Status Updates From Lincoln and the Jews: A His...

It really didn’t take long for the Mormons to show up

Andrew Johnson behaved in a way that was the antithesis of Lincoln’s admiration and respect for Jews. Of Senator David Levy Yulee, Johnson once remarked, “… a miserable little cuss—a contemptible Jew … despicable little beggar…” About Judah P. Benjamin, Johnson said in a speech on the floor of the Senate, that “he belongs to that tribe that parted the garments of our Savior.”

General Benjamin F. Butler, military governor of New Orleans, was notorious for, among other things, his anti-Semitism. Writing of arrested smugglers on October 23, 1862, he says, “They are Jews who betrayed their Savior; & also have betrayed us.”

Edward Yates similarly warned Lincoln in a letter that the Jews were the “most venomously opposed” to his administration, the “perpetual enemies of liberty [and] progress,… animated by the worst feelings toward the communities on which they prey & fatten & for which they never labor or fight,” and were “the spies & most malignant aiders of the Rebels & of every corrupt thing.”

On January 6, 1863, several urgent telegrams went out from Grant’s headquarters in obedience to that demand. “By direction of the General in Chief of the Army at Washington,” they read, “the General Order from these Head Quarters expelling Jews from this Department is hereby revoked.”

Writing in early December to General Sherman, whose quartermaster had created problems by selling cotton “to a Jew by the name of Haas,” Grant explained that “in consequence of the total disregard and evasion of orders by the Jews my policy is to exclude them so far as practicable from the Dept.”

Grant tightened his regulations against Jews: “Refuse all permits to come south of Jackson for the present,” he ordered. “The Isrealites [sic] especially should be kept out.” The very next day he strengthened that order: “no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the Rail Road southward from any point … they are such an intolerable nuisance that the Department must be purged for [sic] them.”

Significantly, he never again, in his official correspondence, referred to Americans as a “Christian people,” nor did he pay further heed to those who sought to publicly identify the government with Christianity. Instead, within a few weeks, Isaac Mayer Wise heard Lincoln reassure Jewish leaders that he would by no means allow any citizen to be “wronged on account of his place of birth or religious confession.”

Many of them, indeed, were better known as Germans than as Jews. Lincoln, from his previous interactions with Jews, had no reason to know that his reference to “Christianity” would offend them. Over time, as we shall see, he learned better.

Radical Jews like Rabbi David Einhorn and his followers, many of whom had supported the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe, detested slavery and cheered on its Republican opponents (as a result, Einhorn would be forced to flee the city in April). The majority of Jews, in the middle, having voted for the Democrats, promoted peace and reconciliation.

Lewis Naphtali Dembitz (1833–1907) of Louisville, Kentucky. An Orthodox Jew, attorney, and polymath (he read twelve languages), Dembitz immigrated to the United States, along with relatives named Brandeis and Wehle, in response to the failed 1848 liberal revolutions in central Europe. He fervently opposed slavery and, like Lincoln and Jonas, revered Henry Clay

Two weeks later, on May 30, Lincoln, using his own funds, purchased a printing press and type for the German-language Illinois Staats-Anzeiger, with the proviso that it promote Republican Party policies. His goal was to win over German Americans and to ensure that German-speaking voters, Gentiles and Jews alike, would be welcomed into the Republican camp.12

I know of no distinction among men, except those of the heart and head I now repeat that though I am native born, my country is the World and my love for man is as broad as the race and as deep as its humanity. As a matter of course I include native and foreign people, Protestant and Catholic Jew and Gentile I go the full length of justice to all men equality among all American citizens and freedom to the race of man

To the contrary, the Jews he befriended during his years in Springfield shaped a positive assessment of Jews on his part. He came to know them as neighbors, clients, and political allies. By the time of his death, he had acquired far more Jewish friends and acquaintances than any American president before him.

In Virginia Thomas Jefferson, in the early nineteenth century concluded from his wide readings that Jewish ideas of God and His attributes were degrading and injurious and that Jewish ethics were not only imperfect, but often irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason and morality Writing to John Adams in 1813 he decried Jews wretched depravity of sentiment and manners a widely held view in America of that time

Still, as non-Christians, Jews regularly were cast as outsiders in America; they stood apart from the mainstream and were deeply suspected.23 Lincoln, we shall see, would work to change that. By the time of his death, he had done more than any previous president to promote Jews’ advance in American society.

But Lincoln Street also memorializes the fact that so many American Jews considered Abraham Lincoln to be their friend. As this book demonstrates, he promoted the inclusion of Jews into the fabric of American life and helped to transform Jews from outsiders in America to insiders.

A Canadian religious enthusiast named Henry Wentworth Monk, for example, specifically urged Lincoln to “follow the emancipation of the Negro by a still more urgent step—the emancipation of the Jew.”6 Sir Moses Montefiore of England similarly linked Lincoln’s efforts to liberate slaves to his own efforts to liberate Jews from oppression.

By the time of his assassination in 1865, by contrast, large-scale immigration, principally from central Europe, had brought the Jewish population of the United States up to more than 150,000. Jews, by then, had spread from coast to coast, and Lincoln encountered them frequently; many other Americans did, too.

Lincoln’s life coincided with the emergence of Jews on the national scene. When he was born, in 1809, scarcely 3,000 Jews lived in the entire United States, most of them concentrated in half a dozen East Coast port cities. Growing up in Kentucky and Indiana, he probably encountered no living Jews; the only Jews he knew at that time were in the Bible.

he repeatedly intervened on Jews’ behalf—most famously in 1862, when he overturned Ulysses S. Grant’s order expelling “Jews as a class” from his war zone. “I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners,” Lincoln explained.2 Experience had taught him to trust Jews, even when those around him displayed ugly prejudices against them.