Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery

by Richard Kreitner

A dramatic history of how American Jews reckoned with slavery—and fought the Civil War.

Since ancient times, the Jewish people have recalled the story of Exodus and reflected on the implications of having been slaves. Did the tradition teach that Jews should speak out against slavery and oppression everywhere, or act cautiously to protect themselves in a hostile world?

In Fear No Pharaoh, the journalist and historian Richard Kreitner sets this question at the heart of the Civil War era. Using original sources, he tells the intertwined stories of six American Jews who helped to shape a tumultuous time, including Judah Benjamin, the brilliant, secretive lawyer who became Jefferson Davis’s trusted confidante; Morris Raphall, a Swedish-born rabbi who defended slavery as biblically justified; and Raphall's rival rabbis—the celebrated Isaac Mayer Wise, who urged Jews to stay out of the slavery controversy to avoid attracting attention, and David Einhorn, whose fiery sermons condemning bondage led to a pro-slavery mob threatening his life. We also meet August Bondi, a veteran of Europe’s 1848 revolutions, who fought with John Brown in “Bleeding Kansas” and later in the Union Army, and the Polish émigré Ernestine Rose, a feminist, atheist, and abolitionist who championed “emancipation of all kinds.”

As he tracks these characters, Kreitner illuminates the shifting dynamics of Jewish life in America—and the debates about religion, morality, and politics that endure to this day.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Jewish, Religion, American History, Judaism, Civil War

Kindle Edition

Published April 1, 2025

Reviews

[Fran Hawthorne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I confess that I intentionally didn't read the entire book: I had picked it up only for the sections on the little-known, 19th century abolitionist and women's rights activist Ernestine Rose, as part of my research for the novel I'm currently writing. (PS I've finished the second draft of that book--my 4th novel!!)

But the information was so compelling, and the writing so easily readable, that I found myself reading far beyond the pages I needed. So, I figured that those qualities, plus the overall topic itself, made this book worth recommending.

The small community of American Jews was sliced and diced along with the larger divisions between North and South, farm and city, nativist and immigrant, anti-slavery and women's rights. There were activists who cited the Hebrew Bible to defend slavery, and then those who compared the enslaved black people in the US with the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt. There were the ones who wanted the vote only for native-born Americans, or white Americans, or Christian Americans. There were the abolitionists who supported Southern secession on the theory of "Good riddance!"

Very readable and worth reading. Oh, and you'll learn about how Ernestine Rose -- daughter of a rabbi, born in Poland, an amazing orator in her adopted language, a feminist who refused to wear radical bloomers -- pulled her own uniquely atheist, uncompromising way.

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This excellent book unravels the tangled threads of American Jewish identity through the prism of bondage, liberation, and moral reckoning. At its core lies a paradox: how could a people whose sacred texts thunder, “Remember you were slaves in Egypt,” navigate a land where chains clinked with the hypocrisy of liberty? The Haggadah’s command to “remember that you were a slave” reverberates as a universal charge – to fight subjugation for all.

Figures like Rabbi David Einhorn, who decried slavery as “an inhuman institution,” and August Bondi, whose Civil War memoir declared “No more pharaohs and no more slaves,” embody this struggle.

Yet the story is not one of saints but of sinners and survivors: Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate jurist who wielded Talmudic rigor to defend plantation economies; Ernestine Rose, the atheist firebrand who fused Jewish ethics with abolitionist zeal; and Mordecai Noah, the diplomat-turned-utopian who sought to establish a “Jewish homeland” on an island near Buffalo. Slavery’s stain touched even synagogues, as when Charleston’s Reform Rabbi Maurice Mayer preached Union loyalty while opposing abolition.

The Israelite newspaper declared, “We have no doubt that the South will ultimately triumph,” it echoed the delusions of Jews who saw their fate intertwined with the Confederacy. Meanwhile, the Mortara Case – a Jewish child kidnapped by the Church in 1858 – sparked outrage among American Jews, uniting them in a rare cry for solidarity.

