The Jewish Confederates (review)

As an effort in chronicling Southern Jewry during the Civil War era, Robert Rosen's work is impressive in scope and deserves mention in any booklist concerning religion and the American Civil War. The Jewish Confederates intimately chronicles the lives of religious communities in such geographically distant places as Richmond, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana. In highlighting the experience of the war among these local Jewish inhabitants, Rosen offers his audience a brief glimpse into Southern Jewish life during America's struggle as a "House Divided"—a metaphor with particular resonance among American Jews. The work highlights well-known historical actors such as Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin, Phoebe Yates Pember, Col. Abraham Charles Myers, Maj. Alexander Hart, and Maj. Adolph Proskauer. Other lesser-known but equally interesting figures such as the Myers family of Richmond, Reverend George Jacobs, and Lewis Leon are among the cast of characters depicted in Rosen's thorough text. For this Herculean effort in research and literary detail, scholars and students of the Civil War are indebted to Rosen for bringing to their attention an important, but all-too-often forgotten element of the Confederacy.

Yet, at the same time, for all The Jewish Confederates offers its audience in terms of its expansiveness, it also lacks the in-depth analysis of Jewish life in the Confederacy that such a subject deserves. While occasionally over-reliant upon secondary sources to forward the historical narrative, Rosen's quest for breadth oftentimes leads the narrative astray, piecing together often interesting vignettes of Jewish life without the necessary interpretative framework to make the text a solid piece of historical research. This keen interest on the personal lives of Jews leads the author to simplify the relationship between Southern Jews and the Confederate cause. What's more, such simplification seems to have led to contradictory claims. For example, the author asserts, "Southern Jewry was an integral part of the Confederate States of America." After making this weighty claim, however, the author fails to substantiate it in any detail. What follows are pages about Jewish immigration and settlement, along with numerous biographical descriptions of prominent Jewish families in the South prior to or on the eve of war. What the author fails to explain is how these Southern Jews became Confederates.

Other subjects such as anti-Semitism in the South and Jewish allegiances to the Confederate cause also receive only cursory treatment. Such methodological pitfalls leave the audience with the impression that all Southern Jews were pro-Confederate and were so because they lived in a region far freer from anti-Semitic bigotry than their fellow Jews in the North. The extant writings of Jews from this era, however, paint a different picture. At times the author hints at such complexities—for example, in his treatment of Jewry in New Orleans the author suggests a division existed between established Jewish families and new immigrant families concerning the Confederacy during Union occupation—but never exploits these issues to paint a richer picture of Southern and Confederate Jewish life. This flat rendering of the Jews obscures such matters as class, gender, and perhaps most importantly among American Jews, how the faith of a covenant people was breeched by political strife.

Despite these criticisms, the work is a welcomed addition to the small but growing body of literature concerning religious life and the American Civil War. While Rosen's treatment is certainly not the last word on Southern Jewry during the war, it nevertheless should be commended as an important first attempt to understand this critical subject and period of American religious life.