Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism 9780472072057, 9780472052059, 9780472029884, 2013037613

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Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism Peter Adams The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Page iv → Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2014 All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 2017

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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adams, Peter, author. Politics, faith, and the making of American Judaism / Peter Adams. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-472-07205-7 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-472-05205-9 (paper)—ISBN 978-0-472-02988-4 (e-book) 1. Jews—United States—History—19th century. 2. Jews—United States—Social conditions—19th century. 3. Jews—United States—Politics and government—19th century. 4. Judaism—United States—History—19th century. 5. United States—Ethnic relations—History—19th century. I. Title. E184.353.A33 2014 973'.04924—dc23 2013037613

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Acknowledgments The writing of this book would not have been possible without the aid and comfort of so many who lent me their resources, their ideas, and their encouragement. I am grateful to librarians Tina Weiss and Marilyn Krider of Hebrew Union College, who were generous in lending me many of the materials that provided the cornerstone of this research. The holdings of the University of Kentucky Library and its Special Collections were invaluable in helping me navigate through regional Civil War history. I am particularly grateful to Gordon Hogg for his assistance. Other libraries that aided me along the way were the collections of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives—in particular, their materials pertaining to Isaac Mayer Wise and the Civil War; the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library; the Alexandria, Virginia, Library's Civil War collection; Georgetown University Library; the American Antiquarian Society; the National Archives; and the Library of Congress, truly one of America's greatest treasures. Special thanks also to the American Jewish Historical Society, West Tennessee Historical Society, the Keokuk Public Library, Patrick and Robin Mooney for their assistance in understanding the finer points of military history, Rabbi Daniel Bronstein for his kind words, and my colleague Jessica Orue, who provided me with a wealth of material through the interlibrary loan service at Montgomery Community College, where I have taught for the past five years. Although I completed this study just before the publication of Jonathan Sarna's When Grant Expelled the Jews, I recognize that the two books cover some of the same ground. I have endeavored to put the events of the Civil War into the larger context of American Jewry's path to acculturation from the antebellum years through the opening decade of the twentieth century. This study also takes into greater account the significant role of Reform Judaism in that long journey to Americanization. Sarna's interpretation of these events has, in turn, strengthened the final draft of this project. I am indebted to Melody Herr Page x → at the University of Michigan Press, who believed in this project even as the competing study was fast approaching. Susan Cronin at the University of Michigan and Samantha Gwinn were most generous with their time (and patience) as I prepared the manuscript for submission. I am deeply grateful to my good friend, historian Mickey Schubert, for opening doors and offering exceedingly wise counsel over Sunday morning coffee. My family, as always, has been the unwavering support and consolation in every endeavor. Maureen is a neverdoubting friend and confidant. Words on a page are inadequate to express my earnest love and appreciation. She has learned more about the history of my people, the Jewish people in America, than she probably bargained for, but she remains eager to experience a culture steeped in the past but always looking to the boundless horizon of this Promised Land.

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Introduction Writing just one year after immigrating to Albany, New York, from his native Bohemia, a young rabbi, Isaac Mayer Wise, expressed a boundless optimism about the future of Judaism in America. In this 1847 letter to the editors of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in Leipzig, Wise assured those living under oppressive laws in Central Europe that Judaism “develops far more swiftly and splendidly in the sunlight of freedom.”1 God had opened the gates of America—a “magnificent homeland to protect us,” Wise wrote. In the ensuing decades, until his death in 1900, Wise would lead the development of a thoroughly American Judaism when the clouds of prejudice would, from time to time, eclipse the sunlight of freedom.2 During those darker moments, Wise and other men would work to clear the obstacles on the path to a modern American Judaism. From the 1840s through a particularly vicious spike in Judeophobia during the Civil War and into the Gilded Age, American Jews made steady but painfully difficult advancements toward modernity. This study examines the major events during this period, both in the United States and places far from American shores, that spurred the Jewish community to Americanize every facet of life, unify their fractious congregations, and engage more forcefully in partisan politics. Anti-Semitism in America has been cyclical and for the most part mild in relation to periods of anti-Semitic agitation in Europe, and it was mild compared with native-born attitudes toward Chinese immigrants on the West Coast during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Hasia Diner, a historian of the Jewish immigration to the United States, notes that although the Chinese and later other immigrant groups were branded as unwanted, Jews were not.3 And American Jews did not experience any sentiments comparable to the persistent and often violent racism against African Americans and Native Americans that has existed throughout U.S. history. Page 2 → Between 1848 and 1860, the U.S. Jewish population tripled to 150,000. Most of the new arrivals were Germanspeaking immigrants leaving a Central Europe torn by the revolutionary activity of 1848, and they constituted a community that “affirmatively sought public anonymity,” in Diner's words.4 However, during the 1850s, members of this religious minority, striving to fit into the mainstream of American life, recognized that they lacked the ability to influence events that affected their very survival.5 In 1840, in a dark corner of the Ottoman Empire, Jews were tortured to confess to a medieval blood libel, a belief that Jewish ritual demanded the blood of Christians. A decade later, certain Swiss cantons barred Jewish businesses, both Swiss and American. And in 1859, the Vatican ruled that Edgar Mortara, a Jewish child in Bologna who was secretly baptized by a housekeeper, should be separated from his parents to live with a Catholic family. In each case, congregational disunity—some termed it congregational anarchy—and Jewish ambivalence about exerting their political rights as Americans proved crippling liabilities. Often bitter rivals, Orthodox and Reform rabbis endlessly debated the fine points of liturgy and ritual and, most important, who should speak for American Jewry. Then came the national calamity of Civil War, which fully awakened Jews to their vulnerability even in a country as enlightened as the United States. While instances of discrimination and crude anti-Semitic images had appeared in popular culture since colonial times, an anomalous spike in Judeophobia on both sides of the conflict brought American Jews to the realization that not only disunity but the habits and even occupations they brought from the Old World would make them convenient scapegoats during times of severe social and economic distress.

Imagining the Foreign Enemy The Civil War was no doubt a transformative event in American history, comparable only to the fight for independence from Britain or the restructuring of American society that came with the New Deal and World War

II.6 Not only was the country as a whole transformed politically, economically, and culturally, but so were the individual groups that constitute America, as there was no refuge from the all-consuming conflict. African Americans received their freedom, southern whites could no longer speak of secession, and men with capital and ideas were invigorated by an unimpeded drive to the West and the strong postwar economy. Page 3 → Surges in nationalism in both the Union and the newly minted Confederacy, shortages of basic necessities and inflation, as well as the wholesale violence of a war that was fought by Americans against their fellow citizens contributed to an atmosphere that sought to expose and demonize the enemy within. Anger and fear led to reprisals against foreigners in their midst. Jewish loyalty to the cause was questioned, whether that cause was preserving the Union or seceding from it. Images of the Jew as pawnbroker, thickly accented peddler of secondhand clothes, or unscrupulous financier were certainly not absent during the antebellum years, but the war grossly magnified them. An uncontrollable and largely illegal trade in cotton across Union lines was enriching northern cotton merchants and putting cash into the hands of rebels. Although the majority of those moving cotton northward were neither foreign-born nor Jewish, when a Jew was caught trafficking, the whole religion was pronounced traitorous, said Simon Wolf, who advised Ulysses Grant and other postwar presidents on Jewish affairs. People made no mention, Wolf said, of the “thousands of Israelites [who] fought bravely on the side of freedom.”7 Jews were subject to a series of orders from Union generals, including Ulysses Grant and Stephen Hurlbut, that banished them from their homes at the point of a bayonet or restricted their freedom to operate their businesses in territory occupied by U.S. forces. While President Abraham Lincoln quickly revoked General Grant's notorious expulsion order, General Orders 11, the other assaults on Jews during the war went unanswered. In the words of historian Frederic Jaher, the only government-sanctioned instances of Jewish expulsion and discrimination in the United States constituted “the first national ordeal of American Jewry.”8 Wise was shocked by the sudden eruption of anti-Semitism in a country that had opened its arms to those fleeing persecution in Europe. “It is but a few years, and how changed, how different are the feelings now,” he said just days before Grant's December 1862 expulsion order.9 Looking back after the war, Wise reflected that “prejudice is one of the low vices which this civil war engendered.” It was “the spirit of the age in Washington at that time.” His counterpart in the Orthodox camp, Philadelphia rabbi Isaac Leeser, spoke of “a spirit of intolerance” that came to life after the opening salvos at Fort Sumter.10

American in Spirit and Form After the war, congregational leaders across the country reassessed whether Jews in America were sufficiently American. Bertram Wallace Korn, whose 1951 Page 4 → study, American Jewry and the Civil War, chronicles General Grant's expulsion order, observed that in 1860, American Jewry was “inchoate and immature…unsure of its strength, almost completely unprepared to solve the most elementary of its problems.”11 But in just five years, this small religious community had learned the lessons and gained the insights of several generations. One of those lessons was a recognition that the best defense against anti-Semitism was for Jews to shed their Otherness and make a deliberate effort to modernize both inside and outside the synagogue. That meant rejecting foreign languages for English and learning the mechanical trades. Wise warned that if the next generation were not raised thoroughly immersed in American religious ritual and public life, constitutional liberties would again be threatened. Next time, he said ominously, “we could have here a second Spain.”12 The majority of Jewish immigrants to the United States during the nineteenth century were peddlers and smallscale traders, occupations inherited from Europe, where laws often barred Jews from the professions. To many Americans, peddlers—foreign or native-born—were less than respectable, and during the war, foreign peddlers were collectively accused of illegal cotton trade. After the Civil War, American Jews of German extraction were intent on putting new arrivals from Romania and Russia on farms to till the land and become self-sufficient

Yankees. Leeser recognized that many Americans had caricatured views of Jews but predicted that if Jews were represented in greater numbers as farmers and craftsmen, they would “obtain the regard of the world.”13 As a writer for the New York Times observed, the general public knows as much about Judaism as it knows about the religion of the people of the Sandwich Islands.14

A Self-Conscious Jewish Politics The postwar years saw the emergence of a new generation of congregational leaders and public intellectuals who worked to create a unified and politically robust American Jewry. The events of the Civil War motivated these acculturated and increasingly prosperous Jewish leaders to create the institutions they would need to confront later discrimination. Jews took sides in the elections of 1868 and 1872, breaking with the timidity of the older generation, which shunned partisan politics. As historian Diner writes, “The Civil War experience nonetheless illustrated the emergence of a self-conscious Jewish politics in mid-nineteenth century America.”15 Even at this time, the Jewish vote mattered in the nation's largest cities, beginning the Page 5 → American electoral pattern in which victories at the polls could be built on ethnic voting blocs. The drive to become fully American in both spirit and form led to the rapid expansion of Reform Judaism, which was fully consonant with American ideas of progress and a scientific worldview. Reform synagogues made greater use of English in shorter and more accessible Sabbath services.16 In short, the Reform service erased the foreign features of Judaism and looked more like the Protestantism of the American majority. Wise envisioned the primary task of the Reform movement as abolishing from synagogue ritual “whatever makes us ridiculous before the world.” With his widely used Minhag America (American Rite), Wise called Reform Judaism the “youngest offspring of the ancient and venerable faith of Israel…. It is the American phase of Judaism.”17 In unifying Judaism around the Reform movement, Wise met resistance from those who thought his reforms did not go far enough as well as from traditionalists who bristled at such radical innovations as seating men and women in the same pews. However, these adversarial congregational leaders certainly recognized that perpetual bickering and disunion lay at the core of their weakness. In 1870, the Jewish Messenger observed that “adversity would have taught us the advantage of union.”18 Three years later, the congregations of the Reform movement coalesced under the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. American Jewry was entering the Gilded Age not only more unified but more assertive in demanding equal rights.

A More Discreet Anti-Semitism That assertiveness was tested in 1877 when a popular New York resort refused a room to one of the nation's most prominent Jewish bankers. Jews in the 1870s and 1880s saw an anti-Semitism of a different nature than what they experienced during the Civil War. Instead of state-sanctioned limitations on their freedom imposed by military commanders, Jews were subject to discreet—and not so discreet—discrimination in employment and public accommodations.19 As fortunes were made in the booming postwar economy, Jews found themselves barred from hotels and clubs that wanted to retain their native-born Anglo-Saxon clientele. Jews were viewed as grasping and crude merchants and as a people who possessed exotic manners and religious rites that meant that they could never truly assimilate. Some historians have attributed American anti-Semitism after the war to the rise of largescale industrialization and capitalism, Page 6 → which threatened the traditional ways of life, especially in the rural part of the country. Jews were associated with the commercial class of small-scale capitalists, merchants, and bankers, but views toward Jews could be curiously ambivalent.20 Most American saw Jews as exotic and possessing admirable traits such as talent in business and trade but also potentially as greedy and dishonest. They were charitable and avoided jails and poorhouses, but they were clannish. They were a biblical people, not Jews but Israelites or Hebrews, chosen by God but complicit in the crucifixion.

In 1889, a newspaper columnist speculated that a Jewish candidate for the presidency was not far off, while another writer asked, “Are you looking for an aristocracy of wealth? The combined financial power of the Jews of Europe can prevent the floating of almost any national loan” and noted “we get our Ten Commandments—the very foundation of our civilization—through the Jews.”21 For many Americans in the 1880s and 1890s, Jews also symbolized a nation undergoing an unprecedented pace of urbanization and demographic changes as thousands of souls from the fringes of Europe landed on U.S. shores.22 That wave of immigration presented new problems for American Jews. These were not German-speaking arrivals with an orientation toward Reform Judaism. The migration of the 1880s and through the first decades of the twentieth century originated in Romania, Russia, and Poland. These new arrivals were refugees fleeing the brutality of pogroms, the worst being the 1903 slaughter of men and women in Kishinev. Most of these immigrants were poor and unrefined Jews with Orthodox rituals and backward ways. Already faced with social discrimination, German American Jews feared losing the gains they made since the dark days of the Civil War. America's Jewish elite had to either bar the door or accelerate the drive to Americanize their coreligionists from the East. Acculturated Jews in New York, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia were not prepared to abandon their brethren and watch the genocide continue as Russia slid into chaos after defeat in the war with Japan in 1905. Therefore, refugees from Eastern Europe must be accommodated in the New World but also they must become solid citizens as quickly as possible. Wolf told the largest Jewish congregation in Washington, DC, that assimilation into the culture and economy was the only path to becoming productive citizens and, most important, loyal Americans above reproach. “It is the man who has a share in the prosperity and…business of the country in which he lives that makes himself a good citizen,” he said. Wolf and other fully acculturated Jews believed that the Russian arrivals had only one choice: “Become a citizen of the United States [or] leave the country.”23 Page 7 →

“Distant Constellation of Liberty and Hope” Wolf was among the leaders of Reform Judaism who believed that their style of ritual was the best fit for the American way of life. The Eastern European diaspora would be Americanized by adopting the liturgy and inherent liberalism of the Reform movement. Wolf was confident that the leadership of American Jewry in the postwar years was passing from doctrinaire and Orthodox rabbis engaged in “too many hair-splitting differences” to “common sense” men.24 In 1885, Wise wrote that in this country, Judaism is “the religion of God, reason, humanity and freedom and may therefore properly be called American Judaism.” In the New World, he remarked, “faith and reason cordially meet.”25 Wolf, financier Jacob Schiff, and Oscar Straus, who served Theodore Roosevelt as the first Jewish cabinet secretary, were among the commonsense men who ushered American Judaism into the twentieth century. Judaism is a malleable entity, in large part as a consequence of its lack of hierarchy and its decentralized nature. This quality served the diaspora well, as Judaism divided into three distinct denominations along a continuum from Orthodox to an almost secular radical Reform. But all three denominations evinced an eagerness to fit into American notions of respectability and conformity.26 As the Jewish Messenger, one of the most prominent voices of acculturated American Jewry, proclaimed in 1886, “It is a mistake and a blunder to make Judaism in America anything but American.” Succeeding generations of Jews setting foot on American soil understood that “Europe has little to offer toward the solution of problems.”27 The United States was the Golden Land as Americans pushed the frontier westward. For Wolf, Wise, and many other members of the assimilated elite living in the United States before the Holocaust, Palestine offered as little as Europe. Wise consequently called on “every true Jew” to work to counter Theodor Herzl's plans for Jewish settlement in Palestine.28 Wise dubbed Herzl's followers “Ziomaniacs” who misled their followers into believing that anti-Semitism existed in the United States. Such people were not sufficiently Americanized and knew nothing of their fellow Americans.29 While Israel is a necessary haven for Jews and has given a stateless people a home, the American experience—in which a largely Christian nation has accepted the Jewish diaspora over the course of four hundred years—is

without precedent in history. Leeser expressed this sentiment in eloquent nineteenth-century prose when he told the readers of the Occident, “The stars of the American flag have appeared to Jews in Europe and Asia as a grand distant constellation of liberty and hope.”30

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1 Jerusalem across the Sea To the first Jewish settlers on America's shores, anti-Semitism was a disease of the Old World. Small in number, America's earliest Jewish immigrants arrived from the Iberian Peninsula and the former Spanish possession of the Netherlands. They and succeeding waves of Jewish immigrants found a welcoming nation and an open frontier. They also discovered that the seeds of prejudice, like any other cargo, traveled safely across the Atlantic. The tiny Jewish settlement in New Amsterdam—destined to be the heart of American Jewish life as New York—faced a particularly harsh Governor Peter Stuyvesant. However, his attempt to kick out the Jews was overturned by the Dutch West India Company, which recognized the need to protect anyone who was engaged in profitable trade.1 Jews constituted a small community—no more than between fifteen hundred and two thousand individuals out of a total population of just over two million at the time of the American Revolution. But in the United States, unlike much of Europe, Jews were free to marry, enter business relations, and worship publicly. One of the main acts of the Congress established under the Articles of Confederation was to guarantee religious freedom in all territories and states.2 Jews in most states could vote and run for office and, unlike in Europe, mixed freely with Christians in commercial and social settings. When the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, the new document—and its authors—provided for religious freedom. As historian Jonathan Sarna notes, “whatever [the Founding Fathers] personally thought of Jews,” they received “full equality.”3 George Washington affirmed in a 1790 letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, that the new nation would be committed to religious liberty: The government would provide “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”4 Page 9 → However, Jews in some states struggled for full equality through the middle of the nineteenth century. In Maryland, the issue of Jewish political rights was fought inconclusively between 1797 and 1826, when those rights were finally guaranteed through the “Jew bill,” which allowed Jews to hold office. Jews had to wait even longer for the right to hold office in Rhode Island (1842), North Carolina (1868), and New Hampshire (1877) Periodic attempts occurred to amend the Constitution to declare the United States a Christian country, but all failed.5

“A Rascally Jew in Every Cheap Novel” American Jews were not completely free from the literary imagery common in Europe at the time, whether as Shylock or crucifier. The stereotype of the Jewish pawnbroker and small-scale trader became a facet of American culture by the early nineteenth century. As early as the late 1840s, caricatures of Jewish peddlers began to appear in popular songs, plays, and stories, and the verb to Jew, meaning “to cheat,” was becoming a common part of American slang. Walt Whitman speaks disparagingly of Jewish glaziers in Lower Manhattan crying out “glass to mend.” Herman Melville's 1849 novel, Redburn: His First Voyage, describes New York's Chatham Street with its “hook-nosed” pawnbrokers.6 Writer and diarist John Beauchamp Jones, a vocal antebellum and wartime anti-Semite, penned a series of novels that demonstrated his contempt for Jewish merchants in the rural South. Jones, a Confederate official in Richmond, kept a record of his experiences during the war and in one case characterized Jews as “extortioners engaged in illicit trade” and draft dodgers “fleeing from Richmond with the money they have made.” In his 1849 book, Western Merchant, Jones uses the stock images of physical description to denigrate the Jewish merchant, referring to his “prominent nose, high cheek bones and small sparkling eyes”; this “cunning Jew, [was] in quest of a location to cheat his neighbors and spoil the regular trader's business.” Such actions, says Jones, are “characteristic of the peddling Jews.” In Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant, Jones also refers to Jews speaking in exaggerated German accents and burning down their businesses to collect insurance money. In yet

another novel, Border War, written in 1859, Jones compares Jews purchasing real estate at an auction to vultures.7 The vulture image, in both illustration and words, would reappear in its most vitriolic forms during the Civil War as anti-Semitic tensions increased.8 On the stage, Jews were portrayed in a mostly unflattering manner. Both American theatergoers and those in Europe saw the Jew as the ever-present Shylock, Shakespeare's moneylender extracting his pound of Christian flesh. Page 10 → Edwin Forrest, known to antebellum audiences as the Great American Tragedian, played the Shylock role, as did Edwin Booth, whose portrayal of the Jew was described by the New York Times as “a fierce malignity.”9 The Jewish press took every opportunity to denounce the medieval image in the Merchant of Venice. Referring to the Shylock figure, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise said Christians “were determined to see in the Jew nothing good.” Wise began publishing a newspaper, the Israelite, in part to counteract abusive and timeworn Jewish stereotypes: “A rascally Jew figured in every cheap novel and every newspaper printed some stale joke about Jews to fill up space.”10 Much of this literary and popular stereotyping derived from English sources; American novelists probably had too little contact with Jews to form their own opinions. One British abolitionist, Edward Yates, spared no invective in a letter to Abraham Lincoln calling American Jews “those Christ-killers…the perpetual enemies of liberty [and] progress” and warning the president that they are “venemously opposed to yr administration.” Typical of the antiSemitic image imported to the United States from Europe, Yates referred to Jewish business acumen combined with dark images of malevolent manipulation of financial markets and governments.11 European anti-Semitism had created a portrait of the Jew with hidden power and wealth whose archetypes were the “financial Jews” of the Rothschild family. In 1858, Harper's Monthly saw the Rothschilds as a power beyond the reach of even governments, carrying “more weight than all the Cabinet and the Generals.”12 This caricature of the economic exploiter and speculator has its roots in medieval Europe, where Jews, prohibited from certain trades and guilds, were relegated to moneylending. Although moneylending was—and still is—a force of economic expansion, usurers were a despised class and perennial outsiders. While Jewish emancipation was debated in German-speaking lands and the extent of anti-Jewish laws varied from state to state, numerous laws severely hampered Jewish business and family relations in Central Europe. Bavaria had some of the most stringent restrictions, with municipal laws in effect until 1861 that limited the number of Jews who could reside within a particular city. There were restrictions on Jewish marriage, and laws stipulated that Jews who could not earn a living could not marry. Such measures led to an exodus of young men to the United States to find both livelihoods and wives.13

“On to America” The United States, with its tolerance for new arrivals and seemingly limitless expanse of land, offered opportunities that were utopian to those crowded in Page 11 → the ghettos of Bavarian towns. The slogan “On to America” clearly expressed the optimism of those preparing to leave the Old World for the New. The promise of religious freedom was Isidor Bush's motivation in calling for an organization that would accelerate Jewish emigration by buying land and aiding in the passage across the Atlantic: “I need no special encouragement…. [N]othing will prevent me…from starting out with my wife and child in search of the classic land of freedom,” Bush said when he departed after 1848.14 In New York, Bush continued his career as an editor, and in his German-language Israels Herold he lamented that the second-class cabins of the steamers departing from Bremen were full. People had little faith, he said, that conditions for Jews would improve in Bohemia, Austria, or Hungary. Despite the enthusiasm of visionaries like Bush, some European Jews hesitated to leave their homelands for an uncertain future in North America. Others asked whether America really was the New Jerusalem. Would fleeing to another shore simply give satisfaction to those who sought to drive them away from their homes?15 The American Jewish population rose from 15,000 in 1840 to 50,000 by 1848 and tripled to 150,000 by 1860 as immigrants from Bavaria, Baden, Swabia, Poznan, and Silesia packed themselves into ships. Jews nevertheless remained a small minority in the United States—less than 1 percent of a total population of more than 30,000,000 at the start of the Civil War—but they were a visible minority largely because of the occupation they literally

carried on their backs from Europe.16

The Peddler as a Jewish Type Forced into ghettos and often expelled from one town to another, Central European Jews found that the best way to make a living was through itinerant peddling or trading. It was a difficult existence, with many barely scraping together enough money to survive, and demanded a certain flexibility and resourcefulness. Jews in these areas were often on the move, sometimes to escape a local rise in anti-Semitism, at other times in response to changing market conditions. In Europe as in the United States, peddlers often worked toward the goal of opening small shops. Peddling gave the German Jew, who arrived in the United States with little capital, a foothold in the American economy. As Americans in the first quarter of the nineteenth century moved to remote and less settled areas in the West and South, families were in constant need of household goods of every description. Lacking dry goods stores, rural hamlets depended on traveling peddlers.17 Well acquainted with itinerant merchandising from their experience in Europe, Page 12 → Jews filled this economic space, and overall, their presence was welcomed.18 And with time and hard work, itinerant peddlers could rise to become merchants and store owners. Abraham Kohn, who left Bavaria in 1842, describes in his diary young men wandering the countryside as they “waste their strength [with] heavy loads in the summer's heat.” Like many peddlers, Kohn soon owned his own store.19 Prior to the Civil War, Jewish-owned dry goods stores became part of the economic landscape of small towns and large cities across the country. By the early 1850s, Jews accounted for a quarter of New York City's dry goods sales.20 Jewish businesses in larger cities such as New York would often send their newest arrivals to set up shop in Alabama, Missouri, Ohio, or other locales further west or south. The emissary received capital and supplies either to get started as a peddler with a wagon or to open a dry goods store in a community that lacked such a business. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, the expansion of railroads through the 1840s, and the ensuing commercial revolution gave immigrants greater opportunities in emerging commercial centers such as Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis. Despite the difficult work—some peddlers' packs weighed up to one hundred pounds—peddling was certainly a business that could be started with limited resources.21 In most American cities and smaller communities, between a quarter and a third of the adult Jewish men made their living by peddling.22 The California gold rush attracted Jewish peddlers to the Far West, and many opened successful businesses. Bavarian-born Levi Strauss exemplifies the story of the road from peddler to merchant prince. After arriving penniless in New York, Strauss headed west to Lexington, Kentucky, as a peddler of goods supplied by his older brothers in New York. From there, he headed to San Francisco, where after the Civil War he built a dry goods, clothing, and household furnishings business that earned more than three million dollars a year.23 The familiar names of twentieth-century American department stores such as Filene's and Gimbel's reflect the rise of Jewish peddler/merchants to successful capitalists: Edward Filene was a peddler from Poznan, while Adam Gimbel left Rheinland-Pfaltz for the United States to peddle common household items from farm to farm in rural Indiana.24 The members of the Seligman family also started out as peddlers—in this case, in rural Pennsylvania—before rising to prominence during the Civil War and into the Gilded Age. Like most peddler/merchants, the Seligman brothers depended on a family network for credit, labor, and inventory. The Seligmans also saw opportunities opening small-town dry goods stores, first in Alabama and later in St. Louis and San Francisco. Page 13 →

“In the Wild Places of America” Working as peddlers and merchants brought Jews into contact with a cross-section of the American population and accelerated their acculturation. A peddler could not afford to remain insular in the fast-paced American capitalism that excluded no one from making a dollar—or a fortune—in the hinterlands. Learning English quickly was paramount to seizing economic opportunity. In short, peddling was a school for Americanization and the first

rung on the ladder to economic and social advancement.25 However, these young and mostly male immigrants quickly found that the highly demanding work was not suited to the Orthodox ways of their parents. Life on the road or in small towns far from the spiritual and cultural centers that sustained Jewish life made for a lonely existence. Kohn lamented that “in the wild places of America,” peddlers had forsaken familiar Jewish customs. “They pray neither on working day nor on the Sabbath. In truth, they have given up their religion for the pack which is on their backs.”26 Keeping a strictly Kosher kitchen, Torah study, Saturday as a day of rest, and other elements of traditional Jewish life were an impediment to financial success in America. This contradiction between remaining an observant traditional Jew and taking full advantage of the freedom available in the United States led to fierce debates among congregational leaders split between Orthodox and Reform. Leaders of the Reform movement believed that the faith must be modernized, not only to be competitive in business but to fit into the mainstream of American life. Otherwise, Wise predicted, Judaism would become nothing more than “a fossil, a mummy or…a curiosity in some museum.”27 Judaism in the New World was advancing against the dogmatism and antique rituals of an Orthodoxy imported from Europe. To a modern American, the rituals and habits of the Orthodox were nothing less than “outlandish,” Wise said.28 That strangeness in customs and even dress only served to separate Jews from their Protestant neighbors, who would not take the time to discover that American Jews were as enlightened and advanced as any Methodist or Presbyterian in their views about government and culture. Jews who adopted the socialist and secularist ideas of the 1848 European uprisings and were among the pre–Civil War migration also wanted a religion more in tune with current scientific ideas. Reform Judaism, they said, would be a more rational set of beliefs than fundamental Christianity. Judaism was not grounded in superstition and had no mysteries, such as the Trinity. In Wise's words, Judaism is “humane, universal, liberal and progressive.” Reform would Page 14 → also make American Jews better citizens and prepare them for leadership in government and the professions.29 Wise was sure that his efforts to create an authentically American Judaism had “revolutionized the opinions of this country concerning our religion and our coreligionists.” To Wise, Reform Judaism was the antidote to anti-Semitism.30

The Disunity of American Israel However, Orthodox clergy despaired the abandonment of faith in the pursuit of acculturation. The bitter debates over ritual and observance between Reform and Orthodoxy profoundly weakened Judaism at a time when unity would have been an even greater antidote to anti-Semitism. American Jews were deeply divided not only between traditionalists and those who sought to modernize the faith but also along ethnic lines: Polish, German, and Sephardic Jews had distinct rites and languages that posed additional barriers to any kind of meaningful dialogue. European Jewry was fragmented and thus offered no model or precedent for American settlers. Wise told the readers of the Israelite that it would be “a glorious day when we shall have actually overcome the disunion and disharmony which we inherited.” Wise compared Jewish factionalism to the division of Germanspeaking lands into small principalities before unification under Bismarck, when “there was no sentiment of fellowship” between Hessians, Prussians, Bavarians, and Bohemians.31 Wise naively believed that in the New World, Jews would start acting more like Americans. Those congregational leaders and rabbis who resisted what Wise termed the “American spirit of…union and solidarity” were still hopelessly German. The Jewish Messenger urged newly arrived Americans to “lose sight of Germany, Poland or any other foreign country when speaking of your nationality.” Ethnic divisions, the Messenger noted, were one reason “American Israelites constitute the most unstable community that can be conceived.”32 Another cause of disunity was Judaism's inherently decentralized nature. Without a well-ordered hierarchy—a distinguishing characteristic of Catholicism and Anglicanism—Jewish congregations were free to improvise. Henry S. Morais, a Philadelphia congregational leader, described a situation where there was “no ecclesiastical authority.” Congregations “were allowed to shape their own course—each congregation doing as it saw fit.”33

Consequently, there was no consistency in the liturgy from one city to another or even from one congregation to another. New York traditionalist leader Myer Isaacs remarked that every Jewish faction was intent on establishing its own congregation: Page 15 → “We have seen two, three or more congregations springing up in a place where there is scarcely support enough for one.”34 Leeser compared individual congregations to independent republics intent on making their own laws, a trend that would only lower Judaism's esteem in Christian eyes.35 These individual congregations, jealously guarding their independence, were led in many cases by strong-willed rabbis who fought among each other for the privilege of speaking for all of American Jewry. “Every one is apparently engaged in promoting his own interests,” Leeser said, with the result that little was being done to lift American Judaism out of the psychology of the European ghetto.36 Leeser was certain American Judaism would become several separate and irreconcilable religions. Wise, who offered no apologies for wanting to be the sole spokesman for U.S. Jewry, observed, “There is such a jealousy among our leading men” that they are unable to address the “practical questions of American Israel.”37 The debates among competing congregational leaders were often less than civil, with personal insults such as “clerical tyrant,” “ignoramus,” and “mad dog” traded in the Jewish press. Referring to the Cincinnati Reformers, Leeser contended that “a friendship with such men is impossible.” Indeed, Leeser said, Wise had not “the courage and decency to debate…as a gentleman.”38 The father-and-son editorial team of Samuel and Myer Isaacs saw synagogues led by “opinionated, incapable officers” and told their followers that they had little choice: “We must reconstruct American Judaism.”39

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2 The First Crisis of American Jewry In 1840, American Jews suddenly realized that their internal divisions and bitter infighting constituted a crippling liability. The catalyst for this realization were events in Damascus in February of that year: As many as a dozen Jews were rounded up and tortured until they confessed to the ritual murder of a Catholic monk, Father Thomas, and his servant, a “crime” for which they were sentenced to death. The charge was the familiar medieval blood libel, which contended that Jewish rituals—in particular, the making of Passover matzo—demanded the blood of Christians. Blood libels were heard in Europe as far back as the twelfth century. The Jews of Damascus were charged with beheading Father Thomas and draining his blood into a bottle.1 Jewish leaders in Britain and France sought to petition the pasha of Egypt, who controlled Syria at the time, on behalf of the Damascus Jews, but these efforts met resistance from European consular officials. In April 1840, the Board of Deputies of British Jews sent a delegation to the country's foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, asking him to use his influence with the pasha to free those condemned to death.2 But the Western powers, vying for influence in the region as the Ottoman Empire declined, hesitated to act. France sought to protect the region's Christians, and the country's consul may have believed the charges. By August, French and British Jewish leaders, including Moses Montefiore of the Board of Deputies, appealed directly to the pasha of Egypt, Mehmet Ali, in Alexandria, and the prisoners were released the following month. A similar incident took place on the island of Rhodes, then an Ottoman possession, in May of 1840.3 Once again, intervention by Jewish leaders in Britain led to the release of those held by the ruling pasha. Nevertheless, such incidents illustrate that the blood libel remained a part of folklore well through the nineteenth century. Page 17 → Sensationalist charges of ritual Jewish killings circulated in the American press as well. In 1850, the New York Herald reported that Jews had drained the blood of a Christian and ground his bones to make unleavened bread for the Passover meal.4 As late as 1893, a Jewish tradesman in Athens was rescued from a mob after accusations that he tried to abduct children for their blood. Even American folk songs of the period perpetuated the mythology.5 In the Damascus affair, American Jews took their cue from their British counterparts, but unlike London's wellorganized Jewish community, with its Board of Deputies, Americans lacked any cohesive and central body. As reports reached the United States of the blood libel charges in distant Syria, American congregations responded with protest meetings in New York, Savannah, Philadelphia and Cincinnati; all of these groups asked President Martin Van Buren to act. However, some congregations, jealously guarding their independence, made little effort to coordinate the protests, and some even refused to participate on the grounds that Jews should remain aloof from politics and mass rallies.6

Put Down All Petty Strife Overall, the American Jewish response to the 1840 incidents was late and largely insignificant, but these events awakened a number of congregational leaders, particularly Philadelphia's Isaac Leeser, to the consequences of their disunity in the event of a crisis. During the Damascus affair, Leeser called for cooperation with Jewish groups in Europe, in particular Montefiore's Board of Deputies. Jews might live in separate countries, Leeser said, but they had an obligation to aid their coreligionists wherever persecution might arise. Rebecca Gratz, one of Leeser's flock and the founder of the country's first Jewish Sunday school, also viewed the persecution in Syria as a sign of the urgency of bringing “all the house of Israel here [in America] into one bond of good faith.”7 The horror of the Damascus blood libel, Gratz said, should provide an impetus for Jews to “put down all petty strife.”8 Nonetheless, “petty strife” continued to divide American congregations through the antebellum years. Attempts at cooperation across congregational and geographic lines still generated suspicion among most American Jews.