Ernestine Rose, stormed Charleston pulpits in the 1840s as a Jewish atheist feminist, declaring the Bible a tool of oppression and urging women to “trample the church underfoot.” Her husband quietly made silverware.

August Bondi, who once dodged bayonets in Vienna and bullets in Kansas, rejected a Southern marriage proposal because the bride came with slaves. He later described slave cries in Galveston as “howlings” and fled after a local warned him that only his age spared him a beating.

Then there’s Mordecai Noah, who tried to found a Jewish homeland free of slavery, Ararat, on an island near Niagara Falls, complete with a cornerstone and a speech in full costume, only to skip actually settling it. A utopia with great views and no residents.

The Civil War became a crucible: Isaac Mayer Wise, the “Barnum of the Jewish pulpit,” urged Jews to “gain proud self-consciousness” through assimilation, while the Union soldier August Bondi, who briefly aided the Underground Railroad, later downplayed his own heroism.

Even Lincoln’s reverence for the Hebrew Bible, citing it “a third more than the New,” mirrored the nation’s fraught dance with Exodus themes. The Confederacy’s “Hebrew of Hebrews,” Judah Benjamin, fled Richmond in 1865 disguised as a Frenchwoman, a farcical end to a man who’d once argued slavery was “as moral as wage labor.” And in Kansas, Bondi’s fellow Jewish settlers imported matzah for Passover while ignoring the displacement of Native Americans – a collision of memory and complicity.

Kreitner’s thesis is a clarion call: to glorify Israel is to embrace its prophetic mandate – to fear no pharaoh, to break chains, to wield memory as a weapon. As Ernestine Rose implored, “Let belief in social righteousness manifest itself in action.”

The book’s heartbeat is the Exodus refrain: “We were slaves in Egypt” is a battle cry. From Mordecai Noah’s ill-fated Ararat colony to Lincoln’s biblical rhetoric, from the Union League’s embrace of Einhorn’s anti-slavery sermons to the Confederacy’s delusional “Jewish soldiers,” the past becomes a mirror.

Kreitner leaves us with a challenge: if the Haggadah’s lessons mean anything, they demand building a just society, where “righteousness goes forth as brightness.”

To glorify Zionism is to honor its roots: not in land alone, but in the unyielding pursuit of liberation. As the prophet Isaiah said, let us “not rest until her salvation burns like a torch” – a flame kindled by those who dared to fear no pharaoh.

[Marc Lichtman · Rating 4 out of 5]

"As she picked her way through the smoldering, glass-strewn streets [of Richmond], a huge eruption of celebratory gunfire signaled the arrival of Abraham Lincoln on his triumphant tour of the former den of treason. Disgusted, Emma turned for home. On the road out of town, she was stopped by another soldier with the United States Colored Troops, “the blackest man I ever saw.” When Emma brazenly ignored his orders to halt, then cursed under her breath, the soldier pointed his rifle at her and cocked the hammer. “You haven’t got things here no longer as you have had them,” he told her. “Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that?” Mortified, Emma scurried back to the farm, where she faced the unpleasant task of preparing for Passover, for the first time in her life, without the help of her slaves."-- (From the book. For any who don't know, Passover is the commemoration of the ancient Hebrews' escape from bondage in Egypt. Whether it is fact-based or not, it plays a huge role in Judaism).

In 2013 as a non-practicing Jewish communist reading tons of books on the Civil War (or Second American Revolution), I looked for a book on Jews and the Civil War. I didn't find much and ended up buying and reading The journey : the first full-length documented biography of the American-Jewish freedom fighter who rode with John Brown in Kansas by Marvin Litwin, who mistakenly thinks that being Jewish and from Kansas gives him a lot in common with Bondi; it doesn't. He feels obligated to twice excoriate John Brown's terrorist actions against civilian pro-slavery forces in the Pottawatomie Massacre (which Bondi wasn't part of) but doesn't manage to write anything so hostile against slavery! While writing a good first chapter on the 1848 Revolution in Austria, which Bondi took an active part in while just a teenager, the best other parts of the book are the long excerpts from Bondi's Kansas memoires and Civil War diary.

