Fear no pharaoh American Jews, the Civil War, and the fight to end slavery

In this riveting study, Nation contributor Kreitner (Break It Up) profiles six American Jews who participated in antebellum debates about slavery, shedding light on how sparring over the issue shaped the history of American Judaism just as much as individual Jews influenced the outcome of the war. Kreitner describes how conservative New York rabbi Morris Jacob Raphall, who defended slavery as biblically sanctioned (because the Israelites owned slaves of their own, after fleeing bondage in Egypt), and moderate Cincinnati rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who advised that Jews not take sides in the conflict, were both challenged by "bold dissident" David Einhorn, a Baltimore rabbi at the "leading edge" of the Reform movement who argued that "defending slavery... amounted to a betrayal" of Judaism, which he thought ought to stand for "freedom... for the whole world." Kreitner also traces three secular Jewish political actors of the period, contrasting left-wingers Ernestine Rose, a firebrand speaker on the antislavery lecture circuit, and August Bondi, a veteran of the failed 1848 European revolutions who fought alongside John Brown, with Judah P. Benjamin, a slave owner and Louisiana senator who became Jefferson Davis's secretary of state. While surfacing fascinating new details about these figures, especially the enigmatic Benjamin, Kreitner also points to intriguing ways in which the slavery debate spurred reflection on assimilation vs. insularity that defined the next century of Jewish American thought. Readers will be engrossed. (Apr.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.