In 1841, Leeser sought a unified conference of congregations to combat what he saw as the anarchic state of affairs caused by decentralization. Some congregations rejected Leeser's invitation based on their differences over ritual, and many registered their firm opposition to any form of ecclesiastical authority. Page 18 → Leeser, who had arrived in the United States in 1824 from Westphalia, was well established as the preeminent rabbi in America by 1848. He published the first American-edited prayer book, and his newspaper, the Occident, started in 1843, was the first successful Jewish American periodical.9 He recognized the need to build Jewish hospitals and charitable organizations on a larger scale than individual congregations could manage. In his view, congregational unity “ultimately…must be carried into effect.”10 Although Leeser led the traditionalist or Orthodox wing of American Judaism, he criticized what he deemed the “gross superstitions” of the Polish Hasidim, and he was equally intolerant of Reformers who “carve and cut at our faith as though it were a dead subject.”11 Despite his rejection of Reform Judaism, Leeser began collaborating with Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise in 1848 to bring together Reform and traditionalist synagogues. Having failed to even assemble a conference in 1841, Leeser set his sights seven years later on pooling resources to establish schools, train rabbis, and improve benevolent societies. He hoped that the effort would generate enough success to lead to more Orthodox-Reform gatherings and eventually congregational union. Orthodox resistance to even modest Reform measures, however, led to an impasse, and a proposed 1848 unity conference never convened. The conference also fell victim to deep-seated rivalries among those who strove to exert leadership. One-quarter of America's Jews were concentrated in Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore, and congregations from these cities competed with each other for control of the conference. Although the persecution and torture of Jews in Syria motivated these congregations to mobilize, they remained united only long enough to lodge a protest or appeal to government officials. To Wise, this dynamic left Jews open to oppression: “Common sense says, ‘united we stand.’”12

Discrimination in the Alps Another crisis just two years after the failed unity effort again forced American Jews to reassess their inability to influence events in Washington. As in the case of the Damascus blood libel, the threat came from abroad—in this case, from the center of Enlightened Europe. In 1850, the United States and the Swiss Confederation negotiated a trade agreement that in essence permitted the individual cantons the right to bar Jewish businessmen. The treaty was worked out in Bern by American ambassador Ambrose Dudley Mann, who was told that some cantons simply wanted to Page 19 → limit the number of resident Alsatian merchants, many of them Jewish. In November 1850, Mann promised Secretary of State Daniel Webster that American merchants, regardless of religious affiliation, would be allowed to conduct business in any part of the Swiss Confederation: Doing so was “a privilege which I am assured will never be denied.”13 However, that privilege was indeed denied throughout the Swiss federation. In some cantons, Jews could not be employed as servants or clerks or deal in leather goods. Other cantons excluded Jews from setting up stalls during fairs. Violators of such measures could be fined. Under the Swiss constitution, the individual cantons were free to continue these policies despite the disagreement of members of the Swiss Federal Council.14 In 1853, the canton of Neuchatel told Boston businessman A. H. Gootmann that he had to leave because the canton already had too many Jewish businessmen, to the detriment of Christian merchants.15 Gootmann was clearly being expelled on religious grounds. U.S. public opinion largely backed Gootmann and other American Jews seeking to do business in the Swiss Confederation. The Richmond Daily Dispatch told its readers that the treaty represented “an odious…and unconstitutional discrimination between the Jewish and Christian citizens of the United States.”16 Other newspapers, however, editorialized that the issue was an internal Swiss matter, and the United States could not dictate to other countries the content of their laws. In an irony that did not go unnoticed at the time, some of the same Washington observers who defended the Swiss cantons' right to make their own laws also lectured the southern states on the morality of slavery. If the United States could demand that the Swiss emancipate the Jews,

could Switzerland demand the abolition of slavery as a precondition for signing a trade pact with the United States? Southerners were also loathe to scrap an important trade agreement over a civil rights issue given that Switzerland was viewed as a strong market for cotton and tobacco.17 American Jewish leaders again began to call on congregations to mobilize and make their case directly to Washington. Writing in the Israelite, Wise said that it would be better to have no treaty with Switzerland than one that violated the Constitution. In August 1857, he told American Jews to write to newspapers demanding a new treaty with no commercial restrictions—“Try to win the press in favor of your cause and rest not until this outrage is blotted from the United States records.”18 Leeser's Occident also lodged its protest with Congress. In October, a delegation of Jewish leaders visited President James Buchanan and Secretary of State Lewis Cass, a strong proponent of religious liberty. Cass and Buchanan declined to attempt to renegotiate a ratified treaty but agreed to Page 20 → instruct the American ambassador, Theodore Fay, to try to convince the Swiss cantons to lift the restrictions. Fay did not shy from the task, writing to Cass that he would “earnestly undertake what I consider a just cause.”19 Congregational leaders were deeply divided on strategy. They had argued about who would bring their case to the president and now disagreed about whether to continue to pressure Washington to renegotiate the treaty. The efforts to lobby senators and the White House were uncoordinated, with Orthodox and Reform congregations refusing to talk to each other, let alone work together. Fay's efforts, as well as those by the French, British, and Dutch, eventually persuaded Switzerland to liberalize its laws. Fay was instrumental in convincing Neuchatel to permit Gootmann to stay, and he spoke with the Swiss Federal Council in April 1858 about the case of Sigmund Muhlhauser, an American optician denied residency in the canton of Basel.20 Taking an interest in Jewish life both in Europe and the United States, Fay wrote to Jonas Levy in Washington asking about the size, wealth, and political influence of the American Jewish community.21 He kept abreast of Jewish public opinion on the Swiss treaty issue by reading Wise's Israelite and providing copies to the president of the Swiss Confederation. Fay accompanied the rabbi of Basel to Alsace to observe the Alsatian Jews' business practices. 22 However, change was slow in the Swiss Confederation, and not until the mid1870s did the Swiss constitution finally establish full religious liberty.

Unity Fails Again As in the case of the Damascus blood libel, Jewish leaders again attempted to reconcile their differences for the greater good. Wise, who in 1854 accepted the pulpit of Cincinnati's B'nai Jesherun synagogue and published the first edition of The Israelite, led a unity conference of about a dozen congregations that met in Cleveland the following year. All shades of opinion were represented in two days of heated debate over not only congregational unity but the particularly divisive questions of a common prayer book and rabbinical seminary. The doctrinal differences between the traditionalist Leeser and the Reformers Wise and Baltimore rabbi David Einhorn remained too wide to bring American congregations together for any effective response to the events in the Swiss cantons.23 Wise was caught between the Orthodox wing and some Reformers who felt he was not going far enough to rid American Judaism of its antiquated rituals and ideas. Page 21 → The Reformers compromised with traditionalists by accepting a limited authority of the Talmud and affirming the divine nature of the Bible. But Leeser felt outnumbered by what he termed “a ruthless majority” intent on pushing through a Reform American liturgy and a plan for a rabbinical college.24 In fact, a day after Leeser left the conference, thinking it had been adjourned, the Reformers reconvened to adopt their agenda without vocal opposition. Leeser, who never held out much hope of finding common ground with Wise, later reflected that “there were ambitious men in that small assembly at Cleveland who wished to rule over their fellows.” A war of religious ideas had been waged in Cleveland, Leeser said, “with a good deal of bitterness.”25

That bitterness was evident in the insults hurled back and forth by strong-willed rabbis who were reluctant to yield authority to their competitors. One reader of Leeser's Occident suggested that Wise be awarded a prize for vulgarity.26 Leeser complained that Wise and his midwestern Reformers “omitted no opportunity to assail me in public and in private”; in the aftermath of the Cleveland conference, Leeser was certain that “divisions will become breaches, and breaches [will] degenerate into hostilities.”27 The only thing on which Leeser and Wise could agree was that these breaches were born out of powerful egos. American rabbis, according to Wise, considered themselves independent chiefs “jealous if another had the reputation for doing something.” Moreover, like their European counterparts, American rabbis were primarily interested in publishing their own prayer books or scholarly interpretations of the Bible, which only added to “the horrible confusion of ideas of Judaism.” Wise blamed the failure of unification efforts in the United States on “fanatics” and “zealots,” especially Leeser, who sought to “throw the reformers out of the synagogue.”28 To Wise, Leeser and his traditionalist followers were malicious and reckless, interested only in “gratify[ing] their personal ambition.”29 While neither Leeser nor Wise would have admitted it, each man had an agenda that was chiefly about promoting himself as the undisputed leader of American Jewry.

A Kidnapping in Bologna Before the 1850s ended, another incident abroad reminded American Jews that bitter rivalries impeded the fight for Jewish rights. In June 1858, papal officials seized six-year-old Edgar Mortara from his Jewish parents in Bologna, saying that the boy was actually Catholic and should be reared and educated in a Catholic household. When the boy was two and seriously ill, a servant had baptized Page 22 → him, fearing that if the child died, he would die without salvation. When the servant informed church authorities of her actions, they ruled that the boy would have to be raised in a Catholic home. Jews and Protestants were equally offended by the Vatican's actions. If this “[child] snatching doctrine” went unchallenged, the New York Times warned, “Protestant families residing in the holy city may be treated similarly.”30 To Leeser's Occident, the incident constituted a shameful violation of Christian principles and a reminder of the days of the Inquisition. American Jews petitioned both Secretary of State Cass and President Buchanan, but the Buchanan administration was overwhelmed by the slavery issue and had no time for the grievances of a small minority. Representing his Cincinnati congregation, Wise asked Cass to forward a letter of protest to Pope Pius IX, and in January 1859, Leeser visited the president and Cass—all to no avail.31 As in the case of the Swiss treaty, the White House hesitated to interfere in the internal political and religious affairs of another sovereign entity, especially given the crisis at home over southern secession and abolition. The Democratic Party, courting the votes of the growing number of Irish Catholic immigrants in cities such as New York, would have been foolish to take a stand in opposition to the Pope.32 Some U.S. Catholics defended the church's actions on the grounds that the baptism saved the boy's soul and that returning him to his Jewish parents would undo his salvation. More ominously, some observers saw the Mortara case as a test of the Jews' secret power among the monarchies of Europe and wondered whether the Rothschilds and the other “money kings of Europe” would eventually rescue the little boy from the Vatican's clutches.33 “The principal creditor of the Pope is the Jew Rothschild, who…seems to be willing to revenge upon the Pope the wrongs of the Jewish nation,” one Boston newspaper wrote.34 Conversely, the Brooklyn Eagle referred to any parents' rights to their children as a “law which prevails throughout the whole universe.”35 For the most part, American Jews sat on the sidelines as Moses Montefiore of the British Board of Deputies worked directly, although unsuccessfully, with the Vatican in the Mortara case. On a visit to Rome, Montefiore was told that as far as the Pope was concerned, the matter was “a closed question.” As historian Bertram Wallace Korn observes, the failure to convince the Buchanan administration to simply approach the Pope revealed the powerlessness of an American Jewish population that was growing rapidly in numbers but not in influence.36 Not only were Jews across the country again split on the best course of action, but many individual congregations were themselves divided. In Philadelphia, Sephardic Jews refused to join their German coreligionists in a joint communiqué to the White House, demonstrating what historian Leon Jick Page 23 → terms “the lack of

communal cohesion.”37 Although as many as twenty-five hundred New Yorkers—Jews and Christians—gathered at the city's Mozart Hall in December 1858 to denounce the abduction, others feared that public protests would result in a Catholic backlash, and rivalries came into the equation when some Jewish congregational leaders attempted to take unilateral action.38 A letter to the White House from Abraham Hart, a Philadelphia congregational president, was one such move that took Jewish leaders in New York, Cincinnati, and especially Philadelphia by surprise. Hart, a bitter rival of Leeser, refused to cooperate with other Philadelphia congregations in coordinating a citywide response. Instead, Hart's November 1858 letter to Cass gave the State Department an early opportunity to publicly turn down any request to become involved in the Mortara case.39 At the same time, Leeser scrambled to bring together congregations in Philadelphia and other cities for a formal petition and a personal visit to the White House in January 1859. Cass and Buchanan reiterated what they had said earlier to Hart—the Mortara case was regrettable but was the internal matter of a sovereign nation.40 Leeser was not alone among Jewish leaders in blaming Hart's go-it-alone approach for the ultimate failure to convince the president to attempt to influence the Vatican. Proponents of this view believed that if congregations had banded together, they could have offered thousands of signatures, including those from sympathetic members of Congress as well as leaders of various Protestant denominations. Leeser took away from the incident the lesson that “united we can accomplish almost everything, otherwise nothing.” With those words in mind, Leeser and other traditionalist leaders met at New York's Cooper Institute in November 1859 and established the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, the first Jewish interest group in the United States. The organization's charter stated its purpose as “to secure and maintain Jewish civil and religious rights at home and abroad.”41

Orthodoxy's Trojan Horse Before the Board of Delegates was organized, “the Israelites of the United States seemed to have no common interest, no point of agreement,” said the editors of the Jewish Messenger; American Jews were not inclined to contribute “one cent, [or] not one thought, for the common defence.” Then came the barring of American merchants from the Swiss cantons and the kidnapping of Edgar Mortara. Suddenly, “the spirit of the age demanded co-operation and union.”42 Others disagreed. The Board of Delegates was made up of mostly Orthodox congregations Page 24 → representing the large Jewish communities of the Northeast, with half of its members in New York. The younger Reform congregations of the Midwest were not represented, and the only community west of the Alleghenies to send delegates was New Orleans.43 To the Reformers, the Board of Delegates was a Trojan horse for Orthodoxy and would seek to dictate every rule of Jewish life. In Charleston, a leading Reform congregation chafed at the notion of a governing authority centered among the Orthodox rabbis of New York and Philadelphia, declaring that such an authority would be the “death blow” to the independence of American congregations.44 In the nation's capital, a committee of influential rabbis also repudiated the Board of Delegates in favor of congregational autonomy. The “so-called Board of Delegates,” the Washington rabbis said, claimed to represent all of American Judaism despite the fact that “the largest congregations and the foremost rabbis in our country never acknowledged their existence…. Shame on such abuse of republican freedom.”45 New York's Reform Temple Emanu-El warned that any effort by the Board of Delegates to attempt to dictate liturgy and ritual to the fiercely independent American congregations would end in failure. “The victory,” said the leaders of Emanu-El, “would inevitably be on the side of freedom…. The religious life of a congregation must emanate from within itself.”46 Some of the board's opponents argued that with a free press and republican form of government, Jews in this country did not need a central organization to watch over their rights. In the event of a rise in American anti-Semitism, one skeptic asked Leeser in 1859, “has not every individual Jew the right to carry his complaints…before the proper authorities?”47 Even in the wake of the Mortara affair, Temple Emanu-El questioned whether a singular Jewish voice would lead Christians to view Jews as a nation apart from other Americans—an “imperium in imperio.” Instead, the congregation told American Jews to act only as “free independent American citizens.”48 Although the Board of Delegates repeatedly assured skeptical congregations that it would not interfere in their

internal affairs or advance Orthodoxy, prominent Reformers held back support. Wise's well-publicized refusal to back the board was indicative of his approach to unity and Jewish defense. He boasted that he would publish nothing about the Board of Delegates in the Israelite and charged that it was an “orthodox clique” and a “discredited aristocracy” intent on stifling the voices of the more progressive Midwest Jews. “What a folly,” Wise wrote; Reformers “lead Judaism in this country from its past into its future.”49 If the Board of Delegates was serious about congregational union, the Reformers said, why did they publish their proceedings only in Orthodox journals? It was arrogance to assume that a few handpicked Orthodox rabbis could “announce themselves representatives of American Israelites.”50 Page 25 → To the Board of Delegates, Wise and the Midwest congregations posed a dangerous obstacle to a stronger American Jewry. One leader of the Board of Delegates described Wise as operating on the principle, “If we cannot rule, we will ruin.”51 Historian Sefton Temkin agrees that Wise was guided by more than ideological differences and was someone who would not play on a team unless he was captain. Einhorn's Reformers were also particularly hostile to the conservative Board of Delegates. One Orthodox reader of the Occident described the Baltimore rabbi as eager to “hurl the torch of discord into the midst of the congregations” and as opposing “any movement which promises to elevate the character of Judaism.”52 The Board of Delegates did find greater cooperation from abroad, especially from its model, the Board of Deputies of British Jews (founded in 1840) and from the French Alliance Israelite Universelle (founded in 1860). But American Jews remained too disorganized and quarrelsome to emulate their British or French counterparts. Leaders of the U.S. Board of Delegates despaired that even the Congress of Italian Jews, in a country itself not yet unified, revealed greater unanimity than the Americans.53 Faced with the dissenting Reformers and a perpetual shortage of funds, the Board of Delegates settled on the modest goals of arbitrating disputes between congregations, aiding religious education, collecting statistics, and, most important, keeping a watchful eye on any incidents of anti-Semitism in the United States. Wise mocked the board's charter: “Statistics, they say…. [A]re you not ashamed to come before the world with such a program?”54 Leeser expressed concerns regarding the board's weakness only weeks after the Cooper Institute convention, and by its second year, the board admitted that its inability to attract a larger number of congregations constituted a serious liability. American Jewry would have to make do, the board's executive committee said, until a true congregational union could be assembled. The members of the executive committee were resigned to the fact that the Board of Delegates represented only “the first glimmerings of light” of Jewish unity.55 While the impetus for creating the Board of Delegates was oppression overseas, American Jews also were beginning to realize that dangers were lurking closer to home. Leeser accurately predicted that “sooner or later the public would become aroused by some startling event.”56 In the months after the start of the Civil War, as American Jews began to feel the sting of a rising anti-Semitism, the Board of Delegates warned, “If there ever was a time when a lack of union for religious purposes was felt, it is at this moment.”57

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3 Lincoln and the “Israelites” The battle cry at Fort Sumter forced Jews, like all Americans, to choose a moral and political position. Whether in the Union or the Confederacy, Jews fell in line with their Christian neighbors in support of their government. Up to seven thousand Jews joined Union forces, while three thousand enlisted on the secessionist side. In a rare case of agreement, most Reformers and traditionalists called on their congregants to enter the battle. Baltimore's fiercely abolitionist David Einhorn, who advocated the most liberal views of Reform Judaism, was unequivocal: “Do you comprehend your duties as members of the American people?,” he asked his flock.1 New York's traditionalist Jewish Messenger saw the Civil War as demanding all American Jews, “whether native or foreign born,” to “stand by the flag!”2 For the Messenger, secession and war were no mere political issues. The editors were clear that although they had avoided partisan politics in the past, they were faced with saving the nation that “has ever extended a welcome to the oppressed and has ever protected Israel.”3 The Civil War demanded that Jews collectively declare their allegiance to the Union. “Do not rely upon the Messenger for political doctrine,” the editors said, “but emergencies have arisen…. this is a time to speak.”4 As the Messenger was telling American Jews in 1864 to affirm their loyalty to the Northern war effort, the leading Cincinnati Reformer, Isaac Mayer Wise, retained an almost ludicrous neutrality throughout the war. He told the readers of the Israelite in 1861, “Silence is our policy…silence on all the questions of the day.”5 Wise's refusal to take a position, which ran contrary to the prevailing Reform current, had more to do with his political convictions than any hesitancy about speaking out on the events that were tearing the Union apart. Page 27 →

The Debate over Slavery Unlike most Reform Jews, Wise remained a loyal Democrat during the election of 1860 and through the war. He supported Stephen A. Douglas's northern wing of the party that sought to avoid a war over slavery. As late as August 1864, he continued to blame extremists on both sides of the conflict who “hurled this country into this abyss of destruction.”6 While Wise was no defender of the peculiar institution, he simply did not believe abolition was reason enough to divide the nation and go to war. To him, New England abolitionists and radical Republicans had only aroused passions that led to violence. He referred to Red Republicans in the North and Fire-Eaters in the South who moved implacably to conflict. “Fanaticism is triumphant,” he said in the days after South Carolina seceded.7 The dissolution of the Union, Wise warned, would only embolden the European powers to “treat [a weakened United States] as they please.”8 Only unified and strong could America remain a beacon for immigrants escaping oppression. The slavery debate among American Jews fell largely along Reform/Orthodox lines, with the glaring exception of Wise. While Orthodox rabbis in the North might defend slavery on biblical grounds, Reformist Einhorn was literally run out of Baltimore in 1861 by a pro-slavery mob whose members objected to his abolitionist sermons. Among the Orthodox leadership, Morris Raphall of New York and Isaac Leeser of Philadelphia justified slavery on the grounds that the Jewish patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—were slaveholders.9 Leeser made the bizarre case that slavery was not technically a sin in the same way that blasphemy or atheism were sins, and in an argument that anticipated modern debates on political correctness, Leeser said that although George Washington was a slaveholder, he was still a man of outstanding character and achievement.10 Despite such views, Leeser found slavery repugnant and predicted that “it is destined to die out as the world advances.” But Leeser also worried that immediate emancipation might let loose uprisings in the southern states,

where freed slaves would become the “enemies and murderers of their masters.” Leeser, reflecting common nineteenth-century American and European racism, said that through slavery, the African's “moral condition has been immensely improved.”11 Members of the German Reform movement—especially those imbued with the egalitarianism of the 1848 European uprisings—saw no justification for an institution that ran counter to modern republican ideals or the spirit of enlightened Judaism. Having emigrated to the United States, these Reformers became early members of the coalition that made up the Republican Party. Recognizing Page 28 → many German immigrants' affinity for the abolitionists, Republicans actively courted the German vote. Arriving from Austria in 1848, Isidor Bush became an outspoken abolitionist and leader of the St. Louis Republican Party. Elected to the Missouri State Convention for three terms during the Civil War, Bush consistently defended the Union in a deeply divided state.12 Bush was among the Germans who enthusiastically supported John C. Frémont for president in 1856 based on the candidate's uncompromising stand against slavery in the territories and his call for homesteading on western lands as a way to relieve the downward pressure on wages for industrial workers crowded into northern factories. In 1861, Bush went directly to Lincoln on behalf of Frémont, who had become commander of the Union forces in Missouri. Aside from suffering serious setbacks on the battlefield, Frémont's actions to free slaves in occupied territory threatened Lincoln's strategy of keeping Kentucky out of the Confederacy. Lincoln relieved Frémont of his command and revoked his emancipation order. Bush, like other radical abolitionists, was not pleased. Abandoning Frémont, Bush told Lincoln, “injures our cause…. Act Sir, act freely—according to the dictates of your honest heart.”13 Before emigrating to the United States, Lazarus Straus was active in the 1848 revolution in his native Bavaria. His son, Oscar, became the first Jewish U.S. cabinet secretary. In his extensive memoirs, Oscar Straus called the generation that experienced the upheavals of 1848 “one of the most valuable groups of immigrants that have come to these shores since our government was organized.” As a result of their fight for constitutional governments in Europe, “they were Americans in spirit even before they arrived.”14 Karl Marx, who wrote lengthy discussions for European newspapers on the Civil War as a stage in the inexorable conflict of classes, reflected the views of many German 1848ers who joined the Republican Party. Marx called Lincoln a son of the working class who would lead his country through the “matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.” Marx's International congratulated Lincoln on winning his second term, declaring “the triumphant war cry of your re-election is, Death to Slavery.” For Marx, the American Civil War constituted another stage of class struggle. Working men in Europe, Marx assured, saw the war and the downfall of the slaveocracy as initiating a new era for the U.S. working class.15

The First Jewish Army Chaplain The German Jewish immigrants and exiles from the Europe of 1848 who praised Lincoln as the Great Emancipator also looked to the president as a defender of Page 29 → their religious freedom in the opening days of the war and through the most trying times for American Jewry. Lincoln's quick action to overturn a discriminatory law that barred Jewish chaplains from the army camps and hospitals was an initial victory during a period when many Jews worried that the bright and welcoming shores of America were darkening. As the Civil War erupted, Congress passed the Volunteer Bill of 1861, which set down the rules for chaplains in the Union Army. They were to be appointed by the regimental commander on the vote of the field officers and company commanders, and they were to be “regularly ordained ministers of some Christian denomination.” The law consequently prevented Jewish soldiers from receiving aid and comfort from chaplains of their choice, and Jewish soldiers in hospitals and army camps near Washington complained about the restrictions.16 Confederate law, for its part, stipulated only that chaplains must be ordained clergymen. An unordained Jewish chaplain, Michael Allen of Philadelphia, was serving in the Union's Sixty-Fifth Regiment of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry (known as Cameron's Dragoons). Many of the soldiers in the Cameron Dragoons, including its commander, Colonel Max Friedman, were Jewish.17 In September 1861, War Department officials learned of Allen's role and

denied the unit's application for a Jewish chaplain. Many Protestants holding the position of regimental chaplain were also not ordained or even minimally qualified, leading Jewish leaders to conclude that the entire system was unfair and poorly managed. “The humbug exploded, ” Wise said, “not every preacher is fit for public function.”18 Jewish leaders also worried that excluding their chaplains from the army would reduce Judaism to a second-class denomination and lead to the establishment of Christianity as a state religion. Some evangelical Christian groups, including the YMCA, which was tasked with policing the army chaplaincy, made a case against Jewish chaplains unless the regiment was 100 percent Jewish. For American Jews, the chaplaincy controversy was a test of the constitutional rights of religious minorities: If Jewish chaplains were excluded now, could Jewish officeholders be excluded next?19 The Cameron Dragoons responded by nominating as chaplain an ordained Orthodox rabbi, Arnold Fischel of New York. In October 1861, the War Department denied the regiment's application. Secretary of War Simon Cameron told Fischel that had the law not barred non-Christian chaplains, his application would certainly have been taken “into favorable consideration.” It was a promising signal that all that was needed was to convince Congress that the law as written was unconstitutional.20 The recently formed Board of Delegates of American Israelites invited Fischel to serve as a civilian chaplain to wounded soldiers in the Army of the Potomac and, most important, to stage a lobbying Page 30 → effort to change the law. Fischel told members of Congress that restricting the chaplaincy to Christian ministers was a concern not just of Jews but of all Americans who valued religious liberty. Legislation that excluded Jews might “be used as a precedent for the oppression of other religious societies,” Fischel warned.21 Jewish congregational leaders across the Union asked their members to flood Washington with mail. “Wherever Israelites live draw up a petition…have it signed by every neighbor…and send it your representative in Congress,” Wise urged the Israelite's readers.22 Leeser agreed, calling on Congress “to repeal the obnoxious clause, and to place Israelites simply on an equal footing with all others.” Changing the law also had considerable support outside the Jewish press, as Horace Greeley's New York Tribune called it a particular hardship that Jewish soldiers were denied a clergyman of their own faith.23 On December 11, 1861, Fischel went to the White House to meet with Lincoln. Three days later, the president wrote to Fischel, “I shall try to have a new law broad enough to cover what is desired by you in behalf of the Israelites.” Lincoln subsequently asked Congress to amend the law.24 The chair of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, had written the original bill and, at the president's request, introduced the new, more inclusive legislation. The wording was carefully chosen to avoid offending evangelical Christians, and in July 1862, the revised measure passed. It provided that “no person shall be appointed a chaplain in the United States Army who is not a regularly ordained minister of some religious denomination.” Fischel's appeal to the president constituted American Jews' first major successful campaign to end official government-sanctioned discrimination.

Who Represents the Israelites of the United States? The Board of Delegates of American Israelites took credit for changing the law and saw the successful effort as justification for a central organization of American congregations under its aegis. Referring to the Board of Delegates, Fischel said, “I think we have reason to congratulate ourselves on the prompt attention paid to our claims.”25 However, the board's opponents remained adamant, even undermining Fischel's mission to the White House. Once again, regional, theological, and personal differences hampered what should have been an obvious cause for unity. In January 1862, Wise and Einhorn were among six Reform rabbis who accused the Board of Delegates of overstepping its bounds by “claiming to represent all the Israelites of the United States.” Wise and Einhorn reiterated Page 31 → that they did not recognize the authority of “several gentlemen of the city of New York, styling themselves as the Board of Delegates of American Israelites,” to petition the government.26 Firing back, Fischel argued that the actions of the White House and Congress proved beyond a doubt that individuals, regardless of how influential they might be, “can never carry with them the weight that a Board representing so many leading congregations can command.”27 In Britain, where the Jewish community

demonstrated stronger cohesion than its American counterpart, the London Jewish Chronicle praised the Board of Delegates and said the exclusion of Jewish chaplains proved the need for “a central authority” to look after the interests of American Jews.28 Leeser, who served as a Board of Delegates vice president, told the board's critics that there was an immediate problem of providing religious comfort to Jewish soldiers and the Board of Delegates—even if it did not have the support of a majority of congregations—was the only organization that could make a credible case to Congress.29 The board did not pretend to speak for all American Jews, but the thirty congregations that did support the board's aims were representative of Jews living not just in New York but also in Newark, Providence, and Boston. The Board of Delegates was a starting point, if only the Reform wing would give it a chance. In fact, Leeser turned the argument around, asking how Wise, Einhorn, and others could interfere in a matter that was so important to the Jewish soldiers serving the Union.30 Looking back to the reason for the board's founding—the Mortara kidnapping—Leeser said American Jews should have learned that their greatest weakness was disunity. Changing the law to allow Jewish chaplains was certainly one such instance that demanded “a general and united exertion of all our congregations.”31 Just two years after coming into existence, the Board of Delegates had played a successful role in a matter that directly affected American Jews, and supporters were confident that this victory would validate its leadership. Although Fischel won the right for Jews to serve as army chaplains, he continued bringing comfort to wounded soldiers only as a civilian. The festering divisions between Reform and traditionalist congregations seriously compromised Fischel's ability to work in Washington beyond only a few months. The Board of Delegates promised financial support, but only four congregations were willing to contribute, raising far less than the thousand dollars Fischel needed to continue ministering to Jews in the area: Wrote the Jewish Messenger in February 1863, “The Jewish volunteer is uncared for…. He may sicken and die but there is no one near him…to perform the last sad rites.”32 The Board of Delegates wondered if Christians would take seriously future Jewish petitions if the nation's congregations failed to support Fischel's modest Page 32 → outreach to soldiers on the Potomac. The Jewish Messenger labeled American congregations' inability to settle their differences for the greater good a national disgrace. According to historian Bertram Wallace Korn, Fischel and the Board of Delegates came under attack from a large number of congregations that were simply antagonistic to any cause other than their own.33 Not until a frightening spike in the most vicious forms of anti-Semitism did these antagonistic congregational leaders recognize that the longer they remained at odds, the more vulnerable they would be to those eager to deprive them of their rights.

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4 Vulture of the Camp The hysteria generated by war often engenders a frightening logic of the crowd. Such reasoning of the crowd and deep-seated racial fears of an Asian enemy led to the World War II–era internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were native-born Americans. Three-quarters of a century earlier, as the United States faced another all-consuming war, Jews were demonized and dehumanized in ugly caricatures, fed by a fear of the easily identifiable foreigner—the Other—in America's midst. American Jews discovered early that they were a convenient target for those looking for the unseen enemy. This enemy did not wear the uniform of the Confederate states or Union regiments. He was the Jewish merchant, long a source of curiosity but now slandered as an economic exploiter and speculator. In the words of historian Frederic Jaher, “In the crucible of sectional conflict was forged modern American anti-Semitism.”1 Anti-Semitic imagery was not new in America, but the Civil War magnified and widely popularized what had previously lain beneath the surface. Anti-Semitism had moved from the fringes to the center of public discourse, coming close to replicating the European experience. American Jewry was unprepared for what historian Bertram Wallace Korn calls “a rising crescendo of shrieking libels hurled at the Jews almost from the very beginning of the war.”2 Washington lawyer Simon Wolf likened the anti-Semitism of the time to the “darkest days of superstition and the Spanish Inquisition.”3 Even the adversarial Isaac Mayer Wise and Isaac Leeser agreed that the ferocity and suddenness of the attacks were something more characteristic of Austria or Russia than the United States as they recounted the threatening rhetoric of high-ranking officers and members of Congress. American Jews, Wise said, “were Page 34 → mortified and outraged.” During the war, he and many other Jews wondered how the American people could have “degenerate[d] from the highest pinnacle of freedom to…low prejudice.”4 Rumors that Jews were selling sick cattle to the government, manufacturing uniforms and blankets that would not stand up to wear, or were responsible for arson in Columbia, South Carolina, were reminiscent of the slander and blood libel that had led to anti-Jewish violence in Damascus two decades earlier. In 1863, the Detroit Commercial Advertiser, employing the medieval image of Shylock, condemned “hooked-nose wretches” who speculate “on disasters…. a battle lost to our army is chuckled over by them, as it puts money in their purse.”5 The image of Christ killer was also used by prejudiced newspaper editors, who freely printed phrases such as the “accursed race who crucified the Saviour.” Writing to President Abraham Lincoln, Englishman Edward Yates called Jews vultures that “prey & fatten most fully in the midst of disasters.”6 Lincoln was not moved by Yates's vitriolic remarks, having defended Jews from attack during the war and possessing no record of anti-Semitic sentiments.

Jewish Peddler and Yankee Trader As North and South mobilized, both sections of the country were forced into war economies that saw crippling shortages of basic necessities, inflation, and government contracting that was prone to corruption and insider deals. German Jews, easily visible as peddlers, merchants, and dealers in secondhand clothing, were part of an economy under severe stress. Although peddling was the first step to participating in the economic life of the country and certainly contributed to acculturation, it was denigrated as not fit for a decent Christian. Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of New York's Central Park, noted the Jewish traders he saw in many small rural communities while traveling through the South in 1856. He and many others compared Jewish peddlers with another stereotype of the period, Yankee traders.7 Said one German observer in 1870, “People say the Jews are clever traders, but in the Yankees they have found their masters.” An 1864 journalist writing from Leipzig thought the “inclination for business is not a specific property of the Jewish nation…. [T]he Anglo-Saxon fosters it almost as much as the Jew.”8

So closely related were the images that Jew and Yankee could appear as a composite figure in the popular literature. Like Yankee traders, Jewish merchants could also be praised for their industriousness and sobriety. To Leeser, Jews were the perfect example of the American capitalist. “Jews are not singular,” Page 35 → he said, “since the trading spirit seems to pervade all classes of Americans.”9 When Jewish merchants in Union-occupied New Orleans came under a particularly nasty barrage of attacks in the winter of 1863, the Cincinnati Enquirer suggested that the source of the anti-Semitic sentiment might be Yankee traders “foiled by a class shrewder than themselves.”10 As inflation and fear rose on both sides of the conflict, Jewish merchants were accused of conspiring to hoard food, war supplies, and other necessities to sell them at a profit. The Jew as speculator became a part of Civil War folklore. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who served as Ulysses S. Grant's second-term vice president, was both an abolitionist and a Know-Nothing before the war. He used anti-Semitic imagery on the Senate floor in February 1862, attacking “curbstone Jew brokers…who fatten upon public calamity.”11 To him, the North was divided along class lines that posited Christian workers and farmers against a capitalist class of speculators and financiers that included Jews. Such language was not confined to the North. Southern Punch, a tabloid based in Richmond, Virginia, associated long-established Jewish merchants there and in other cities with northern capitalists and referred collectively to “Jew and Yankee extortioners.”12 Confederate ideology linked industrialization and capitalism with northern cities, an environment that some observers perceived as lacking Anglo-Saxon righteousness. Merchants were divided between Christian and foreign or Jewish. To the more extreme Confederate nationalists, Jews were cast as sinful and unscrupulous simply because they were not Christians or resided mostly in urban centers.