Richard Kreitner in this book relies on an autobiography Bondi wrote late in life, using these sources but with the later views Bondi adopted during the period of Thermidorean Reaction (see Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861-1877: The Rise and Fall of RadicalvReconstruction). I never read Bondi's autobiography.

The other book I read was Jews and the Civil War: A Reader, which has a few decent essays, but didn't do much for me. THIS is essentially the book I was looking for, which didn't exist when I first looked. I recommend it to everyone, Jewish or not, who has a genuine interest in the subject and is tolerant enough to be able to read stories of Jews on both sides in the conflict (Wokes need not bother).

Jews are the perfect scapegoat for almost anything that goes wrong and there are plenty of examples of that here. For an understanding of why this is, see The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation and The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch.

For the best overall book on the Civil War, see Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson. And complement it with Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deeply researched history of the Jewish experience in America before and during the Civil War with special attention the Jewish reaction to slavery. To me this was very scholarly so not so easy to read. I don’t mean this to be critical of the author but more a statement of what I like (or don’t like) to read. Fascinating exploration of the antebellum Jewish experience.

[Alan Kaplan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fear No Pharaoh is one of the best books I have read in a long time, but it is really for a niche audience, Jews who are interested in how Jews responded to the American Civil War. At the time of the Civil War there were about 150,000 Jews in America and they were on both sides on the issue of slavery. Some were abolitionists and others such as Judah Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of State, were passionate supporters of the Confederacy. The author finds this amazing that Jews would support slavery due to their history of being slaves in Egypt and their freedom from bondage is celebrated every year on the Jewish holiday, Passover. Kreitner makes the point that some Jews celebrated Passover while being served by their slaves.
The book is filled with amazing trivia. Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan are wrong. Jews owned 2% of slave ships, which is too many but not the blood libel that Farrakhan repeats.
David Isaacs, who started the first synagogue in Charlottesville, was a good friend of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville, Virginia. Isaacs ran a small business, and he sold meat, cheese, and butter to Jefferson. He was married to a free black woman, and their daughter, Julia Ann Isaacs married Easton Hemings, one of Sally Hemings children and as now been proven the son of Thomas Jefferson. Whether the Jefferson family realizes it or not, there is Jewish blood running through many of his descendents.
August Biondi, a Jewish immigrant from Austria, was part of John Brown’s group in bleeding Kansas when that state was voting to become a free or a slave state. Shockingly he joined the Confederacy during the war.
At the 1860 Republican convention in Chicago, Lewis Dembitz, the uncle of the future Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, formally nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency.
On the other side, Benjamin Mordecai, a Charleston, South Carolina merchant, donated $10,000 to the newly suceeded South Carolina government, and he offered his slaves for use by the government.
Even Larry David, the liberal actor, had a relative who owned slaves in Mobile, Alabama.
On the Union side, General Ulysses S. Grant decreed Order no.11. This order stated that as of December 17, 1862, all Jews, traders, and residents alike would be deported from Grant’s military district. “The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation 0f trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.”
Anti semitism never changes. Jews are blamed for everything even when they are a tiny minority.
Thankfully, Lincoln rescinded the order 2 weeks later.
Kreitner relates that the themes and images of the Biblical Exodus even influenced the Founding Fathers.
Benjamin Franklin recommended that the seal of the US displayed Moses lifting his rod as the Pharaoh troops drowned in the Nile. Jefferson lobbied instead for a band of wandering Israelites following a pillar of fire through the desert.
The Hebrew Ladies Association of Richmond raised funds for a Jewish cemetery in Richmond for 30 Jewish Confederate soldiers. The wrought iron fence displayed stacked rifles and the furled Stars and Bars, topped by rebel soldiers caps. It is still there. It is the only Jewish military graveyard outside of Israel.
My take home message of this book is that Jews have a long and complicated history in America.
Read this book for a fuller understanding of the long and amazing Jewish history in this the greatest of all countries.

