‘Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other” is how Abraham Lincoln described the dueling forces of the North and South in his Second Inaugural Address. He was, of course, speaking to a predominantly Christian national audience—but the words resonated with America’s Jews, who constituted half a percentage point of the population at the time. From their number, Richard Kreitner has assembled the cast of characters he portrays in his engaging volume, Fear No Pharaoh.

Ernestine Rose was the daughter of a Polish rabbi but had renounced her Orthodoxy as a child. She arrived in New York in 1836 at the age of 26. There she advocated for women’s rights and against slavery and became friends with Susan B. Anthony and Walt Whitman. Her efforts led to the passage in 1848 of a New York law giving women property rights in marriage. This was months before the Seneca Falls Convention formally inaugurated the women’s rights movement. Eventually one of the most prominent abolitionist orators in the country, Rose spoke alongside Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and William Lloyd Garrison at countless meetings and conventions. While her advocacy stemmed from her universalist leanings—“Humanity’s children are, in my estimation, all one and the same family [and] therefore there should be no slaves of any kind among them,” she believed—she would, later in her career, ac-knowledge her own background as “a daughter of poor, crushed Poland, and the down-trodden and persecuted people called the Jews, ‘a child of Israel.’”

August Bondi came to his anti-slavery views from a more consciously Jewish perspective. Though he never kept kosher, Bondi considered himself “an enthusiastic Jew” as well as a “lover of humanity.” After arriving from Vienna in the mid-19th century, he fought for the North and was a supporter of the radical abolitionist terrorist John Brown. In his memoirs, Bondi wrote that those who came after him should know that “Jeuhudim were active at the very commencement of the ‘late unpleasantness’ between the States.”

Then there was the Swedish-born Morris Jacob Raphall, the first rabbi to offer a blessing before a session of Congress. Raphall’s January 1861 sermon in New York defending slavery from a biblical perspective was so well received that the New York Historical Society asked him to repeat it at an event chaired by the telegraph inventor, Samuel Morse. In contextualizing the explicit permission the Bible grants to slave-owning, Raphall noted that the Patriarchs possessed slaves and the Ten Commandments mandated Sabbath rest for them. He added, however, “The slave is a person in whom the dignity of human nature is to be respected; he has rights.” Kreitner suggests Raphall “intended his sermon as a last minute peace proposal, an audacious effort to patch up the differences…and use Judaism as the glue.”

Emma Mordecai was one of many Southern Jews who saw no conflict in celebrating Passover with a meal served by slaves. And Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise insisted as late as 1864 that there was nothing “absolutely unjust” in buying “savages” in order to “place them under the protection of law, and secure them the benefit of civilized society.”

While today it is easy to judge those slavery supporters, Kreitner notes that the abolitionists didn’t always make it easy for Jews to join their cause. William Lloyd Garrison, who edited the nation’s most prominent anti-slavery newspaper, “considered himself to be a more faithful interpreter of Hebrew scripture than the Jews themselves.” Garrison once criticized a Christian critic of his views as “groping in Jewish darkness” and referred to the prominent Jewish publisher Mordecai Manuel Noah as “the miscreant Jew…that lineal descendant of the monsters that nailed Jesus to the cross.” Theodore Parker, an abolitionist minister admired by Lincoln, claimed that Jewish minds were “sadly pinched in those narrow foreheads” and that the blood libel was true—Jews “did sometimes kill a Christian baby at the Passover.”

Kreitner also shows how individual Jews vacillated on the issue over time. “What is a slave?” asked Charleston-raised Judah Benjamin before the Louisiana Supreme Court. “He is a human being…his heart, like the heart of a white man, swells with love, burns jealousy, aches with sorrow, pines under restraint and discomfort…and ever cherishes the desire for liberty.” This empathy, displayed early in his career, didn’t prevent Benjamin from resigning from the U.S. Senate in support of the Southern cause and serving as Jefferson Davis’s secretary of state in the Confederacy. Abraham Jonas, an early political supporter of Lincoln, ended up with four sons fighting for the South and two for the North. “Conflicted and divided, implicated and appalled, Jews were pretty much like everyone else,” Kreitner observes. “The absence of any Jews from the slave trade would hardly have made a difference. Free Black people in the antebellum South owned many more slaves than Jews did.”

Kreitner is careful to show, during the Civil War era, “how difficult it was for both [Jewish] leaders and ordinary men and women to figure out where they fit in American society and what they thought should be done about the most divisive political issue of the day.” Supporting abolition in the South would have “meant standing out in the crowd, an armed and dangerous one at that”—something Jews were prudently loath to do. In the North, Jews, grateful to have escaped European persecution and gained unparalleled religious freedom, gravitated toward the Democratic Party, known for its immigrant-friendly leanings (alongside its pro-slavery views). As Kreitner writes, “Any Jews who decided to speak—or act—against slavery had to do so as individuals, without communal protection or encouragement of any kind.”

Thankfully for the historical record, there were also unabashed heroes like David Einhorn. Rabbi Einhorn had lamented Raphall’s defense of slavery, considering the speech a desecration of God’s name, a stance that cost Einhorn his own job as head of a Reform synagogue in Baltimore—he was literally run out of town by a mob. In a sermon delivered in 1878, the year before he died, Einhorn, by this time a New Yorker, expressed gratitude for the American experiment while urging his co-religionists never to compromise for profit the prophetic voice of liberation.

“Here in America,” Einhorn thundered, “the sons of Judah are no longer pushed around like strangers. Full of strength, they step forth out of darkness into the light, out of slavery into freedom…. So many of us suffered under Pharaoh-like laws in our old homeland.” But, he reminded them, as Kreitner reminds us as well in his fine book, “we will be even greater here, if we bring about an aristocracy of the spirit, rather than an aristocracy of gold.”

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