Vulture of the Camp Because of their easy identification as merchants and peddlers, Jews were also associated with the negative stereotype of camp followers—itinerant peddlers who traveled behind advancing Union forces. The group included honest merchants as well as scam artists and even rebel spies. The Washington Chronicle described camp followers as men who “hawk ‘notions,’ cigars, and fruit about the camps; they sell whiskey to the soldiers; they loan money” as well as “pass on intelligence to the enemy in exchange for a lucrative cotton deal.”13 Camp followers ranged from boys selling newspapers to photographers who would send home to family and friends pictures of officers in full-dress uniform with gleaming sabers. Public opinion regarding camp followers was for the most part hostile. They Page 36 → were accused of selling substandard goods to the men in the field at exorbitant prices. In the words of the New York Times, camp followers “defraud our brave soldiers out of their hard earnings.” In Union-occupied Nashville, General William Rosecrans barred camp followers from entering the city and setting up their tents.14 In other cases, camp followers' goods were confiscated; at Vicksburg, camp followers were accused of dodging the draft and routinely rounded up and impressed into service. One war correspondent following Rosecrans's army described them as “sharks who follow the army and sell indiscriminately at immense profits.” Neither merchants nor peddlers, the correspondent reported, they mostly sold stolen goods and competed unfairly with legitimate businesses.15 Reporting from the field, the northern press relentlessly portrayed Jews as dishonest camp followers, using extreme caricatures to further isolate Jews from Christians and to paint Jews as disloyal to the Union cause. In federally occupied Memphis in the summer of 1863, the New York Times described “hordes of Jews, who follow in the rear of the army, like wolves behind the hunters.”16 The Washington Chronicle called Jews the most conspicuous camp followers and “the boldest speculators in the world.” Camp followers were often compared to vultures: Commented one correspondent, “Vultures were human, compared with the monsters who furnish rotten blankets and rotten meat to those living in the camp.”17 A cartoon in Frank Leslie's illustrated weekly, Budget of Fun, in 1864 showed a distorted Jewish face with a beaked nose on the body of a vulture hovering over the battlefield and was captioned “the vulture of the camp.”18 According to the New York Times, one steamboat of merchants was as “covered with German Jews as a dead carcass is with carrion crows.” Again employing the symbolism of the vulture, an Indiana newspaper referred to Jews as among the “myriad of army vultures that preyed constantly and mercilessly on the poor, half-naked, hungry soldiers.”19

High-ranking officers also embraced the prevailing Judeophobia. General William Tecumseh Sherman recalled in his memoirs the merchants with German surnames who sought permits to trade in cotton and referenced the “commercial enterprise of the Jews.”20 Benjamin Butler, who took command of New Orleans with practically dictatorial powers, was brutal toward his enemies, both real and imagined. His administration ordered a man hanged for displaying the Confederate flag, and he accused New Orleans Jews of making fortunes from the war, swearing that they “deserve to receive at the hands of this government what is due to the Jew [Judah P.] Benjamin, ” the confederate secretary of state.21 The presence of Judah Benjamin and Florida senator David Yulee in the Confederate government proved a lightning rod for anti-Semites in the North. Page 37 → Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln to the presidency, attacked Benjamin and Yulee not only as secessionists but as Jews. When the New York Times referred to Yulee's “Jew heart” in an article that inferred that the senator's call for Florida's secession was motivated by his disappointment with U.S. government contracts for his railroad interests, the Messenger asked, “Has an inquiry ever been made relative to the religious belief of Jeff Davis?”22 In a February 1861 speech on the Senate floor, Wilson referred to Benjamin as a member of “that race who stoned the prophets and crucified the redeemer of the world.” One of the most vitriolic anti-Semites of the war was Tennessee Know-Nothing leader William “Parson” Brownlow, who called Benjamin the “little Jew of the bogus Confederacy.” In an 1862 rant at Nashville's St. Cloud Hotel, Brownlow thundered that the Confederate secretary of state would show “no more mercy from him than was shown by his illustrious predecessors toward Jesus Christ.”23

The Threat of Genocide Although pro-Union and an abolitionist, Brownlow expressed an almost pathological bigotry against Catholics and “circumcised Hebrews.” Brownlow was so “coarse-minded and vulgar,” in the words of the abolitionist Liberator, that many in the antislavery movement distanced themselves from him.24 In 1860, he voiced his opposition when Morris Raphall became the first Jewish clergyman to offer a prayer before Congress. To Wise, Brownlow's objection to a Jewish prayer in the U.S. Capitol proved him “an impious and ungodly man.”25 Charges of disloyalty to the Union cause were leveled at Jews, and in one case Simon Wolf was arrested on the order of Lafayette C. Baker, a powerful figure in the War Department who headed the National Detective Police. While Baker suspected Wolf and the B'nai B'rith of Confederate sympathies, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was unconvinced of the charges and quickly ordered Wolf's release. Wolf was among those who challenged the Washington Chronicle's assertion that Jewish cotton merchants in Tennessee were seen passing military intelligence to Confederate guerrillas. Wolf responded in a letter to the newspaper that Jews were as involved in the struggle to preserve the Union as any other denomination. “It matters not whether the American Senate or the press do us justice,” Wolf said with his characteristic elegance; “History will—for the dark ages have passed.”26 Typical of the association of Jews with the Confederacy was an 1861 Vanity Fair cartoon titled “Exodus to Nashville” that showed Benjamin leading the secessionists and the words, “No more shall the children of Judah sing.”27 Page 38 → The rising tide of anti-Semitic rhetoric that tied Jews to the enemy prompted an Associated Press reporter to write in February 1863 that “the Jews in New Orleans and all the South ought to be exterminated. They run the [Union] blockade and are always to be found at the bottom of every new villainy.” The reporter said he was reacting to the arrest of three Jews caught on Lake Pontchartrain carrying medicine and letters from New Orleans to Confederate forces.28 Such over-the-top rhetoric provoked a backlash: The Cincinnati Commercial labeled it outrageous that any American could “recommend the massacre of a class of American citizens.” Demanding an investigation of the Associated Press, Wise said that the reporter was not the first to advocate such mob violence and he urged American Jews not to sit “patient as sheep and good-natured as lambkins.” For the first time, Jews in the United States faced a potential “reign of terror,” he said. Wise also asked whether the use of anti-Semitic rhetoric in Congress might cause others to feel that they could openly express their bigotry.29 Leeser blamed prejudiced newspaper editors who influenced military officers in the field “to spread a spirit of

personal dislike against us.” When the Washington Chronicle said that Jews had a “fondness for illegitimate…modes of making money,” Leeser called on congregations in the nation's capital to respond forcefully. “Vigilance on our part is needed,” he said.30

“The Swindling Contractors” Just as merchants and peddlers were accused of profiting from the war, so were clothes dealers and makers of apparel. Once again, a stereotypically Jewish occupation, also inherited from Europe, became a source of antiSemitic propaganda as the Lincoln government mobilized to clothe and outfit the troops. By early 1862, Northern forces had swelled to 700,000 and the Confederate forces to 450,000. Those dramatic numbers led to logistics and supply problems for both sides. For the Union in particular, mobilization was fastpaced and at times chaotic, and little planning took place. At the beginning of the war, volunteer regiments often came to battle with their own weapons, and each soldier was advised to bring “a good stout woolen blanket.”31 Northern governors complained to Secretary of War Simon Cameron that soldiers faced dire shortages of ammunition and rifles. In some instances, state governors, frustrated by paralysis and confusion at the national level, sent purchasing agents to Europe to buy arms. From a Union command at Cairo, Illinois, Grant observed that the clothing for the troops was of an inferior quality, rifles were barely usable, and transportation was deficient. A dispatch from Harpers Page 39 → Ferry in the autumn of 1862 reported that the colder weather had caught Union troops unprepared: “Some are without tents, others without blankets, and still others who are not provided with sufficient clothing.”32 Lincoln admitted that a breakdown had occurred in the supply chain at the onset of war: “One of the greatest perplexities of the government is to avoid receiving troops faster than it can provide for them.”33 Because of an inadequate manufacturing base, the Confederacy also had difficulties equipping a rapidly growing force. The South failed to industrialize at the same pace as the North, and by 1860, the northern states manufactured 97 percent of the country's firearms, 94 percent of its cloth, and 90 percent of its boots and shoes.34 Even as the Union government took over from the states the job of equipping soldiers, it faced the mounting problem of corruption and profiteering. As one newspaper wrote, “The fingers of every third man in America itched for a share of the plunder.”35 Railroads overcharged the government, and in some cases, ships leased or sold to the government were not seaworthy. Cameron himself was notoriously corrupt, signing large contracts without competitive bidding and awarding many others based on cronyism and payoffs. While the government was paying millions of dollars to dishonest contractors, soldiers in the field were going without shoes or adequate protection from the elements and eating vermin-infested food. One journalist's account referred to soldiers having to make do with moldy biscuits and gangrened beef.36 Another newspaper suggested that a fraudulent contractor receive a good beating with a tar and feathering.37 An 1862 congressional investigation found Cameron's administration of the War Department abysmal, noting in particular the conflict of interest arising from the fact that his family owned the Northern Central Railroad, which made enormous profits from wartime contracts. “Here was a man,” said Vanity Fair, “who hoodwinked the President while he pocketed hundreds of thousands.”38 Pressured by Congress, Lincoln replaced Cameron with Stanton, who remained at the War Department's helm through the end of the conflict. His quartermaster general, Montgomery Meigs, rooted out corruption, streamlined the procurement process, and insisted on competitive bidding on fixed-price contracts to eliminate inflated contractor costs. Meigs was responsible for everything the army needed except food and weapons, including clothing, boots, blankets, and tents. Early in the war, both Confederate and Union regiments came to the battlefield in a wide variety of dress, largely as a consequence of the government's failure to produce enough to meet demand as well as individual states' contracts with textile mills.39 With so many different colors and styles on the battlefield, Page 40 → confusion and casualties from friendly fire were inevitable, as was the case during the Battle of Manassas in July 1861. With

the loss of that battle, the North assumed control of the manufacture of uniforms and created the standard blue of the Union Army. Along with the invention of the sewing machine in 1846, the enormous Civil War demand for uniforms transformed the apparel industry in the United States, leading to modern forms of mass production. Meigs supplied manufacturers with a series of fixed, graduated sizes, while small stores and garment makers were turned into factories producing thousands of trousers, shirts, and coats. After the war, standard sizes as well as factory production were adapted to the civilian industry in the burgeoning ready-made men's clothing business.40

Days of Shoddy The crushing need for blankets, tents, and uniforms caused textile mills to cut corners, and the troops received thousands of blankets that literally melted in the rain as well as tents and trousers that fell apart after just a few weeks. The problem centered on shoddy, a material that was created from compressed fibers and refuse swept up from the shop floor. Shoddy was weak and fell apart quickly. Civil War historian Fred Shannon called the use of shoddy instead of genuine cloth “a crime against civilization.” He described it as “a villainous compound, the refuse stuff and sweepings…pounded, rolled, glued and smoothed to the external form and gloss of cloth.”41 New York journalist and travel writer Henry Morford popularized the term in his 1863 exposé, The Days of Shoddy, writing that the term is “a new popular word to the English language” with “a wide and disgraceful significance.” Shoddy, said Morford, had “no capability of wear and yet [was] easily made into the semblance of more durable goods.” Blankets often disintegrated after a few days of simple handling. Some were so thin, Morford observed, that thrusting a finger through the material was like poking a hole “through soaked blotting paper.”42 Shoes and overcoats dissolved into rags on the field of battle. As Shannon noted, “One day they had brand new uniforms, the next day they were practically naked.”43 Morford's The Days of Shoddy was typical of the public outcry in the North. Dishonest War Department contractors were described as the “meanest reptiles that ever crawled the earth…capable of trading upon any necessity and making the almighty dollar out of” it. While the nation remained in distress, “every swindling shoddy contractor…has been a national murderer.”44 Soldiers in the Union camps used the term to refer not only to uniforms made of this cheap Page 41 → substitute but also to the contractors who supplied inferior products to the army. As Vanity Fair observed, “The boys have nick-named the army contractors in general ‘shoddies’ and when any of these personages make their appearance the cry of ‘shoddy, shoddy’ goes up from all parts of the camp.”45 The editors of Vanity Fair recommended printing the names of swindling shoddies: “Let us hang the suit of shoddy on his dishonor'd frame.”46 At a time of war and national crisis, the issue of adequate provisions for soldiers became deeply emotional. One “shoddy mill” burned in Albany, New York, likely a case of arson.47 Morford dubbed contractors the “shoddy aristocracy,” portraying them as living in opulence in mansions built from war profits. Shoddy contractors, Morford said, were in collusion with dishonest government bureaucrats in the War Department. Just as the shoddy contractor was held up for public condemnation, so were the government officials who ordered substandard clothing and supplies, usually on the basis of a kickback. According to some estimates, a quarter of the first two hundred million dollars spent on the war was diverted to the pockets of dishonest contractors or government officials.48 One of the more highly publicized scandals of the early war effort involved uniforms manufactured by Brooks Brothers (a company that today invokes a far different image). In April 1861, the New York State Military Board awarded Brooks Brothers a contract to manufacture twelve thousand uniforms for the state's volunteer regiments. The company quickly fulfilled the order, but problems with quality were immediately evident. The pressure to meet the needs of the newly formed regiments led to shortcuts in the manufacturing process.49 In many cases, shoddy was substituted for cloth, and the uniforms fell apart in the field. “Straws could have been shot through some of the garments,” Morford said. The Brooks Brothers contract was also flawed. The manufacturer had a competitive advantage, and accusations of bribery surfaced. Following an investigation, Brooks Brothers agreed to replace almost three thousand uniforms.50

The Jews of Chatham Street Brooks Brothers was not a Jewish firm, but the shoddy label, like the camp follower, became affixed to the Jewish merchant. Beginning in the 1820s, Jews worked in all branches of the garment industry as furriers, tailors, shirtmakers, and hatmakers. By the opening of the Civil War, more than one-fifth of the Central European immigrants in New York City, almost all Jews, wielded a needle, according to historian Hasia Diner. The garment trade was a crucial Page 42 → part of the American Jewish economy, bridging the experience of American Jews from the decades before the Civil War through the twentieth century.51 The fact that New York was the center of the industry meant that Jews entering the port could find immediate employment, contributing to the city's status as the most Jewish of American metropolises. However, this staple pursuit of the Jewish people would be a central factor in the quickly rising tempo of Civil War Judeophobia.52 The exploding demand for uniforms after Fort Sumter offered a golden opportunity for smaller manufacturers or anyone with a labor pool of tailors. In addition to Brooks Brothers and other larger contractors, a number of smaller shops received government contracts to produce uniforms. Jewish merchants and businessmen were most involved in this corner of the wartime economy. The Bavarian-born Seligman brothers received as much as two million dollars in contracts early in the war for Union uniforms, a fact that may have been attributable to the brothers' support for the Republican Party.53 In Cincinnati, clothing makers received a head start in the years before the war as that city grew into a Midwest mercantile hub and a center of the ready-made men's clothing business. In 1841, Cincinnati's clothing industry employed 800 workers, a number that grew to 14,500 in 1859; over that same period, the number of garment factories in the city increased from 86 to 134. By the beginning of the war, the clothing industry had become Cincinnati's largest employer. The war cut the city's factories off from their southern markets, but with a mature industry in place, Cincinnati businesses were well positioned to receive sizable government contracts for uniforms.54 More than a quarter of the city's 15,000 Jews were involved in clothing manufacture and retailing. Between 1830 and 1860, the number of Jews involved in the retailing end of the business in the Queen City grew from less than a dozen to more than 600. Jewish peddlers had long visited Cincinnati to stock their wagons before heading out to sell wares to Ohio settlers, increasing business for the city's garment makers.55 In 1861, Ohio governor William Dennison awarded the state's first army contract for uniforms to Henry Mack, a Cincinnati garment manufacturer. Mack had emigrated from Bavaria in 1839, heading to Cincinnati, where he started by peddling with a horse and wagon in rural Ohio. He soon opened two small-town stores. By 1847, he and two siblings operated Mack and Brothers, and the clothing firm joined with two of its competitors to execute the army contract. Between August and November 1861, Mack, Stadler, and Glazer produced more than 191,000 individual articles of clothing, including 64,600 infantry pants and 31,200 infantry overcoats.56 Although Mack's operation was among a handful of Page 43 → Jewish suppliers to the Union and his products were not among those singled out as substandard, the association of Jews with poorly made garments was already well in place. The teeming immigrant streets of New York's Bowery, far from Mack's Cincinnati factory, offer a clue. In The Days of Shoddy, Morford calls New York, particularly Lower Manhattan's Chatham Street, the center of the trade in cheap secondhand clothing.57 While the business of secondhand garments satisfied a need for inexpensive apparel at a time before discount retailers, the Chatham Street clothes dealer personified a ubiquitous stereotype of the dishonest petty merchant at the bottom of the economic ladder. In a typical description, the North American Review referred to “the Chatham Street broker…who first carefully removes all marks of previous ownership from the handkerchiefs which find their way to his counter.”58

Tabloid Caricatures Morford did not specifically mention Jews, but the popularized and tabloid descriptions of the Chatham Street vendor became associated with the very visible Jewish immigrants crowding into New York's lower wards. In 1867, the Atlantic Monthly described Chatham Street as the place where “Israel predominates” with its traditional stock of “cheap clothing and bawbles that are made to wear, but not wear long.”59 The writer listed the physical characteristics of the Jewish merchant in the overtly racist language that came to define Civil War caricatures: a

“short thick-necked clothier with the curved nose and spiral oily hair…. Here and there one may see a pretty face among the younger girls, and it is sad to reflect that these little Hebrew maids will become stout…and have hooked noses like their mothers.” Reporting from Vicksburg, Mississippi, the New York Times referred to “Hebrews…gathering up the immense amount of old rags left everywhere by the rebels” and bringing their “shoddy to market.”60 During the war, the most egregious examples of stereotyping and denigrating Jewish businesses came from the illustrated tabloids. These sensational newspapers, filled with news of crime and romance, were prone to unflattering caricatures of leading political figures as well as of the Irish, Jews, and African Americans. One cartoon, published in November 1861 in Phunny Phellow, shows a caricature of a Jew dubbed Moses refusing military service and instead offering to sell uniforms to the Union troops. The caption reads simply, “Shoddy patriotism.”61 Page 44 → Frank Leslie, who emerged as the leading publisher of these periodicals during the war, featured a number of cartoons that showed Jews in the worst possible light, especially in his widely read flagship publication, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. In one, a recognizably Jewish merchant stands before a barrel of onions wondering “if there isn't a chance of a little spec here?” The onions are causing his eyes to water, and he says, “Onions for the soldiers, eh? Dear me! It's quite affecting.”62 To Leslie, the Jew was a camp follower who sold “old clos” to the soldiers and spoke in an exaggerated German accent—“Me ish got no Christian name, me ish a Jew,” was typical of this caricatured voice.63 Vanity Fair periodically published rhymes with a distinctly anti-Semitic tone, again making the association between shoddy contractors and Jewish clothing merchants. One, in August 1861, was titled “The Triumph of Israel.” In times like these it is a real treat To ramble by the stalls of Chatham Street Where all day long, the sons of Israel With smiles obsequious their goods do sell. Viewed, as I have, the swindle-stitched disgrace Of uniforms daubed with sordid lace, With cheap tag-rags disguised, and paltry loops, served out by mean contractors to our troops.64 In a series of cartoon panels, Harper's Weekly contrasted the freezing soldier and his family with the opulently attired shoddy contractor enjoying a drink at a lavish saloon. Harper's was particularly vicious in its wartime antiSemitism. One columnist, who signed himself “The Lounger,” attacked the German Jew as having “no political, no religious sympathy with this country. You are here solely to make money…. You are inevitably a Copperhead and a Rebel.”65 Despite such negative images in the popular press, American Jews found numerous defenders among their Christian neighbors. Comments in Harper's about unscrupulous peddlers were met by one reader who reminded the editors that “on Chatham Street we shall find as many Christians as Jews among these merchants.”66 The Civil War years may represent an anomaly in Christian-Jewish relations in the United States, producing an anti-Semitism that appeared suddenly with the stresses of a bloody war and disappeared thereafter. While most members of the military appeared to be free of prejudice, incidents of anti-Semitism at the front mirrored the prejudice in the general population. One Jewish soldier wrote that he and most of his coreligionists on the battlefield “do not care to make their religion a matter of notoriety…. [S]ome of our brethren fear, that Page 45 → were they known as Hebrews, it would expose them to the taunts and sneers.”67 Wise voiced his concern about what he described as the emergence of “a spirit of dark prejudice in the army against our people.”68 That spirit of dark prejudice saw its most extreme manifestation in the territories under Union occupation in 1862 and 1863 as high-ranking military officers, caught in a desperate drive to stop the cotton trade, expelled and limited the

freedom of Jewish civilians.

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5 The Hunger for Cotton From the Civil War's first battle, King Cotton would play a crucial role in almost every aspect of the conflict. Cotton was a factor in economic policy, dealings with foreign powers, and military strategy for both sides. The cascade of cotton from the American South, says Civil War historian James McPherson, dominated the world market and helped to fuel the Industrial Revolution in England and New England. The price of the precious crop increased more than 50 percent in the decade before the Civil War, as an emerging textile industry reshaped American business.1 By 1859, as southern cotton furnished three-fourths of the world's supply, South Carolina senator James H. Hammond proudly proclaimed before his colleagues, “No power on Earth dares…to make war on cotton.”2 In June 1862, as Northern gunboats silenced the Confederate fleet on the Mississippi, rebels in Union-occupied Memphis became convinced that they could regain the upper hand by destroying thousands of bales of cotton sitting in warehouses. Once supplies in New England were exhausted, they thought, the North would have no material for uniforms and tents or cotton seized for export.3 Memphis was a vital transit point for cotton flowing northward, and in the words of the Memphis Daily Appeal, “The principal object of the enemy's winter campaign is to obtain cotton…. If we can…foil them in their desperate attempt to appease the increasing clamor in the North, we will yet realize that Cotton is King and that its power has not departed.”4 King Cotton also wielded power in the New England economy. Yankee mill owners thought the war of rebellion would be over in a matter of months, but as the fighting dragged on after Bull Run, reserve stocks were depleted and many of New England's two hundred thousand textile mill workers began to lose Page 47 → their jobs in what was termed a cotton famine. Export trade had fallen rapidly, and by June 1862 more than 3 million of the 4.5 million spindles in the Northeast were idle.5 European textile mills also hungered for cotton, and Europe's cotton famine played a role in both Northern and Confederate foreign policy. In England, which depended on southern cotton for more than three-quarters of its supply, manufacturers called loudly for the country to back the Confederacy. By January 1863, one-third of England's cotton mills had shut down, and nearly a half million factory workers were unemployed.6 As the European cotton shortage worsened, U.S. secretary of state William Seward feared foreign intervention. British vessels seemed poised to breach the U.S. naval blockade of southern ports. Observing the American war from Europe, Karl Marx said that since “this great pillar of English industry” was imperiled, Britain seemed likely to declare war on the Union.7 France, which also bought southern cotton, saw the chaos on the other side of the Atlantic as an opportunity to gain a foothold in Mexico, to the advantage of the Confederacy. Seward urged President Abraham Lincoln to allow enough cotton trade to satisfy foreign demand. The secretary of state's concerns were certainly a factor in Lincoln's decision to move cotton north in 1862 even if doing so meant trading with rebels in occupied territories. As cotton began to flow out of the conquered South, Britain and France backed away from openly supporting the Confederacy, believing that the North would eventually emerge victorious.

Trading Cotton for Gold Both sides saw trade as a necessary evil but struggled with the question of how to conduct that trade without compromising military objectives. In the states in rebellion, cotton was a priceless commodity. Confederate leaders sought to starve the North of the cotton it needed for uniforms and blankets but also recognized that it could be traded for food, ammunition, medicine, and even gold. As A. Sellew Roberts notes in his study of the southern cotton trade, “There seems to be good grounds for the statement that cotton was the most efficient instrument that the South had for obtaining the supplies necessary to carry on the war.”8 In some cases, Confederate troops had to choose between burning bales of cotton sitting in warehouses or trading

it for food. Confederate secretary of war George Randolph told President Jefferson Davis that cotton trade with the enemy should be limited “to what is absolutely necessary to feed the Army and supply it with blankets and shoes.”9 Davis understood well the economic bind Page 48 → the southern states faced, saying that “as a last resort we might be justified in departing from the declared policy” of prohibiting trade with the United States.10 The Lincoln government was pulled in one direction by Secretary of State Seward and Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, who wanted to use trade to relieve the stress on northern textile manufacturers and as a political bargaining chip to prevent a wholesale European tilt toward the Confederacy. They were opposed by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Attorney General Edward Bates as well as Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, who despaired as gold fell into the hands of Confederate munitions makers.11 Union generals were virtually powerless to keep cotton out of the hands of private traders willing to buy from rebels still loyal to the insurrection. Trade, they said, would only lengthen the conflict and result in needless casualties. The problem, Lincoln confided to William Kellogg, “deeply affects the Treasury and War Departments and has been discussed again and again in the Cabinet.”12 By July 1861, as large quantities of war materiel and gold were slipping into rebel hands, Lincoln prohibited all commerce between the United States and the Confederacy; however, he retained the power to allow commerce in cotton if it was in the national interest, was regulated through a procedure of licenses controlled by the Treasury Department, and did not involve gold. Lincoln and Chase formulated a policy to allow limited trade in those parts of the Confederacy and border states under Union control. Chase described the policy as allowing commerce to follow the flag; Sherman replied that the policy only “supplies our enemy with the means to destroy the flag and the Government whose emblem it is.”13 In the border states of Missouri and Kentucky, Lincoln saw cotton trade as a political necessity. Keeping commerce open and lessening deprivation would win the loyalty of those in slaveholding states that had not seceded. In addition, Lincoln acknowledged that the government needed to procure enough cotton to supply the Union troops with clothing and tents. General-in-Chief Henry W. Halleck instructed a reluctant Sherman in Memphis to move cotton north any way he could. “Tents…cannot be furnished [to Union troops] till we get more cotton, and hence the absolute necessity of encouraging that trade just now,” Halleck explained.14 While Sherman said he would respect the orders of his superiors, he vowed to “move heaven and earth for [their] repeal.”15 The rules on trading with cotton dealers in the border states produced confusion and rampant corruption. Treasury agents and military officers argued about who had ultimate authority over shipments moving north or granting permits. In some cases, Yankee detachments seized cotton from planters and resold it at a tidy profit. Permits could be sold to the highest Page 49 → bidder, counterfeiting and alteration of permits was common.16 Complicating matters further, enforcement of Treasury Department rules permitting legal trade was sporadic and lax. Chase called the whole process “exceedingly arduous and perplexing.”17 Treasury agents could be bribed, allowing smugglers to load cotton at remote and heavily wooded points on the Mississippi. Typical was a trader who paid twelve thousand dollars for fifteen hundred bales of cotton in Mississippi with the intention of selling it in Columbus, Kentucky, for more than half a million dollars. Officers who aided in the shipment north received their cut of the profits. Southern planters were supposed to be paid in U.S. currency, but some demanded and received permission from the Treasury Department for payments in gold, and while planters were to take loyalty oaths before being permitted to sell, loyalty was hardly enforceable.18 Amid the chaos, traders and even high-ranking officers shipped tons of illegal cotton worth millions of dollars through Union lines. With numerous land and river routes north to cotton markets, nearly a million bales of cotton were shipped to the ports of Boston and New York during the war, about half of it illegally.19 As prices soared and cotton dealers descended on Union-held territory in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, the government could do little to control the mad rush to make a quick buck. Even an assistant secretary of war, Charles A. Dana, was caught up in the cotton rush and requested a permit from Stanton. Dana formed a partnership with New York congressman Roscoe Conkling to ship the crop north from Memphis. Stanton advised against the enterprise but granted a permit nonetheless. In January 1863, after traveling to Memphis Dana reconsidered, telling Stanton that

“the mania for sudden fortunes…has to an alarming extent corrupted and demoralized the army” and urging him to “put an end to an evil so enormous, so insidious, and so full of peril to the country.”20

“They Have Cotton on the Brain—Every One of Them” In his self-enlightening account of the cotton trade, Dana observed the corruption among army officers who pocketed large sums in deals with the enemy. “Every colonel, captain, or quartermaster is in secret partnership with some operator in cotton; every soldier dreams of adding a bale of cotton to his monthly pay.”21 In other cases, officers in the field were bribed to load cotton onto steamboats or military railcars, even providing armed escort for wealthy traders. An 1866 account of life on the battlefield quotes one colonel who admitted resigning Page 50 → his commission to trade cotton. “Why…continue in the service when I saw a chance to make twenty or thirty thousand dollars in a few months!,” he asked.22 The proceedings of a military court in 1863 provide a window onto the extent of corruption at all levels of the army command. Major General Samuel Curtis, a veteran of the Mexican War and a former congressman from Iowa, was implicated in a wide-ranging scheme to move thousands of bales of cotton up the Mississippi River from Helena, Arkansas.23 At the time, Curtis was leading Union forces on the Arkansas-Missouri border, but as one witness testified, victory on the battlefield may have been a secondary concern: the general's table was “covered with money, greenbacks and gold.” Regiments were called into service to guard and even transport cotton bales by rail or steamboat. According to the witness, “I saw government transportation hauling cotton from almost every direction.”24 Grant was outraged that soldiers would be diverted from the fight to protect contraband that would soon enrich speculators with thousands of dollars in profits. Lincoln was warned that these so-called cotton officers were a demoralizing influence on an army already suffering great hardships.25 The men leading the battle were exasperated. Grant, whose supply base was at Holly Springs, Mississippi, warned Secretary Chase that the sale of cotton was putting new rifles and provisions into the hands of the rebels. In December 1862, before Grant's spring offensive at Vicksburg, the Chicago Tribune observed that the numerous cotton traders at Holly Springs were suffering from a “disgusting moral malady…. They have cotton on the brain—every one of them.”26 Aside from the spectacle of cotton merchants crowding the military camp, Grant was concerned that some traders were involved in espionage. Stations along the Mississippi River were established where cotton could be unloaded, potentially allowing spies to observe the strength and position of Grant's forces. In some cases, traders warned Southern regiments when impending attacks threatened cotton shipments.27 Grant told Chase that “our lines are so extended that it is impossible for any military surveillance to contend successfully with the cunning of the traders.” Grant was sure that the cotton trade was compromising the effectiveness of his army by one-third, and Sherman bluntly wrote, “We cannot carry on war and trade with a people at the same time.”28 Military historians have speculated that in the absence of trade between North and South, the war might have ended a year earlier.29

Letting Trade Follow the Flag Grant tried to take control of the situation in the territory he commanded, the Military District of Tennessee, which included northern Mississippi, the western Page 51 → parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, and areas as far north as Cairo, Illinois. The district contained numerous transit points from the southern cotton belt northward. Although he prohibited the use of government transportation to haul cotton and tried to limit the areas where permit holders could travel and conduct business, Grant could not adequately monitor the frantic trading and manage a major military campaign. In a letter to Secretary Chase, Grant said the policy of “‘letting trade follow the flag’ is…benefitting almost exclusively…a class of greedy traders.” As Grant's forces reached the northern part of Alabama, the scramble for cotton intensified. “To all the other trials that I have to contend against, is added that of speculators whose patriotism is measured by dollars and cents,” Grant wrote to his sister.30 In his letters to members of his family, Grant recounted the grueling conditions and long hours working on military strategy deep in enemy territory. “My duties are very laborious…It is a rare thing that I get to bed before two or three o'clock in

the morning,” he wrote. He was concerned about supply lines and the protection of his men as he made his headquarters in Oxford, Mississippi, comparing his army to a “peninsula into an enemy's country.”31 On December 15, 1862, Grant wrote to his sister, Mary, from Oxford that “an immense number of lives [are] staked upon my judgment and acts…depending for their daily bread [on] a line of railroad running one hundred and ninety miles through an enemy's country or, at least, through territory occupied by a people terribly embittered and hostile to us.”32 There was no shortage of commonsense solutions to the problem of illegal cotton deals. Both Dana and Grant preferred that the War Department turn over all cotton trade to the army quartermaster, entirely eliminating the private sector. Cotton would be bought at a fixed price, paid only in greenbacks, and shipped to Cincinnati or Memphis via military rail. Sherman suggested to Chase that cotton brought to Memphis be paid for in Tennessee banknotes “good here but not elsewhere” or, better yet, seized as spoils of war.33 As Grant's forces pushed farther south during the summer and autumn of 1862, some cotton was confiscated and the proceeds turned over to the army, but enough enterprising cotton speculators had the right Washington connections to scotch any proposal to turn the entire trade over to the army. As one wartime correspondent following Grant in Tennessee observed, only “interested parties” would argue that cotton did not rightfully belong to the government.34 Elihu Washburne was one such “interested party” and Washington insider. While there is no indication that Washburne personally profited, he certainly had close associates who did. A congressman from Illinois and longtime political adviser to Grant, Washburne likely used his friendship with the general to move cotton for one of his cronies, Russell Jones. Jones later bragged to Washburne he would make an “eternal hell-roaring fortune” if he could transport cotton from Page 52 → Arkansas to Memphis.35 Congressmen and governors also had their fingers in the pie. A Cleveland cotton dealer who shipped sixty bales from Nashville to New York cleared four thousand dollars and boasted that with the help of a high-ranking officer, he could move thousands of dollars in cotton by rail and wagon.36 Even Lincoln was approached by cotton traders looking for permission to ship boatloads of the staple upriver. “I think you do not know how embarrassing your request is,” he told a prospective trader in the summer of 1863.37 By April 1863, Lincoln shut down commerce in some federally occupied areas and clamped down on permits. Attempting to stamp out military cotton trade, General Halleck directed officers to seize cotton in the possession of anyone wearing a Union uniform. Still, other Washington leaders recognized that the only way to keep contraband out of the hands of the enemy was to put an end to all private cotton trade. Not until 1864 was the failed system of granting permits finally terminated and replaced with a government-operated cartel that had a monopoly on trade with the occupied territories. Under these rules, planters who took a loyalty oath received receipts to be redeemed after the war.38 These changes helped solve but did not completely end the persistent problem of smuggling from the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River. As historian E. Merton Coulter wrote, regardless of what was tried, “there was almost unrestricted trade [with the Confederacy] and wild speculation.”39

Judeophobia on the Mississippi Beyond army officers and Yankee merchants, one other group was singled out by the press and the War Department as cotton speculators—Jews. Despite the evidence that cotton speculation was rampant in the military, the small number of Jews on the Mississippi were viewed as the primary culprit. During the war years, smugglers and speculators were not identified by nationality or religion unless they were Jewish. Dana informed Stanton in 1863 that cotton was being brought in from behind enemy lines “especially by the agency of Jewish traders, who pay for it…in gold.” Newspapers in cities such as Louisville and Nashville informed their readers of Jewish smugglers and cotton merchants—“these birds of passage,” as one writer poetically noted.40 An 1868 biography of Grant expressed what was a typically skewed view of the Memphis cotton trade: “The long dining hall of the principal hotel…looked at mealtimes like a Feast of the Passover.”41 Army officers engaged in cotton traffic were often disparagingly referred to as competitors to Jewish merchants. One Illinois colonel, Lorenzo Whitney, repeatedly Page 53 → asked Washburne to pull some strings with Grant

and even Lincoln to get a permit to ship twelve hundred bales out of Memphis. Whitney argued that he had served his country well and now “I ought to have the same chance that rebels & Jews have.”42 When a military court of inquiry sitting in St. Louis investigated charges of corruption among officers, blame was conveniently placed on the influence of foreigners and Jews. General Curtis granted permits exclusively to his business partners because his camp was overrun with spies and traitors. “Short sighted pimps of our army…and Jews,” he said, sought vengeance against him for cutting them out of the business, but the general assured Lincoln “before God and my country” that charges that he had profited from the cotton trade were groundless.43 Sherman saw the Jews as an easy target for his anger at illegal cotton shipments. Jews and speculators, said Sherman, “have sent enough gold [south] to get all the cartridges necessary.” Sherman's record of anti-Semitic remarks predated the war: during the economic troubles that befell the nation after 1855, Sherman believed, the Jews—“without pity, soul [or] heart”—had prospered.44 In July and August 1862, Sherman found Memphis overrun by speculators taking advantage of the Treasury Department's zeal to move cotton north, with “swarms” and “flocks” of Jews among the merchants.45 In separate accounts, the New York Times leveled accusations of “Jew traders” and “successful smuggling carried on mostly by foreigners.” One November 1862 dispatch from the Army of the Potomac noted an assistant provost marshal near Warrenton, Virginia, who “accomplished a good work by clearing out the Jew traders.” After the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, a Times correspondent reporting from Grant's headquarters took specific aim at “Hebrews” following the army to bring their “shoddy” to market.46 Without mentioning the numerous army officers engaged in illegal trade, the reporter described Jews “besieging the authorities from Cairo to the Gulf” with permits to buy cotton or shipping loads of Confederate clothes, cotton, and tents to St. Louis for sale.47 A fiercely destructive civil war that tore the nation apart and brought economic distress to every corner of the country raised suspicions that unseen enemies were lurking in the shadows. Typical of witch hunts throughout history, these enemies were viewed as manipulators of commerce and money. Most significantly, they were foreign. The attacks on Jews were so harsh and focused that Union commanders became convinced that the trade in cotton was a uniquely Jewish problem. The vulgar caricatures in the tabloid press and accusations of disloyalty led to a series of military edicts, including the only Jewish expulsion on American soil.

