the podium, lighting up the inaugural stand as if God had cast celestial light on the day’s momentous proceedings.

  God’s will and judgment figured throughout Lincoln’s address, as it had throughout his presidency. He asserted that if all the wealth accumulated and blood spilled from 250 years of slavery were to be repaid by an equivalent loss of treasure and blood in the Civil War, such a fate must be accepted as God’s will. Lincoln’s biographer, David Herbert Donald, has termed this cold reference to divine retribution, even at the horrific level caused by the war, “one of the most terrible statements ever made by an American public official.”30

  Yet Lincoln clearly knew the dangers of invoking God to justify one’s actions, especially when he observed, speaking of North and South: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” It was a statement true of Jews as well as Christians.

  A month and a half later, on the morning of April 15, 1865, Rabbi Elkan Cohn was about to ascend his pulpit for Shabbat services at Congregation Emanu-El, the reform-oriented synagogue in San Francisco, when someone handed him a note. Cohn, an émigré from Poland with a graying beard and wire-rim glasses, silently read the news: Abraham Lincoln had been shot and killed the night before, on Good Friday, in Washington. Overcome with shock, the rabbi wept and sank to the floor. After getting to the bima, Rabbi Cohn made the announcement: “Lincoln, the twice-anointed high priest in the sanctuary of our Republic, has fallen a bloody victim to treason and assassination, and is no more,” he intoned. The congregants then burst into tears themselves. “Arise, my brethren, and bow in humble devotion before God!” Rabbi Cohn declared. “Arise, and honor the memory of the blessed, whose life was a blessing to us.”

  In Philadelphia, Rabbi Leeser shed his mixed feelings about the war as he also lost his composure on the same morning and apologized to his congregation for doing so. In another part of Philadelphia, Rabbi Morais told Congregation Mikveh Israel: “I loved every action, every word of that godly man.” Sadly, he added, Lincoln’s critics could not see underneath his rough-hewn exterior to the “inestimable and precious” qualities that Lincoln brought to his office. Rabbi Einhorn, speaking his German vernacular, told the Philadelphia congregation to which he had moved that Lincoln, like Moses, had “led his people through a long, bleak desert to the border of Canaan, and was not allowed to enter it.” If Lincoln had a flaw, Einhorn said, it was his “excessive leniency towards the rebels” in the South. And in Kentucky, Lewis Naphthali Dembitz, a prominent attorney, said the Jews of Louisville referred humorously to Lincoln as “Rabbi Abraham.” Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise called Lincoln a messiah for his country and a man of great principle—and even asserted the dubious proposition that Lincoln was of Jewish heritage. In an essay in Die Deborah on April 28, 1865, Wise elaborated on his improbable claim that “Lincoln maintained before four witnesses, I being one of them, that he believed he was descended from Jewish parents, and he insisted that his face had Jewish features, which was indeed so.”31

  Lincoln has the unique distinction of being revered as both an American Moses and an American Jesus. For Jews, like Moses, Lincoln freed the slaves only to be barred from the Promised Land. For both Jews and Chris
tians, he was a man of godlike humility who died for American sins. It was almost as if his prophetic second inaugural address only a few weeks earlier had come true—that the “terrible” assertion that the war’s bloodshed had served as divine restitution for the sins of slavery had been fulfilled. Now Lincoln had been nailed to the cross and murdered so that America might experience the “new birth of freedom” he had called for in the Gettysburg Address. It was hard for Americans, especially Jews, not to see him and his murder in a deeply religious and redemptive context.

  Just as historical interpretations of the Civil War have evolved over time, so too have the interpretations of the role of Jews in the war and its causes. In the first century or so after the war, Jews continued to seek to weave their experience into the mainstream narrative of American history, retelling and almost fetishizing stories about Abraham Lincoln’s encounters with Jews.

  Perhaps the best-known Jew to interact with Lincoln was Isachar Zacharie, a foot doctor who treated the president’s bunions and is often cited as a key to what was the president’s sympathy for Jews in general. The conversations between Lincoln and his doctor were said to have ranged through many subjects and included a share of gossip, since Zacharie also treated various members of Lincoln’s cabinet, the Senate, and the Union’s commanding general and thorn in Lincoln’s side, George P. McClellan. Lincoln even dispatched Zacharie to New Orleans after it fell to Union forces. There Zacharie treated a number of prominent people for their foot problems and sent back impressions to the White House.

  Zacharie’s most famous mission entailed a trip to the Confederate capital of Richmond in 1863 to discuss a possible accommodation between North and South. When aspects of his discussions came to light—supposedly involving a scheme for the Confederacy to attack Napoleon III’s French troops in Mexico, oust Emperor Maximilian, and install Jefferson Davis as president of Mexico—they were widely ridiculed. Although Zacharie presciently proposed establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which Lincoln apparently found worthy of consideration, he was clearly part clever ingratiator, part self-promoter, part genuine patriot, and perhaps even part spy. He was certainly one of the strangest characters in the annals of Jewish American history, not to mention Lincoln’s personal associations.32

  Many other Jews appear to have interacted with Lincoln, among them Edward Rosewater, who is said to have transmitted the Emancipation Proclamation by telegraph; Samuel Huttenbauer, who sold Lincoln suspenders and collar buttons from his peddler’s pushcart; and Samuel G. Alschuler, a photographer who captured Lincoln in an early portrait, having lent his own coat to the future president for the sitting. Another figure, Abraham Jonas, was a political activist who befriended Lincoln in his Whig Party days in the Illinois legislature and supported his nomination at the Republican convention in 1860.

  After Lincoln’s death, the Gettysburg Address was translated and recited in Yiddish. The identification of Lincoln as “Rabbi Abraham” and “Father Abraham” later figured in a landmark publication in 1927 of Abraham Lincoln: The Tribute of the Synagogue, which consisted of sermons and eulogies by rabbis and prominent Jews following his assassination.

  Jewish histories in the century after the Civil War paralleled the histories of the war written for all Americans. The political bargain that installed President Rutherford Hayes in the White House in 1877 officially ended Reconstruction and ushered in the depredations of Jim Crow laws reinstituting racial subjugation and the deliberate amnesia and romanticizing of the South and its “Lost Cause.” Initially sanitized accounts of the role Jews played in the war emphasized that the conflict was caused by many factors—sectional, economic, cultural—beyond the dispute over slavery. Jewish histories in turn bought into the interpretation of the conflict as a painful domestic disruption interrupting the progress that accompanied the making of modern America, a time of shared sacrifice and common cause, with Jews playing the role of loyal citizens of whichever part of the country they inhabited.

  “The key elements of the dominant depiction of the war—loyal Jewish service to the North and South, the reciprocated Jewish love of Lincoln, and the braininess of [Judah P.] Benjamin—echoed the reconciliatory spirit of the broader historiography in the early decades of the twentieth century,” writes Adam Mendelsohn, adding that this was a “convenient” way of looking at history, allowing historians to overlook Jewish slaveholding, support for slavery, and other unpleasant facts. This approach “allowed a superficial discussion of Southern Jewish slaveholding that avoided troubling questions about morality and responsibility and enabled the resurrection of Judah P. Benjamin as a communal hero.”33

  In The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (published in 1895), Simon Wolf, who was the B’nai B’rith representative in Washington, D.C., sought to demonstrate the loyalty of Jews to their new country. His book, an encyclopedic account of Jewish participation in both sides, showed that Jews signed up to fight in larger proportions than adherents of other religions. It was largely written as a rejoinder to Mark Twain, who had earlier denigrated Jews as soldiers.

