"A Struggle Which Ended So Beneficently:" A Century of Jewish Historical Writing About the American Civil War

The Civil War has arguably been the most contested area in American historiography. The guns had barely fallen silent before politicians, polemicists, and historians mustered to refight the military and political battles of the war. Even though its armies lost on the battlefields, the Confederacy won these early intellectual skirmishes.¹ Initially, American Jewish historical writing paid much less attention to the conflict, shying away from it because of its controversial nature. Jewish involvement in the war first received serious attention in the late 1880s and 1890s. These early accounts established the tone and approaches adopted almost uniformly in later interpretations.

This article focuses on the period before American Jewish history became a field examined primarily by professionals, exploring how amateur historians crafted a consensual understanding of the meaning and importance of the Civil War for Jews. For the most part, this was popular history written with eyes focused as closely on the present as cast back to examine the past. By investigating American Jewish historical writing of the period up until the centenary of the Civil War, it is possible to delineate the evolution of dominant and durable themes. While these foundational themes remained static, they were flexible, molded to meet changing circumstances. Although the war received limited attention in most works of modern Jewish history, these representations are revealing of the position and self-perception of the community. The omissions from these accounts are equally revealing, highlighting controversial and uncomfortable subjects judged best avoided. These works also reveal the relationship between American Jewish historical writing and the historical mainstream. For much of this period, Jewish representations were closely tethered to the conservative center of Civil War historiography.

The first book by a Jewish author to attempt a comprehensive examination of the Jewish involvement in the war was Isaac Markens's The Hebrews in America, published in 1888.² Markens assembled a collection of his newspaper articles into a chronicle celebrating Jewish success in America. His boosterism presented the rapidly expanding community as the obverse of its critics' unfavorable descriptions. Yet, Markens's paean to progress and prosperity was laced with an implicit warning of the need for Jews to contribute conspicuously to broader American society.³ This same concern was evident in his representation of the Civil War. His listings of Jewish soldiers, interspersed with tales of heroism and sacrifice, highlighted Jewish loyalty and offered an ideal of Jewish-Christian fellowship. Although sketchily presented, Markens's uncomplicated depiction contained some of the core elements of future representations. Furthermore, he all but ignored antisemitism and slavery, two problematic issues that were treated with similar circumspection by many later Jewish authors.

While Markens treated the Civil War in a perfunctory manner, skirting controversial issues, Katie Magnus's Outlines of Jewish History, reissued in 1890 by the Jewish Publication Society with new chapters on American Jewry written by Henrietta Szold and Cyrus Adler, avoided the conflict entirely. Markens had originally been approached to write the new section, but his contribution was judged unsatisfactory.⁴ However, his exultant and optimistic tone, but not his attention to a still divisive war, was reproduced in the new volume. Szold and Adler seem studiously to have avoided the subject, even as they did not demur from extolling Jewish loyalty and bravery in "furthering the patriotic cause" in the War of Independence and the War of 1812.⁵ Their discussion of Michael Heilprin, a figure rarely described elsewhere without mention of his support for abolitionism, neglected this aspect of his biography. Perhaps the troubling dimensions of the war interfered with Szold's and Adler's buoyant presentation of American Jewish history. They discussed antisemitism in America as an alien import—"legal rubbish, brought over from Europe" that was "swept away forever" in the early nineteenth century—an interpretation that was incompatible with evidence of its surge during the Civil War. Moreover, their focus on the themes of "unification, elevation and advancement," and their presentation of Americans as a people "who have never failed to ignore speculative differences when the...