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6 Exile and Other Edicts from the Battlefield As General Ulysses S. Grant marched his army south through Kentucky, he complained bitterly that camp followers and cotton merchants were putting their interests ahead of victory on the battlefield. Faced with a persistent enemy in occupied territory, Grant desperately tried to restrict commercial traffic across state lines. While there is little to suggest in his writings or his actions after the war that Grant harbored deep-seated prejudices, he did issue orders in 1862 specifically targeted at Jews. On July 26, 1862, Grant told subordinates at Columbus, Kentucky, to search the baggage of cotton merchants for gold or ammunition, adding, “Jews should receive special attention.”1 On November 9, 1862, Grant sent a dispatch from La Grange, Tennessee, to Major General Stephen A. Hurlbut instructing him to “refuse all permits to come south of Jackson for the present. The Israelites especially should be kept out.”2 One newspaper correspondent following Grant's army south called that order a “good step…excluding all Jews from the lines of the army.” In a tone that was typical of the prevailing anti-Semitism, he also reported that the area still had plenty of camp followers and traders “as rapacious and unprincipled as the worst Jew that ever lived.”3 A day later, on November 10, Grant told Joseph Webster, his superintendent of military railroads, that to prevent illegal cotton deals, he should “give orders to all the conductors on the road that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point. They may go north and be encouraged in it.” Anticipating his expulsion order, Grant described Jews as “an intolerable nuisance” and ended the communiqué with the opinion that the “Department must be purged of them.”4 On December 5, 1862, Grant told William Tecumseh Sherman that he would soon expel Jews from the region under his command “so far as practicable.”5 Page 55 →

General Grant's Expulsion Order The expulsion of Jewish families from General Grant's military district in December 1862, known as General Orders 11, reminded many Jews of the experiences that brought them to the United States from Central Europe.6 The origin, intent, and circumstances of General Orders 11 are characterized by confusion. Because of the minor political storm it created both at Grant's Oxford, Mississippi, headquarters and in Washington, those connected with the expulsion order quickly distanced themselves from it and in some cases laid the blame on others. Regardless of the often contradictory accounts, it is clear that Grant was reacting to the chaotic trade in cotton through Union lines. In one account, Grant was approached at Oxford by his father, Jesse Root Grant, who had established a partnership with Cincinnati clothing manufacturer Henry Mack. With substantial government contracts to produce uniforms, the Mack brothers needed cotton—lots of it. Mack wanted to move five hundred bales from occupied Union territory to his warehouses in Cincinnati and enlisted Jesse Grant to obtain a permit from his son. In return, Jesse would get 25 percent of the profits. When Jesse arrived at Oxford with his request, Ulysses was enraged and threw the Mack brothers out of his camp. Then, on December 17, 1862, Grant issued his order:7 The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the [Department of the Tennessee] within twentyfour hours from the receipt of this order. Post commanders will see that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and anyone returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters. No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal applications for trade permits.8

Whether Jesse Grant's application for a permit from his son was the spark that set off the expulsion is not entirely clear, but there is no doubt that Jesse Grant and Henry Mack were involved in a short-lived partnership to move cotton north, and it is likely that they looked for help in securing a permit and rail transport from the most powerful military commander in the region, Ulysses Grant.9 Civil War historian Bruce Catton characterized the senior Grant as “a shrewd little leather merchant…who possessed…a total lack Page 56 → of understanding of the standards which ought to guide the father of a major general.”10 In another version of the story, Grant reacted to a stack of letters sent to him from Washington complaining about the cotton trade and Jewish merchants in particular. In this account, Grant's hand was forced after he received a telegram from the War Department that charged that “Jews are buying up the gold in the various cities of the Union for the purpose of investing in cotton in the South.”11 Grant said that his superiors' concerns were not unexpected: Gold for cotton was putting ammunition and rifles in the hands of Confederate soldiers. But these instructions, witnesses at Oxford said, were specific to a “class of citizens.” Grant was told, “You will therefore issue an order expelling from your lines all Jews who cannot give satisfactory evidence of their honesty or intentions.”12 One witness, Grant's assistant adjutant general, Colonel John A. Rawlins, countersigned the expulsion order and insisted that it was issued under pressure from the War Department. There were persistent fears that spies were passing through the lines along with the traders and camp followers. The surprise attack on Vicksburg, Rawlins said, could have been compromised. With a flood of complaints, “the general felt…that some immediate action was demanded of him.”13 Grant often said after the war that the expulsion order was issued in haste and under the most difficult circumstances. As late as 1875, President Grant told one Jewish acquaintance that “during war…we had no time to handle things with kid gloves.”14 Jesse Grant also weighed in, telling Congressman Elihu Washburne that the “Jew order so harped on in Congress was issued on express instructions from Washington.” Yet no record exists of any such orders from the War Department.15 Other accounts said that Grant had nothing at all to do with the order—it was signed by a subordinate, Colonel John Dubois, without the general's knowledge. These accounts may have confused a December 8 order that Dubois issued under his own name to expel Jews from the Union supply depot at Holly Springs.16 Written under pressure from General Sherman, Dubois's order refers to camp followers and peddlers as well as cotton merchants who were taxing the scarce provisions at Holly Springs and the surrounding area. Dubois commanded that “all persons from the North not connected with the Army…and having no permission from the Commanding General to remain in town, will leave in twenty four hours.” Violators would be put to work in the trenches. Although Dubois's order was directed at anyone not involved in the war effort, it singled out “cotton-speculators, Jews, and other vagrants.”17 Ironically, Grant rescinded Dubois's order, calling it “manifestly unjust.” It is therefore unlikely that the colonel would have tried to push the order again by Page 57 → forging Grant's signature.18 Some observers have speculated that Dubois was asked by Major General Henry W. Halleck, Grant's commander, to take full responsibility for the expulsion and that Dubois complied in an effort to protect Grant's career.19

“The Fault Lies in the Washington Atmosphere” During the winter of 1862–63, Grant faced severe criticism for the humiliating surrender of Holly Springs and the failed attempt to march on Vicksburg; in addition, there were concerns about his drinking. Under the circumstances, it is likely that Grant, who had few allies at the time, simply reacted quickly to any War Department complaints coming his way, including the one regarding Jews. The fact that Grant countermanded Dubois's original order lends support to the assertion that Grant issued his expulsion order under a directive from Washington several days later. In letters home, Grant was deeply troubled by the rumors of his drinking and poor battlefield decisions. These critics, who professed patriotism and love of country, Grant said, “never heard the whistle of a hostile bullet.”20 Abraham Lincoln retained his faith in the general, and Grant was more than vindicated as a military commander with the victory at Vicksburg on July 4, 1863. If Grant was pressured from Washington to act against Jewish cotton traders, the instructions might have come

from Assistant Secretary of War Christopher P. Wolcott.21 On the day he issued General Orders 11, Grant seemed to defend the expulsion, writing to Wolcott that Treasury Department rules had been violated by what he described as “Jews and other unprincipled traders.” Grant also said that attempts to bar Jews from military camps proved unsuccessful. In a dispatch to Wolcott, Grant referred to Jews as a “privileged class that can travel everywhere.” He told Wolcott, “they come in with their carpet-sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it.”22 In this letter, Grant confirms his authorship of General Orders 11 and explains that he did so largely to rid his military district of cotton merchants, particularly Jewish ones. Isaac Mayer Wise, always the critic of the Republican administration, sought to pin the affair on as many heads as possible, speculating that Grant was instructed by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton or Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. “The fault lies in the Washington atmosphere,” Wise opined. Sherman wrote to Chase in August 1862 about the rampant cotton trade across enemy lines, pointedly referring to “the commercial enterprise of the Jews” but omitting mention of corruption among Union officers. There is no record of Chase's Page 58 → reply.23 Most Jewish leaders, however, were unconvinced that an expulsion order could have come from anyone in the Lincoln cabinet. The pro-Lincoln Jewish Messenger called for caution: Though some of the general's defenders sought to shield him by spreading the rumor that the injustice had come from the War Department or even the White House, American Jews would have to make their own judgments and discern the truth from “those who would enkindle and fan into flame such a terrible suspicion.”24 In many parts of the military district, the expulsion was carried out loosely, if at all. It is possible that some officials thought it unjust and that others did not receive it, especially after the raid on Holly Springs by Confederate forces three days after the order was issued. In Jackson, Tennessee, General Jeremiah Sullivan reportedly refused to comply at first but did so under pressure four days later,25 and according to the diary of one Jewish soldier, the expulsion was not enforced in Memphis.26 Conversely, in Nashville, military authorities and the chief of police instructed Jews to leave and not return. A few weeks before the expulsion order, General William Rosecrans had attempted to ban all traders from the city.27 The New York Times characterized the ubiquitous camp followers around Rosecrans's forces as “ambiguous personages who are neither merchants, sutlers, or peddlers…. These fellows are a grand nuisance to the army.” Post commanders at Louisville and Bowling Green were instructed not to allow Jews to travel to Nashville or Memphis, regional centers of the cotton trade.28 According to reports sent to Wise's Israelite, during the three weeks when the expulsion order was in effect, Jews were effectively barred, detained, or at least questioned along the major transit points running from Mississippi north to Memphis.29 Because the terms of the order precluded direct appeals to General Grant, there was one reported arrest—a Chicago businessman traveling through Tennessee to Memphis who attempted to telegraph headquarters at Oxford.30 One Jewish soldier with the Ohio Volunteer Cavalry tendered his resignation, saying that with the expulsion order, his fellow soldiers now regarded him as an enemy.31

Exodus by Riverboat The small Jewish community of Paducah, Kentucky, however, appealed directly to a sympathetic President Lincoln to revoke the order. Most of Paducah's thirty Jewish families departed hastily by riverboat for Cincinnati. Several of those asked to leave were elderly, and two women who were ill were allowed to stay in Paducah. None of the deportees were engaged in cotton trade, and two of them Page 59 → had served in the Union Army. Jonathan Sarna estimates that the expulsion order affected fewer than one hundred individuals in the town and that most of those affected were itinerant traders.32 Paducah was a key town in a state that was pivotal to the war effort. Although Kentucky declared that it would stay out of the fight but remain in the Union, it was a deeply divided slave state. Kentucky's tightrope dance could not hold long, and by early September 1861, the state's neutrality was breached. As the Stars and Bars flew over Paducah rooftops in anticipation of the arrival of Confederate forces, Grant realized that federal occupation was necessary to prevent rebels from completely seizing power in the prosperous cotton town.

On September 6, Grant's forces occupied Paducah, whose location at the junction of the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers made it commercially and militarily important to the Confederacy. Grant staged the attacks on Fort Henry and Fort Donelson from Paducah, clearing the way for Union operations southward. When western Kentucky was declared to be under insurrectionary influence, the Treasury Department took control of trade to keep gold and supplies from going south. Despite the volatile situation in Paducah, Grant assured the city's businesses that he would not interfere with their lives except to “deal…with armed rebellion…. You can pursue your usual avocations without fear or hindrance.”33 Merchants complained that they were continually harassed by marauding bands of rebel cavalry and guerrilla fighters and asked Andrew Johnson, military governor of Tennessee, for federal protection. The cessation of trade with Confederate territory meant that markets were closed, and competition among Paducah's businesses—Christian and Jewish—grew more acute, as did the tone of anti-Jewish sentiment in official circles.34 Treasury agents warned of “the rascally conduct of secessionists and Jews,” and a naval officer patrolling the Ohio River claimed that smuggling operations out of Paducah were conducted “chiefly by Jews.”35 In those dark days, writes Isaac Bernheim in his history of the Jews of Paducah, “what little of communal, social and commercial activity still existed was almost completely suspended.”36 German Jews had arrived in Paducah as merchants starting in the 1840s. They were well represented among the city's political leadership and proud of a decorated and fallen Union officer, Gabriel Netter. While there is no record of a reaction to General Orders 11 by the city council, Paducah's Jewish businessmen carried the protest to Washington.37 Brothers Cesar and J. W. Kaskel first sent a telegram to President Lincoln on December 29 protesting “this inhuman order.” Expelling citizens from their homes, the Prussian-born Kaskels wrote, violates the Constitution and would “place us…as outlaws before the whole Page 60 → world.” When the dispatch went unanswered, thirty-year-old Cesar headed to the White House. As Sarna observes, “Following time-tested traditions of Jewish politics, Kaskel began by appealing to the highest governmental power available.”38 Stopping in Cincinnati, he enlisted the help of the city's foremost congregational leader, Rabbi Wise. Through Wise, Kaskel won the support of Ohio congressman John Gurley. Kaskel's mission was also helped by the fact that he served as vice president of Paducah's pro-Lincoln Union League Club. Gurley secured Kaskel a January 3 appointment with the president. During their meeting, Kaskel told Lincoln that some of those sent from their homes were Union soldiers and that if Jewish merchants were engaging in illegal cotton trade, the good citizens of Paducah were not among them.39 Employing biblical imagery, Lincoln supposedly asked Kaskel, “So the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?” Kaskel responded in kind: he had come to “Father Abraham's bosom, asking protection.” And this protection, Lincoln replied, “they shall have at once.”40 Whatever the exact words exchanged, Lincoln immediately reversed the expulsion order. “Fortunately for the country,” Isaac Leeser said, “the President would not be the instrument of such cruelty.”41 Lincoln then sent a telegram to General Halleck, who, in turn, sent one to Grant on January 4, 1863. Halleck instructed that the order which “expels all Jews from your department…will be immediately revoked.” On January 7, the only case of Jewish expulsion on American soil, now nicknamed “the Jew Order,” was reversed. The Jewish Messenger took note of the tersely worded revocation that offered “not the slightest apology…not the slightest reparation.”42 One of General Halleck's subordinates, Colonel John Kelton, explained to Grant that if the words Jew peddlers had been used instead of simply Jews, “I do not suppose any exception would have been taken.” Kelton also alluded to several complaints registered in Washington from Jewish soldiers serving under Grant's command.43 On January 21, Halleck reiterated Kelton's observations, telling Grant that while he and Lincoln understood the rationale of ridding the area of “Jew peddlers,” the expulsion of all Jews, “some of whom are fighting in our ranks,” was objectionable.44

Congress Debates the Expulsion Order Unaware of Lincoln's quick response, Wise and Max Lilienthal of Cincinnati, Martin Bijur of Louisville, and Moses Strauss of Baltimore also had arrived in Washington and were making the rounds of Capitol Hill. On January 7, Wise Page 61 → met with Gurley and another Ohio congressman, Democrat George Pendleton. Having learned of the president's revocation order, Wise insisted on thanking Lincoln personally.45 During their brief

White House meeting that evening, Lincoln expressed his disbelief that General Grant could have approved of the Jewish expulsion. The president offered the delegation assurances that he would oppose any law that would condemn “a class or nationality…on account of a few sinners.”46 As Kaskel, Wise, and other Jewish leaders left Washington satisfied that they had secured a victory, the storm in the press and in Congress was only beginning. Grant's detractors soon demanded a resolution to censure the general. Democrats in Congress and others who opposed Grant for a number of reasons, mostly unconnected with the Jewish expulsion, tended to paint him as intolerant and cruel. Grant was often taken to task for risking too many casualties to meet his military objectives; now his critics added to their list of grievances his banishment of innocent families from their homes solely based on their Jewish faith. In the House, Pendleton introduced a resolution condemning the order as “illegal and unjust and its execution tyrannical and cruel.”47 Washburne, Grant's strongest supporter in Washington, shot back, saying that the resolution “censures one of our best generals without a hearing.” Representing Grant's hometown of Galena, Washburne dismissed the petitioners from Paducah, remarking simply, “There are two sides to this question.” Washburne, in fact, defended the expulsion and advised Lincoln not to rescind the order on the grounds that it was “the wisest order yet made by a Military Command.”48 The House Republicans won the censure fight, and the resolution was defeated by a vote of fifty-six to fifty-three. Much the same battle was waged in the Senate, where Kentucky Democrat Lazarus Whitehead Powell offered up a January 5 resolution censuring Grant for “this most atrocious, illegal, inhuman and monstrous order.”49 Calling Paducah's Jews “inoffensive citizens” who were not engaged in the cotton trade, Powell told his fellow senators that to expel Jews would be no different than expelling Methodists or Episcopalians for the same crimes: “All are alike protected…by the Constitution of our country.” Powell explained that Democrats had come to the defense of Paducah's Jews because it was just one more example of the Lincoln government's propensity for trampling individual rights and Constitutional guarantees of liberty.50 Lincoln had already been branded a dictator by Democrats after he suspended the writ of habeas corpus as an emergency power in 1861. “The constitutional rights of the citizens are being stricken down and trodden under Page 62 → foot throughout the entire country by the executive and military power,” Powell told the Senate.51 Powell and other Democrats viewed General Orders 11 as an extension of military power that included denying the rights of defendants and the arrest of opposition Democrats and newspaper editors. “If we tamely submit to allow military power to encroach on the rights of our citizens, [we] shall be setting a bad and most pernicious example to those in command of our Army,” Powell warned his fellow senators.52 Senate Republicans including Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts sidestepped the issue of civil rights. They did not defend General Orders 11 but insisted that it was the wrong time to reprimand a military commander engaged on the battlefield. Wilson saw the expulsion as “utterly indefensible” but told other legislators that with Lincoln's speedy revocation, “the matter may rest.”53 The Senate resolution to censure was rejected by an overwhelming vote of thirty to seven, prompting Wise to call the small number of dissenting senators the only ones who “had the moral courage to stand by an outraged class of their fellow citizens.”54 Only a few Jewish leaders agreed with Wise's position. The Board of Delegates of American Israelites, with its representation of Republicans and strong supporters of the Lincoln government, agreed with Sumner that loyal Americans should do nothing to “embarrass military operations.” Moreover, the board wanted to make sure that no one could “accuse the Jewish community of treason.”55

The Partisan Press Takes Sides Coverage in the national press echoed the debate in Congress. With most papers closely tied to one of the two political parties, press coverage was blatantly partisan.56 Democratic newspapers that freely printed unflattering descriptions of Jews now came to the defense of Paducah's deportees. In contrast, despite Cincinnati's influential Jewish community, the Republican Cincinnati Daily Commercial told its readers that while General Orders 11 “subjected innocent persons to great hardship…Jew traders have been the most adroit smugglers.”57 In the Queen

City, only the Cincinnati Enquirer opposed the order. Wise was disappointed by the press's reaction: “We know what we have to expect of the Cincinnati press in case of an emergency,” he said.58 Republican newspapers that usually struck a more liberal note and were read widely by American Jews now found, in the words of the Washington Republican, that Grant was “worth more to the cause [of the war] than the votes of the whole Jewish nation resident in our midst.”59 One correspondent Page 63 → to the New York World went even further, calling the expulsion “one of the few righteous orders.” Using standard anti-Semitic imagery, he referred to the “ten thousand descendants of Shem, clogging the wheels of war…like vultures at the carcass.”60 The Washington Chronicle approved Lincoln's decision to revoke the order on humanitarian grounds but added that with the presence of Jewish merchants in Memphis and other neighboring cotton centers, “there was at least some excuse” for its promulgation. A letter in the Washington Star took issue with the editors of the Chronicle, which “pretends to offer an apology” for the order but falsely inferred that “illegitimate trading” “is inherited alone by these people.”61 The pro-Lincoln New York Times admitted that Grant's expulsion was a “momentary revival of the spirit of the medieval ages” and cautioned that restricting the rights of a religious denomination or any other “class” put the freedoms of all Americans at risk. The Times also admonished Grant for the wording of the order—“a jumble of bad writing and worse logic.”62 Departing from its usual stereotypically negative images of Jews, the Times told its readers that “All swindlers are not Jews. All Jews are not swindlers.” Following a somewhat jumbled logic, the editors of the Times argued that in light of the “well nigh omnipotent” financial clout wielded by the European Rothschilds, the Union should avoid antagonizing them.63 Like the New York Times, the Philadelphia Public Ledger saw the expulsion as “contrary to the spirit and genius of our Constitution.” Leeser, whose congregation was one of the city's largest, thanked the Ledger for taking one of the few editorial stands completely against any distinction between Jews and gentiles. “Is it only Jews who have acted thus?,” the Ledger asked. “We think not. There are thousands of other speculators and traitors daily in communication with the enemy.”64 And the Indianapolis Sentinel went so far as to call General Grant a liar and accuse him of “exhibiting only malice and prejudice.”65 A little closer to the scene of the expulsion, newspapers expressed greater empathy with people they viewed as neighbors. The Louisville Journal, which certainly was hostile to Union military decrees, referred to “our Hebrew friends of Paducah,” and the Louisville Democrat expressed disbelief that the Paducah families received only twenty-four hours to leave their homes. The editors of the Louisville Democrat deemed General Orders 11 “certainly the most extraordinary, unwarrantable order we have ever heard of.”66 Although it was extraordinary, it was not the last order from a civil war commander that restricted American Jews' freedom. Even after Lincoln repudiated such discrimination, Grant and other generals continued to level attacks at Jewish citizens and businesses in areas under Union control. Page 64 →

Restricting Jewish Trade in Memphis More than six months after the expulsion was revoked, Grant directed General James McPherson to confiscate any property that Jewish merchants were storing for sale at the military post at Vicksburg. Grant was acting in response to a telegram from several St. Louis dry goods companies that complained that “a number of Israelites [were] selling goods contrary to your orders.” The main concern seemed to be that some Christian merchants—referred to by the St. Louis dry goods owners as “Americans”—“pressed hard for the same privilege and have been flatly denied.”67 One of these firms, Northrup and Company, accused a Jewish competitor, Aaron Meyers and Company, of moving goods for sale to areas not yet under Union occupation. In messages between officers investigating the matter, Colonel Loren Kent admitted that the accusations from the St. Louis store owners could not be justified and that it was difficult to determine exactly who was a Jew, “judging from the names.” Kent also said that out of a hundred merchants with goods stored for sale, only four or five were Jewish.68

In Memphis, General Hurlbut was responsible for General Orders 162, a discriminatory edict that excluded the city's fifteen Jewish apparel makers from selling uniforms or any military supplies. Many of the businesses had already paid a 5 percent duty on the merchandise they had readied for delivery. The official reason for General Orders 162, issued on November 30, 1863, was a vaguely worded complaint that some businesses had supplied unauthorized persons with military clothing “to the detriment of the service.”69 Union uniforms likely were falling into the hands of Confederate guerrillas. While the order did not single out any particular group, all of the firms excluded from supplying to the army were Jewish-owned. The sixth-largest city in the South and a thriving cotton town, Memphis was home to about one thousand Jews, most of them shopkeepers. In 1863, Jews owned more than half of the city's twenty-six clothing stores. The Israelite surmised that Hurlbut was pressured by two non-Jewish firms that saw the upsurge in anti-Semitic feelings as an opportunity to eliminate some of the competition.70 One of those companies was granted a near monopoly by the military authorities running the city. Myer Isaacs called General Orders 162 “an unlawful restriction upon trade” in a city placed under martial law.71 Memphis had no history of prewar anti-Semitism, but the wartime influx of northern merchants and cotton traders, some of whom were Jewish, created an undercurrent of anti-Jewish feeling. In the words of one newspaper, “The Page 65 → Israelites have come down upon the city like locusts. Every boat brings a load of the hook-nosed fraternity, with mysterious boxes under their arms, and honied words on their tongues.”72 Some Memphis residents were disturbed to see businesses change hands or foreigners in the streets. “The entire character of the place has changed,” the New York Times reported a year into the federal occupation; “very few of the business houses are conducted by the old firms…. Strange faces fill…all the avenues of business.”73 That fear of “strange faces” and foreign-sounding names that stood out to the New York reporter traveling through Memphis was also expressed in major cities in the Confederacy. While there is no record of military edicts directed specifically at Jews in the secessionist states, the South was certainly not free from wartime Judeophobia.

Page 66 →

7 Confederate Ideology and Southern Jewry In contrast to the Union, the Confederate States of America assembled a government that was represented at its highest levels by a man of Jewish heritage, Judah P. Benjamin. Some historians of the period see significant differences between attitudes toward Jews in the North and the South. Jews had settled in the ports of Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans long before the Civil War. Not only were prewar incidents of anti-Semitism rare in the South, southern states were largely welcoming to Jews, who numbered about twenty-five thousand in the region at the start of the war.1 Many evangelical southerners saw Jews as a biblical people, and in 1850, the Virginia House of Delegates became the first state legislature to invite a Jewish clergyman to deliver a prayer; ten years passed before the U.S. Congress invited Morris Raphall to do the same. The nation's first Jewish senators were from southern states: David Yulee of Florida, elected in 1845, and Louisiana's Benjamin, whose term began in 1853. In 1847, when Richmond's Jews sought funds for the construction of a new synagogue, Christians made generous donations.2 Seven years later, during the debate over the Swiss treaty, the Richmond Dispatch called restrictions on Jewish business a flagrant violation of religious freedom.3 While high-ranking Union generals such as Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Benjamin Butler were openly antagonistic to Jews, such prejudices do not appear to have existed in the armies of the South. General P. G. T. Beauregard told one prominent Richmond rabbi not long after the war started that although he could not furlough Jewish soldiers under his command for Rosh Hashanah, he praised the Israelites for their service to the Confederacy and to God.4 However, some southern Jews experienced attacks based solely on their faith. Page 67 →

A Southern Economy in Free Fall Early on, the war took a terrible toll on the economy of the Confederacy. Losses on the battlefield and a naval blockade of southern ports of entry led to severe shortages in the major cities. Prices soared on basic necessities, and panic set in. E. Merton Coulter's landmark study of the Confederacy shows that in Athens, Georgia, the price of salt rose from eighty cents a bushel in January 1861 to thirty dollars a bushel by the end of 1862. In Richmond, speculators bought up the supply of nails and prices leapt from four dollars a keg to ten dollars. In 1863, the Richmond Examiner editorialized that “speculators broke into the streets like vultures…buying up every barrel of sugar that could be found.”5 As economic conditions worsened, merchants and small-scale traders often became the targets of public hostility, whether or not they were guilty of hoarding goods. Some called for vigilantism as the civilian population was forced to trade cotton with Yankee soldiers for flour, bacon, clothing, and medicine.6 Like their northern counterparts, most southern Jews were involved in peddling, the dry goods trade, or the manufacture and sale of apparel. As in the North, Jewish businesses in the South became the focus of those looking for an unseen enemy. German-speaking peddlers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were most often condemned as speculators and war profiteers.7 Conspiracy theories circulated in cities hard hit by the blockade. Emma Holmes, a Civil War–era diarist from Charleston, South Carolina, wrote in 1862 that Jews had bought all the silver in the city.8 Virulent in his prejudice, Confederate diarist John Beauchamp Jones blamed Jews and foreigners for the rising cost of goods: “Oh, the extortioners!” Jones wrote; “Fredericksburg has been evacuated by the enemy! It is said the Jews rushed in and

bought boots for $7.00, [for] which they now demand $25.00 for, and so with various other articles of merchandise.”9 In Mobile, Alabama, the Daily Advertiser and Register called on its readers to boycott Jewish merchants in 1863—“Try it, and dry goods will fall to rational prices within six months.”10 Resentment against all of Richmond's shopkeepers grew sharper as prices for increasingly scarce flour and salt shot out of the reach of most of the city's residents. In the spring of 1863, Richmond experienced bread riots and looting as prices climbed to record highs.11 Foreign-born merchants were particularly hit hard, with Jones predicting “a reign of terror” against Richmond storeowners, particularly those with German surnames.12 The city's few Jewish clothes dealers were attacked as “an accursed race” and accused of hoarding. A December 1862 letter to the Richmond Examiner that appeared under the headline “The Page 68 → Jews' Harvest,” refers to the stereotypes of Jewish camp followers and moneylenders.13 Anti-Semites in the Confederacy complained that Jews avoided farming and mechanical trades and were suited only as petty traders—“their natural occupation,” in the words of the Richmond Examiner's correspondent.14 With biblical imagery, the Southern Illustrated News, also published in Richmond, wrote in its October 1863 issue that Jews were speculating in currency just as they had done when “they were driven out of the Temple.”15 The surge in anti-Jewish feeling in Richmond was accompanied by inflammatory speeches on the floor of the Confederate Congress. Tennessee congressman Henry S. Foote railed against Jews and foreigners who he said had invaded the South. Raising the pitch of Judeophobia to alarming levels, Foote told the Congress in 1863 that “in every city and village of the Confederacy it might be safely estimated that at least nine-tenths of those engaged in trade were foreign Jews.”16 Foote was joined by Florida congressman Robert Hilton, who invoked metaphors from Old Testament scripture to compare Jews to “the locusts of Egypt” and the common Civil War image of Jews who “flocked as vultures.”17 Jefferson Davis, who resisted efforts to remove Benjamin from his cabinet, nevertheless blamed inflation and shortages on what he delicately termed foreign speculators. The attack on foreigners, whether as a substitute for outright anti-Semitism or not, was a reflection of Southern anxiety as economic conditions declined. In some cities, recently arrived German-speaking immigrants were a growing presence in a time of crisis and deprivation. One Richmond diarist refers to a city changed by the signs over the shops—“Israel and David, and Moses and Jacobs, and Hyman and Levy…and other names…were prominent instead of the old Anglo-Saxon.”18 The Richmond Examiner referred to the “spread of Judaism in the Confederacy” and told its readers that Jews were taking over Main and Broad Streets in cities throughout the South. Maybe soon, the Examiner joked, “we shall have a column in Hebrew.”19 Confederate nationalists saw immigrants as less committed to the rebellion's success than were native-born people of Anglo-Saxon stock. The particularly xenophobic Richmond Examiner referred to the Irish, Germans, and Jews as unwilling to sacrifice for the cause and eager to get passports to “skedaddle” north at the start of the fighting.20 Many Southerners saw these recent arrivals, whether Jews or Catholics, as having no allegiance to the secessionist states. In 1863, Foote proposed that the Confederate Congress give foreigners in the South a choice—join the army or leave.21 Page 69 →

Confederate Nationalism and the Stateless Jew As traders, Jews became the object of an anticapitalist bias among southerners, who saw industrialization, tariffs, and northern capitalism as counter to their way of life. Many Confederates viewed urban capitalism as antithetical to Christian and southern values that lauded the hardworking yeoman farmer. This ideological position in part represented a reaction against the perceived materialism and avarice of the Yankee merchant. To the Confederate nationalist, the Yankee trader and Jewish peddler were indistinguishable.22 The Richmond tabloid Southern Punch, reflecting an extreme nationalism and racism, called the Jewish merchant “so genuinely Yankeeish in character”: “Who are our capitalists at the present time?…The dirty, greasy Jew peddler…bowing and cringing even to Negro servants, now struts by with the air of a millionaire.”23

