FEAR NO PHARAOH

Historical examination of a dilemma facing 19th-century Jewish immigrants to the U.S.: Did assimilation require supporting slavery?

As Kreitner observes in opening, many Jews in both the North and the South supported slavery as biblically endorsed, with one New York rabbi asking abolitionists, “Does it not strike you that you are guilty of something very little short of blasphemy?” It did not help that many abolitionists were also fervent evangelists who sought to convert as well as liberate, some of whom “called for altering the Constitution to make America an officially Christian nation.” Kreitner follows the lives of six representative figures, three of them rabbis. Of them, one was opposed to abolition, one wanted Jews to stay out of the argument for their own security, and one was wholeheartedly opposed to slavery. Adding to these are three secular Jews, not especially religious, who took different paths: one a veteran of the European revolutions who came to America in 1848 and fought with John Brown in Bloody Kansas; a socialist named Ernestine Rose, who combined her opposition to slavery with a strong denunciation of “women’s subjugation”; and, best known of all, Judah Benjamin, the slave-owning Louisiana senator who became the most powerful member of Jefferson Davis’ cabinet but who, Kreitner notes, is also “conspicuously absent from the Lost Cause pantheon.” Though it is difficult to generalize from so small a sample, Kreitner makes clear that each was sincere in his or her beliefs: The antislavery rabbi David Einhorn, for instance, held that “Jews fortunate enough to have found refuge in the United States should work to make it better, for everyone,” while Benjamin sought to protect his financial interests even as he recognized that sooner or later the South would have to abandon slavery—and who wisely fled the country at the Civil War’s end.

A welcome contribution to the literature of slavery, the Civil War, and American immigration.