In the concluding chapter of this highly readable book, Richard Kreitner decries the dualistic thinking that underlies many contemporary reckonings with the role of Jews in the racial history of the United States. All we seem to care about is “whether Jews ought to be classed primarily as victims or as oppressors.” The cause of responsible historical inquiry, not to mention common sense, demands better of us. Southern Jewish slave owners who read the Haggadah at their Passover seders, for example, didn’t automatically consider themselves to be stand-ins for Pharaoh. Fear No Pharaoh helps us to understand why Jews who witnessed and participated in the Civil War spoke and acted as they did.
For most of their history preceding the Civil War, the white citizens of the United States, including white Jews, tied themselves in knots over the practice of slavery. Their failure to address its fundamental injustice resulted in a devastating war. Even when they were deeply religious, the positions that Americans took had more to do with where they lived than with what they believed. When the war broke out, the majority of Southern Jews sympathized with the Confederacy, and about three thousand fought in its army. Northern Jews, who were highly concentrated in a more urbanized, immigrant-receptive region, acted similarly: they aligned themselves with their neighbors, and seven thousand or so served in the Union Army as enlisted men and officers. Though slavery was undoubtedly the cause of the Civil War, Jews, feeling unassured of their own status in the majority Christian milieu of North America, generally kept their views about it to themselves.
A handful of Jews on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, however, including a significant number of rabbis, did take positions. While Kreitner’s book provides an overall chronology of how all American Jews experienced the war to end slavery, it also highlights the stories of six public figures. This narrative technique enhances the book’s accessibility and also helps to prevent it from getting bogged down in academic argumentation. The author humanizes each of his six central “characters” — including Judah Benjamin, the slave-owning Confederate cabinet member, and Morris Raphall, the Swedish-born Orthodox rabbi whose 1860 sermon in defense of slavery earned him an infamous place in history.
Making resourceful use of the enormous body of scholarship that already exists on this subject, Kreitner sheds light on how vexed Jews were by the question of slavery and, at the same time, how fully engaged they were in the struggle to come to terms with it. He acknowledges and addresses the urgency that motivates our inquiries without imposing moral judgments on people who faced circumstances that are difficult for us to fathom now. Not surprisingly, the Jews whose views come closest to ours paid a particularly heavy price for being so far out of step with their contemporaries. Even the handful of Jews who took principled stands in favor of abolition, including the Reform rabbi David Einhorn and the women’s rights advocate Ernestine Rose, said many things in public that would not meet with our approval in the present. Learning about what their bravery cost them is an important takeaway from this enlightening book.
Michael Hoberman teaches American literature at Fitchburg State University. His latest book, Imagining Early American Jews, is due out from Oxford University Press in 2025.