John Beauchamp Jones was typical of those who linked Yankee capitalism, German immigrants, and Jews as inimical to the traditional southern way of life. Foreign capitalists, he predicted, would corner the market on gold and “instead of being the vassals of the Yankees, we shall find our wealth in the hands of the Jews.”24 To nationalists on the far right, like Jones and the editors at Southern Punch, Jews were a more sinister presence than northerners because, unlike Yankee capitalists, Jews had no nationality.25 At a time when both Confederate and Union nationalism were raised to a fever pitch, the eternally wandering, stateless Jew became a persistent theme of anti-Semitic rhetoric. Reflecting the worldview of the Confederacy's extremists, Jones wrote about Jews in the most threatening of terms: “Having no nationality, all wars are harvests for them. It has been so from the day of their dispersion.”26 The attack on Jews was not limited to the merchants and peddlers. Benjamin, maligned in the North as a traitor, was on the receiving end of bigoted remarks from Confederates as well. He was born in St. Croix, and his family subsequently moved to Charleston, where his father was one of the founders of the Reform synagogue in 1824. First appointed as Confederate attorney general in 1861, he went on to serve as secretary of war and finally as secretary of state, an appointment one writer to the Richmond Enquirer described as blasphemous.27 Though Benjamin was married to a Catholic and apparently did not practice either faith, Foote accused him of favoring and protecting Jewish businesses. Northern Jews found the attacks on Benjamin ludicrous, with Myer Isaacs describing him as “the accidental Jew” in the Confederate cabinet.28 The Confederate government had another high-ranking Jewish figure in Page 70 → quartermaster general Abraham Myers, another Charlestonian. Like Benjamin, Myers was a fully assimilated Jew who married into a Christian family. Nevertheless, anti-Semites attacked him as a Jew when the army faced shortages of clothing and weapons. In Jones's view, Myers and Benjamin represented a fifth column of foreign Jews secretly working against the Confederacy, and they had “injured the cause more than the armies of Lincoln.” Union general Benjamin Butler referred to both Confederate treasury secretary Christopher Memminger and Confederate secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory as Jewish, but both men had likely converted to Christianity long before the war.29 The sudden surge in Judeophobia caught off guard not only Richmond's Jewish citizens but also Jews throughout the South. “Do you not know that there are in all the large cities, both North and South, Jews of the highest character, natives of the soil?,” asked a writer to the Richmond Examiner who identified himself only as “a Jew.”30 Many southern Christians also came to the defense of their Jewish neighbors. The editors of the Charleston Courier “protest[ed] earnestly and emphatically against any wholesale denunciation of Germans or Jews, or of German Jews.”31 The Richmond Sentinel's editors labeled their counterparts at the Examiner intolerant and illiberal and considered it only fair to “hail every good citizen as a brother. We ask him not where he was born or what his faith.”32 Richmond's century-old Jewish community had previously remained on the political sidelines. After the Beth Ahabah synagogue was vandalized in 1863, the city's Jewish leaders could no longer afford to be silent. Gratz Cohen, a Jewish student at the University of Virginia, told his father in 1864 that the passivity of southern Jewry was part of the problem, since no one mounted a defense to silence the “lying tongues.”33 But quelling antiSemitism proved more difficult than Cohen imagined. Like their coreligionists in the North, southern Jews were divided by the Orthodox and Reform movements and by their regions of origin as well as by the debate over whether it was in the best interests of the community to take strong political stands even when faced with prejudice. Richmond's congregations could not agree about how to confront the crisis. The German synagogue called for a mass meeting but received no cooperation from the older Sephardic congregation, which urged “silent contempt, confident that the enlightened and unprejudiced do not join in this unjust crusade against our freedom.”34

Fear and Reaction in a Small Georgia Town Two halfhearted attempts occurred to expel Jews from their homes in the Confederacy. The more important of the two took place in the small south Georgia Page 71 → city of Thomasville, about thirty miles north of Tallahassee, Florida.35 On August 30, 1862, with Union forces off the Florida Gulf Coast, some of the town's residents

gathered at the courthouse to speak against Thomasville's handful of Jewish traders. Facing an invasion, Thomasville lay in the path of federal troops taking a critical point on the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad that connected the coast with points inland. Adding to the anxiety was ruinous inflation and shortages of food and salt vital for preserving meat.36 At the courthouse, Colonel James L. Seward, a former congressman, blamed the town's and the Confederacy's hopeless situation on foreigners who were hoarding goods and “demanding exorbitant and ruinous prices by which the families of soldiers are likely to suffer.” Seward then told the crowd that those foreigners were Thomasville's German Jewish businesses and the itinerant peddlers who followed them.37 Following the courthouse meeting, Seward organized the “Committee of Vigilance,” which demanded that “no German Jews [be allowed] to settle among us” and that Thomasville's three German Jewish families (part of a total population of twenty-five hundred people) leave town within ten days. The committee also sought to expel any foreign railroad workers, who constituted “a nuisance which should be removed.”38 The local newspaper printed resolutions in which the committee accused Thomasville's Jewish residents of conspiring “with the itinerant German Jews” to pass counterfeit currency.39 If the Jews decided to stay, Seward said ominously, the townspeople should “assemble and take such steps as may be deemed advisable.”40 The panic spread to nearby Macon, and after a September 8 town meeting to discuss economic conditions there, the Macon Journal and Messenger reprinted the Thomasville resolutions, calling them “well worthy of attention and perhaps action in other communities.”41 The Savannah Daily Morning News also published the committee's expulsion notice. Defending his decision to reprint the Thomasville decree, the editor of the Savannah daily subsequently said that he neither opposed nor endorsed it but was merely fulfilling his responsibility to inform readers on events in wartime Georgia. With area residents warned to watch these strangers among them, an atmosphere of witch-hunting prevailed.42 In the wake of the Thomasville resolutions' appearance in the Savannah press, Jewish residents there protested the “wholesale slander, persecution and denunciation of a people.” Savannah's congregations compared the Committee of Vigilance's threats to the “barbarities of the Inquisition and the persecution of the dark ages.” Jewish soldiers of the Tatnall Guards defended their loyalty to the Confederacy in a letter to one Savannah editor, and members of the Thirty-Second Georgia Volunteers met on September 16, 1862, to protest the Thomasville expulsion order.43 Private Charles Wessolowsky told his fellow Page 72 → soldiers that Jews were being blamed for hoarding and speculation because they lacked the influence of their well-connected Christian competitors, who “push the whole of the crime upon the German Jews and clear their own skirts by asserting their nativity.”44 Despite the antiforeigner hysteria, most citizens in these southern towns had enough respect for the Jewish community to blunt any attempt at expulsion. Although some Jewish peddlers reportedly left Thomasville for Savannah, none of Thomasville's resident families or traveling merchants were especially harassed. After the war, three of the town's largest dry goods stores were Jewish-owned, and good relations between Jew and Christian generally continued uninterrupted for many years.45 In yet another small Georgia town, Talbotton, a grand jury accused the one Jewish merchant of extortion. No expulsion order was ever issued, but Lazarus Straus decided to leave town in 1862 anyway, saying he would not live in a community that had cast such a shadow over his character. Some of Talbotton's citizens pleaded with Straus to stay, but he and his family moved to New York, where he founded L. Straus and Sons, an importer of crockery.46 Lazarus's son, Isidor, who was a clerk in his father's store when they left Talbotton, persuaded R. H. Macy to sell their crockery. In 1888, Isidor and his brother, Nathan, gained part ownership of the store, and in less than a decade, the Straus sons had become full owners, converting Macy's into the model of the contemporary department store. They later acquired another department store, Wechsler and Abraham, and changed its name to Abraham and Straus. Isidor also served in Congress before he and his wife perished on the Titanic, and another brother, Oscar, became the first Jewish cabinet member in 1906, when President Teddy Roosevelt appointed him

as secretary of commerce and labor.47

Zebulon Vance's Scattered Nation Historian Robert Rosen, who has studied Jewish participation in the Confederacy, downplays anti-Semitism in the South, calling it “a lot of bombast from a few demagogues and journalists and a minority of a sorely tried and increasingly frustrated populace.”48 The few instances of discrimination in the South arguably resulted from the severe societal stresses caused by war, and anti-Semitic sentiments never took solid root in the states of the Confederacy. Anti-Jewish feelings periodically surfaced in the postwar South—usually isolated incidents in times of economic hardship. During the depression of the Page 73 → 1890s, when farmers faced foreclosures as a result of plummeting wheat and cotton prices, widespread conspiracy theories held that a network of international financiers was manipulating currencies to deny hardworking farmers a fair price. Proponents of this view blamed railroads that charged inflated rates, middlemen, and the hidden hand of Wall Street bankers and Jews.49 The discontent of western and southern farmers expressed itself in the political platform of the Populist Party as well as in terrorism from the Ku Klux Klan and a similar group called the Whitecaps. While the Populists were a diverse coalition that included those who denounced “Wall Street Jews,” it was not an overtly racist party.50 The quasi-military Whitecaps, conversely, were violently racist and anti-Semitic. Between 1892 and 1894, they terrorized parts of Mississippi, targeting merchants who tried to collect from indebted farmers or from shopkeepers who employed African Americans. From late 1892 to mid-1893, Whitecap horsemen attempted to drive Jewish merchants out of southern Mississippi, incidents that probably resembled Russian pogroms. In Lincoln and Franklin Counties, Whitecap nightriders led unprovoked and vicious attacks on Jewish businesses that employed African Americans laborers. Whitecap leaders warned that “under no circumstances will the negro be allowed to cultivate a Jew's…land” and threatened Amite County lawyers who took cases pitting “a Jew against a farmer.”51 Despite such occasional localized expressions of prejudice, southerners generally accepted Jews and welcomed them as neighbors (if not always as fellow members of country clubs). A decade after Appomattox, Zebulon Vance, a leading figure of the Confederacy who went on to become North Carolina's governor and a senator, wrote “The Scattered Nation,” a speech in which he lauded the Jews through history as a biblical people and as survivors of centuries of persecution.52 Vance was certain that as American Jews joined the rest of the country in rebuilding after the war, they would be recognized for their charity and patriotism: “In every land where he has been protected, he has been a faithful and zealous patriot.” Vance delivered the lecture to numerous audiences between 1876 and 1889.53 Vance had built strong friendships with members of Charlotte's Jewish community and realized that anti-Semitism still flourished in certain quarters. But he was encouraged by trends he saw in the conscious effort of Jews of German origin to join the mainstream of American life in a nation healing from conflict and division. American Jews, Vance said, were “reforming” their religion and “adapt[ing] it somewhat to the spirit of the age.”54 Just as significantly, Jews were rejecting the occupations and mode of life that kept them a people apart in Europe and in the United States.

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8 Americanize as Fast as You Can The Civil War accelerated the Jewish community's process of becoming American in spirit and form. Conflicts of such magnitude have profound effects on society, and the pace of acculturation certainly would have been slower had peace prevailed. The war forced Jews to shed their European way of life as they made sacrifices on the battlefield and on the home front. To historian Bertram Wallace Korn, the events of the war shaped the life of American Jewry for generations. More recently, Jonathan Sarna writes that “General Orders No. 11 marked a turning point in American Jewish history. Paradoxically, Ulysses S. Grant's order expelling the Jews set the stage for their empowerment.”1 Every immigrant group felt the impact of a war that tore the nation apart, and every immigrant group engaged in rebuilding the Union. The signing of the peace at Appomattox made all residents of both the Union and the Confederacy into Americans. In late 1863, as Union forces sent Confederates retreating into Georgia after the Battle of Missionary Ridge, Myer Isaacs held out hope that the war would unite Jews and Christians in the common struggle to save the nation.2 A sudden and vicious spike in anti-Semitism provided a rude awakening to Jewish communities in both the North and South that had for the most part been comfortable and unnoticed in antebellum America. In Wise's words, General Grant's expulsion order was “a thunderclap from a clear sky.”3 Even before the surrender at Appomattox, American Jews recognized that in times of severe stress on the economy and the breakdown of order, they indeed were noticed. For Simon Wolf, one of the most influential Jewish leaders in postwar Washington, the rise in anti-Semitism “furrowed deep the doubts” about whether Christians regarded Jewish citizens as equals, and he warned Page 75 → that as long as Jews remained a community apart and foreign in every aspect, they would be subject to the prejudices of a few conniving politicians.4 Immigrant Jews stood out in their dress, speech, and occupations, all of which differed markedly from those of their Christian neighbors. In the words of one historian, the Civil War years led many Jews to “reassess both their Judaism and their Americanism.”5 The Jews of the postwar years were unequivocal. The only proper course was to assimilate into the greater American culture. Doing so meant modernizing the synagogue, abandoning the life of the itinerant peddler, rejecting foreign languages and customs, and participating fully in the country's political life. “This will attach us closer to American society and protect us against many an evil that might come,” Isaac Mayer Wise wrote.6 With liberties unheard of in Europe, American Jews were obligated to create a Judaism “corresponding to the…political freedom of the age and country in which we live,” Wise said.7 Even the traditionalists at the Jewish Messenger realized that Americanization was the best defense against anti-Semitism: “When Israelites are known to be Americans in every respect…there will be nothing to fan the flame.” With assimilation, the Messenger optimistically predicted, “prejudice will cease.”8 Crude anti-Semitic pronouncements by political leaders on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line shook Jews out of their insular lives and forced them to reconsider their place in the greater society. “In the political and social life, we exclude ourselves too much,” Wise warned. “Be Israelites in religion and Americans in every other respect.”9 If American Jews remained outsiders, he pointed out, they could not rightly complain about being targeted by those who resented or looked suspiciously on foreigners. Directing his remarks to the younger generation, he urged, “Americanize as fast and thorough as you can…. We apprehend the danger growing out of this state of exclusiveness.”10

The Problem with Peddling

American Jews recognized above all that the Protestant majority had little esteem for peddlers and small-scale merchants. Thick German accents and peddlers' wagons made Jews an easy scapegoat during the war. Isaac Leeser told readers of his Occident that Jews were shunned partly because “so many of us are engaged in pursuits which others consider dishonorable” and because of what he described as a “somewhat unsettled [way] of life.”11 Leeser went so far as to say that earning a livelihood “by means of small trading has a debasing influence on the mind.” One reader of the Occident asked if acculturation was even possible Page 76 → if a peddling life was handed down from generation to generation: “Shall our children become nothing but traders?”12 American Jews also asked if their children would remain makers and merchants of apparel or whether future generations would no longer be associated with the old clothes dealer of Chatham Street. To Leeser, “entirely too many follow the clothing business in all parts of the country…. We regret to say it seems to have become the staple pursuit of our people.”13 The caricature of the urban Jewish garment seller was enough of a concern that the Board of Delegates proposed a Hebrew Colonization Society and agricultural college so that “Jews could till the ground…for a desirable and respectable mode of subsistence.” Acculturation also would come through greater representation in professions such as medicine and law, paths to respectability that were closed to Jews in many parts of Europe.14 One of the lessons of the Civil War was that Jews were “unjustly condemned…as a moneymaking, money-loving, money idolizing class of people,” Wise told the readers of the Israelite.15 The professions and the mechanical trades were open to anyone in America, Leeser noted, and Jews just needed to pursue these new avenues of economic success. In Europe “we had no chance of even approaching a work shop…and hence it could not be expected that we should become experienced in the handling of tools.”16 Americans, still with an open frontier before them, regarded farmers and settlers as the individuals best suited to a democracy. Midcentury Americans saw an eternal truth to Thomas Jefferson's insistence that “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people.” Those who looked, as Jefferson did, to the idyll of a nation of small landholders perceived a direct connection between the occupations of a people, their character, and their commitment to the ideals they believed shaped the early republic.17

“We Cannot Be Germanized” Becoming American in every respect also meant adopting the English language at home and in the synagogue. If Christians failed to view Jews as wholly American, German speech and heavily accented English would be partially to blame. Wise urged his readers to be American and speak the language of their new country. There would be no turning back—“We cannot be Germanized,” he said, predicting that those who failed to learn English would be regarded as “strangers in our very home.”18 Wise even suggested opening synagogues to non-Jews with an all-English-language service so that the religion could “be understood correctly and judged accordingly.” Wise reflected a commonly held Page 77 → opinion that the German language detached Jews from the American people—“from the body of the people of which we are a part.”19 Although the bilingual Simon Wolf was often asked to speak before German clubs and political organizations, he rarely deviated from English.20 In arguments that still sound familiar today, native-born Americans also asked how immigrants could truly assimilate while still speaking a foreign tongue. In 1872, the New York Herald noted the inadequate number of English-speaking rabbis as a consequence of the slow pace of acculturation. Jews born on American soil had to separate themselves from European languages and ideas, the Herald cautioned. Reflecting the view of many Christians, the editors of the Herald warned that Jews were “not keeping up with the progressive spirit of the age.”21 Though Reform and Orthodox congregations agreed on little, most acknowledged that German had no future in the American synagogue. As strong a traditionalist as Leeser introduced English into his synagogue, predicting that German would be rendered “useless as a pulpit language” in another generation.22 Although Orthodox with respect to ritual, Leeser recognized the need for immigrants to conform “as nearly as possible to the manners of the people among whom they live.” Every German word, Wise said, reminded him of oppression and the “demoralized German and Polish Jew.”23 One Reform rabbi dissented from the prevailing wisdom. For David Einhorn, who learned his theology in Bavaria

and Budapest before arriving to the United States in 1855, the German language was the “carrying case” of the Reform movement.24 From his Baltimore pulpit, Einhorn published the German-language Sinai. German, said Einhorn, is “the language of our spirit and our heart.” However, immigrants who wanted to make their fortunes in the New World learned quickly that romantic notions aside, mastering English was the key to commercial success. German was a hangover from the past, historian Leon Jick says; English and the larger goal of Americanization were indeed the real bearers of the Reform movement.25 Aside from embracing the English language, postwar Jews also realized the need to reject an identity that made them seem less American than their neighbors. To some Americans, Jews were a diaspora people without allegiances or a permanent nationhood. Accusations of disloyalty during the war often were accompanied by references to Jewish statelessness and the metaphor of the wanderer from nation to nation. The larger society viewed American Jews as temporary residents with their eventual destination in a biblically restored Israel. This “Scattered Nation,” in Zebulon Vance's words, had “strange customs,…distinct features, personal peculiarities.”26 Page 78 →

Modernizing the Temple Before the birth of the Zionist movement, Myer Isaacs explained that while the restoration of Israel remained “an integral article of faith,” until they again had a homeland, Jews would be loyal American citizens. Yet Isaacs worried that some Christians believed that Jews showed fealty only to their destined home in Palestine.27 Concerns about coreligionists in distant Romania and Russia added to the perception that Jews remained outside the American experience. Wolf, who championed rapid acculturation, warned that Christians will not view Jews as socially equal as long as “we do things as Jews, not as Americans.”28 The case for Americanization brought Reform and Orthodoxy into renewed conflict. To the Reformers, biblical Jews shared a common destiny with America, a latter-day Israel chosen by God to lead the world down the enlightened path of liberty and reason. Einhorn, Wise, and other Reform Jews saw Orthodoxy as out of touch with democratic and pluralist ideas. America, with its faith in science and secular government, fit with a Reform Judaism that abandoned its mysticism and reliance on the Talmud.29 Wise rebutted the traditionalist notion that Reform Judaism was not Judaism at all. The Orthodox were mistaken, he said, when they claimed that they alone maintained the sacred traditions of the faith. Unlike Reform, Orthodoxy was concerned with the minutiae of ritual and observances—again, unsuitable for an American Judaism or for success in the capitalism of the Gilded Age. To the proponents of Reform Judaism, acculturation would come with a modern liturgy adapted to American conceptions of religious behavior. “Times have changed,” Wise wrote in 1865, and through a Reform synagogue, Jews could mold an identity that would speed their entry into the American mainstream. The progress of Judaism in America, the Israelite claimed, “goes hand in hand with Reform.”30 Times indeed were changing, and traditionalists who had earlier fought Reform Judaism's efforts to liberalize the liturgy knew that the moment had arrived when theological debates would have to be subordinated to ensure that the United States remained a hospitable destination for European Jews. In the days following General Orders 11, the Jewish Messenger warned that “the necessity of a strong central organization for American Israelites was never more apparent than at this juncture.” In Leeser's estimation, the infighting that had plagued American Jewry from the early years of the century had reduced the faithful to a hodgepodge of “petty subdivisions.”31 Writing in 1945, historian Philip Foner was explicit: One result of the struggle against General Grant's Page 79 → bigoted order was the “recognition of the need for greater unity among the Jewish people of America.”32

The Competing Voices of American Israel Congregations that distanced themselves from the Board of Delegates added to the cacophony of competing voices. It was no wonder, the board's Myer Isaacs said, that Christians would ignore Jewish grievances “if every

minister of our faith, every trustee of a congregation, every person bearing a Jewish name will arrogate to himself the right of speaking for the American Israelites.”33 Reform and Orthodox congregations may have failed to reconcile their differences over ritual and leadership, but they were clearly in agreement that the events of the Civil War constituted a call to action. The Civil War demonstrated that the persistent disunity that stymied efforts to influence events during the Mortara affair was now a barrier to defending against threats to Jewish rights in the United States. As anti-Semitic rhetoric increased in the early months of the war, Jewish leaders raised concerns that the “Israelites in these United States” were at most indifferent to the “collective welfare.” Opening new synagogues was not enough for the editors of the Jewish Messenger—“We never can become morally powerful or religiously respected, unless we unite for the public good.”34 Referring to the crude images in the press and the statements by politicians that defamed American Jews, the Messenger told its readers, “Every day, we witness the result of our disunion.” In a tone that differed markedly from the timidity of the prewar years, Myer Isaacs's Messenger was sure that “Grant would never have issued an order expelling all Jews from his Department if he were conscious that the Jews were an influential, a powerful community.”35 As a leader and vigorous proponent of the Board of Delegates, Isaacs placed much of the blame for congregational disunity on Wise and the Midwest Reformers who refused to endorse the board. To Isaacs, the Board of Delegates demanded the support of every congregation in America—“There must be an understanding among us that the Board of Delegates, and that alone, speaks for the Israelites of the United States.”36 Not only did competing delegations take their case to the White House in the days following the expulsion order, but scattered petitions from various organizations were sent to Congress, the president, and the War Department. Individual B'nai B'rith lodges also sent letters of protest to the White House. The St. Louis lodge addressed its concerns to President Abraham Lincoln as “Defendor & Protector of the Constitution.”37 Page 80 → Isaacs argued that congregations that chose not to join the ranks of the board could hardly complain if American Jewry was perceived as weak and fragmented. Every congregation was welcome, he said, but “the collective body of Israelites is not to be paralyzed” just because some congregations stubbornly clung to their independence.38 In an unambiguous reference to archrival Isaac Mayer Wise, the editors of the Jewish Messenger said that if certain individuals had stayed home and allowed the Board of Delegates alone to represent all of American Jewry, Grant might have been “more sternly reprimanded.”39 Such a viewpoint reflected a new assertiveness from a faction that had previously preferred the life of the synagogue to the turmoil of secular politics. “Stand up boldly,” the Messenger exclaimed, and demand that the American public “desist from holding up the Jewish name to contempt.” Isaacs envisioned the board not only as championing the rights of Jews in the United States but working with Jewish organizations internationally.40 Rebutting those who complained that the Board of Delegates was too timid, Isaacs described the board's response to General Orders 11 as “firm and dignified.” The president's quick revocation of the order demonstrated that there was no cause for “extreme measures” such as mass meetings, demands for Grant's dismissal, denunciations of the Lincoln government, or even “an uprising of the Jewish people.”41 A moderate course, Isaacs said, had given the government the opportunity to overturn the expulsion without compromising Grant's effectiveness as a military commander. As a result, he said, American Jews had confidence in the board's ability to mediate in future cases of discrimination. Isaacs said the Board of Delegates should make no apology for thanking General Henry W. Halleck for promptly carrying out the president's instructions and pointed to correspondence from the White House and War Department that validated the board's conservative approach to the problem.42 In a letter assuring the board that the government would not tolerate discrimination against civilians based on their religious affiliation, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton thanked members for their “declarations of attachment and devotion to the Constitution and the Union.”43 Wise remained adamant that the board did not represent his brand of progressive and Americanized Judaism and was not up to the task of leading American congregations. He contended that the board had not brought Grant's

expulsion order to President Lincoln's attention, since Wise was already in Washington when the board's executive committee met on January 8, 1863, to issue a letter to Lincoln that called Grant's order “worthy of despotic Europe.” To Page 81 → Wise, the board's slowness proved it had outlived its usefulness. Furthermore, for many congregations, the Board of Delegates' note of thanks to General Halleck on behalf of American Jews again misrepresented the board's authority—in Wise's wording, sending the note constituted “a species of insanity.”44 The invective back and forth between the Board of Delegates and Wise about who should take credit for the revocation of General Grant's expulsion order prompted the New York Times to note the “bitter feuds in the ranks of the Faithful.”45

Leaving behind the European Ghetto Transformed by national calamity, American Jews were freeing themselves from the ghetto mentality and becoming more insistent on political rights. Jews recognized that had Jewish leaders refrained from knocking on the White House door in protest, General Orders 11 might never have been rescinded, leaving a precedent for future expulsions or worse. “The Jews of this country would have seen hard times,” Wise reflected.46 Politicians and newspaper editors “ventilating [their] crude ideas…or malicious canard about the Jew” were on notice that a politically astute and increasingly Americanized Jewish community was ready to defend itself vigorously. The Jewish Messenger noted that Jews could not expect to gain the respect of the Christian majority “unless we sternly and determinedly maintain our rights as American citizens.”47 According to historian Jacob Rader Marcus, the Civil War not only gave Jews a heightened sense of their stake in America but taught them to have faith in themselves.48 Philadelphia rabbi Joseph Krauskopf said that during the war, Jewish soldiers proved their patriotism, and with peace they “have taken an active interest in the upbuilding of the nation's prosperity.”49 “There is nothing odious or revolting in the term Jew,” Wolf remarked, “we are proud to be Jews.”50 Wise urged his congregants not to “hide their Hebrew origin” and argued that the Jewish voice in the United States was no different than the Catholic or Methodist; Jews were true Americans who differ only in religious faith. Some American Jewish leaders admitted the difficulty of leaving behind the European experience and quickly adapting to life in a country with a wide-open frontier, economic opportunity, and freedom to worship.51 Life in America could be compared to “walking awkwardly in new dress which hangs somewhat loosely on our limbs,” Leeser said.52 Civil War historian Allan Nevins writes that Jews emerged from the war with their rights fortified, and in battling for their place in the American democracy, they performed an important service to all Americans.53 Page 82 → As the nation began the process of rebuilding after the guns had been silenced, American Jews recognized that one of the obligations and responsibilities of citizenship was to engage politically. Doing so also represented another step toward Americanization. Concerned about the intensely anti-Semitic rhetoric emanating from Congress and the pens of newspaper editors, Wise insisted that seeking public office would offer Jews “the safest remedy for present evils and the best security for the future.”54 Page g1 → Page g2 → Page g3 → Page g4 → Page g5 → Page g6 → → Page g10 → Page g11 → Page g12 →

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9 Lincoln, Grant, and the Jewish Vote Before the war, American Jews were reluctant to participate forcefully in U.S. political life. Orthodox leaders such as Isaac Leeser saw political activity and even officeholding as an anathema. Jews ran the risk of neglecting their religious duties “when any office is bestowed upon us,” he said. During the election campaign of 1860, Leeser warned American Jews not “to wade into the pool of partisan warfare.” While some Jewish publications might note the election of Jewish candidates, the Occident “never paid much attention to the appointments of Israelites to office,” Leeser said.1 Just as the Civil War erupted, Leeser told his congregation, “We are not very solicitous that our people should be appointed to office, nor would we complain if a Jewish candidate should be beaten in a popular election.”2 Officeholding, he said, did not necessarily confer dignity to the Jewish citizen. “We can do without voting, we can live without holding office, but we are nothing without religion. We die without our faith,” Leeser told his Orthodox followers. In his view, American Jews' only responsibility in the political realm was to vote, and they should do so “quietly and unostentatiously.”3 That kind of limited political participation, he said, required no national political organization, no self-imposed quota of Jewish officeholders, and, most important, no central authority to tell Jews how to cast their ballots. Leeser was not alone, especially among the traditionalists, in saying that “Israelites have no party politics.” Orthodox leaders were concerned that once in America, Jews would be drawn into a more secular life. Freedom and material abundance would lure Jews away from the synagogue and into the political clubhouse. A Jewish Democratic club in New York, Leeser said, was guilty of holding meetings on the Sabbath “in violation of all decent propriety.” Such actions could Page 84 → only reflect poorly on all Jews—“What must these [Christian] neighbors think of us?,” he asked.4 New York rabbi Morris Raphall was instructed by his traditionalist congregation in 1860 on the “impropriety of any intermeddling with politics,” which they viewed as inconsistent with the Jewish clerical character.5 Traditionalists also expressed concern that once in the fray of political battles, Jews might be tempted to form their own party, an obvious target for anti-Semites. In 1860, Leeser asked why New York needed a “German Hebrew Democrats” club: “Do they wish to create a well-founded odium against themselves?”6 Political organizations that would “advocate a united Jewish response” at the ballot box, said Leeser, “are fraught with danger.” Always viewing Jews as outsiders in Protestant America, Leeser feared that if a coordinated Jewish vote were crucial in an election, “we would…expose ourselves, justly, to the hatred of the party defeated by our influence.”7 When the New York Herald raised the prospect of a Jewish political party emerging out of the Board of Delegates, the board's traditionalist leaders responded firmly that promoting the welfare of the American diaspora was a far cry from running candidates for office on a Jewish ticket.8 When Jews appealed to the government to reject the discriminatory trade pact with Switzerland, Leeser judged the situation to represent unique circumstances that “demand that the quiet with which we habitually regard passing events should be thrown aside.” Otherwise, Leeser said, “we do not deem foreign politics, and, for that matter, domestic ones also as deserving the special attention of the Israelites in America.”9 With the end of the Civil War, congregational leaders recognized that the reluctance to speak out in the political arena was a distinct weakness. Civil War–era anti-Semitism accelerated the drive to assimilate, which meant joining other Americans in the partisan battles of the day. According to Isaac Mayer Wise, Jewish editors' motto could no longer be, “No politics.” Even Leeser told the readers of one Philadelphia newspaper that Congress's failure to censure General Ulysses S. Grant after his expulsion order “should make the blood boil in the veins…. It would be unnatural if Israelites should rest quiet under such an infliction.”10

The Election of 1864 In 1864, American Jews vigorously supported Abraham Lincoln's reelection, grateful for the president's decisions to appoint Jewish chaplains as well as overturn General Orders 11. Some Jewish Democrats who had earlier complained Page 85 → that no Jews were appointed to high-level posts in the Lincoln government now acknowledged the generosity and greatness of the man who saved the Union. With Lincoln's reelection campaign, the Republican Party in 1864 remained, as it was in 1860, a natural home for the progressive tendencies of German immigrants, both Christian and Jewish. Aiding Lincoln's overall relations with the German and immigrant population was his party's deliberate move to shed its anti-Catholic KnowNothing element. The 1864 Republican platform was more liberal than it had been four years earlier, saying that “foreign immigration…should be fostered and encouraged by a…just policy.”11 Not all Jewish leaders thought the Republican Party was completely free of prejudice. Wise remained a loyal Democrat, pointing to the crude statements of Radical Republicans such as Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade, who days before the election referred bluntly to “circumcised Jews” in the ranks of the opposition. Wise wondered if such sentiments were representative of the “enlightened” Republican Party.12 Facing the Republican ticket of Lincoln and Andrew Johnson were Democrats George McClellan for president and his running mate, George Pendleton of Ohio. While most Jews likely voted for Lincoln, anti-Semites in the press labeled Jews as Copperheads. One Indiana newspaper stated it as “a fact that our fellow citizens of the Hebrew persuasion are, with a few honorable exceptions, all afflicted with the Copperhead mania.”13 In addition, August Belmont's status as chair of the Democratic Party offered ready ammunition for those who wanted to charge Jews with having southern sympathies. The German-born Belmont was Jewish, but converted to Christianity after immigrating to the United States, where he served as the American representative of the Rothschild banking firm. During the war, Belmont was a staunch supporter of the Union and made a strong case in European capitals for backing the Lincoln government.14 Nevertheless, Belmont and McClellan's Peace Democrats were viewed as appeasers, willing to compromise with the slaveholders to end the war. The proLincoln New York Times stooped to anti-Semitic prejudice, characterizing Belmont as “the agent of foreign Jew bankers.”15 The Republican Chicago Tribune similarly argued that Belmont and the Rothschilds were financing the McClellan campaign. The Tribune charged that having invested in Confederate bonds, the banking family would suffer substantial financial losses if the North prevailed. McClellan would negotiate “a dishonorable peace,” the Tribune wrote, “to enrich Belmont, the Rothschilds, and the whole tribe of Jews.”16 Countering claims that the Jews were siding with the Confederacy, Republican lawyer Simon Wolf reminded Americans that Jews were serving the Union cause admirably and that it was ludicrous to assume Page 86 → that Jews were loyal to the Confederacy because Belmont headed the Democratic Party.17

The President's Podiatrist As the 1864 election saw an increasing number of Jewish voters, a debate arose about whether Jews should vote as a bloc and whether a “Jewish vote” existed. In the autumn of 1864, Lincoln's close friend and podiatrist, Isachar Zacharie, went to New York to register Jewish voters. By that time, New York was home to between forty thousand and fifty thousand Jewish citizens, and Zacharie assured Lincoln that the Jewish vote could take a bite out of the city's Democratic majority.18 “As regards the Isrelites [sic]—with but few exceptions, they will vote for you…I have secured good and trustworthy men to attend to them on Election Day,” Zacharie promised the White House.19 Some Jewish leaders chafed at the notion of a unified ethnic vote. The Board of Delegates insisted that “nobody is authorized to speak for our co-religionists on political questions; there is no such thing as a Jewish vote.” Calling Jewish voters “free agents,” Myer Isaacs cautioned that they should not slavishly attach themselves to one political party.20 Weeks before the election, Isaacs again warned that “distinctively Jewish political organizations” could result in an anti-Semitic backlash from those who saw a Jewish hand behind each candidate's fortunes: “Let there never

arise in America a political organization based on devotion or hostility to a particular creed…. [D]o not court such persecution.”21 A Jewish bloc vote or a Jewish political party would only justify the views of those who saw the Jews as clannish, a people apart from other Americans. In October 1864, Isaacs objected to the visit of a delegation of New Yorkers to the White House to “pledge the Jewish vote” to the president's reelection.22 In a private letter, Isaacs told Lincoln that the Jewish Messenger had “refrained from interfering with the private political views of individual readers” and that anyone who would presume to deliver the Jewish vote to any candidate was mistaken. “There is no necessity for ‘pledging’ the Jewish vote which does not exist,” though Isaacs assured the president that Jews by and large were committed to the party that preserved the Union.23 Lincoln replied that not only was there no promise to deliver the Jewish vote, but rumors that the New Yorkers had received some financial reward for their activities on behalf of the Republican Party were false.24 However, during the same week, New York politician Samuel A. Lewis informed the president that any Jewish groups interested in Page 87 → working for a Republican victory on election day should be referred to him. “I will furnish them such amounts…[that] can be used to advantage,” he wrote, promising Lincoln that “nothing shall be wanting on the part of your friends here towards carrying the Union Cause.”25 As election day drew near, Jewish voters pressed the candidates to clarify their positions on religious freedom, given some of the intolerant statements made during the war. Herman Moos, a German immigrant to Tennessee, wrote to Johnson in September predicting that his statement castigating Judah P. Benjamin as a Christ killer, along with anti-Semitic remarks by Benjamin Butler and Henry Wilson, would alienate the growing Jewish electorate and cost the Republicans “tens thousands of votes.”26 Moos, who worked with Wise at the Israelite and later practiced law in Cincinnati, asked Johnson to declare categorically that he was committed to religious liberty. Johnson replied that he had a long record of opposing prejudice and had spoken out against the Know-Nothing Party during the 1850s. However, Johnson was evasive regarding his statements about Benjamin, simply saying that he had no recollection of ever making them.27 Myer Isaacs also challenged the editors of major newspapers who printed rumors and conspiracies. Even progressive journalists were not below intimating that Jewish bankers were funding American political parties, that Jews were working behind the scenes to vote as a bloc, or that “the election depends on the dictum of a…chief rabbi who decides by a mysterious, cabalistic, supernatural sign how the soldiers' ballots shall read.”28 Referring to the pro-Lincoln New York Tribune's charges of Jewish disloyalty to the Union cause, Isaacs said that it was “poor policy to estrange Israelites who approve of the principles of the Tribune's party.” Isaacs also joked that he was flattered that Jews were reputed to have such influence and power.29 Conspiratorial power would figure in the anti-Semitism of a later generation that read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent, but these strains of anti-Semitism first surfaced during the Civil War era.

