Book Review: “Fear No Pharaoh” — How American Jews Accommodated Slavery
One might suppose from its title that this excellent work of history is the stirring story of Jewish Americans battling the beast of slavery before and during the American Civil War. Actually it’s more the opposite — how a great proportion of Jews accommodated themselves to, ignored, defended, and made excuses for, even profitably participated in, the trade and ownership of human beings.
Independent scholar Richard Kreitner concentrates on six Jewish figures: two proslavery, one doubtful but publicly equivocal, and three opposed. Outside those six, it seems that most of the Jewish voices in the story, especially but not solely in the South, are either enthusiastic supporters of slavery, slaveholders themselves, or at least tolerant of its continuation. Theirs is the previously untold story of this book.
Slavery’s two most prominent Jewish apologists are Judah P. Benjamin, a Louisiana planter who became secretary of state of the Confederacy and the closest confidante of Jefferson Davis, and traditionalist New York Rabbi Morris Jacob Raphall. The slippery Benjamin, a slaveholder whose Judaism was virtually invisible, made no religious argument. But Raphall gave a famous sermon in January 1861 strongly supporting slavery as consistent with biblical teaching. Addressing abolitionists, he asked, “Does it not strike you that you are guilty of something very little short of blasphemy?” The silent doubter is Issac Mayer Wise of Syracuse, who maintained that while slavery was repellant, Jews should take no side but avoid the national quarrel lest they attract unwelcome attention.
The three opponents include reformist Baltimore Rabbi David Einhorn, who fiercely identified the slave power with Egypt, the biblical enslaver of the Hebrews. To endorse chattel slavery, he thundered, would “prove the greatest triumph of our adversaries and our own destruction.” Next there was August Bondi, a refugee from Prague who joined John Brown’s campaign in “Bleeding Kansas” and later served in the Union Army. The third Jewish enemy of slavery is Ernestine Rose, whose public campaigning for atheism and feminism was as fiery as her abolitionism.
There were no opinion polls in ante- or postbellum America, so it is impossible to know definitively what the mass of Jewish Americans thought about slavery. That said, Kreitner’s narrative shows that Jews in general apparently were no more intolerant of the Peculiar Institution than any other Americans – notwithstanding their spiritual and national history of liberation from bondage.
Some were fanatical supporters of slavery. Charleston editor Jacob N. Cardozo, an ancestor of Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, called slavery “a harmonizing bond of union and sympathy” endangered chiefly by, writes Kreitner, “the masters’ overly indulgent treatment of their bondsmen. He called for ‘reduc[ing] the standard of comfort of our slaves in order to ensure slave owners ‘receive a fair remuneration of living profit on our capital.’” Fellow Charlestonian Benjamin Mordecai “kept his own slave pen next to his warehouse and once purchased $12,000 worth of human beings in a single sale; in 1840 he put forty people, including three children, up for sale at one time.”
“The country’s 150,000 Jews,” Kreitner writes, served in the Civil War “in both blue and gray uniforms, filling the ranks from lowliest cannon fodder to … generals – in all some six thousand Jewish men would serve in the Union forces, about half that number in the Confederate ranks…. On both home fronts, Jews contribute to relief organizations and gathered donations …. Women knitted clothes and bandages, nursed the wounded, filled sandbags for fortifications, rolled and filled cartridges for rifles. Rabbis exhorted their congregants to join the fight and said Kaddish over the slain.”
Then as now, pious souls found ways to harmonize their religious beliefs with financial or political interests (much as do such present-day political Christians as Franklin Graham, Mike Johnson, and JD Vance). Jews are and were no different.
In the antebellum period, many Jews were urban immigrants from central or western Europe (the masses of hoi polloi from the eastern shtetls poured in long after the Civil War). Some (such as Bondi) were veterans of the failed European rebellions of 1848 and many were educated. Einhorn, Rose (daughter of a Polish rabbi), Bondi, Benjamin, Wise, and Raphall (son of a Stockholm banker) were all immigrants.
While they often began life in America as peddlers, many became shopkeepers, rabbis, lawyers, or other prosperous economic players who found themselves tolerated – South as well as North — as they never had been in Europe. They and their progeny could live, speak, and worship freely without fear of pogroms. Not only tolerated, but in America they were not the lowest class of society as they had been in Europe: the slaves were lower. Indeed in the South, Jews were admitted to the blessed caste of whiteness.
After emancipation, writes Kreitner, “Southern Jews were as resentful over the end of slavery as their neighbors … even more worried about what it might mean for the future. The mere existence of Black bondage, whether they had directly profited from it or not, had eased Southern Jews’ acceptance into antebellum society. They feared its abolition would … make their lives in the South more insecure.”
As it turned out, their fears were not misplaced. After the war, the Jews, blamed by many for the defeat and poverty that dogged the South long afterward, suffered a surge of vicious antisemitism that continued and crested notoriously in the Jim Crow era with the 1915 Atlanta lynching of Leo Frank. Jews were among those persecuted by the Ku Klux Klan.
Skillfully researched and written as this book is, I was puzzled by the title, Fear No Pharaoh, which seems to suggest a heroic resistance to slavery. There are a few resisters here, but that is far from the main thrust of the narrative. Did the publisher insist on this title to dispel any suspicion of antisemitic overtones?
Kreitner’s account is vivid, dramatic, peopled with many more closely observed characters than the six protagonists. The irony of hypocrisy is thick on every page. Although he strives to consider the moral problem of chattel slavery as its antebellum apologists did, in the context of their time and circumstances, yet in his tone a restrained edge of indignation is evident.
As a McGill University undergraduate, Kreitner wrote a paper “on the handful of Jewish abolitionists who, drawing on their own people’s history of enslavement and oppression, felt they could not keep silent while others suffered the same.” That there were so few, however, and that the American experience of slavery seldom came up at present-day Passover seders he attended, “continued to gnaw at me” over time. “Given that the point of the holiday is to commemorate the Jews’ liberation several thousand years ago,” he writes, “did it not make sense to consider how slavery also shaped the country in which we lived?” So he undertook to research and relate this time in history, which he does not view as a relic of the distant past. “Even for the huddled masses who arrived decades after the Civil War, even for those of us who are their descendants, the experience of living as Jews in America has been shaped by the legacy of slavery and by the ideas and laws devised to defend and then replace it,” Kreitner writes, “They protect and threaten us still, in this otherwise blessed land.”
READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE
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