The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai is a text to be wrestled with. Begun by the historian Dianna Ashton, and completed by her colleague at Rowan University Melissa Klapper following Ashton’s death, the book contains the diary entries of a wealthy, single Southern Jewish woman, written between 1864 and 1865.
Mordecai, whose family had lived in North America since before the Revolution, describes having friendly interactions with her Christian friends, visiting church with them, and observing her own faith. She references celebrating Shabbat, attending synagogue in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia, enjoying meals with friends on Tabernacles (Sukkot), and learning Torah on Pentecost (Shavuot). Many of Mordecai’s family members assimilated and converted to Christianity, but she remained proudly Jewish.
Although her faith in God was tested by the war’s turn toward Northern victory, Mordecai continued to be a steadfast believer. In the diary, she notes with pride that a fallen Southern Jewish soldier and his brother observed the laws of kashrut while in the field. Most jarring is Mordecai’s support of slavery. The ability of Jews to own human beings while participating in Passover seders that celebrate liberation has long been a lamentable part of the American Jewish past.
As the book’s introduction notes, “Emma believed that Jews awaited a future that would lift them out of their dispersed, powerless status and restore God’s ‘light’ to their community.” Her diary is a rare testimony of a Southern Jewish woman’s experience during the Civil War, and a reflection of Lincoln’s lament that both the North and South “read the same Bible and pray to the same God.”
Dr. Stu Halpern is Senior Advisor to the Provost of Yeshiva University. He has edited or coedited 17 books, including Torah and Western Thought: Intellectual Portraits of Orthodoxy and Modernity and Books of the People: Revisiting Classic Works of Jewish Thought, and has lectured in synagogues, Hillels and adult Jewish educational settings across the U.S.
