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Judah Benjamin: Counselor to the Confederacy
A moral examination of Judah Benjamin—one of the first Jewish senators, confidante to Jefferson Davis, and champion of the cause of slavery
“This new biography complicates the legacy of Benjamin . . . who used his nimble legal mind to defend slavery and the Confederacy.”— New York Times Book Review
“A cogent argument for acknowledging, rather than ignoring, Benjamin’s role in both Jewish and American history.”—Diane Cole, Wall Street Journal
Judah P. Benjamin (1811–1884) was a brilliant and successful lawyer in New Orleans, and one of the first Jewish members of the U.S. Senate. He then served in the Confederacy as secretary of war and secretary of state, becoming the confidant and alter ego of Jefferson Davis. In this new biography, author James Traub grapples with the difficult truth that Benjamin, who was considered one of the greatest legal minds in the United States, was a slave owner who deployed his oratorical skills in defense of slavery.
How could a man as gifted as Benjamin, knowing that virtually all serious thinkers outside the American South regarded slavery as the most abhorrent of practices, not see that he was complicit with evil? This biography makes a serious moral argument both about Jews who assimilated to Southern society by embracing slave culture and about Benjamin himself, a man of great resourcefulness and resilience who would not, or could not, question the practice on which his own success, and that of the South, was founded.
“This new biography complicates the legacy of Benjamin . . . who used his nimble legal mind to defend slavery and the Confederacy.”— New York Times Book Review
“A cogent argument for acknowledging, rather than ignoring, Benjamin’s role in both Jewish and American history.”—Diane Cole, Wall Street Journal
Judah P. Benjamin (1811–1884) was a brilliant and successful lawyer in New Orleans, and one of the first Jewish members of the U.S. Senate. He then served in the Confederacy as secretary of war and secretary of state, becoming the confidant and alter ego of Jefferson Davis. In this new biography, author James Traub grapples with the difficult truth that Benjamin, who was considered one of the greatest legal minds in the United States, was a slave owner who deployed his oratorical skills in defense of slavery.
How could a man as gifted as Benjamin, knowing that virtually all serious thinkers outside the American South regarded slavery as the most abhorrent of practices, not see that he was complicit with evil? This biography makes a serious moral argument both about Jews who assimilated to Southern society by embracing slave culture and about Benjamin himself, a man of great resourcefulness and resilience who would not, or could not, question the practice on which his own success, and that of the South, was founded.
200 pages, Hardcover
Published October 5, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 20, 2025
A very concise but well written biography, this was a volume that only took two sittings to complete. The author did a great job of summing up Benjamin's life story in a relatively short book. One other thing about this book was very satisfying; the paper was of a superior quality. Too often in modern publishing the publishers cut costs by using inferior paper. This book has earned a place on my top shelf of Civil War biographies. A worthy effort.
March 12, 2022
It's ironic that this biography's author, James Traub, shows the same moral equivocation to his subject that Judah Benjamin himself showed to the cause of slavery in his service to the Confederacy.
Judah Benjamin was a slaveowner and a plantation owner. He was the most important fixer in the Confederacy. In his lifetime he was called "the brains of the Confederacy." As the Civil War progressed, the Confederate president Jefferson Davis came to rely on Benjamin more than any other counselor. A lawyer, Benjamin not only came up with legal rationales for human bondage, he also masterminded the practical solution of countless problems faced by Davis. Without Benjamin, the Confederacy would not have endured as long as it did.
Traub is too smart not to acknowledge Benjamin's bad character. He states that "Benjamin does not deserve our admiration; but like some other figures who have yoked their lives to deplorable causes, he nevertheless deserves our attention." Very true. Yet in an interview with The Jewish Insider, Traub also notes that of Benjamin he, Traub, thought that "there were many aspects of [Benjamin] that I admired and wish I could have known more about."
This admiration comes through in the writing. For example, in the defeated Confederate leadership's flight from Richmond, Traub does not hide his admiration for Benjamin's cool and collected demeanor as Benjamin recites Tennyson to the despondent Jeff Davis. Then when Benjamin abandons Davis and slips away in disguise to escape the Union's manhunt, you can almost see Traub nodding his head and smiling. "So canny! So shrewd! Attaboy!"