The Election of 1868 To the New York World, the Republican Party's selection of Ulysses Grant to head the national ticket in 1868 produced “a revived indignation of the Hebrews of the United States.”30 Although the Jewish vote was still relatively small, Jews confronted some crucial questions: If they were to be truly American, should they base their votes on a strictly Jewish issue? And should General Grant, the Page 88 → hero of the Union victory, be forgiven by the Jewish electorate more than five years after his expulsion order? Historian of American Jewry Hasia Diner observes that while Jews were divided over Grant's presidential candidacy, Civil War anti-Semitism led to the emergence of a “self-conscious Jewish politics” by the election of 1868.31 This self-conscious politics reflected a new tone. The voice of American Jewry was far more confident in 1868, and as one activist warned the bosses of the two major parties, “We are numerous, we are influential, we are wealthy, we are diffused over the whole continent, we are as one family.”32 While many in the German Jewish community remained faithful to the Republican Party, the Grant nomination presented a problem. How could the party that fought for the abolition of slavery reward someone as hostile to Jews as Grant? For the first time, the significance of the Jewish vote and the alleged anti-Semitism of a nominee

for national office were debated in newspapers across the country. It was something new and uncomfortable. Although Illinois lawyer Adolph Moses regretted that Jews were now “prominently paraded” into the national spotlight, he warned that the “instinct for self defence” demanded that American Jews press candidate Grant publicly for an explanation of General Orders 11 before election day.33 To his opponents, Grant had inherited the historical prejudices and reactionary politics of Europe. Wise clearly exaggerated when he described Grant's order as the most severe anti-Jewish action of the nineteenth century. “Every free man felt outraged by the lawless ukase,” said Wise, using the emotionally charged Russian word for the czars' restrictive orders.34 One New York Democrat characterized the “spectacle of soldiers wearing the American uniform” displacing the “respectable Jewish residents of Paducah” as an embarrassment before the world. This was not the enlightened American tolerance but a “re-enactment of the brutalities of medieval bigotry in France and Spain.”35 Typical of the appeals for Jews to cast their ballots against Grant was a June 1868 pamphlet that urged American Jews to send a message to the Republican Party that Grant is “unworthy of the dignity of a President of the United States.”36 The author argued that the expulsion order revealed much about the candidate's true sentiments because it was issued when he was not yet pursuing a political career—a “true reflection of [Grant's] soul.” Most significant, the pamphlet, General Grant and the Jews, expresses American Jewry's newfound determination to influence political events on the national level. Addressing Grant directly, the pamphlet thundered, “As a Class, you have stigmatized and expelled us! As a Class, we rise up and vote against you like one man!”37 By the summer of 1868, following Grant's nomination, the Jewish communities in a number of cities staged wellorganized protests. A June rally that drew Page 89 → twelve hundred of St. Louis's five thousand Jewish residents worried Republican leaders, who feared a Democratic voting bloc. Reporting on the protest, the German-language St. Louis Abendzeitung characterized General Orders 11 as “semi-barbarian.”38 In Memphis and Nashville, Jewish community leaders called on “all Israelites in the state—be they Democrats or Republicans—to cast their votes for Horatio Seymour and Francis Blair and thereby assist the great Democratic party to defeat our enemy.”39 Rabbi Simon Tuska, an influential leader of Memphis's Jewish community, was prepared to show Republicans that the Jewish vote could no longer be taken for granted. In sermons before the election, Tuska urged his flock to vote Democrat. Wise echoed the sentiment: “Thank heaven for the existence of…an opposition party, or else we might be sold out altogether.”40 In the former Confederacy, Jews could oppose Grant on the same grounds as their coreligionists in the North. They also could justify their votes as loyal southerners, opposing a general who was instrumental in crushing southern independence. Richmond Rabbi M. J. Ezekiel called on southern Jews to reject the candidacy of a man who, with “a mere scratch of the pen, can deprive us of all the rights and benefits of a free country.”41 In Los Angeles, Democratic Party activist and merchant Herman Hellman mobilized California's few Jewish voters against the Republican candidate. According to Norton Stern, a historian of California Jewry, although Los Angeles's population at the time was about 6 percent Jewish, both parties courted the wealthy and politically active community.42 True to form, Wise, a lifelong Democrat, spearheaded the attack on Grant's candidacy in the Jewish press: The time for political fence sitting was over, Wise said, now that “men like Grant, Butler, [William “Parson”] Brownlow and others of this kind abused and outraged the Jew.”43

“Jewish Views on Politics” Even as a significant number of congregations called on their members to vote against Grant, some traditionalists still believed that overt political involvement was not in American Jewry's best interests. Not far enough removed from the European experience, proponents of this view feared that loudly opposing a popular general's quest for the presidency could encourage anti-Semites. Moses opposed what he called “exclusively Jewish indignation meetings.” Myer Isaacs judged Tuska's prominent role in an anti-Grant rally inconsistent with the rabbi's position as a religious leader, and a St. Louis congregation warned Wise that his actions “might redound to our injury.”44 To the proponents of an Page 90 → Americanized Reform Judaism, this timidity was unacceptable after the experiences of the Civil War. The editor of the Messenger might have claimed that he was advocating for a

politically independent Jewry, but Wise bluntly labeled that position cowardice.45 Traditionalists also remained adamant that rabbis and ministers were in no position to instruct voters. The Orthodox Leeser called a coordinated response by any religious denomination on election day “voting cattle.” Mobilizing synagogues across the country to vote as a bloc was at odds with the very core of a decentralized Judaism: “We have no priesthood who can carry the masses with them,” Myer Isaacs wrote.46 Directing his comments to Wise, Isaacs cautioned—as he had in 1864—that “there is nobody in America who can speak for the Israelites…to influence [them] in their political sympathies or actions.” Isaacs's greatest concern was that in an emotional election campaign, Republicans and Democrats would “make tools of Israelite voters.”47 Some observers saw pamphlets such as General Grant and the Jews as perpetuating the idea that Jews were monolithic: “There are no ‘Jewish views’ on politics,” said one writer to the New York Sun who accused the pamphlet's author of playing into the hands of those who assumed that all Jews thought and behaved alike. As a denomination, they did not differ from Episcopalians or Methodists in their diverse political loyalties.48 The Brooklyn Eagle agreed that American Jews could make up their minds without the consent of their religious leaders and could “very safely be left to deal with Grant individually.” However, the editors of the Eagle also understood and sympathized with Jewish voters who were inclined “to make a sectarian matter of their votes.”49 Isaacs was confident that if Jews demonstrated their independence and did not cast their ballots as a referendum on the expulsion order, their Christian neighbors would deem the “Israelites…worthy of national respect.” Typical of this sentiment was a letter to a Cincinnati newspaper: “I think when we go to the polls…our religious feelings ought to be entirely banished from our minds at that moment and vote as American citizens in accordance with our political convictions.” For one German Jew writing in the Illinois Staatszeitung, “I do not ask what pleases the Israelites. I consult the welfare of the country.”50 Wolf, who made no secret of his admiration for General Grant, said that Jews would never be truly assimilated as long as they voted as Jews—“We are not Jews in any political sense,” he said; “we are, what is of far more value, American citizens.”51 Even Adolphe Cremieux, leader of the French Alliance Israelite Universelle, weighed in with his hope that American Jews would repudiate calls for vengeance.52 Page 91 →

The Emergence of the Jewish Vote The 1868 campaign for the White House not only made American Jews aware of their stake in the political process but also awakened the leadership of both parties to the newly emerging Jewish electorate. Although the Jewish vote was small on a national scale, it was gaining in numbers and importance in some cities. The Democratic New York Herald warned Republicans that “this thing is at least certain…every influence of money and votes that can be controlled by the Hebrew race in the United States will be put forth [in the campaign]…. their power is by no means to be despised.”53 The size of the Jewish vote was a matter of debate, but with an American Jewish population of between 150,000 and 200,000, most observers agreed that about 50,000 Jewish votes were at play. About two-thirds of America's Jews were concentrated in a few cities—New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, and Cincinnati. Democrats in Pennsylvania and Ohio were counting on a strong anti-Grant turnout among Jewish voters that could be the tipping point in carrying closely contested congressional districts. In Chicago, Republican Party leaders were also concerned that Jews would cast the deciding votes in that city for Seymour.54 Chicago's Jewish population matched the growth of the population at large. The city's 112,000 people in 1860 nearly tripled to 300,000 by 1870, and Jews were fast becoming an influential minority. The city's Jewish population rose from about 1,500 at the start of the Civil War to at least 4,000 (and by some accounts as much as 8,000) in 1868.55 Not long after the nominating convention, Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill informed Elihu Washburne that Chicago was home to hundreds of Jewish Republicans who were looking for an explanation from the candidate for the “Jew Order” before committing their votes.56 Medill asked Washburne to press the Republican nominee to

address the issue to one of Chicago's Jewish leaders—General Edward Salomon, who had served under Grant during the war, or Republican alderman Henry Greenebaum. Medill suggested that Grant “mollify the Jews” by reiterating that he harbored no prejudice and “that he is in favor of full toleration of all religious opinions.” Medill also urged Grant to tell voters that he had long since learned that Jews were not the only violators of army regulations regarding trading with the enemy. Medill worried that Jews were beginning to exert an influence in the party that was far greater than their numbers. They are “strong enough to hurt us in Chicago, as they include many of our most active Republicans,” he confided; “we shall have no votes to spare.”57 Page 92 → Chicago Republicans particularly targeted the city's tanners, many of whom were German Jews. The profession included several hundred Jewish voters, among whom were union leaders. By autumn, Republicans boasted that about one hundred Jewish tanners who had been Democrats were switching their allegiance to Grant. Republicans made the case that Seymour was intent on overturning Reconstruction policies that represented a “dangerous and revolutionary programme laid down by the rebels and Copperheads.”58 In the summer of 1868, Republican strategists looked to St. Louis and Cincinnati, which also had large German and Jewish populations. Medill was worried that both cities had sufficient Jewish votes to defeat the Republican ticket. Republicans also were concerned that Jewish voters in other parts of Illinois and in Indiana could make a difference in those states if the election were close. “A wholesale defection on their part,” the New York Times warned, “would endanger the election of Grant and Colfax in Illinois, and render the election of the Democratic ticket in Indiana certain beyond a doubt.”59 Even before the nominating convention, some Jewish leaders made it clear to the Republican Party that their political influence in cities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago was too valuable to risk by nominating Grant.60 In some of these contested cities, Republicans complained that Democrats were exploiting the controversy, “trying to alienate the mass of the Republican Jews from General Grant.” Republicans in the West charged Democrats with a dirty tricks campaign of anonymous letters and circulars sent to Jewish homes portraying Grant as an unrepentant bigot. The New York Times reported that “the demagogues” were active among the “very strong and wealthy Jewish element” in Evansville, Indiana.61 Democratic operatives whispered to Jewish voters the rumor that when Wise had visited President Lincoln, the rabbi was shown a letter from Grant that said that although he was rescinding the order as directed, “these people are the descendants of those who crucified the Savior.”62 In Los Angeles, Republicans took the low road, with one partisan newspaper falsely accusing the Democratically controlled county board of supervisors of singling out Jewish property owners for a tax increase.63 Across the country, a vigorously partisan press on both sides made every effort to paint Grant as an unreconstructed anti-Semite or as a fair and just man who had simply been misunderstood. The pro-Grant New York Times advised Jewish voters to cast their ballots without considering General Orders 11 or any other sectarian issue on the grounds that “there is already too much of a growing tendency to divide our population…sometimes by race, sometimes by religion.”64 To the editors of the Times, voting as a Jew or a Catholic was “thoroughly un-American” and could be perilous. The Jewish people's “best Page 93 → guarantee” for preserving their political rights was not to vote as Jews: “Let us all be Americans, and the rest will take care of itself.”65

Appeals to Racism and Xenophobia In contrast, some editors in this particularly divisive election campaign tried to portray Jews as not fully American, expressing those sentiments in openly racist and xenophobic terms. Commenting on a rally that drew Jewish Democrats, the Republican Cincinnati Commercial informed its readers that “nearly every Jew that figured in this meeting was…a contraband dealer who grew rich during the war by trading to both sides.”66 Reviving the anti-Semitic language of the war years, the editor of Indiana's Newburg Herald commented during the campaign that it was “part of their faith to prey upon and rob Christians…. Their object was to make money out of” the war. The Indiana newspaper wrote off the Jewish vote, saying that for every Jewish ballot for Seymour, “a dozen,

decent, honest Christian White men” would vote for Grant.67 The attack on Jewish voters in many ways mirrored the nastiness of the 1868 campaign in general. One of the more influential Democratic papers, the New York World, not only repeatedly stressed Grant's drinking but also called Grant an inept commander. For the paper's editors, the expulsion proved that Grant was “not to be trusted with power over the rights and the liberties of fellow countrymen.”68 Vice presidential nominee Schuyler Colfax was also on the receiving end of a concerted effort to alienate the immigrant vote. He came under fire for his alleged membership in the Know-Nothing Party before the war. Like Grant and numerous other politicians at the time, Colfax may have attended a meeting more out of curiosity than honest conviction. During the campaign, Democrats tried to discredit Colfax among the growing number of Irish and German voters in New York and Chicago. Whether or not he harbored an anti-immigrant bias, Colfax supported the effort to have Morris Raphall offer an invocation before Congress in 1860, and he thought President James Buchanan should have taken a stronger stand in the Mortara affair.69 Wisconsin's overtly Copperhead La Crosse Democrat was particularly noxious in its partisan attacks against candidate Grant, running racist cartoons and headlines that blared, “We say White supremacy or another war.” “Grant…has always been a drunken ignoramus,” was typical of the level of discourse offered by its editor, Brick Pomeroy.70 In August 1868, as the campaign rhetoric intensified, Pomeroy founded the New York Democrat, which threatened another war Page 94 → if Radicals took the White House. To Pomeroy, the Republicans were a “Negro bureau, standing army, high tariff, unequal taxation party.”71 Pomeroy used Jewish indignation about General Orders 11 as yet another opportunity to attack Grant and the Republican Party. The editor charged that Grant had expelled the Jews from his military district in an effort to eliminate competition in the cotton trade. Grant's cronies, Pomeroy said, were grateful for the expulsion that enriched the entire Grant family. Wise agreed: after Jewish cotton traders were locked out of the market, he said, the price per pound was fixed at twenty-five cents.72 Grant supporter Isidor Bush of St. Louis told Attorney General Edward Bates that he, too, suspected that the order was pushed by non-Jewish merchants, in collusion with military authorities, to fix prices and limit competition. Some observers also saw the exclusion of Jews from Nashville by military authorities under General William Rosecrans as a calculated effort by corrupt military officers to keep Jewish competitors out of a major center of the cotton trade.73 With concerns that the Jewish vote would be lost to the Democrats, Wolf wanted the future president of the United States to set the record straight once and for all: Why, indeed, had he issued the expulsion order? Wolf took his concerns to one of Grant's advisers, Colonel Adam Badeau. In April 1868, Badeau told Wolf that while he was entitled to an answer as “an American citizen and an Israelite,” the candidate would steer clear of the issue. Badeau assured Wolf, however, that Grant felt no animosity toward Jews.74 Grant remained silent until late in the campaign, perhaps because he believed that he could win without discussing his wartime orders with a religious minority.

Taking the Campaign Directly to Jewish Voters Another Grant adviser, John Rawlins, took the campaign to Jewish voters. He assured Louisville Republican Lewis Dembitz, who had cast his ballot for Lincoln during the 1860 convention, that a vote for Grant was in the best interest of the country. Writing to Dembitz before the 1868 Republican Convention, Rawlins said the expulsion was only intended to limit the number of people crossing between Union and Confederate lines in an effort to keep military plans secret: “It was therefore of the utmost importance that every avenue of information to the enemy should be closed.” While Rawlins repeated the allegation that Jewish peddlers were the most persistent violators of military orders, he again assured Jewish voters that Grant had no intention of singling them out solely based on their religion. “The idea that it was issued on account of the religion of the Jews,” Page 95 → Rawlins said, “cannot be seriously entertained,” given Grant's support for religious freedom.75 Such explanations were met with skepticism. As one writer to the New York Herald asked, was Grant prepared to expel “Methodists, Catholics, Baptists, Quakers, Mormons or anybody else belonging to one of the thirty and odd different religious

sects,” on the grounds that they might reveal military plans to the enemy?76 Admitting that he had indeed received numerous inquiries, Grant finally issued a reply on September 14. In a letter to former Illinois congressman Isaac Newton Morris, Grant confirmed that he had written the original order but appeared to pin the whole mess on Washington. Grant said that he was pressured by a reprimand from Washington for “permitting acts which Jews within my lines were engaged in.” Although plenty of non-Jews had violated the law, according to Grant, the Jews appeared to be more adept. In a backhanded compliment, he said that Christian speculators envied Jews' supposed success in moving from one army to another “with impunity.”77 Grant emphasized that he had no intention of defending the order. He had issued it impulsively, angry at the rebuke from Washington, and assured Jewish voters that “I have no prejudice against any sect or race.” Grant's claim that he gave the order without reflection seems disingenuous in light of the fact that he told General William Tecumseh Sherman a week earlier that he was considering expelling Jews from his military district “so far as practicable.”78 As a consequence of fears that the correspondence with Morris would draw more attention to the issue and sound like a campaign stunt, the text of Grant's letter was not released until after the election. To some commentators, Grant's admission that he had made a mistake indicated the general's integrity. The New York Times called it “a manly confession…satisfactory to both his friends and his enemies of the Hebrew race.” In the words of the Occident, Grant's acknowledgment that his actions were indefensible proved that “he is in truth a great conqueror, for he has conquered himself.”79 Grant also took the time in the final days of the campaign to reassure David Eckstein, who met personally with the candidate at the urging of Republican governor John Geary of Pennsylvania. Eckstein came away from his twohour conversation in Covington, Kentucky, confident that voting for Grant was the right choice and pledging “hearty support of the party which put the General in nomination.”80 Eckstein told Adolph Moses that the more Democrats predicted that “Jews as a class” would oppose Grant, the greater the support from Jewish Republicans for the general. Geary credited Eckstein with mending political fences: “You deserve the most exalted…praise…and I sincerely hope it may result to your advantage.”81 Geary suggested that Grant reward Eckstein, and Page 96 → in 1870, he was appointed U.S. consul to Vancouver, British Columbia, a post he held for seven years. While Grant gave Eckstein permission to publish the substance of their conversation, Eckstein, like Morris, decided against it, fearing that any such effort would look like a self-serving bid for Jewish votes.82

The Election of 1872 Civil War anti-Semitism reemerged in Grant's 1872 reelection campaign. Grant's challenger for the White House was newspaper editor and New York intellectual Horace Greeley, who opposed the president's Reconstruction policy as too harsh. Under the banner of the newly created Liberal Republican Party and as the Democratic nominee, Greeley charged that both as a general and as president, Grant had used the powers of his office for personal gain. Referring to the administration's corruption scandals, Greeley said that the warning signs of a dishonest public official had been evident during the war, and he cited the failed cotton deal involving Jesse Grant and the Mack brothers. As editor of the New York Tribune, Greeley had a convenient perch from which to remind voters of Grant's failings. The journalist told Jewish voters that with the expulsion order, Grant had “made no distinction between the innocent and the guilty, between the thievish followers of his army and the honest residents of Kentucky. In the spirit of savage warfare he directed that men, women and children should leave their homes and property to the mercy of the settlers and camp followers.”83 In New York, the pro-Grant Times called Greeley's appeals to the Jewish vote as “frantic as they are clumsy.” The Times recounted one off-the-cuff comment in hopes of turning Jewish voters away from Greeley: Grant's appointment of a Jewish superintendent of Indian affairs in Arizona had led Greeley to joke that some of the newly converted—and unhappily circumcised—Jewish Indians headed for Canada. If he were elected, Greeley said, he would send more rabbis to Indian country. “Let them circumcise every red-skin” if doing so would make them leave U.S. territory.84 The New York Times found Greeley's comments “vulgar” and alleged that “a rite of the Hebrew faith was turned into ridicule.” Greeley's campaign managers were not pleased by the publicity, which

dealt another, albeit minor, blow to his failing effort to capture the White House.85 Greeley also warned Jewish voters about Grant's 1872 running mate, Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson, mocking Wilson's defense of Grant's Reconstruction policy as humane: “Perhaps abuse of the Israelites does not count as inhumanity in Mr. Wilson's code.” In addition, the Tribune revisited Wilson's Page 97 → 1861 antiSemitic rhetoric on the Senate floor, when he assailed Judah P. Benjamin.86 Wise, who favored the Liberal Republican stand on corruption and a more accommodating policy toward the former Confederacy, enthusiastically backed Greeley, describing his nomination as a “triumph of the liberal cause.” As a Universalist, Greeley well understood the importance of religious freedom and could show common cause with other religious minorities, “stepp[ing] across the mountains of dogmatism.”87 As for Wilson, Wise said, America did not need a vice president who would “trample the foreigner and spit upon the Jew.” Republishing the text of Wilson's remarks about Benjamin, Wise recalled that the opening days of the war were “dangerous and threatening” times to make crude references to Christ killers and reminded readers that Wilson had introduced the legislation that excluded Jews from the army chaplaincy (but failed to mention that Wilson had also introduced the legislation that ended the discriminatory practice).88 In addition, political operatives revived the expulsion order in 1872 simply to score political points and raise voters' fears. In some cases, negative campaigning and outrageous scare tactics were employed, such as rumors that Wilson had promised freed slaves that the Jews, Germans, and Irish would be sent back to Europe to make room for African American labor in the big cities.89 Anti-Semites advised Grant that Jews were hoping for a Republican defeat so that they could engage in wholesale corruption. One hawker of conspiracy theories told Grant just days before the election, “I wish it were in your power to banish them all from our country.”90 After Grant's reelection, Wise could only work up a “bow in submission to the will of the majority” and a promise not to leave the country in protest. He jokingly resigned himself to the fact that he would likely not be offered a cabinet position.91

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10 Prosperity and Discrimination in the Gilded Age The postwar years and the advent of the Gilded Age came at a time of transition for American Jews. The fear of generals trampling on the rights of inoffensive citizens was receding into the past. The remaining official barriers to Jewish rights came down after the war and into the 1870s. In 1868, largely through the efforts of the Board of Delegates, the North Carolina Constitution was rewritten to allow non-Christians to serve in state office, and over the next eight years, the rest of the states followed suit. Jews during the Gilded Age enthusiastically participated in the affairs of both parties, reflecting the stability of the political system.1 Jews in various cities across the country also asked that Sunday laws be modified to allow people who closed their businesses on the Jewish Sabbath to be permitted to open on Sunday. In 1861, for example, the California Legislature had passed a law that fined businesses for opening their doors on Sunday.2 The issue was more than a religious matter: it was a restraint on trade that deprived observant families of a day when they could conduct business. Change came slowly, and the right to open on Sunday gained acceptance as a consequence of the competitive pressures of late nineteenth-century capitalism rather than respect for the Jewish Sabbath. With the help of the Board of Delegates, American Jews turned back a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution to declare the United States a Christian nation, a matter the Board of Delegates called one of the most important issues confronting American Jews.3 Some evangelical Christians saw the carnage of the Civil War as God's punishment of a nation that had forsaken Page 99 → Jesus Christ for a secular state. Members of the National Association for Securing the Religious Amendment of the Constitution, meeting in New York in 1870, characterized the American government as Christian, “not Jewish, Mohammedan, Pagan or Infidel,” and they insisted that these minority voices had no right to protest the inclusion of Jesus Christ in the language of the Constitution.4 The issue was complicated by those who simply favored adding a recognition of God, formalizing the United States as a nation under God without a specific reference to Christianity. “The flag and the Bible,” vowed one supporter of the amendment, “let either be torn down and its guardian will fly to the rescue.”5 Isaac Mayer Wise found the idea a breach of the separation of church and state. He and other Jewish religious leaders in the 1870s were not hesitant to challenge their Christian counterparts about respecting the rights not only of Jews but also of Spiritualists and atheists. Congress generally offered little support for the idea of changing the Constitution, and the cause died in the House of Representatives in 1874.

The Competition for Status in the Postwar Economy During the 1870s and 1880s, opportunities for immigrants seemed limitless. With an open frontier and a robust economy, enterprising Americans of every religion could amass great fortunes. German Jews already at home in America were moving up the ladder of social respectability, becoming wealthier and more influential in the country's political life. President Ulysses S. Grant offered Joseph Seligman the post of secretary of the treasury in recognition of the Seligman brothers' efforts to sell up to two hundred million dollars in U.S. government bonds to investors in Germany, England, and France to help finance the war at a time when many in Europe were betting on an independent Confederate States of America. Seligman declined the offer.6 Merchants turned bankers and financiers, the Seligmans were transforming their operations into an international investment house. They opened offices in London and Frankfurt in 1864, with branches following in New Orleans in 1865 and Paris in 1867. By 1870, the New York Times, in a typical exaggeration of Jewish power in post–Civil War America, referred to “the great political influence which Jews necessarily exercise in our midst.”7 Despite the optimism that many German Jews felt and the sense that they had earned a stake in their adopted home, the 1870s demonstrated that the path to Americanization was far from over. As Joseph Seligman

discovered, the most Page 100 → tenacious Judeophobia existed on the social level: American Jews, even those confident in elite society circles, faced discriminatory policies by employers, hotel owners, and others in the private sector. Unfavorable perceptions about Jews during the war centered around whether a people so different in occupation, language, and custom could be truly loyal to the state, whether that state was the Union or the Confederacy. A heightened nationalism and war hysteria on both sides of the conflict brought suspicion of the Other. After the war and well into the Gilded Age, perceptions and stereotypes changed. Prejudicial views of Jews were driven not by nationalism but by competition for status and prestige in a growing economy.8 No longer the treacherous cotton trader (though that image was occasionally revived), the Jew became the overreaching social climber. The German Jewish peddlers and merchants who came to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s were now joining the ranks of America's middle class, and some were counted among the nation's new millionaires—the Seligmans and the Lehmans as well as merchant princes such as Adam Gimbel, Edward Filene, Benjamin Altman, Isidor Straus, and Benjamin Bloomingdale, all of whom had abandoned the peddling past and were now transforming urban retailing. John Higham, a historian of the immigrant experience in America, observes that in no other immigrant group have so many men risen so rapidly from rags to riches.9 This economic success came with a price, as the newly affluent Jewish merchants and bankers competed for place and privilege with their Christian neighbors. In the appropriately named Gilded Age, both Jew and gentile clamored for admission to more prestigious social circles. Moreover thousands of Romanian, Polish, and Russian immigrants poured into cities across the country. In the twenty years between the start of the Civil War and 1880, the U.S. Jewish population rose from 150,000 to roughly 250,000.10 Jews became visible everywhere. Christians did not welcome the new immigrants, and they posed a problem for the German Jewish elite, who saw the Eastern Europeans' crude manners and Old World customs as a step backward from the goal of acculturation.11 All American Jews—whether cultivated and assimilated or the new arrivals—were painted with the same broad brush by Christians unaccustomed to living among Jews.

The Underwriters' Conspiracy The first signs of resentment against Jews appeared just a few years after the war. After a series of fires in New York's clothing district in 1866 as well as at some Page 101 → Jewish properties in the South and West, insurance companies assumed that the blazes were arson—fires deliberately set to collect compensation. Within months, the Aetna, Manhattan, Niagara, Germania, Hanover, Phoenix, and Republic insurance companies conspired to deny coverage to Jewish businesses.12 The companies secretly instructed their agents to submit any applications from Jewish businesses for special approval; not surprisingly, most of those applications were then turned down. Germania president Rudolf Garrigue revived the wartime anti-Semitic accusations and imagery, saying that while his company would insure “all respectable New York Jews,” “second-hand goods dealers [and] Jewish war profiteers” would be rejected.13 The full scope of the conspiracy was uncovered by Wise when he published the text of a special circular sent out by the Underwriters' Agency of New York, which coordinated actions by four New York insurance companies. Wise called for a boycott of the firms, and meetings were held in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Richmond, and New York, with organizers issuing a statement that “regulating commercial intercourse upon the basis of nationality or religion…can have no place in this enlightened age and favored land.”14 The effort worked, and many insurance agents severed their connections with the boycotted companies. Moreover, Jewish businessmen organized a number of rival insurance companies. By the 1870s, Jews found themselves locked out of the social clubs that had previously accepted their membership in what historian Gerald Sorin termed the scramble for prestige in the “status-hungry” postwar decades.15 In Portland, Oregon, Jews had been elected to the mayoralty in the 1860s and 1870s, yet that city's elite Arlington Club, founded in 1867, did not admit Jews. San Francisco, which had a reputation for being liberal and inviting,

had two social directories by the late 1870s—one for Christians and one for Jews. In New York, the Social Register was closed to Jews, and in 1893 the Union League Club shut its doors to Theodore Seligman even though his father and other Jewish members were among the club's Republican Party founders.16 When Sigismund Kaufmann's nomination as the 1870 Republican candidate for New York's lieutenant governorship was challenged on the basis of his Jewish faith, his running mate, Stewart Woodford, answered that he had hoped “the day had gone when…a man's religion was to be thrown at him.”17 “Jews Need Not Apply” was the headline of the Jewish Messenger in November 1872, reflecting the signs that appeared in occasional shop windows or newspaper classifieds. That same year, the Twenty-Second Regiment of the New York National Guard denied membership to a Jewish volunteer, B. F. Waterman, who wondered publicly why such prejudice had not been “long since eradicated in this free country.”18 Others asked how this exclusion could be possible Page 102 → in a city with so many prosperous Jewish merchants, bankers, and lawyers. Some private schools and colleges instituted quotas for the number of Jewish students to be admitted. In 1876, a hotel on the New Jersey shore advertised that it would not admit Jews. A year later the same policy at the prestigious Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, opened the exclusionary policies of certain resorts and hotels to national attention.

Incident at the Grand Union Hotel The Grand Union was a resort for the newly affluent Americans making their fortunes in the decades after the Civil War. According to Higham, the Grand Union was a flashy watering hole and meeting place for “prominent politicians, Wall Street tycoons, Western copper kings, ladies of easy virtue as well as a good many Jews.” But on June 14, 1877, Joseph Seligman was told that after patronizing the hotel for a decade, he and his family were no longer welcome.19 Judge Henry Hilton, who became executor of the estate of department store and hotel magnate A. T. Stewart, said his Christian visitors would stay away if the resort attracted “colonies of Jewish people.”20 Hilton vowed to keep them out with a defiant, “I don't care whether they like me or not.”21 Others turned away at the Grand Union that summer included a Jewish New York district court judge. Not since the Civil War had American Jews felt such a sharp sting of prejudice. The Brooklyn Eagle was sure that the exclusion of the Seligmans from the Grand Union would not be ignored or simply blow over. For an American Israel that considered itself truly American, shedding its foreign dress and archaic rituals, the closed door at the Grand Union Hotel represented a jarring about-face.22 Two years later, New York banker Austin Corbin closed his Manhattan Beach Hotel on Coney Island to Jewish beachgoers. Corbin had opened the hotel in 1877, boasting of an eighth of a mile of oceanfront. Within just three years, the Manhattan Beach Hotel became the summer destination of New York's movers and shakers from the Union Club, the University Club, and the Coney Island Jockey Club.23 Hilton and Corbin claimed the right of a private property owner to deny entrance to anyone they deemed undesirable, but neither man hid his prejudice. In June 1879, a meeting of the short-lived American Society for the Suppression of the Jews took place at the Grand Union. “If this is a free country,” Corbin asked, “why can't we be free of the Jews?” The group vowed to boycott Jewish businesses and keep Jews out of public office.24 For the most part, New York's popular press condemned the exclusion of Page 103 → Jews. The New York Evening Post called it “contemptible bigotry.” The Brooklyn Eagle editorialized that if Hilton's motivation was to exclude “vulgar ostentation,” he could have kept out plenty of Christian patrons.25 Editorial writers reminded their readers that Seligman was one of the most respected bankers in the nation and that his efforts in Europe had helped raise the money the Union needed to prosecute the war. “A splendid American citizen,” the New York Times said of Seligman, “he has done more for the foreign credit of this country than any other man.”26 In the eyes of some observers, Seligman was the preeminent Jewish American; “the head of the Jewish people in this country,” said Seligman's attorney, Edward Lauterbach, who recounted his client's bank board memberships, presidency of New York's Rapid Transit Company, and leadership in the city's Republican Party.27 The Grand Union and Manhattan Beach hotels emerged as a line in the sand for American Jews, who realized that with increasing numbers and greater influence, they had no choice but to enter the fray with both arms swinging.

