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197 Part IV Jewish Soldiers during the Civil War From the first, Jewish writing about the Civil War extolled (and enumerated ) the participation of Jews in the conflict as soldiers and sailors, officers and enlistees. Paradoxically for a subject repeatedly foraged by historians , we know surprisingly little about the experience of Jews in the armies of the North. Partly this reflects the difficulty of assembling the sources necessary for writing a richly textured account of Jewish life in uniform. But primarily it suggests the vestigial legacy of several generations of historians who collected and collated material to serve political, apologetic, and presentist—rather than historical—agendas. The former approach is exemplified by Simon Wolf’s The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, a massive compendium of articles and lists of servicemen published in 1895 in response to an antisemite’s allegation that he could not “remember meeting one Jew in uniform of hearing of any Jewish soldier.” Wolf’s work has since served as a template (and sourcebook) for many others who have written about Jewish Civil War service. Perhaps in reaction to these largely amateur efforts, scholars have largely avoided the subject of Jewish soldiering. Bertram Korn, in his magisterial work on the Civil War, offers only fleeting glimpses of Jewish life in the ranks. Korn deliberately eschewed the form of military history favored by many of his forebears who studied Jewish involvement in the war, preferring to write a social history of the American Jewish community’s experience of the conflict. Aside from the publication of several memoirs and diaries of veterans, as well as a handful of scholarly accounts that have often echoed Wolf, the field of battle has been left surprisingly barren. Historians of Jewish military service in the Civil War have fallen behind a broader historiography that has long since moved from recounting the 198 Part IV: Jewish Soldiers during the Civil War exploits of military heroics to investigating the social and psychological experience of soldiering. Social historians of the Civil War have explored subjects that include the effects of trauma, the social lives of soldiers, popular religion within the ranks, troop culture and camaraderie, and the origins of courage and cowardice, as well as the ethnic and national divisions within the armies. It is within this latter category that studies of the Jewish experience of soldiering have most to contribute. We still know surprisingly little of Jewish service for the Union. Thanks to Robert Rosen, we know more about those who fought for the Confederacy . By Wolf’s unreliable estimates, close to eight thousand Jews served in uniform. All-Jewish companies were formed in Syracuse, Chicago, and Cincinnati, as well as two in Georgia. Other units, by virtue of geography and the connections between enlistees, were heavily composed of Jews. Yet we have no group portrait of those who chose to enlist (and those who opted to avoid conscription) in the Union armies. We have only a handful of anecdotal examples of the conflicts and compromises that service forced on those observing Jewish law—kashrut, worship, and burial—in the field. We know little of antisemitism and proselytizing in the ranks. Most strikingly, we have no broad sense of the impact of the war on the Jews who fought: the effects of billeting and serving alongside Christians, as well as the long-term impact of service on Jewish veterans’ identities, religious observance and faith, integration and Americanization. Although the essays by Stanley Falk and Jacob Rader Marcus included here do not engage with these issues systematically, they break substantively with a historiographic tradition that, above all, celebrated service. Marcus’s study of the career of Louis Gratz, who arrived from Germany months before the outbreak of war, points to some of the advantages—and even attractions—of enlistment for recent immigrants. After struggling unsuccessfully as a peddler, Gratz found rapid advancement in an army desperately short of skilled officers and full of opportunities for capable young men fortunate to survive a perilous profession. Marcus describes how the army acted as an avenue for his integration: Gratz’s period of service improved his command of English, provided rough socialization in American ways, deepened his sense of belonging, and broadened his postwar prospects. At the end of the war, Gratz settled in Knoxville, a town in which he had been stationed during the conflict, opened a legal practice (some soldiers had helped with his training in the latter months of the war), and married the...

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