Traub also gives Benjamin his, the author's, sympathy in subtle ways. In one instance, when discussing contemporary John Stuart Mill's anti-slavery position, Traub states: "It is also true, however, that by 1869 Mill was revered as the foremost thinker in England, whereas Benjamin, whatever his reputation, always understood that as a Jew he stood on shaky ground. Apostasy [of the pro-slavery cause], in his case, would have carried the terrible price of exile." This implies either that Benjamin would not, or could not, have moved North; or that in the United States there were no Jewish abolitionists, no loud ones anyway. The first assumption is a mighty stretch; as a (very good) corporate attorney, Benjamin could have worked anywhere, and since his wife and child already lived far away in Paris, he could have moved from Louisiana to an anti-slavery state like New York or Massachusetts without much disruption. The second assumption is 100% incorrect, as Traub must know.
This book is one in a series of Yale's Jewish Lives. In the context of this series, Traub misses an opportunity. For while the series rightly celebrates great Jewish people like Einstein, this biography of Benjamin could have offered a flip take, a cautionary tale of a Jewish person of great gifts and ambition who chose to yoke their gifts to causes terrible, and who turned their back on the moral teachings of Torah and Talmud while yet profiting from their learning, having mastered the tools of reason and argument in the Talmudic tradition. Benjamin applied this mastery in the arenas of law and debate and public opinion, for the cause of slavery. He was the worst possible scenario. Yet Traub, for all his learning, either cannot see this, or Traub's willful blindness will not permit him to give Judah Benjamin the unqualified condemnation that Benjamin deserves.
Judah Benjamin's detractors in his own lifetime got it right: Benjamin was "an Israelite with Egyptian principles." If James Traub had had the primary sources to write a biography of Pharaoh's consigliere, would Traub have been as admiring?
Judah Benjamin was a slaveowner and a plantation owner. He was the most important fixer in the Confederacy. In his lifetime he was called "the brains of the Confederacy." As the Civil War progressed, the Confederate president Jefferson Davis came to rely on Benjamin more than any other counselor. A lawyer, Benjamin not only came up with legal rationales for human bondage, he also masterminded the practical solution of countless problems faced by Davis. Without Benjamin, the Confederacy would not have endured as long as it did.
Traub is too smart not to acknowledge Benjamin's bad character. He states that "Benjamin does not deserve our admiration; but like some other figures who have yoked their lives to deplorable causes, he nevertheless deserves our attention." Very true. Yet in an interview with The Jewish Insider, Traub also notes that of Benjamin he, Traub, thought that "there were many aspects of [Benjamin] that I admired and wish I could have known more about."
This admiration comes through in the writing. For example, in the defeated Confederate leadership's flight from Richmond, Traub does not hide his admiration for Benjamin's cool and collected demeanor as Benjamin recites Tennyson to the despondent Jeff Davis. Then when Benjamin abandons Davis and slips away in disguise to escape the Union's manhunt, you can almost see Traub nodding his head and smiling. "So canny! So shrewd! Attaboy!"
Traub also gives Benjamin his, the author's, sympathy in subtle ways. In one instance, when discussing contemporary John Stuart Mill's anti-slavery position, Traub states: "It is also true, however, that by 1869 Mill was revered as the foremost thinker in England, whereas Benjamin, whatever his reputation, always understood that as a Jew he stood on shaky ground. Apostasy [of the pro-slavery cause], in his case, would have carried the terrible price of exile." This implies either that Benjamin would not, or could not, have moved North; or that in the United States there were no Jewish abolitionists, no loud ones anyway. The first assumption is a mighty stretch; as a (very good) corporate attorney, Benjamin could have worked anywhere, and since his wife and child already lived far away in Paris, he could have moved from Louisiana to an anti-slavery state like New York or Massachusetts without much disruption. The second assumption is 100% incorrect, as Traub must know.