Seligman wrote to Hilton that the American people, “who despise intolerance,” would surely withdraw their patronage from a hotel that excludes certain guests based on religion. “You are no judge of American character,” he told Hilton. Hilton would not yield, responding that the Jews have “completely ruined Saratoga Springs.” With that answer, Seligman prepared to launch a boycott of the A. T. Stewart department store, one of New York's largest.28 Lauterbach called on Jews to “awaken and defend ourselves.” The Jewish Messenger also urged a boycott of the Stewart holdings, which would “touch [Hilton] at his most vulnerable point.”29 Jewish patrons shopped elsewhere, and New York's Jewish apparel makers, who made up more than half the city's total, pulled their business from A. T. Stewart. The boycott was successful, hastening the store's decline, and in 1882, Wanamaker's bought Stewart's.30 Observed one newspaper correspondent, Hilton attempted to boycott Israel, but “Israel boycotted him and he closed his doors.”31

Resurrecting “The Shoddy Aristocracy” By the late 1870s, Jewish leaders had become more assertive and single-minded in claiming their rights. Hilton and Corbin plainly echoed the words of General Orders 11 with their dislike of “Jews as a class.” Using the Civil War term that became synonymous with unscrupulous clothing merchants, the Brooklyn Eagle saw the actions of the New York hoteliers as a reaction against “the shoddy aristocracy.” Page 104 → Despite efforts to combat the negative image created during the war, the view persisted in the 1870s and 1880s that Jews were the main profiteers in cotton and gold speculation.32 Hilton and Corbin dusted off the image of the Chatham Street clothes dealer to paint a picture of the undesirable Polish immigrant who, like his German predecessor, was eager to enter the American middle class. Reflecting the competitive nature of Gilded Age social climbing, Corbin said that New York's “highest social element” would no longer patronize his hotel “if the Jews persist in coming.” Corbin and Hilton made no distinction between a fully acculturated Seligman and the Yiddish-speaking Polish immigrant with less-than-American etiquette.33 Class of course played a large part in popular attitudes toward Jews. Poorer, less literate Jewish immigrants living on Manhattan's Lower East Side found Coney Island an easy retreat from the summer heat. One Coney Island hotel owner complained of “the lower classes who come here in swarms…and act generally in a manner that is offensive.”34 When one Jewish patron at a hotel exhibited less-than-perfect behavior, all Jews were targeted for exclusion. When the American Hebrew surveyed more than sixty prominent educators, writers, and jurists about the roots of anti-Semitism, the replies reflected the sense that class, more than religion or ethnicity, was the barrier between Jews and Christians. The Reverend R. Heber Newton of All Souls' Episcopal Church in New York and a leader of the Social Gospel movement, referred to “the enterprising members” of the lower strata who are “pushing into the higher ranks of business and demoralizing it.” But like most of the respondents, Newton strongly denounced prejudice. As novelist and editor William Dean Howells suggested to the American Hebrew, it might help to “Christianize the Christians.”35 In addition, Jewish immigrants were associated with a growing urban population that was feared and despised by some Americans. Native-born Protestant culture saw Jews and other foreigners as living and working apart, urban dwellers in a society that still idealized the rural life. The city and the foreigner were equally corrupting the traditional way of life. Many Americans' images of big-city life highlighted crime, radicalism, and teeming sweatshops in filthy tenements. To the Jewish Messenger, that image of immigrants clustering into urban quarters that seemed like ghettos posed a barrier to acculturation because “they present the appearance of a separate community.” As one New York relief group phrased it, the object is to “induce [the Eastern Europeans] from the start to Americanize [and] dissuade them from crowding in the already overcrowded wards of their countrymen.”36 That sentiment was echoed in urban congregations Page 105 → across the country. There was hope, said Philadelphia rabbi Joseph Krauskopf, that in succeeding generations, the “ghetto walk and talk, habits and cravings will disappear…Jewish proneness for consorting only with their own…will have vanished.” Only in the synagogue would Jews be Jews, Krauskopf

predicted; in the world, they would be Americans.37 New Orleans rabbi Maximilian Heller wondered how gentiles would ever come to fully accept Jews as their equals if the only image presented was of “the evils of Ghetto cramping.”38 Simon Wolf had little tolerance for those who cast fellow Jews in an unfavorable light, writing, “If the congested districts of the sea-board cities are a social and moral menace, we should bring about a revolution even at the expense of the individual Jew.”39 Wolf was particularly concerned about the practice followed by some newspapers of identifying criminals by religion, but only if they were Jewish. Such identification reinforced the image of the Jew as stuck in the bowels of the sinful urban ghetto. Newspaper terms such as Jew smuggler and Jew arsonist were holdovers from the war. When five men were arrested for smuggling supplies to Confederate forces in Virginia in 1862, only one was identified by ethnicity—“a German Jew.” In 1864, Wolf asked William Cullen Bryant of the New York Evening Post, “Why when the authorities arrest a criminal, do they telegraph…that a Jew blockader has been caught” when Methodists or Presbyterians were not identified in other criminal arrests?40 And when the New York Herald reported that a “German Jew jewelry peddler” had been robbed, the Jewish Messenger asked who robbed the peddler as well as why the positive achievements of Jewish Americans were not similarly highlighted.41 Wise offered to put the names of Jewish and Christian criminals side by side: “Let them point out the Jewish offenders,” he said, “the balance sheet is largely in our favor.”42 When one reader of the Brooklyn Eagle took that newspaper to task for asking in a headline whether a particular thief was a Jew, the Eagle responded that it was simply a matter of easily identifying a suspect. Jews, the Eagle explained, were a race with “very marked characteristics.”43

The Butler-Isaacs Correspondence Bringing some clarity to the question of identifying undesirables by their religion was the goal of a lengthy correspondence between Myer Isaacs of the Board of Delegates and Benjamin Butler in 1864. Butler was best remembered during the war for his near dictatorial occupation of New Orleans and his inflammatory statements equating Jews with treason. Page 106 → When Butler was transferred from New Orleans to Fort Monroe outside Washington at the beginning of 1864, he issued a report that announced the capture of 150 rebels, 90 mules, 60 slaves, and 4 Jews.44 Jewish sentiment regarding Butler was summed up in an 1864 letter from Adolph Moses to the Israelite: “Butler hates us because we are Jews.”45 Wolf, who called Butler's dispatch “entirely un-American,” asked President Abraham Lincoln if he could see the Jewish defendants to determine their guilt. Lincoln agreed, and Wolf visited Butler, demanding a fair hearing. The defendants subsequently were released.46 What followed was a dialogue between Butler and American Jews that helped shed some light on the roots of antiSemitism in the United States. Of course, Butler was quick to say that he harbored no animosity toward Jews or any other religious group, but he returned to the old stereotypes of the Jew as clannish, clustering in certain professions, and marrying only within their faith.47 He also resurrected that object of Union scorn, Judah P. Benjamin. Butler asked Wolf if Jews were more properly defined as a nationality or a religion. The distinction was important to Butler because as a nationality, naming a defendant as Jewish would be no different than identifying him as Italian or French. Wise responded by asking why a military dispatch should ever mention a criminal's nationality.48 Butler also asked whether the promise of a Jewish return to Israel did not prove the existence of a “nation among the Hebrews, and a greater homogeneity, than belongs to no other nation?”49 Isaacs rejected Butler's definition of Jewish nationality, describing himself as a Jew “in the sense that you are a Christian; yet I am an American in nationality.” Isaacs also refuted Butler's charge that Jews made their livings as merchants and moneylenders to the exclusion of other professions.50 Isaacs saw no shame in peddling but wrote that “it is nevertheless a serious mistake to charge that the liberal professions are avoided by Israelites…. [I]n medicine there are many eminent

practitioners.”51 Butler responded by admitting “that my experience with men of the Jewish faith or nation has been an unfortunate one” but pledging a constant “desire to be enlightened.”52 For his part, Isaacs hoped that such public exchanges could put to rest misconceptions and prejudicial opinions. The Butler-Isaacs correspondence led some in the press to reassess their own views, as one editor credited Isaacs with “giv[ing] us all a salutary lesson” in the distinction between religion and nationality.53 Later in 1864, Butler pardoned a Jewish soldier who had been charged with desertion after fleeing from anti-Semitic taunts from members of his regiment.54 Butler may have sincerely changed his views by the time the Jews of Boston asked him to give an address at a Hebrew Fair for Charity in Page 107 → 1877, when he told the audience, “Here in America you have the opportunity of making yourselves what you are—a leading power in the state and country.”55 Despite negative perceptions that saw Jews as exotic, backward, or part of the urban masses, Americans were deeply conflicted—or, in the words of cultural historian Louise Mayo, ambivalent—in their opinions of Jews.56 Publications that vigorously opposed overt anti-Semitism, such as the Grand Union Hotel incident, might display more subtle prejudices. Jewish weddings were seen as both lavish and a testament to Jewish commitment to family. Gilded Age Jews were perceived not only as purveyors of shoddy secondhand clothing but also as social climbers trying to move into more elite and Christian middle-class circles.57 The Occident warned that commercially successful Jews could do little to avoid anti-Semitic taunts short of living in squalid conditions to conceal their actual wealth. “While we are poor, we may be tolerated, but let us…become the social equals of our neighbors, and their ire will be at once aroused.”58 Americans in the 1870s and 1880s, as in the prewar years, often praised Jews as a biblical people and as hardworking entrepreneurs. In a reversal of earlier anti-Semitic sentiments, one Richmond newspaper welcomed the city's Jews in 1866 as a sign that business was returning to normal: “We hail their presence in the Southern States…a more industrious…class of the population does not exist.”59

Jew, Hebrew, or Israelite A good many Protestants steeped in biblical thought further distinguished between “Jews” and the somewhat more literary-sounding “Israelites” or “Hebrews.” The Hebrew or Israelite was charitable, stayed sober, and was not prone to criminality, unlike the Chatham Street clothier or the ostentatious nouveau riche whom Hilton wanted barred from his hotel. Hilton claimed to have no prejudice against “Israelites” but said he objected to “Jews in the trade sense of the word,” an obvious reference to his own notions of upper- and lower-class Jews.60 Despite his words, however, his exclusion of Joseph Seligman indicated that no “Jew” or “Israelite” would have been acceptable. Many Christians saw “Hebrews” as carrying connotations of an idealized people historically connected to God. In his address to Boston's Jewish community, General Butler drew a parallel between the Jews as God's chosen people and America. He also speculated that having survived persecution, “the Jewish race…must come from some preordination of the Almighty.”61 Page 108 → The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher told his congregation at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn that the Jews “gave to the world an ethical religion.” Beecher, who compared Hilton to an annoying mosquito, encouraged Jews to assert their rights when faced with discrimination.62 During the debates over slavery, abolitionists widely used the metaphors of the biblical Israelites to justify freedom for the slaves. One Civil War general writing in 1863 described Lincoln as a modern-day Moses. The Emancipation Proclamation “was as the waters of the Red Sea…to the oppressed Israelites.” Wise believed that Protestants were more accepting of Jews as Israelites—a Biblical People.63 When praising Jewish opposition to Grant's presidential candidacy, Christians often associated them with the biblical Israelites “who have endured more than any other people.” Any Jew who would vote for Grant, said the editors of the Atlanta Constitution, “becomes the instrument of his own degradation and is unworthy to be called an Israelite.”64 This mythical Jew not only created an image in the mind of Christians but also influenced the way Jews viewed themselves.

Many Jews preferred the descriptor Israelite or Hebrew, terms that garnered greater respect in Christian society. Avoiding the term Jew, Wise called the association of synagogues he founded in 1873 the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and its college Hebrew Union College. He proudly named his newspaper the American Israelite. American Jews also looked to ancient institutions such as the Sanhedrin to justify their quest for congregational unity. The Hebrew Journal saw the word Israelite in terms of national unity under King David and Solomon: “Our broad national distinction gave us the name Israelite in the time of our ancient greatness.” The word Jew, conversely, “is a narrow name” that only applies to the religion.65 Isaac Leeser bluntly noted that “the name of Jew has become unjustly a term of reproach.”66 The term Israelite or Hebrew implied a Jewish nationality with roots in the ancient Near East and even a separate racial classification. Butler and Isaacs and other Americans through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries debated whether Jews could be properly considered a religion or a race. Some viewed Jews as a race apart from other people with white skin; conversion to Christianity could not change an immutable and inherent national character. Typical of the logic, even from those who would have called themselves philo-Semitic, was the notion that distinct Jewish characteristics resulted from historical conditions. As one Gilded Age pamphleteer phrased it, “As there is a cause for everything, so there is a cause for the extraordinary greed for gain which exists among the Hebrews as a race.” He suggested that Christians “make due allowances for this peculiarity.”67 Page 109 → The race/faith issue arose in New York in 1870 when the Republican Party nominated Sigismund Kaufmann for lieutenant governor. Kaufmann was chosen to capture the state's German vote, but some observers questioned whether a Jew could also be a German. Was Kaufmann a German by nationality and Jew by religion? He was president of the German Society of New York and a director of the city's Hebrew Orphan Asylum, indicating his comfortable relationship with both German and Jewish social organizations.68 For Kaufmann, who had survived the 1848 uprisings in Germany, his ethnic identity was as easily German as it was Jewish. The two might be separate but did not cancel each other out. Charles Dana's New York Sun weighed in on the question, claiming that Jews were not merely a religious sect but were “a race, and as such they are distinct from Teutons.” Dana's viewpoint was not necessarily the anti-Semitic line of reasoning that racist ideologies of the twentieth century employed. Typical of the ambivalent image of Jews, the newspaper added that although the two groups were distinct, each had its own set of achievements. The Jews had the “glory of being the oldest distinct race in existence, and of maintaining an unbroken, indestructible continuity through calamites and persecutions,” the Sun concluded.69 Even among the most educated of Americans, Jews remained exotic in the mid-nineteenth century. Referring to Jewish “race peculiarities,” Tufts president E. N. Capen reflected the common opinion that Jews “do not assimilate like other aliens…. They can never be American pure and simple.”70 American Jews who witnessed the comparisons of peddlers to vultures and other dehumanizing images during the war were suspicious of those who would classify them as racially apart from other whites. Statements from a university president saying that Jews could never be fully American deeply disturbed people who were working hard to ensure that their children would live and work as Americans without the distinction of religion or race. For the generation that experienced the frightening anti-Semitism of the Civil War and race theories that sought to attach an inferior status on non-Anglo-Saxons, Americanization meant nothing short of total assimilation. Wolf said the Jewish characteristics that fostered prejudice and ostracism in Europe could be subsumed in an amorphous American identity. The widely held American viewpoint, according to Mayo, was assimilate or be damned.71

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11 Toward a Progressive and Americanized Judaism Like the generation of immigrants who arrived in America before the Civil War, Reform Judaism was born in the German-speaking lands of Europe. One of the earliest Reform synagogues, opened its doors in Hamburg in 1818 and published its own ritual, with far less reliance on Hebrew than was the case in traditional synagogues and the addition of German hymns. The city's Orthodox establishment refused to recognize the Reformers and banned the prayer book, but the Jewish ritual was undergoing unstoppable changes that reflected a society absorbing Enlightenment ideas, termed haskalah—the Hebrew word for “reason.”1 In addition, a gust of secularism was blowing from the burning fires of revolutionary France, and Germany saw the development of a new literary /philosophical movement, Die Wissenschaft des Judentums (the science of Judaism), that counted Heinrich Heine among its leading intellectuals. Syncretistic with haskalah thought and synagogue reform, Die Wissenschaft des Judentums recognized the primacy of scientific evidence and not necessarily the authority of tradition.2 Reformers in Europe and in America sought the same goal: making Judaism more accessible to modern congregants and breaking down the ghetto barriers. These innovative thinkers believed that the vernacular language was necessary to make the liturgy more understandable. Even the wearing of prayer shawls, separate pews for women, and the length of the service were challenged.3 The broad Reform movement also refuted mysticism, rabbinic orthodoxy, and the important role of Talmudic studies in Jewish education. To Isaac Mayer Wise, if “You seek God…you will find him…in his works in the sciences…. What is commonly called profane knowledge is not at all profane.”4 Page 111 → The haskalah ideology of Moses Mendelssohn, the spiritual and intellectual force behind religious reform in Europe, was well suited to the liberal spirit of the United States and its conceptions of modern Judaism. American Jews understood the importance of creating a religious community that was consonant with life in the modern world, where Jews were to a large extent part of an expanding capitalist economy. Reform in many ways was driven by the new Jewish upward mobility.5 Consequently, Reformers saw themselves not simply as destroyers of the old but also as creators of a world where they could be both Jewish and prosperous Americans. For some congregations, striking that balance was a matter of continuous adjustment between tradition and modernity.6 On both sides of the Atlantic, innovation in the synagogue proved a deeply divisive issue. However, for the increasingly affluent and vocal sector of American Jewry that was offended by post–Civil War discrimination in accommodations, Reform would play a much larger role than changes in the ritual. The Reform movement was central to the drive to Americanize and acculturate the diaspora, but like any effort to change deeply held views or challenge a traditional worldview, a protracted battle was inevitable. The American Orthodox-Reform debate over religious doctrine preceded the Civil War. Philadelphia Orthodox leader Isaac Leeser saw the Reform movement and the European Wissenschaft des Judentums caught in the grips of extremists, “professing false doctrines” that denied the Talmud as the authoritative interpretation of Scripture.7 These heretics rejected the cardinal belief that the Bible was divinely inspired. Holiness was cast aside, Leeser argued, in the name of science and “a new German enlightenment…an utter abomination to us.” Leeser accused Wise of spreading “un-Jewish doctrines and instituting arbitrary reforms…guided by foolish counsels.” Wise had been led astray by German radicals.8 Among the theological questions debated was one central to Orthodoxy—a belief in the literal resurrection of the dead. Dating to the late biblical period and consistent with Jewish theology at the time of Christ, Reformers considered the belief in resurrection to have no religious foundation. Reformers and members of the Orthodoxy also disagreed about the nature of the supreme being, with Reform Judaism rejecting the notion that God is an

anthropomorphic figure or that the Messiah will appear in a human form.9 Drawing on the works of the medieval Sephardic philosopher Moses Maimonides, Wise said that humans' only knowledge is that God, the Creator, exists. “We have no knowledge of substance or nature,” he said. Wise declared that the concept of a personal God was not Jewish but Christian theology. San Francisco Reform rabbi Jacob Page 112 → Voorsanger was adamant that “in Judaism, God need not be defined.” He called it “unbecoming” to speak of God in human and therefore limiting terms.10

A Mongrel Mixture” In addition to relinquishing mysticism and Orthodox conceptions of God, the Reformers sought to Americanize the synagogue service. Hebrew, the Reformers said, was an ancient language that had become “unintelligible to the larger majority of our co-religionists” and should be replaced by English in the Sabbath service “as far as existing circumstances render it advisable.”11 But even Reformers cautioned against Torah readings in the vernacular because only reading the Torah in Hebrew would ensure that the meaning of the Holy Scripture was rendered correctly. To the Reformers, the introduction of music would also help to create a more Americanized service. Influenced by the organs and choirs of the Protestant churches, the Reformers defended music on the Sabbath. It was not work, strictly prohibited on the Sabbath, but an allowable art form. Opponents of introducing organs and choirs into the Sabbath service responded that it should be resisted because it was a Christian innovation. Myer Isaacs was astonished that the radical Reformer David Einhorn invited singers from a neighboring Catholic church to assist his choir; doing so was a “stain on Judaism.”12 The debate over music was not limited to American Jews. The 1836 introduction of an organ in a synagogue in Hamburg also sparked fierce arguments among German clergy. Wise and other Reformers, who preferred a shorter service than the traditional Orthodox, favored eliminating the piyyutim, poems inserted within the regular liturgy on special occasions.13 The recitation of the piyyutim was more a matter of local custom than of religious law, and the addition of a choir and singing left less time for these obscure poems. New York traditionalist Myer Isaacs opposed another innovation—adding a Sunday service along with the Saturday rites so that Jewish shopkeepers could work on Saturday. With a Sunday service, Reformers were erasing the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity in an attempt to act more American, he said.14 Isaacs predicted that soon the twelve apostles would replace the patriarchs of the Old Testament. Wise was defensive and quickly assured his Orthodox critics that Sabbath services would remain on Saturday at his synagogue, but he did add a controversial Friday night service that eventually became accepted.15 The Orthodox recognized that some changes were necessary but believed that Reformers like Wise were carrying the changes too far and too fast—a process that Leeser labeled “ultraism” and a “woeful leaning to innovation” Page 113 → that seemed ad hoc and arbitrary.16 If Judaism was to be subject to new formulas and “a thousand poisonous quack nostrums,” Leeser said, the true undiluted faith would be lost. Leeser pointed to Einhorn's synagogue in Baltimore as one of the chief offenders of tradition—“a modern Temple that is as un-Jewish as a thing can be.”17 Traditionalists saw Reform Judaism as a watered-down Judaism, resembling Deism more than the faith of the Israelites. So much innovation could lead only to “indifference, irreligion, and finally atheism.” Leeser worried that in their zeal to adopt the lifestyle of the Christian majority, American Jews would forsake their ancient traditions. Would Americans “remodel [Judaism] so as to harmonize our duties with the circumstances of the moment?,” Leeser asked. Judaism Americanized with the trappings of Enlightened thinking would become “a mongrel mixture of philosophical speculation and a little ancient religion.”18 Such a Judaism would satisfy neither free thinkers nor people of faith. These radical assimilationists, the traditionalists warned, would lose their identity. In Leeser's words, American Jews would be eventually “swallowed up and lost among the gentiles.”19 Wise's progressive Judaism, as Reformers described it, did not fit into a single, easily adopted form. The limits of Reform were continually debated in rabbinical conferences and among the bitter rivals within the movement.

Baltimore's Einhorn was among those who challenged Wise's leadership of the Reform movement. More radical than Wise in his ideas for remaking the American liturgy, Einhorn scorned dietary restrictions and rejected a Jewish restoration in Palestine. Einhorn and Wise agreed that ritual must change with national customs. “Experience has shown the futility of all attempts to breathe life into the obsolete and dead,” Einhorn said, clearly rejecting the possibility of modifying Orthodoxy.20 Einhorn's attack on Orthodoxy as well as his refusal to accept the Board of Delegates as a representative body of American Jewry enraged traditionalists, one of whom accused Einhorn of pretensions to being a latter-day Moses; instead, his critic argued, Einhorn was a divisive preacher motivated by “meanness and cowardice.” To the traditionalists, Einhorn advocated a spiritless secularism that went “against everything Jewish and sacred.”21 Wise's success in uniting the nation's Reform congregations under his leadership resulted in part from his strategy of hewing close to the ideological center. His moderate course accepted some adaptation but rejected Einhorn's extremism. In most cases, the transition from Orthodox to Reform ritual occurred incrementally. Reformers did not overwhelm established congregations but rather introduced changes slowly. This approach often led to factionalism, with traditionalists splitting off to form separate congregations. In one Chicago Page 114 → congregation, the construction of the synagogue created controversy when Orthodox members objected to pews that faced north rather than east, as custom dictates.22 In 1870, the traditionalist congregants of a Baltimore synagogue took their Reform leaders to court on charges that they had unilaterally and illegally instituted such changes as a mixed male-female choir.23 At New York's Temple Emanu-El, the issue of head coverings during worship service divided congregants. Removing hats during Sabbath services was a big step in conforming with the decorum of Christian churches. By 1880, worshiping without head coverings or prayer shawls as well as mixed seating of men and women were acceptable not only at Emanu-El but at most Reform congregations.24 Wise's experiment with Reform started during his first tenure with an American congregation, Beth-El in Albany, New York, in 1846. By the spring of 1849, Orthodox congregants were furious at his decision to introduce a choir and female singers. Wise referred to the opposition as fanatical, but he was sent packing in 1850. He then founded an explicitly Reform congregation in Albany, Anshe Emeth, which became the first in America to eliminate seating by gender. Wise later looked back and proudly claimed credit for bringing “women into the interior of the temple [with] all privileges equal to man as far as divine worship is concerned.”25 By the late 1860s, when he had moved to Cincinnati's B'nai Jesherun, Wise was confident that the majority of Reform congregations were lining up behind his vision of a modern American synagogue. Changes in the ritual, which were resisted before the Civil War, gained acceptance in the postwar environment. In 1876, with the number of Reform congregations continuing to multiply, Wise sounded a theme that many other commentators would repeat in the bicentennial year: Reform Judaism was consistent with the American experience and would gain greater respect from the Protestant majority for its rationalism.26 Younger and bettereducated Jews assimilating into American life were more likely to be drawn back to their Jewish roots through Reform since “progress is the great watchword of our century,” Wise said. Another prominent Reform rabbi, Samuel Adler, proclaimed that “reason is the leader” in the secular and religious life of the United States. Here, the “spirit of freedom is the newly-born Messiah.”27

Promising a Century of Peace and Unity To Wise, every congregation had become a “sort of independent republic” with its own mode of worship, chanting, regulations, and prayer book. Einhorn published Page 115 → his own in 1856. Wise described the situation as full of “anarchy [and] confusion,” “a miserable state of affairs in American Israel.”28 Wise was searching for a consistent and uniform set of rules for the modern synagogue, and he was sure that his Minhag America would close the gaps among these disparate congregations of the Reform wing. It “guarantees American Judaism peace and unity for a century,” he promised, and ensures that “no Israelite be a stranger in any synagogue

he may happen to visit.”29 Wise proposed that his American rite would respect Jewish law while responding to the demands of an acculturated Jewry. Minhag America was a distinctly modern prayer book, providing English translations of the Hebrew. Wise also carefully removed excerpts from the Talmud and what he called the “cabalistical” or mystical portions of Jewish religious thought. For Wise, the Talmud was a nonbiblical compendium of insignificant laws that were superfluous to modern Judaism.30 Einhorn's radical Reformers went further, deriding the Talmud as practically worthless. And Christians viewed it with suspicion. In 1870, Wise boasted that Minhag America was being used by more than fifty U.S. congregations; four years later, he claimed that the number had doubled.31 Wise was sure that a prayer book and synagogue service that were modern and relevant to the progressive spirit of the late nineteenth century provided the perfect foundation for finally uniting American Israel, a goal that had eluded the Jewish community for more than thirty years. Indicating Wise's influence, in 1870, the U.S. Senate chose him as the first rabbi to deliver its opening prayer.32 According to historian Bertram Wallace Korn, “Wise represented a segment of the American Jewish community which was gradually reaching the height of its power and maturity,” and that segment was building synagogues at a quickening pace during this era.33 Attempts at congregational unity before the Civil War failed as a consequence of Reform and Orthodox leaders' inability to see the benefits of speaking with a single voice during times of crisis regardless of their theological differences. The Board of Delegates of American Israelites, created in response to the Mortara affair, represented a crucial first step in this direction. However, by the 1870s, the board, with its predominantly Orthodox leadership concentrated in New York and Philadelphia, was looking less and less like contemporary American Judaism. Furthermore, the Board of Delegates was criticized for not taking assertive enough stands during the surge in antiSemitic propaganda and discriminatory military edicts during the war. Even the traditionalist Jewish Messenger conceded that the Board of Delegates's effectiveness during the war was compromised by its failure to represent Reform congregations. However, Myer Isaacs told Messenger readers that the Reformers were to blame for the persistent disunity. Jewish concerns, he Page 116 → said, would never be taken seriously as long as the Board of Delegates was undermined by dissenting congregations. “We must show ourselves strong [and] determined on the vindication of our rights. How can we do this, except by a union among ourselves?”34 After the conflict, however, Isaacs asked if the Board of Delegates was outdated for the new generation of Jewish leaders—the sons and daughters of the immigrants who came to the United States before the Civil War. For the board to survive, it had to attract Jewish Americans who were born in the United States, were more prosperous than their immigrant parents, and had come of age accustomed to life in a democracy.35 By the dawning of the 1870s, the board's time was clearly over, with a membership that had dwindled to fewer than a third of the country's 180 or so congregations. And only a handful of those members were truly active in advancing the board's goals.36 Although the Board of Delegates was losing ground to Wise's vision of a united Reform Jewry, some board leaders remained bitter, blaming Wise for sabotaging their mission and charging that the Cincinnati Reformers were interested only in deciding who would lead American Jewry. These allegations certainly contain some truth. Wise was an ambitious man who often tried to drive the agenda. According to historian Sefton Temkin, Wise resisted the Board of Delegates because it was not his idea.37 With Leeser's death in 1868 and the increased number of Reform congregations, Wise was prepared to resume the task of Jewish unity under his leadership. In an 1868 letter to New York Reformer Adolph Huebsch, Wise confided that his life's work would be complete only with “one united Israel.” Even reform of the synagogue was “merely a means to re-establish unity under the pressure of the times.”38 Starting in 1869, he called for another round of rabbinical conferences. Asking for a minimum of twenty congregations to make a quorum, Wise was determined to advance the cause of Reform and his Minhag America. He told Huebsch that the success and future development of Judaism in America depended on a conference that would meet on a regular basis to continually refine and modernize the liturgy.39 While Wise was inviting religious leaders to convene under the banner of his Conference of Rabbis, Einhorn

organized a competing convention of radical Reformers. Einhorn issued his call to action in German, reflecting just how out of touch he was with developments in American Judaism. Wise made one final attempt to bring the two Reform factions together, dropping his own plans and attending Einhorn's conference in Philadelphia. Wise was ignored by the pedantic Einhorn, but Einhorn came across as a spoiler and his aspirations to national leadership of the Reform movement were finished.40 Page 117 →

Cincinnati as the Zion of the New World Wise subsequently led sessions of his Conference of Rabbis in Cleveland and New York in 1870 and in Cincinnati in 1871, when he told his congregation, “I cannot die in peace before I have secured to the American Israel the Union, Seminary and Synod.” Wise ultimately accomplished all three goals.41 Although the Conference of Rabbis was dominated by Reformers, it had to navigate a breach of opinion. “Without the radicals we stagnate,” Wise said, but “without the conservatives we outshoot the target.” Wise promised that all perspectives would be fully aired in an organization he described as a “permanent American institution…opening a new era in American Judaism.”42 Wise was aided in his rise as Reform movement leader by the pattern of Jewish settlement in the United States. In 1860, Cincinnati was the country's third-largest city, a growing commercial metropolis on the Ohio River that was fast becoming a center of American Jewish life. Not only was the Queen City a magnet for emigrating Jews, it attracted Germans of all faiths heading west. By 1860, half of Cincinnati's population was foreign-born.43 Jews in the Midwest lived and worked in closer proximity to their Christian neighbors, in large part because there were fewer urban enclaves, like New York's Lower East Side, where Jews had little contact outside their own immigrant group. This integration with the greater community was a factor in a quicker pace of acculturation and consequently the easier acceptance of Reform Judaism. Cincinnati's Reform movement was strengthened by an inherent openness to new ideas that was characteristic of the American West at that time. Unburdened by established ritual and institutions, Jews in Cincinnati and other midwestern cities were freer to create their own forms of worship. With few congregations in Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, or Illinois with a rabbi or even a leader with rabbinical training, Reformers came to a land that could be shaped to their vision of an American Judaism. Cincinnati, Wise boldly declared, “is the Zion of the New World which sent forth that light of progressive and Americanized Judaism.” The city's first Jewish settler had arrived in 1817, and over the next four and a half decades, the Jewish population increased to about ten thousand. From his pulpit at B'nai Jesherun, Wise made Cincinnati “the cradle of the American Jewish Reform movement.”44 When Wise convened his 1871 Conference of Rabbis in Cincinnati, he made the strongest push yet for a permanent congregational union. He called on Reformers to organize a synod representing at least twenty congregations with Page 118 → a total of two thousand members.45 That synod finally met with thirty-four congregations from thirteen states on July 8, 1873, to erect a Reform-led rival to the Board of Delegates. The founding members of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) included synagogues from Louisville, Memphis, Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Evansville, Indiana, but the Cincinnati congregations were unquestionably in charge. Eleven of the UAHC executive board's twenty members came from the Queen City.46 Wise had stitched together the competing forces in the Reform movement. He admitted his own cautious nature when he claimed that he could be classified as both Reform and Orthodox or as neither Reform nor Orthodox; rather, he was a “historical Jew.”47 This ambiguity and semantic juggling act were certainly meant to hold together the conservative and liberal trends in the Reform movement when it came to the all-important goal of union. The reaction from the Orthodox establishment was predictable, and even some in the Reform camp attacked Wise and the UAHC. Most congregations from the Eastern Seaboard were absent from the synod and were suspicious

that Wise was trying to single-handedly seal the fate of the Board of Delegates and dictate the shape of American Judaism. A rabbi from New Haven, Connecticut, said that although his synagogue would join and that he was “heart and soul” with the Union, the founders needed to do a better job of attracting East Coast congregations: “I regret to say that I know but very few of my Eastern colleagues advocating for the Union. The sectional lines between East and West are not yet disregarded as they should be.”48 Still others were hostile from the very beginning: The founding of the UAHC represented a call to “warfare with the Board of Delegates,” thundered one Charleston congregation. To Einhorn, Wise was the “Barnum of the Jewish pulpit” and a man who “arrogates to himself the role of dictator.”49

