Lincoln and the Jews: A History by Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell, St. Martin Press, New York; ISBN 978-1-250-05935-6 ©2015, $40.00, p. 227, plus appendices and index
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, California — Abraham Lincoln died on Saturday, April 15, 1865. Most Northerners and many Southerners, particularly those who understood the ramifications of having a new, but weak President, incapable of controlling a radical Republican Congress, mourned his death. Jews, in the midst of their joyous Passover holiday, a celebration of passing from slavery to freedom, were now shocked, unnerved, and perhaps even disheartened, just as Americans felt over the Thanksgiving, 1963 holiday in the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Lincoln was the first President to publically demand the end of an anti-Semitic act, possibly the most egregious up to that point, by a public official. General Ulysses S. Grant, in December, 1862, issued his now infamous General Order No. 11, which expelled all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi because of his mistaken belief that Jews, as a class, “violated every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department” as well as orders from his own Department of Tennessee; namely their involvement in the black market of Southern cotton.
Jews from around the country sent telegrams to the White House condemning the unconstitutional act. Soon after, a group of Jewish merchants from Paducah, Kentucky, led by Cesar Kaskel, met with Lincoln regarding this matter. It was reported that after seeing Grant’s order, Lincoln said, “And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?”
To which Kaskel replied, “Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.”
“And this protection,” Lincoln declared, “they shall have at once.”
Lincoln immediately instructed the Army’s General-in-Chief, Henry Halleck, to rescind General Orders No. 11. Two days later, Grant sent telegrams from his headquarters saying: “By direction of the General in Chief of the Army at Washington, the General Order from these Head Quarters expelling Jews from this Department is hereby revoked.”
Lincoln and the Jews, co-authored by Brandeis University professor, Jonathan Sarna and Lincoln expert and manuscript collector Benjamin Shapell, recounts the details of numerous interactions between Lincoln and members of the Jewish faith. In the first two chapters, they cover the time period from Lincoln’s birth to 1858, the start of the famous Lincoln-Douglass debates. Beginning with Chapter Three, they divide Lincoln’s biography into smaller one to two-year time units.
In 1809, the year of Lincoln’s birth, there were only about 2200 Jews in the entire country, so it is very unlikely that Lincoln ever met a Jew while growing up in poverty in either Hardin County, Kentucky or Spencer County, Indiana. The only knowledge of Jews during his formative years most likely came from the Bible. Starting in the 1830s, while living in New Salem, then Athens, and finally Springfield, Lincoln began to acquire Jewish friends: Shopkeeper and livestock trader Louis Salzenstein, clothier Julius Hammerslough, and orthodox-reared Abraham Jonas, whom Lincoln called in February, 1860, “one of my most valued friends.”
Through Lincoln and the Jews Sarna and Shapell name and describe how many Jews worked behind the scenes in support of Lincoln’s presidential aspirations. Some worked the convention floor, while others were out in the field gathering Republican votes. In the end, Lincoln won the four-man race with less than forty percent of the popular vote, but winning the presidency by garnering 180 of the 303 electoral votes, mostly from the free states in the north, along with California and Oregon, which “vindicated the electoral strategy that [Abraham] Jonas had crafted.”
Sarna and Shapell note that the many communications between Lincoln and Jews, both before and during his Presidency are hardly momentous, thereby escaping the scrutiny of historians. However, taken as a whole they form a pattern showing that Lincoln treated “Jews on the same basis as everybody else,” even though many in his cabinet, the bureaucracy of the Executive Branch, and the upper echelons of the military, including Gens. Benjamin F. Butler, George B. McClellan, and Ulysses S. Grant, were anti-Semitic.
When confronted by the Jewish community’s complaint that new congressional legislation requiring that chaplains “must be a regular[ly] ordained minister of a Christian denomination” meant that Jewish soldiers could not be counseled by rabbis, Lincoln worked behind the scenes to create a compromise enabling members of the Jewish faith to become military chaplains. He was so sensitive to the plight of religious minorities that, although invoking God and the Bible on many occasions, he never once mentioned Jesus by name.
Lincoln pardoned Jews, asked for them to be admitted to West Point, authorized passes to the South for family visits, and suggested their appointment to pre-civil service positions without mentioning that they were Jewish, except on one occasion, when he told War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton that he wanted a particular person to be named quartermaster because he had “not yet appointed a Hebrew.”
On one hand, some of Lincoln’s appointments of Jews to government and military officers’ positions, such as lieutenants and quartermasters, were blocked for frivolous (read anti-Semitic) reasons. On the other, Mary Todd Lincoln had no problem hosting a reception, with the President’s assistance, in the drawing room of the Executive Mansion, which included three prominent Jews in February, 1865, yet a few weeks earlier the wife of General John G. Foster, Commander of the Department of the South, refused to sit at the same table as Issachar Zacharie, Lincoln’s chiropodist and personal spy in the South, “because he was a Jew.”
The book’s Epilogue points out that as many Jews were heading to synagogue when word of Lincoln’s death became public knowledge, so that some of the first prayers of mourning were Jewish in content and spirit. Christians and Jews, however, differed in their eulogies. Sarna and Shapell tell us that nearly every Jewish religious leader in the country offered a eulogy—speaking of his character, leadership, and faith. Some Christians noting that Lincoln’s death took place on Good Friday construed this coincidence to imply that he died “to expiate the nation’s sins.” Others used the occasion for an anti-Semitic diatribe, saying that this horrendous event stands second only to the time when “the wicked Jews crucified the Savior.”
Lincoln and the Jews, a large format, cocktail-table size book with hundreds of marvelous photographs and sepia-colored pictures of letters and documents written by and to Abe Lincoln, concentrates on issues and controversies, both lofty and mundane, simultaneously affecting American Jewry and President Lincoln, as well as devotes many pages to the biographies and histories of Lincoln’s Jewish friends and the affection he held for them. Lincoln and the Jews captures the greatness of Lincoln’s presidency and celebrates Lincoln’s grandeur as a human being.
*
Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Public Education in Camden, NJ: From Inception to Integration; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. You may send your comment to him at fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com or post it on this website, provided the rules below are observed.
__________________________________________________________________
Care to comment? We require the following information on any letter for publication: 1) Your full name 2) Your city and state (or country) of residence. Letters lacking such information will be automatically deleted. San Diego Jewish World is intended as a forum for the entire Jewish community, whatever your political leanings. Letters may be posted below provided they are responsive to the article that prompted them, and civil in their tone. Ad hominem attacks against any religion, country, gender, race, sexual orientation, or physical disability will not be considered for publication. There is a limit of one letter per writer on any given day.
__________________________________________________________________