This book is one in a series of Yale's Jewish Lives. In the context of this series, Traub misses an opportunity. For while the series rightly celebrates great Jewish people like Einstein, this biography of Benjamin could have offered a flip take, a cautionary tale of a Jewish person of great gifts and ambition who chose to yoke their gifts to causes terrible, and who turned their back on the moral teachings of Torah and Talmud while yet profiting from their learning, having mastered the tools of reason and argument in the Talmudic tradition. Benjamin applied this mastery in the arenas of law and debate and public opinion, for the cause of slavery. He was the worst possible scenario. Yet Traub, for all his learning, either cannot see this, or Traub's willful blindness will not permit him to give Judah Benjamin the unqualified condemnation that Benjamin deserves.
Judah Benjamin's detractors in his own lifetime got it right: Benjamin was "an Israelite with Egyptian principles." If James Traub had had the primary sources to write a biography of Pharaoh's consigliere, would Traub have been as admiring?
February 19, 2024
The Journalist James Traub published a biography of Judah Benjamin which has the subtitle of Counselor to the Confederacy in 2021. Benjamin was a lawyer who happened to be Jewish, who served in the cabinet of Jefferson Davis in the Confederacy. Benjamin served as the Confederate States Attorney General, the Confederate States Secretary of War, and the Confederate States Secretary of State. Taub does not admire Benjamin. Benjamin tied himself to a morally wrong system. Traub does believe that the reinvention of Benjamin many times throughout his life is very interesting. Traub believes that in many ways Benjamin was similar to Alexander Hamilton. Benjamin just had a more limited political vision than Alexander Hamilton. Traub writes that “under other circumstances, we would regard Benjamin as an exemplar of the great American exemplar of the great American art of assimilation; but it was to the South, and to the culture of slavery, that was assimilated” (Traub 9). I read the Kindle. After the Confederacy lost the American Civil War, Benjamin reinvited himself as a successful lawyer in Great Britain who wrote books on property law in England, the United States, France, Scotland, and other 19th-century countries (Traub 160). Traub’s biography of Benjamin is for Yale University Press and the Leon D. Black Foundation's Jewish Lives series. The book was very used by lawyers in the 19th Century. James Traub’s biography of Judah Benjamin is interesting and readable.
July 11, 2022
A concise biography of the man known as "the brains of the Confederacy" that, perhaps, doesn't delve deeply enough into the character of the man himself. We see Judah P. Benjamin most often through his actions and the responses of those around him as he used his brilliance to promote a cause which much of Europe, not just Abolitionists in the North, viewed as morally repugnant. Perhaps he was most swayed by his friendship with Jeff Davis, a deeply symbiotic bond where Davis depended on Benjamin while giving him honors and positions he might not otherwise have been able to achieve as a professed, if non-practicing, Jew.
An interesting and troubling biography, but in some ways an unsatisfying one.
An interesting and troubling biography, but in some ways an unsatisfying one.
March 31, 2022
Succinct biography of a complicated figure in the Civil War era - a non-practicing Jew who lived in the South, owned and traded slaves, held high office in the Confederacy, and ultimately ascended the legal ranks as an exile in London.
December 9, 2022
A good short biography; it’s not as exhaustive as Eli Evans’ work but it gives a good picture of Benjamin in under 200 pages.
March 3, 2025
This was a really well-thought out and lovely biography of a little known man. Interesting.
March 29, 2025
It is a shame that an American so talented in the legal profession was on the wrong side of history.
April 16, 2025
A good basic review of the man. Not a thick scholarly tome, but it isn't intended to be. Part of a series written by Taube on famous Jewish Americans.
January 30, 2022
A survivor
The author himself shows his own erudition by use of vocabulary in an interesting manner. This befits his subject, Judah Benjamin, himself a complex, brilliant and canny man who managed to, like Houdini, escape using his wits. He was plagued by antisemitism, yet a slavery advocate and the second most important official of the Confederacy.
The author himself shows his own erudition by use of vocabulary in an interesting manner. This befits his subject, Judah Benjamin, himself a complex, brilliant and canny man who managed to, like Houdini, escape using his wits. He was plagued by antisemitism, yet a slavery advocate and the second most important official of the Confederacy.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews