• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

American Tewish ARCHIVES Devotd to the prestrvation and study of American Jewish historical records DIRECTOR: JACOB RADER MARCUS, PH. D., Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Amcrican Jewish History ASSISTANT TO THE DIRECTOR: STANLEY F. CHYET, PH. D. Published by ?'HE AMERICAN JEWISH ARCHIVES, CINCINNATIto, OHIO m the Cincimti campus of the HEBREWUmo~ COLLEGE-JEWISH INSTITUTE OF RELIGION - - VOL. XI11 NOVEMBER, 1961 NO. 2 In This Issue THE JEWS OF THE UNION.. ............................ 131 A colorful array of individuals and events passes through the current issue of the American Jewish Archives. Among them are documentary accounts of the important Jewish Chaplaincy controversy, the anti-Jewish expulsion order issued by General Grant in Mississippi, the part American Jews took in providing needy war-victims with help and in supplying the Union armies with clothing, the heroism and military prowess of several Jewish servicemen, the adventures of an immigrant Jewish soldier taken prisoner by the Confed- eracy, the attitudes of a number of rabbis, and the pilgrimage to Washington of a Boston Jew ecstatic at the defeat of the South. Much of this material, drawn largely from sources like the Library of Congress, Jewish and general newspapers of the Civil War period, and contemporary war records, has hitherto been little-known, and the editors are confident that interested readers will find a great deal to intrigue them in this latest offering of the American Jewish Archives. INDEX TO VOLUME XIII. ............................... 231 ILLUSTRATIONS Four of Northern Jewry's Rabbinical Leaders, page 145; Samuel Myer Isaacs, page 146; Revolution in Baltimore, page 163; Blue against Gray at Gettysburg, page 164; Marcus M. Spiegel, page 197; Sir Moses Montefiore, page 198; Lincoln, page z I 5; A Jewish Lithographer Interprets the Emanci- patton Proclamation, page z 16. With this issue, the American Jewish Archives adopts a new publishing schedule. Henceforth, the fall issue will be published in November, rather than October. The spring issue will continue to be published in April. Patrans for 1961 THE NEUMANN MEMORIAL PUBLICATION FUND AND ARTHUR FRIEDMAN LEO FRIEDMAN 5"1 BERNARD STARKOFF Published by THE AMERICAN JEWISH ARCHIVES on the Cincinnati campus of the HEBREWUNION COLLEGE -JEWISH INSTITUTE OF RELIGION NELSON GLUECK President 0 1961, by The American Jewish Archives The Jews of the Union Introduction by BERTRAMW. KORN [In this issue, the American Jewish Archives takes pleasure in pre- senting a number of documents relating to the Jews of the Union. The last issue, published in April, 1961, dealt with material relating to the Jews of the Confederacy. - Editor.] This collection of Jewish documents dealing with the Union aspect of the Civil War, illuminating as it is in its own right, gains even greater meaning when contrasted with the data reflecting Jewish life in the Confederacy published in the previous issue of the American Jewish Archives. Among the many salient differences that obtained between the Jews of the two sections, perhaps the most notable involved the striking unanimity of rabbinical opinion in the South as against sharp disagreements over the crucial questions of slavery and secession voiced by the rabbis of the North. A wide spectrum of opinion can be discerned in the sermons and editorial pronouncements of outstanding Northern religious leaders like Isaac Mayer Wise, Morris J. Raphall, Samuel M. Isaacs, Isaac Leeser, David Einhorn, and Bernhard Felsenthal. Although these rabbis, in view of the nonhierarchical organization of the American synagogue, spoke only for themselves, there can be no doubt that each represented the views of various segments of the Jewish community in the North. Such public discussion regarding the moral elements of the slavery question and the justification of military force to preserve the Union was virtually unthinkable in the South. If David Einhorn found it necessary to leave Baltimore because his congregants hesitated to bear re- sponsibility for his outspoken Abolitionist sentiments, what would have been his fate had he dared to verbalize those same convictions in Richmond? When he came to Philadelphia, he was at least Dr. Bertram W. Korn, rabbi of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, Philadelphia, is the author of American Jewry and the Civil War. He is currently engaged in writing a history of the Jews of the South. 