[Book Club of One · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like any religious faith, what it means to belong in that faith can embrace a spectrum of tenants and practices. In the 19th century, German Jewish immigrants to the U.S. were faced with many questions of assimilation, but one with the greatest import was the question of slavery. Should it be supported? Or should one join the growing ranks of abolitionists? This is the central question in Richard Kreitner's Fear no Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery..

Through the known biographies of six representative figures, Kreitner traces the Jewish discourse around this issue. Three of the figures were Rabbis, each with a different viewpoint. One support slavery, one abolition and the third urged silence for the sake of social security. The other three were secular Jews with a wide variation in experience. One was a European Revolutionary who fought with John Brown in Kansas. Another, Ernestine Rose, was born to a religious family but instead spent her life speaking and actively working for women's rights and the abolition of slavery.
The last figure was Judah Benjamin, slave owner, Senator and member of Jefferson Davis' cabinet. All of this is framed by the yearly observance of Passover, with its focus of the Jews being freed from Egyptian slavery. As with much of Jewish history and tradition what the true meaning of Passover is could be debated and interpreted many different ways. For African Americans however, the iconography of Passover made for compelling songs and hopes.

Kreitner moves chronologically, beginning the in the mid 1800s showing the rising tensions of the two opposed American ideologies. As the nation grew more divided, so too did the American Jewish community, though the closest it would come to any sort of national unification would not occur until after the Civil War.

In the conclusion Kreitner speaks of writing this book due to the one he wanted to read not existing. And there are several points where he challenges or proves false some notable quotes or claims about Jews in various positions during the Civil War. Kreitner also demonstrates there was no one, clear viewpoint, there were many and of the six figures who spoke publicly took a stand and position, even if we consider them differently for it both then and now.

A compelling Jewish American historical examination.

Recommended to readers or researchers of American History, the American Civil War or Jewish Studies.

I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.

[Larkin Tackett · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subtitle summarizes this book well -- a detailed account of Jewish American history in and around the Civil War and the institution of slavery, a much closer relationship than I understood. "...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." I'd heard of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, and LA Senator and Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, but not the other figures. There are so many interesting nuggets:

- Roughly one-fourth of Southern Jews owned at least one slave, about even with the overall Southern population.
- in the 1850s. All three Jewish men elected to the House of Representatives that decade were strong supporters of human bondage.
- Judaism has itself reabsorbed the Black interpretation of Exodus, an appropriation of an appropriation.
- By the late eighteenth century, as many as one in ten Jews in the Americas were people of color. In some communities, such as the Dutch colony of Suriname, they may have been up to half of the Jewish population.
- Some Jewish masters converted their female slaves to Judaism in order to marry them as Jews.
- 1826 passage of Maryland’s “Jew Bill,” which finally—a half-century after the adoption of the Constitution—granted Jews in the state political and civil rights.
- six thousand Jewish men would serve in the Union forces, about half that number in the Confederate ranks
- The South had never been an especially hostile place for Jews. Because they were generally seen as white and had not made themselves odious by criticizing slavery, Jews had been accepted, more or less, as equals. Outnumbered, in many areas, by the Black people they enslaved, white Southern Christians needed all the allies they could get.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before the Civil War, what were the varying beliefs held by American Jews concerning slavery? How did the fact that Jews were generally considered white affect those beliefs? Did the American Jewish population support the North or South during the war? As Richard Kreitner notes in his “Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the answers to these questions are far more complex than one might expect because there was no one reaction that describes the thoughts, beliefs and actions of all American Jews.
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/book...

[David A. Koch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written. Identifies and analysis a significant time in the history of American Jews. Does a good job of separating fact from fiction. Makes you wonder if history is repeating itself for American Jews.

[Bob T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thorough account of the lives of several American Jews, revealing what may be some of the surprising viewpoints they had about the issues of that era.

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

A disturbing but enlightening history of injustice and inequality shared and enabled.

[Donna Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written deeply researched very informative