Jews and the Civil War: A Reader

Overview: The War between Jewish Brothers in America

27 Overview The War between Jewish Brothers in America Eli N. Evans For Jews in America, the Civil War was a watershed that involved Jewish soldiers from all over the nation. Jews served in both armies and helped in the war effort in many other ways. Serving their countries under fire and fighting side by side with their Gentile comrades in arms accelerated the process of acculturation, not only through their self-perceptions, but also because of the reactions of the community around them. Jewish immigrants who had only recently arrived in America and thought of themselves as Germans came to see themselves not only as Americans, but as Americans who belonged. And the veterans were largely treated that way when they returned home. By 1860, with a Jewish population of 150,000 (more than 100,000 new immigrants having arrived since 1850, mostly from Germany), there were at least 160 identifiable Jewish communities with synagogues in America, which meant that Jewish families with sons from cities and towns all across the country were involved in the Civil War. There were thirty congregations in New York City, but congregations also existed in cities and towns such as Albany, Utica, Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo, New York, as well as Savannah and West Point, Georgia, and Springfield, Illinois. Slavery evolved into the lightning rod and the sword that made a civil war on this divided continent inevitable. The divisive political, economic, social, and moral upheavals brought about by the struggle over slavery Reprinted, with minor abridgement, with permission of Eli N. Evans from From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America, ed. Michael Grunberger (New York: George Braziller, in association with the Library of Congress, 2005), 47–67, copyright © 2005 by the Library of Congress. 28 Eli N. Evans gripped the nation for decades. There was no one Jewish position on slavery, but German Jews, who in 1848 had begun the great journey to America in search of religious liberty, gravitated to the newly formed Republican Party in the North. There were many Jews who stood up for what they believed in on all sides of the issues, but on the whole Jews in both sections of the country, especially the struggling new immigrants, preferred political neutrality to outspoken participation in the bitter arguments over abolition. In the end, as Naomi Cohen pointed out in Encounter with Emancipation, “geographical location determined which army they fought in; for whom the women rolled bandages, and for which side the rabbis invoked divine aid.” Finally, as the war clouds gathered, Jewish neutrality was tested from an unexpected quarter—an improbable clash of rabbis impassioned by Old Testament interpretation. The War Years Anti-Semitism, or what one historian refers to as “Judaeophobia,” during and in the aftermath of the Civil War was as great as anytime in American history. That Jews didn’t fight, but just made money off the war, is a canard that gained great currency in the press during and in the years after the war. The charges took on the coloration of the fierce regional divisions that were at the core of the conflict. When the presence of Jews in the South during the Civil War was even acknowledged, the image in the Northern press was often of the cunning merchant-cheat and the speculator . The Southern press depicted Jews as “scavengers” who were unpatriotic and therefore “un-Southern,” outsiders safely behind the lines, feeding off the troubles of the South in its most desolate time. In the North as well, the Jews were accused of undermining the war effort and Jewish financiers of making money off the war. The truth for both sides is a more dramatic story of participation and sacrifice. Shocked by the charges that Jews avoided the dangers of the war and that no Jews even fought in the war, in 1895 Simon Wolf, a lawyer who had supported Abraham Lincoln and was the major lobbyist for Jewish causes in Washington, assembled a list of as many Jewish soldiers as he could find and published it in his book, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (which contains 300 pages of lists and biographical data taken from his interviews with families, citing their recollections, Jewish names, testimony, and other inexact sources). Wolf estimated that Overview 29 approximately twelve hundred Jews served in the Confederacy, including twenty-four army officers and eleven navy...