  In 1896, Max Kohler, a New York lawyer who wrote frequently for the American Jewish Historical Society, argued that slaveholding in general by Jews, and the slaveholding of Benjamin, demonstrated that Jews were “receptive and assimilative” to their environment. Acknowledging that Benjamin was not an observant or practicing Jew, Kohler hailed him as the “most distinguished statesman, orator and lawyer, that American Jewry has produced.”34 On the other hand, not one statue of Benjamin appears to have been erected throughout the South in the post-Reconstruction period, despite his supposed reputation as “the brains” of the Confederacy. Jews in the region were not exactly rushing to honor him.

  Scholars argue that a historiographic sea change after World War II brought a new willingness by researchers to look hard at the darker sides of the American Jewish experience. By the 1950s, the weight of growing impatience over the legacy of Jim Crow and the stirrings of the struggle over civil rights burst forth. It was time for Jews themselves to confront the issue of Jewish support of slavery, and to explore the reality behind the myth that Jews were loyal to the South because they were trying to integrate themselves into American society.

  The main Jewish advocate of this revisionism was Bertram Korn, an ordained rabbi who had served as a chaplain in the Marines during World War II. His 1951 book, Jews in the Civil War, raised multiple questions about the Jewish role, including their participation in slavery. Korn joined with a handful of other historians to challenge the consensus and he took it even further, looking fearlessly at Jewish slaveholding and at Benjamin himself.

  Still, the reverence for Lincoln has permeated Jewish American tradition down through the ages. After Lincoln’s assassination, a Jewish shopkeeper in Buffalo, New York, Julius E. Francis, collected Civil War and Lincoln memorabilia, displaying them in his store and campaigning for Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, to be a national holiday—the cause of his life, he said. Francis died in 1881, after founding the Buffalo Lincoln’s Birthday Association, which continued work that is widely credited with the success of making Lincoln’s birthday the holiday it has become. In 1909, to commemorate the one hundredth birthday of Lincoln, Victor David Brenner, a Jewish sculptor originally from Lithuania, designed the profile of Lincoln in bronze that remains on the penny. In 1942, the composer Aaron Copland wrote his stirring “Lincoln Portrait,” a musical accompaniment to Lincoln’s words. Most recently, Steven Spielberg’s 2012 movie Lincoln, with its screenplay by Tony Kushner, was another case of two Jews enshrining Lincoln as a saint.

  The attachment of Jews to Lincoln is historically appropriate. There is after all little doubt that the Civil War transformed the status of Jews in the United States, fusing their religious identity with the fate of their adopted country. Brought to a new level of status and prosperity, American Jews were ready to transform their own relationship with Judaism. But that challenge was to be fraught with peril, discord, a
nd struggle.

  Ten

  PROSPER AND DIVIDE

  As the Gilded Age beckoned after the Civil War, Jews shared in the turbulent but steady economic growth of postbellum America, attaining greater material, social, and cultural status than Jews had ever enjoyed in modern history. The Civil War shattered the South, reducing it to smoldering ruins, but most of the country thrived despite intermittent economic crises through the rest of the century. Leaders of the increasingly prosperous Jewish community optimistically proclaimed that a new era had arrived in which they could take their place alongside non-Jews, enjoying American secular values as virtual coreligionists. The term Judeo-Christian, which had begun as a derisive way of describing Jewish converts, was becoming a phrase characterizing the common spiritual and ethical legacy of two Abrahamic religions.

  Signaling their self-confidence and prosperity, Jewish communities built monumental synagogues of Moorish or Byzantine design and marble and gilt décor throughout the country, copying the fashion in some parts of Germany. Especially in the big cities, synagogues moved into statelier houses of worship that reflected Jewish self-confidence and prosperity. “The acquisition of a synagogue edifice with the accompanying display of civic recognition and patriotic affirmation became a symbol of belonging in the new society,” writes the scholar Leon Jick. By the 1860s, he writes “there was hardly a congregation in America which did not build a large and sumptuous new edifice.”1