131 accorded a warm welcome by the members of the Keneseth Israel Congregation, but even there he found only a small measure of support for his radical antislavery position. Nevertheless, he continued to exercise the freedom to preach and to publish senti- ments with which many of his people disagreed. Einhorn's exper- ience, however, typifies not so much a difference in the attitudes of the Jewish communities North and South, as it typifies a difference in the mood of the citizenry of the two sections. Jews in Richmond and other Southern cities tended to act and think like the non- Jews among whom they lived, just as Jews in Philadelphia and Cincinnati commonly adopted the views of their neighbors. This is not to suggest that there was no feeling of comradeship which united the Jews of the North and of the South. Despite the war, the Jews of one section took a keen interest in the experiences of their coreligionists across the battlelines, and when relationships were possible, as in the prisoner-of-war camps, acts of friendship were often performed. When Union soldiers of the Jewish faith entered captured Confederate areas, they were certain to seek out fellow Jews; sometimes they were welcomed, sometimes scorned. But despite the ancestral faith which they shared in common, political convictions separated them. My favorite story of Civil War times concerns Myer Levy, a Union soldier from Philadelphia. Walking down the street of a newly seized Virginia town at Passover time, Levy noticed a little boy, sitting on the steps of a house and eating matzah. When he asked the boy for a piece of the unleavened bread, the child fled indoors, shouting at the top of his voice: "Mother! There's a 'damnyankeey Jew outside, and he wants my matzah." That boy is probably as good an example as any of the Confederate proclivities of Southern Jews; and most Northern Jews were equally vehement in their attachment to the Union. The identification of Jews in each section with the dominant political philosophy of their fellow citizens was due, in large measure, to the prevailing climate of freedom in both sections which encouraged Jews to think of themselves as first-class citizens, not as a special group segregated from the majority. By and large, Jews felt that they were accorded equal opportunity THE JEWS OF THE UNION '33 in America, particularly when they compared their present status with the experience which they had endured in Europe whence most of them stemmed -for in 1861 at least two thirds of all American Jews were recent immigrants. Still, this feeling of equality notwithstanding, the Civil War provoked a more serious ex- pression of anti-Jewish sentiment than had ever before appeared in American life. The Judeophobia which reached a high-water mark in General Ulysses S. Grant's notorious Orders Number Eleven - described in detail in these pages - was a shock to all Jews who had thought of themselves as indistinguishable from their neighbors except in religious faith. Although the spread of antiSemitic prejudice does not rank high in the total story of the passions, hatreds, and frustrations which flamed throughout the war- torn land, it was a terribly serious matter for the Jews themselves. More important, perhaps, than the prejudice itself was the reaction which it produced among Northern Jews. They did not meet it with sullen resentment or hopeless apathy; they did not throw up their hands in despair or surrender and assume that America was like all other countries. They met it with determined courage. Men like Rabbi Wise, of Cincinnati, and Cesar Kaskel, of Paducah, Kentucky, were confident that, even in the midst of war, Jewish rights to equal treatment before the law could be defended and upheld. It was, therefore, with supreme trust in the American promise that Kaskel and his fellow exiles from Kentucky telegraphed to the President, and that a delegation of distinguished Jewish leaders from the Midwest journeyed to Washington to interview Mr. Lincoln. And when the President, through the offices of General Henry W. Halleck, instructed the offending Grant to revoke the order, the delegation and Jews throughout the North did not feel that a favor had been granted to them; Lincoln's abrogation of the discriminatory edict was, they believed, only just and fair. America was to them a land of equality -and they would be satisfied with nothing less. Such a mood of assurance characterized not only the defense against anti-Semitism which Jews developed, but also their in- sistence on affirmative measures which recognized their equal participation in the war effort. The question of Jewish chaplains for the armed forces had hardly been mentioned prior to the spring of 1861 -the number of Jews serving in previous wars or in the regular Army would not have warranted such discussion - but once Jews began to volunteer in large numbers, it was urgent that this matter of religious equality be settled. A vigorous campaign was initiated and prosecuted throughout the North - in rabbis' sermons, in the weekly Jewish press, in the councils of the only representative Jewish body of the time (the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, with its headquarters in New York City), in communities like Bangor, Maine, where only three Jews had their residence, but where 200 non-Jews were willing to sign a petition in favor of the appointment of Jewish chaplains, and, finally, in the nation's capital, where Rabbi Arnold Fischel served as lobbyist and civilian chaplain.

Load more

  128

Copy Link