Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery
By Richard Kreitner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pp.
Two Jews, three shuls: The old joke is funny because it’s true. Throughout 5,785 years of history, the Jewish people have argued among themselves over matters large and small, religious and secular.
In that sense, it’s unsurprising that there would have been no consensus among the United States’s pre-Civil War Jewish population on the great issue of their time: slavery. Among the many examples adduced by journalist and independent historian Richard Kreitner in his superb new book, Fear No Pharaoh: Baltimore Rabbi David Einhorn’s fiery abolitionist sermons got him run out of that pro-slavery Maryland city. New York’s Rabbi Morris Jacob Raphall, by contrast, invoked the biblical patriarchs’ ownership of servants to justify the South’s “peculiar institution.” In Cincinnati, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise preached “silence on all questions of the day,” the better, he believed, to preserve Jewish cohesion and avoid inflaming either pro- or anti-slavery gentiles.
Probably the most famous Jew of the period, Judah Benjamin of Louisiana, resigned from the U.S. Senate to join the Confederate cabinet—and became Secretary of State of the Confederacy and Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s trusted consigliere. Meanwhile, radical feminist Ernestine Rose traveled the country delivering abolitionist stem-winders. Vienna-born August Bondi briefly joined John Brown’s militia in Kansas and later took two bullets fighting for the Union Army. In Charleston, Richmond and New Orleans, members of Jewish congregations owned slaves and backed secession.
For U.S. Jews today, their forebears’ division and equivocation in the face of slavery’s evils can only be a cause for sober reflection. It would be more comfortable if the record showed unanimous Jewish opposition to the enslavement of Black people, but it decidedly does not.
As Kreitner argues, American Jewry, numbering just 150,000 on the eve of the Civil War in 1861, generally experienced the secession crisis as most other Americans did: a potential disaster to be survived with as little damage to one’s own family and livelihood as possible. One rabbi’s wife spoke for many when she wished that “the whole thing should pass peacefully for the Jews.”
What lends the story special impact, of course, is that Jews were not just ordinary Americans, but heirs to a tradition whose “beating heart,” as Kreitner writes, is “a rebellion of slaves against masters,” recalled annually at the Passover seder. Though other U.S. religious groups also argued and divided over what God expected them to do about slavery, none confronted quite the tension between principle and pragmatism that the Jews did.
“Is the point [of Exodus] that Jews should remember their years of bondage so as to avoid being persecuted ever again,” Kreitner writes, “or is it that slavery, like all subjugation, is inherently wrong and unjust and that Jews should seek to end oppression for everyone?”
While Kreitner is appropriately critical of Confederate leader Judah Benjamin, and admiring of abolitionists David Einhorn and Ernestine Rose, he resists moralizing or presentism. His judgments take into account the real-world choices Jews faced as imperfect and—often—insecure inhabitants of a nation that was relatively religiously tolerant but still prone to antisemitism.
“Declaring oneself an abolitionist meant standing out in the crowd,” Kreitner writes, “an armed and dangerous one at that.”
Kreitner, the author of a previous book on secession and separatism in U.S. history, astutely links the collective ambivalence of Jews in America to events in Europe. In the decade prior to the Civil War, the U.S. Jewish population had been swollen by refugees from autocratic crackdowns against the uprisings of 1848. Jews who had taken part in those liberal rebellions saw the United States as both an arena for continuing the struggle and a sanctuary they were loath to destabilize.
At the same time, Jewish doctrine itself was in flux, with Reform rabbis such as Einhorn, who arrived from Europe in 1855, calling for a complete modernization of the faith and conservatives such as Raphall moving more slowly. With faith leaders sending mixed signals, rank-and-file Jews could claim scriptural support for a wide range of positions on slavery. In 1861, a Richmond Sephardic rabbi actually likened white Southerners to the “chosen people of old,” praying that they “may pass with dry feet safely to the position of peace and plenty.”
There are illuminating facts on almost every page of this well-researched book. Kreitner explodes the smear, peddled by the Nation of Islam, that Jews dominated the slave trade but also acknowledges that the few Jews who trafficked in human beings, such as Aaron Lopez of Newport, Rhode Island, often did so on a large scale. The profits built that town’s magnificent Touro Synagogue.
The predominantly Christian abolitionist leadership could repel Jews with its sometimes crude antisemitism. William Lloyd Garrison referred to Jews as “those monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross between two thieves.” Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker said Jews “sometimes kill a Christian baby at the Passover.” Suffragist Lucy Stone lamented that audiences “feared” Ernestine Rose because “her face is so essentially Jewish,” and urged Susan B. Anthony to shun her.
Meanwhile, in the South, Jews who had fled persecution in Europe could be accepted as white and enjoy the attendant privileges. Brothers Henry and Mayer Lehman migrated from Germany to Montgomery, AL, where they set up a thriving cotton brokerage—later to develop into the eponymous Wall Street firm—and owned nine slaves between them.
Nor did the opinions of individual Jews necessarily remain fixed throughout the tumultuous time. August Bondi fought for a free Kansas and joined the Union Army but dropped out of Brown’s militia when he heard Brown’s plans for a slave insurrection. Later, Bondi—like many other white Americans—turned against Reconstruction and Black suffrage, insisting in a memoir that he opposed slavery because it threatened the economic prospects of white workers, not out of sympathy with the people he referred to by the n-word.
Prussian-born Marcus Spiegel joined the Union Army to defend the Union, not what he called “the darkies.” In a letter home, he professed fury at the Emancipation Proclamation. Later, though, after years of fighting in the South, Spiegel had seen enough of the “horrors of slavery” to pronounce himself “a strong abolitionist.”
As they grapple with today’s moral and political challenges, American Jews have much to learn from how their ancestors met those of the 19th century. Kreitner’s account, blending original scholarship and judicious analysis, is the place to start.
Charles Lane is a journalist and author of three books on American history and law.
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