“We Have No Use for Dead Cargo” Trying to cast as wide a net as possible, Wise avoided theological discussions. The object of the UAHC, he said, was to “preserve and advance the union of Israel” in America. Wise traveled extensively to sell the new group to congregations in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, saying, “Let us set aside all petty questions of rivalry.”50 Congregations were asked to contribute a dues of one dollar per congregant, with the total to be paid in two installments. Wise also made it clear that any Jews who were not members of a congregation were Page 119 → not fulfilling their duty. Join a congregation “or leave us for good,” Wise insisted. “We have no use for dead cargo.”51 Despite the naysayers, even the most recalcitrant Reform congregations in the East joined the UAHC before long. The Jewish Messenger conceded that there was finally “a united movement in the interest of Judaism.” The Board of Delegates's 1875 annual meeting was poorly attended, and in the Messenger's estimation, the proceedings were “of less interest than usual.”52 Doctrinal differences among the shades of American Judaism appeared less important than creating institutions that were wholly American in form. By 1871, Wise was confident that through his efforts, “the days of disunion and dissension are closing.” By 1875, the UAHC's membership had doubled to seventy-two congregations with more than four thousand members.53 The urge to bridge the gap between rival congregations on the local level also gathered momentum. In Nashville, Jewish congregations that had been “torn into factions” for almost two decades agreed in 1874 to build a common house of worship. In what was clearly a recognition of the growing influence of the city's Jewish community, former president Andrew Johnson attended the ceremonies to lay the cornerstone.54 The small Jewish community in Paducah, Kentucky, established its first synagogue in 1871. After what one congregant described as heated discussions over proper head coverings as well as family pews that sat men and women together, the Reform faction won out and “a majority of [the congregation's] members abandoned Orthodoxy.”55 An important order of business for the UAHC was to fold the Board of Delegates under the new group's wings. Defenders of the UAHC assured congregations in New York and Philadelphia that the tasks of the two organizations could be merged and, in Wise's words, “no rivalry need exist.” Simon Wolf convinced many in the East that the overall goal of Jewish unity, so often frustrated by infighting, was paramount to combat antiSemitism either on Coney Island or on the shores of the Danube. It was foolish to divide American congregations as East or West, Wolf said: “It is high time to bury the hatchet…. I am for Peace and Union.”56 In 1878, at Wolf's urging, the Board of Delegates became a committee within the UAHC and became known as the Board of Delegates on Civil and Religious Rights, the first modern lobbying group for Jewish causes. Wolf, with his extensive connections on Capitol Hill and the White House, led the committee from his Washington law offices. With the official merger of the two organizations, a balanced governing body was established, with half of its thirty members from the East and half from the West.57 The Jewish Messenger acknowledged that the Board of Delegates and UAHC Page 120 → were making substantial progress in bridging the gap between regions “so that sectionalism shall be ended.” As the two organizations were being merged, the Messenger's editors praised those on both sides who were leaving behind “personal jealousies and misconceptions” for the sake of American Judaism.58 In 1879, Myer Isaacs, formerly a bitter opponent of Wise and his Cincinnati power structure, “cordially welcome[d] the Union to the Atlantic coast.” The Board of Delegates, in historian Allan Tarshish's estimation, served as “a midwife for a stronger and

more definitive future” for American Jews.59 One of the UAHC's first priorities was opening a college to train succeeding generations of American religious leaders. Wise wanted a seminary that would serve all shades of Reform Judaism and would not only train American rabbis but also offer a general course of study to “teach Israelites to be citizens of the world, to be men.” Wise sought to ensure that Jewish education in America was uniform and above all modern.60 This was not Wise's first attempt to create an institution of Jewish higher learning in the United States. In 1855, with the help of Henry Mack and other Cincinnati commercial leaders, Wise opened Zion College, but it closed just one year later. Antebellum Cincinnati was still considered a Jewish backwater, and Wise's insistence that the college be located there alienated East Coast congregations, which quickly withdrew their support. Wise blamed the failure on everyone but himself. The college, he said, was opposed by both the Orthodox and “aesthetes who, to be in fashion, affected atheism.” He even hinted that opponents were aligned with the newly formed Republican Party. After the failure of Zion College, Wise declared, “I would have nothing to do with these people, even politically.”61 East Coast traditionalists opened another short-lived seminary in Philadelphia in 1867. Maimonides College was a project of the Board of Delegates and Leeser, who also served as provost. Wise stridently condemned Maimonides College's Orthodox hue, calling its courses “humbug” and devoid of reason. He referred to the faculty as fanatical and ignorant, “a laughing stock of every informed man.” The Board of Delegates struck back, claiming that as the only Jewish college in America, Maimonides was entitled to support from both Reform and Orthodox Jews.62 Defenders of Maimonides College blamed its failure on liberals and Cincinnati Reformers who were determined to destroy this experiment in Jewish higher education simply to advance their own agenda. The reasons for the failure of Maimonides College were more nuanced, however. It was poorly funded and had no library, and by the late 1860s, the Board of Delegates was clearly losing ground. After Leeser's death, Maimonides College was left without the rabbi's strong moral support or funds, and it closed its doors in 1873 having graduated only three people. Page 121 →

Hebrew Union College In defending his position that a Reform seminary should again be built in Cincinnati, Wise boasted that the city's “Israelites occupy a high and respectable social position.” He argued that Cincinnati was centrally located and accessible by river and rail and had a fresh “Western style” of doing business and “plenty of energy.”63 In words that clearly offended traditionalists in New York and Philadelphia, Wise said that the Midwest congregations represented the future of American Judaism, having “embraced the cause of Reform [for] the elevation and Americanization of Judaism.” New York, conversely, was “no place for the education of rabbis” because it was too expensive and full of tempting distractions.64 In 1875, remembering the financial problems that plagued previous attempts to operate a seminary, Wise sought a permanent organizing body that would govern the school and finance it via payments from individual congregations. It would also appoint officers and even select faculty. This approach, Wise said, would be in harmony with U.S. democratic traditions. By pooling their resources, the synagogues would create a stable institution with real financial backing. Only such a seminary could attract serious students seeking a college education or rabbinical training, and Wise believed that if the congregations owned the seminary, they would work for its success.65 A seminary would also ensure a steady supply of well-trained religious leaders for a growing Jewish community that was settling far from the larger cities. Smaller congregations had difficulty affording full-time religious teachers or rabbis and often found themselves with poorly trained clergy who charged fees but offered little spiritual guidance. One congregant from Iowa reported having one spiritual leader who was “addicted to strong drink” while another kept “bad company.” Wise promised that his seminary would educate honest, well-trained

“ministers who are American with heart and soul.”66 On October 3, 1875, a few of these future American ministers of the faith began classes at Cincinnati's newly opened Hebrew Union College. Wise served as president, and Mack headed the college's board of governors. It was a “little hole-in-the-wall of a school…carrying the pompous name of college,” Wise later recalled, but the word Union in its name implied the hope that the school would bring some order to the chaotic state of clerical affairs by building bridges between Judaism's factions.67 True to Wise's vision, Hebrew Union College was tasked with educating a new generation of Jewish clergy to a standard of professionalism. Wise looked to the congregations of the UAHC as well as to Jewish merchants, bankers and capitalists for financial support. He knew that without Page 122 → an endowment, parents would be reluctant to invest in tuition for fear that the school would have insufficient resources and would close.68 The UAHC and Hebrew Union College represented the new American Judaism born out of the events that tested Jewish resolve to unify and acculturate—the Mortara affair, the outrageous anti-Semitic propaganda in the nation's newspapers during the Civil War, edicts aimed specifically at Jews by military commanders, and signs in shop windows telling Jews they need not apply for employment. “The new American Judaism of the 1870s,” says historian Leon Jick, “was not an importation from abroad and not the creation of rabbis.” The UAHC and Hebrew Union College were led by what Wolf termed commonsense men, not doctrinaire rabbis engaged in “too many hair-splitting differences.”69 Wise envisioned these institutions of American Reform Judaism uprooting the faith from the ghettos of Europe, “shelv[ing] for good” the long beards and foreign dress of the Jews of Poland. “This is a new country,” he proclaimed, “with new conceptions and a new future.”70 During the U.S. centennial celebration, Wise said proudly and with his usual bravado that his efforts “made American Israel, American.” Jewish leaders in the late 1870s looked back to the darkest days of the Civil War and assessed their progress. With the establishment of the UAHC and the opening of Hebrew Union College, Reformers claimed that American Jews were now among the most progressive in the world. “This is our triumph,” Wise said, “and this has planted Judaism forever on American soil.”71 In 1874, Wise told his readers that the Israelite would henceforth be named the American Israelite. It reflected the fact that “the Hebrew is Americanized” and “perfectly at home in this blessed country.” Wise had also insisted that the name of the congregational union include the word American.72 By 1881, the UAHC's membership included 123 of the 200 largest American congregations. Wise was certain that with Reform solidly in place, Jews would no longer be viewed as a curiosity from Poland or Germany but as “American, and fully so, in language, spirit, and form.”73 However, during the 1880s, 1890s, and first decade of the twentieth century, the Americanized community of German Jewish businessmen, civic leaders, and patrons of the arts would face a new challenge—the mass migration of Jews from a part of Europe that knew little of the Reform movement or the country across the sea that would be their new home.

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12 Violence in the Backwaters of Europe From the late 1860s through the early twentieth century, Jews came under increasing attack in the Russian Empire. Pogroms were nothing new, but by the middle of the nineteenth century wholesale persecution reached new heights, with Jews finding themselves deprived of their rights, starved, and murdered. They sought refuge by the thousands in the United States. The German Jewish community was divided on how best to accommodate this migration of coreligionists coming from the backward fringes of Europe. But American Jews were united in pressing succeeding presidential administrations to apply diplomatic pressure to the court of St. Petersburg to relieve the suffering in places unfamiliar to most Americans. Ulysses S. Grant's appeal to Czar Alexander II in 1869 was the first in a long series of actions by Washington, lasting through the Cold War, on behalf of Russian Jews. Grant and his more reluctant secretary of state, Hamilton Fish might have ignored this cause so far from home had it not been for the voice of a more confident and acculturated American Jewry emerging from the Civil War years.

The Czar's Ukase With defeat at the hands of Britain and France during the Crimean War in 1856, Russia was forced to cede territory to Moldavia. New borders meant that Jews had to be displaced and moved further into the interior. A law benefitting Christian merchants who sought a monopoly in cross-border trade stipulated that Jews could not live in cities less than seven and a half miles from the border. Page 124 → In November 1869, the czar ordered as many as twenty thousand people displaced.1 American Jewish leaders agreed with their European counterparts that the Russian edict was the critical issue facing world Jewry. On November 30, Simon Wolf went to the White House for a meeting with the president and Treasury Secretary George Boutwell. Wolf presented a petition addressed not only to the U.S. government but also to the Russian ambassador that appealed to Czar Alexander II's humanity.2 Alexander had freed the serfs in 1861 and was often compared to Lincoln. Wolf even intimated that the czar's ukase was more to appease “an ignorant and cruel peasantry” than a reflection of his true feelings.3 Wolf asked Grant to convince the czar to revoke the order before winter, when thousands of refugees would face starvation or freezing to death. Added to this misery was a famine that swept through parts of Lithuania and Poland, a cholera epidemic in 1868, and harsh restrictions that kept Jews from farming the land or leaving the Pale of Settlement. Grant did not hesitate, promising diplomatic pressure. He also assured Wolf that Washington would mediate between Jewish organizations and the court at St. Petersburg. Moreover, Grant would transmit a personal letter to Alexander. The spirit of the age, Grant said, ran contrary to racial or religious persecution.4 Wolf effusively praised Grant's decision, which gave “a moral impetus to struggling people everywhere.” Wolf also said that Grant's quick response to the plight of Russian Jews also should completely dispel the accusations of anti-Semitism. He has “shown his humanity [and] by one word answered the query of politicians as to whether he fosters prejudice against Jews.”5 With his typical zest for exaggeration, Wolf saw the U.S. government's initial promises as the dawning of a new age for Jews worldwide: “We are nearing the day of complete vindication as a people.” By intervening diplomatically, Wolf believed, the United States was fulfilling its mandate as a refuge for the persecuted.6 This optimism and faith that Washington could prevail on the czar proved to be far more difficult to accomplish than Wolf first realized. Secretary of State Fish was less than enthusiastic in pursuing what was to him a foreign policy sideshow. Consumed mostly by the task of reassembling the Union and Reconstruction in the South, the Grant administration was not overly concerned with matters overseas. Aside from an anti-Spanish insurgency in

Cuba, little beyond U.S. shores attracted the president's attention. The U.S. Navy prepared for possible intervention on the side of the Cuban rebels, but for the most part, the Grant administration's foreign policy was consistent with the way the majority of Americans viewed the world beyond their borders—“a languid interest,” in the words of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1889.7 Page 125 → Early in December 1869, Fish informed Wolf that he was reluctant to act after receiving assurances from the Russian government that “the Israelites…now enjoy all the civil and political privileges allowed to other subjects.”8 Fish was told that some Jews were represented in the highest councils of government and that the czar had even commissioned the building of a new synagogue in St. Petersburg. Without sufficient evidence of largescale persecution and “in the absence of details,” Fish was not prepared to interfere in Russian internal affairs. With an enlightened Alexander II on the throne, surely the rumor of Jewish expulsions “rests upon some misapprehension of fact or upon some exaggeration,” Fish said in a letter widely reprinted in the Jewish press.9 Furthermore, the U.S. consul in St. Petersburg, Andrew G. Curtin, reported that Jews had brought this calamity on themselves. Echoing the charges leveled by American anti-Semites during the Civil War, he accused Jewish merchants of attempting to monopolize trade at the Russian borders and engaging in smuggling.10 Fish's reluctance to press the czar may have been motivated by a desire to retain the amicable relations between the United States and Russia that was evident in a commercial treaty signed in 1832. The abolition of serfdom in Russia and the Emancipation Proclamation were viewed as proof of the two countries' shared ideals, and during the Civil War, Russia remained steadfastly pro-Union while Britain tilted toward the Confederacy. Wolf felt betrayed by Fish's insistence that the Russian Jews were under no threat of forced exile. He informed Adolphe Cremieux of the French Alliance Israelite Universelle of the State Department's indifference and cornered members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for an answer. Cremieux cabled Wolf to tell him that Fish was being misled by the Russians—“the expatriations are to continue” through the dead of winter.11 Wolf expressed his outrage with the State Department, demanding to know why “we have been so cavalierly treated.” Fish apparently got the message and wrote to Curtin asking him to “make diligent but careful inquiry.”12

Russian Jewry and the Election of 1872 Curtin was not hopeful that the czar would rescind his edict in the face of a U.S. protest. He told Fish in January 1870 that “it would seem to me that no action on the part of the United States would change the policy of the Russian government in this matter,” but the Romanov court did allow families to stay in Kishinev, the largest of the cities under the order, until the spring. Only single men, presumably a criminal element, according to Russian officials, were Page 126 → to be removed at once.13 It was a small victory, but Wolf would take it. Wolf disproved Curtin's assumption that no pressure from Washington could move the implacable czar. President Grant was credited with encouraging the State Department to act more resolutely. The B'nai B'rith weighed in with its praise for the president, and the organization's leaders accompanied Wolf to the White House in February to personally thank Grant, who apparently enjoyed the attention and “was highly pleased with this recognition.”14 Grant's motives in lending support to Russian Jews appear to have been born out of a sincere concern and likely out of his deepening friendship with Wolf. Historian Evelyn Levow Greenberg suggests that “Grant's action was a genuine expression of good will to the Jewish people.”15 A more cynical explanation may be a recognition that Jewish votes mattered by the 1870s. In 1872, just weeks before election day, the U.S. chargé d'affaires in St. Petersburg, Eugene Schuyler, wrote to Secretary of State Fish that any lingering Jewish opposition to Grant's reelection could be countered “if the government gave them another proof of the interest [it] takes in their welfare” in places far from the United States.16 Consequently, Schuyler wrote a comprehensive report, “Memorandum on the Legal Position of the Hebrews in Russia.” “I hope it will not arrive too late” to be of service, he told Fish, “but the preparation of it was delayed by the amount of reading and research necessary to make it accurate.” In the report, Schuyler expressed his disapproval of Russian laws restricting Jewish professions and settlement.17

At age thirty-three, Wolf was winning a reputation as a Washington insider with privileged access to the highest official circles. Over the next five decades, Wolf occupied a central position in defending Jewish rights in the United States and abroad. He remained instrumental in pressuring official Washington to alleviate the sufferings of East European Jewry and to keep the gates open to immigrants seeking refuge in the New World.18 Russian Jews in the 1870s were not alone facing persecution in the eastern backwaters of Europe. As in Russia, the redrawing of borders and the movement of peoples in Romania after the Crimean War was the catalyst for anti-Jewish violence. With the 1856 Treaty of Paris, Russia ceded the territories of Moldavia and Wallachia to Romania, and they received autonomy under the rule of Prince Charles. The signatories of the treaty pledged to guarantee equal rights for all, but after Romanian nationalists united the two principalities in 1862, Jews were subject to expulsions and attack. Jewish leaders in the United States, Britain, and France asked the European powers to enforce the treaty's equal rights provisions but received little response.19 By 1867, conditions quickly deteriorated for Moldavian Jews when new trade Page 127 → regulations made it nearly impossible for them to earn a living. Rumors circulated in the countryside that Jews were cornering certain trades, speculating in currency, and sought to create a separate state inside Moldavia. Jewish residents were barred from owning inns, alehouses, distilleries, and any amount of land. Consequently they could not farm, a particular hardship during food shortages.20 Moldavian Jews were excluded from the legal and medical professions in 1864 and 1868, respectively. They were forced to serve in the army but could not attain any rank. The Ministry of the Interior countenanced an ethnic cleansing that saw the eviction of Jewish families from entire villages in 1867, and wholesale anti-Jewish violence erupted in 1868 and 1869.21 For President Grant, events in Romania probably seemed very distant, but with the visit to the United States of Hayyim Zvi Sneersohn, a self-styled holy man, Grant was drawn into Jewish affairs in a part of the world he scarcely thought about. Sneersohn's great-grandfather had founded the mystical Lubavitch line of Hasidic rabbis. The Russian-born Sneersohn, who was an early advocate for a Jewish state, emigrated with his family to Palestine and subsequently traveled the world to raise funds for Jewish settlements and the rebuilding of holy sites.22 Sneersohn conducted an American speaking tour in 1869, lecturing on the conditions of the Jewish diaspora and the remnant of about three thousand Jews in Jerusalem.23 He told American audiences that the day would soon arrive when all Jews would return to Palestine. In an April visit to Fish, Sneersohn made his case for consular protection for Jews in the Holy Land facing hostile neighbors. He also asked for the ouster of the U.S. consul in Jerusalem, who was accused of Christian proselytizing.24 Fish promised a quick response, and the consul was recalled. Sneersohn was now ready to turn his attention to an even more pressing matter, the pogroms in Romania. In January 1870, Sneersohn wrote to Grant that “the children of Israel live [in Romania] as a scattered flock of defenseless sheep,” proposing that the president appoint a Jewish consul to Bucharest who could mediate on their behalf with the full authority of the American government.25

Bloodshed in Moldavia Americans were shocked by reports in May 1870 of a massacre in the Moldavian city of Botoshani. Jewish leaders across the country urged the administration to take action. Henry Mack and Isaac Mayer Wise mobilized Cincinnati's congregations to demand immediate action from Congress and the White House, Page 128 → even as some people questioned the initial reports of murder on a mass scale. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, knew little about Judaism in Romania or America: According to Wolf, Sumner “knew more of the Negro in Africa than of his fellow Jewish citizens [but] he was anxious to be enlightened.”26 Learning of the brutality in Botoshani, Sumner characterized the pogroms as “so absolutely horrible that it is difficult to believe.”27 Other members of Congress, however, were less sympathetic. Senator William Sprague of Rhode Island seemed to justify the pogroms when he said that Jewish merchants represented “a rich trading, monopolizing class.” Sprague's not-so-thinly veiled anti-Semitism was challenged by another senator who wondered if it would be “a dangerous rule to establish that a man, when he gets rich, shall be killed.”28 American Jews feared that they had little time to spare to save their coreligionists from further violence. Without a

consular representative, the State Department had no reliable information and no leverage with the Romanian government. With Wolf and Myer Isaacs making the rounds in Washington, letters from the Seligman brothers, and the strong support of Rabbi Sneersohn, Grant appointed as consul Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, a thirty-sixyear-old New York lawyer of Sephardic stock.29 Sneersohn backed Peixotto in the hopes that he would press for a Romanian exodus to Palestine; however, Peixotto proved to be an independent thinker, rejecting Sneersohn's agenda and leading to a break between the two men. Peixotto saw Palestine as a fine destination for saints or those willing to tough it out in an unforgiving landscape.30 The United States, conversely, was the right place for tradesmen and aspiring entrepreneurs. In a letter to another advocate of American emigration, Leon Horowitz, Peixotto said that “if 20,000 or 30,000 [Jews] could leave Rumania to go to our good and blessed land of America, it would be a great boon to those who go and to those who remain.”31 Before taking up his residence in Bucharest, Peixotto had to address the persistent problem of finances. The post of consul was to be unsalaried, putting the burden of financing the mission on the American Jewish community, including wealthy donors such as the Seligmans. Despite the generosity of some Americans, Peixotto's entire fiveyear stay in Bucharest was plagued with difficulties making ends meet. Accompanied by Wolf, Peixotto was received by the president on December 8, 1870. Grant related “the story of the sufferings of the Hebrews of Roumania[, which] profoundly touches every sensibility of our nature. It is one long series of outrage and wrong.” Peixotto's instructions from the State Department before departing were more explicit: Any actions on behalf of Romanian Jews would Page 129 → be unofficial.32 In the fashion of a seasoned Washington player, Wolf stopped by the office of the Associated Press to leak news of the president's stance on Romania, which he believed “would make the name of General Grant immortal.” Wolf thought that his personal relationship with the president would bring the plight of persecuted Jews in Eastern Europe into focus for an American public unfamiliar with the word pogrom.33

“The Ku Klux of Roumania” Arriving in Bucharest in February 1871, Peixotto was not warmly received. One Bucharest newspaper referred to his appointment as an attempt by American Jews to convert the country into “a filthy Palestine.” By mid-1871, however, the anti-Jewish agitation of the previous years appeared to have subsided. Peixotto reported back to the State Department that “the moral influence” of the United States had put an end to the worst violations of human rights.34 While individual cases of discrimination might be hard to eliminate in a culture where anti-Semitism was ingrained, Prince Charles was becoming more enlightened. American Jewish leaders credited Peixotto with carrying the ideas of American tolerance and democracy to a part of Europe where a medieval worldview still persisted. That optimism was shattered in January 1872 when pogroms occurred in the cities of Ismail and Cahul. When rumors circulated in Ismail that a church was looted and vandalized, several residents, including the town's rabbi, were beaten and arrested. Riots followed in Cahul, a small town of about seven thousand people, where Jewish homes were plundered and torched. In addition, Peixotto reported, “blood has been shed.”35 Jews from both towns pleaded for diplomatic intervention, and the American consulate became a refuge for terrified townspeople. Joined by European diplomats in Bucharest, Peixotto filed a protest with Prince Charles. These rioters, Peixotto told Fish, were “the Ku Klux of Roumania.”36 Back in the United States, the New York Times editorialized, “This is not an epoch for advanced nations to fold their hands and look on with mere wonder at such sickening barbarities.”37 Fish lodged a protest with Prince Charles but avoided anything that might appear as if the United States intended to interfere in what was an internal problem. In a meeting with a particularly attentive Secretary Fish, Wolf and Washington businessman Adolphus Solomons convinced the State Department to modify its position and give Peixotto more leeway to speak forcefully to Romanian authorities. Even as those officials demanded that the consul be recalled, Page 130 → the administration concluded that more should be done. Fish instructed Peixotto, “Do anything which you discreetly can…toward preventing a recurrence or continuance of the persecution.”38 While he continued to appeal to Prince Charles to stem the violence, Peixotto also saw his mission as educating

Romanian Jewry. Peixotto was sure that to some degree anti-Semitism was rooted in the habits of the Jews themselves. He founded the Zion Society, telling Wolf that Romanian Jews needed a strong dose of Western education to make them more acculturated. That meant establishing secular schools and support for Reform Judaism. Freedom from persecution, Peixotto believed, began with emancipation from the superstitions and ceremonies of the past. The consul urged Romania's Jews to look toward the United States, where Eastern European Jews “cast off old customs and became assimilated with the nation.”39 At the same time, the Jewish Messenger was encouraged by the czar's attempts to Russianize the empire's Jewish subjects. After visiting Alexander II at the Winter Palace in 1872, Moses Montefiore, who headed the Board of Deputies of British Jews, reported back that he was pleased to see modern ritual in the St. Petersburg synagogues and observed that “the Jews now dress like any gentlemen in England, France or Germany.”40 Like Peixotto, the Messenger duly noted the difference between Russians and Romanians in their “antiquated garb” and modern, patriotic American Jews who aspired to acculturation both in dress and manners.41 A combination of Peixotto's financial woes, his declining health, and Romanian efforts to kick him out of the country led to his return to the United States in 1876. During Peixotto's last two years in Romania and beyond, conditions for Jews showed little improvement. In early 1877, Wolf and Peixotto told President Rutherford B. Hayes that without a paid U.S. consul, the pogroms were being revived with a vengeance.42 Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to characterize Peixotto's mission to Romania a failure. In an 1878 report, the Board of Delegates noted that the conditions for the more than two hundred thousand Jews living in the Romanian principalities would have been far worse without his oversight and the open dialogue with Prince Charles and the European powers.43 The Russian and Romanian persecutions of the 1870s set into motion events that dramatically changed the nature of American Judaism. Peixotto was not alone in urging Romanian and other Eastern European Jews to set sail for American shores, and as the tempo of persecutions escalated in Russia in the 1880s and 1890s, the number of refugees crowding into U.S. ports of entry swelled. These new arrivals presented a dilemma for the German Jewish congregations already well situated in what they called the Golden Land. Page 131 → The opening years of the 1880s were marked by revolutionary violence in Russia; as in the past, the government's fiercest attacks targeted the Jews. In 1880, Wolf and Solomons went to Secretary of State William Evarts to lodge a protest to Czar Alexander II. Sounding like Fish a decade earlier, Evarts said he could not recommend that the U.S. mission to St. Petersburg make any formal demands on the czar: Treatment of the Jews was an internal Russian matter.

“Robbed, Slain and Hunted Like Wild Beasts” On March 1, 1881, Alexander II, the Liberator Czar, was assassinated by the revolutionary People's Will. Pogroms followed for more than a year in two hundred cities across the empire. The American ambassador to St. Petersburg, John Foster, informed the State Department of a wave of violence that was horrifying in its extent and brutality. As the Israelite reported, “Jews have been robbed, slain and hunted like wild beasts.”44 Foster hoped that the massacres would lead to international pressure on the newly crowned Alexander III to remove harshly discriminatory legislation. By early 1882, as the czarist crackdown continued against radicals, particularly Jews, American and European Jews mobilized with fund-raising and public meetings in London, Washington, New York and other cities. The State Department called on the Russian government to end the violence as well as to end discrimination against American Jews conducting business in Russia.45 But there would be no reprieve. In May 1882, Alexander III expelled half a million Jews from rural areas and forced them into the Pale of Settlement after Christian merchants complained about competition.46 Americans generally were shocked at the wholesale destruction of Jewish villages. The New York Times reported widespread revulsion “when the world is told that men are murdered, infants burned to death, [and] women

outraged.” Poet Emma Lazarus, whose words are inscribed at the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, persuaded DeWitt Seligman to organize relief efforts, resulting in a packed meeting at New York's Chickering Hall on February 1, 1882.47 Participants at the meeting drew up a petition to the czar: among the signers were former Missouri senator and secretary of the interior Carl Schurz, New York Tribune editor and diplomat Whitelaw Reid, and Ulysses S. Grant. Wolf, who was instrumental in getting Grant to sign the Chickering Hall proclamation, thought the resolutions asking the government to apply pressure on St. Petersburg would have more weight with the support of both Jews and Christians, especially a man of Grant's prominence.48 Although Grant did not attend the Chickering Hall meeting, the tabloid pundits cynically saw a political motive as Page 132 → Grant was still considered a viable candidate for the presidency. The humorists at Puck printed a cartoon in the February 15, 1882, issue that portrayed Grant draped in crocodile skin and shedding crocodile tears with the words “Jewish Vote 1884” reflected in the pool of tears. To underscore the point, Puck contrasted the words “Army Order No. 11” with “Sympathy For The Persecuted JEWS OF RUSSIA” under the caption, “THEN AND NOW. 1862 AND 1882.” As the attacks on Jews heightened, the pressure to emigrate strengthened. In July 1881, the editors of a Russian newspaper, Razsvet (Dawn) took the position that the best hope for Jewish survival was to leave Russia. Not all members in the intellectual community agreed. Many middle-class Russian Jews had supported the martyred Alexander II, who was more tolerant than many of his predecessors. Others had no hope that conditions in Russia would ever improve, particularly after the monarch's assassination. For one writer to Razsvet, the only course of action was “well-organized emigration, primarily to America,” while others expressed uncertainty that America was indeed the Promised Land. In October 1881, Moses Leib Lilienblum published The General Jewish Question and Palestine, arguing that even in America, Jews would be foreigners. “We need to have our corner,” he wrote, “we need Palestine.”49 However Ellis Island, not Palestine, was the overwhelming choice of destination for the Jews of the Russian Empire. In the immediate aftermath of the 1881 pogroms, thirteen thousand Jews emigrated from Russia to the United States. They arrived with practically nothing in their pockets, spoke Yiddish, and practiced the Orthodox faith. Their customs and habits, considered hopelessly backward, were unappealing even to the German Jewish community. Prior to 1881, according to George Price, a diarist and historian of the period, “American Jews had a very faint conception of the Russian Jews.”50 The Russian newcomers quickly sensed a solid wall of class and ethnic division and perceived the acculturated and well-heeled Germans as the yahudim, or “uptown Jews.” As early as 1870, the Jewish Messenger raised concerns about acculturating the mass migration from Eastern Europe, many of whom were “ignorant of our language and perhaps without trades or profession.” And in 1884, the editors wrote that anyone who seriously considered that three million Russian Jews could settle in America was goodhearted but clearly lacking in common sense.51

“Let Them Emigrate Is Easier Said Than Done” The Board of Delegates warned that after making the difficult voyage across the continent and the Atlantic, “shipped like so many cattle,” these mostly impoverished Page 133 → peasants would be hard-pressed to scratch out a living. It would be a “painful and discouraging experience.” Charities were stretched to the limit—even the five hundred thousand dollars that the United Hebrew Charities spent each year through much of the 1880s was inadequate.52 Some American congregations were concerned that Jewish relief organizations in Europe were dumping Russian and Polish paupers on U.S. shores. The American Hebrew warned the Jews of France and Germany, “know that you are inviting a danger to us. You send us hither a multitude of men, women and children whom we cannot sustain.” During a Paris visit in 1882, Wolf told European relief organizations they should provide each emigrant one hundred dollars before departure.53 In an October 1881 letter to the French Alliance Israelite Universelle, Manuel A. Kursheedt, a director of the United Hebrew Charities, exasperatedly explained that while there was demand in the United States for skilled mechanics and “able-bodied laborers,” fully a third of the Russian arrivals sent by the French were either unskilled or penniless. A year later, Kursheedt was more direct with his counterparts in Paris: “We will not receive another refugee. Funds here exhausted. Emigration must cease.”54 In some cases, those who lacked any skills or were too

infirm to work were sent back. United Hebrew Charities sanctioned the return to Russia of almost a thousand arrivals in 1887 and almost fourteen hundred the following year. Wolf warned, “The unemployed are a menace in every direction.” Americans, he said, “must look to the future of our country.”55 Showing little sympathy for the unrefined masses from the East, Wise proposed that Jews remain in Russia to “stand their ground, and fight it out to the bitter end.” Now was not the time to emigrate, he said, calculating that it would require up to five million dollars to bring just ten thousand families to the United States. And millions would be left behind. “Let them emigrate is easier said than done,” said Wise. Instead, he called on American congregations to “send [Eastern European Jews the] means to relieve immediate wants” and mobilize worldwide public opinion to influence the czar.56 These proposals could not be taken seriously given the ingrained antiSemitism of the Romanov dynasty and the Jews' desperation to leave Russia. The numbers of Jews clamoring to enter American ports did not abate. Between 1881 and 1910, more than 1.5 million Eastern European Jews came to the United States, three-quarters of them from the lands of the Russian Empire.57 Such numbers overwhelmed U.S. Jewish organizations. In 1881, Kursheedt was among the yahudim who created the Hebrew Emigrant and Aid Society (HEAS) in an attempt to find homes for the families crowding onto Ellis Island. And as soon as they are settled, the immediate task of HEAS, Kursheedt said, was to “Americanize these persecuted brethren.”58 HEAS established temporary Page 134 → lodging for many newcomers, but the organization came into bitter conflict with Polish congregations, who were outraged that their German brethren did nothing to help the poorest of immigrants or the infirm, many of whom were sent back to Russia. Polish and Russian congregations consequently organized their own relief efforts in New York and other cities. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) was one such organization of Polish Jews far more sympathetic to the new wave of Orthodox refugees unfamiliar with life outside the shtetl.59 Yahudim and Ostjuden The yahudim had little in common, aside from core religious beliefs, with Eastern European Jews. Class and culture constituted strong dividing lines between uptown and Lower East Side Jews. Germans and Eastern Europeans rarely mixed socially. The Harmony Club of New York advertised to its German Jewish clientele that the ostjuden were excluded with the slogan “More polish and less Polish.” Price bluntly observed that “the aroma and sight of these Russians annoy the gentlemen of Fifth Avenue.”60 For the Jewish community defining its place in the United States of the Gilded Age but facing the barriers of social discrimination, the crucial problem remained how the accelerating mass invasion of backward coreligionists could be accommodated and Americanized. San Francisco rabbi Jacob Voorsanger was among those in the German American establishment who warned that the “invasion from the East [would] undo the work of two generations of American Jews” and suggested that immigration be curtailed.61 Kursheedt told the French relief agencies that only those Russians and Poles who could quickly acculturate were welcome. “Please bear constantly in mind,” he said, “that the position of the Jews in America is not such that they can well afford to run any risk of incurring the ill-feelings of their fellow citizens.”62 If the distinction between the acculturated German Jews and the Russians is erased in the minds of Gentiles, everything for which the yahudim had worked over the past four decades would be threatened. To Kursheedt, a successful New York attorney from one of the most prestigious Jewish families, the Russians were “ignorant of…our methods of conducting business.” He saw them stuck in the stereotypical Jewish occupations, which only inhibited their acculturation. “We are overrun with peddlers already who have become a source of much annoyance to us,” he wrote.63 Higher crime rates within the tenements of the Lower East Side and the appeal of radical ideologies that had no place Page 135 → in America prompted the UAHC to warn at its 1892 annual convention that “if there should grow up in our midst a class of people abnormal and objectionable to our fellow citizens, all of us will suffer.”64 Some Jews took an even harder line, especially in smaller cities, where the newcomers would be less likely to

blend into the background. The United Jewish Charities of Rochester, New York, called the Russians “a curse to the Jews. The Jews have earned an enviable reputation in the United States, but this has been undermined by the influx of thousands who are not ripe [for] the enjoyment of liberty.”65 Despite the aloofness and occasional hostility, most acculturated American Jews were dedicated—or at least resigned—to uplifting their Russian brethren. Lazarus spent her Sunday afternoons leading English-language instruction for young Jewish women. In Chicago, the German Jewish president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, Julius Rosenwald, helped found the Chicago Hebrew Institute, which also sought to Americanize through education. To the yahudim, acculturation might also be achieved through farming and other occupations not necessarily associated with immigrant Jews. Transforming the Russians into self-sufficient farmers far from the cities of the Northeast would prove to Christians that Jews, regardless of their origin, could be molded into true Americans. Certain quarters of the major cities clearly reminded the uptown Jews of the European ghettos they had left behind. New York's Jewish population mushroomed from roughly sixty thousand in 1878 to six hundred thousand by 1906. Over the same period, Philadelphia's Jewish population increased from twelve thousand to one hundred thousand, while the number of Jews in Chicago grew from ten thousand to one hundred thousand.66 The still-open frontier, with its expanses of land, would give the Russian Jews a sustainable livelihood and wean them from Yiddish and a life of peddling. San Francisco's Voorsanger saw the West as a school for assimilation. “Ethnological peculiarities,” Voorsanger said, “will melt away under the influence of air and soil.”67 Colonization would also make the Russians, Romanians, and Poles less visible to Americans concerned about the daily arrival of bulging ships of mostly impoverished foreigners. Talk of colonization in the American West started as early as 1869, when Rabbi Bernard Felsenthal of Chicago broached the idea of settling starving Russian refugees on farms in Kansas and Iowa. Wolf looked forward to Jewish homes in the Upper Northwest after President Grant appointed Edward Salomon to administer the Washington Territory in 1870. Some congregations cautioned that just because the governor of the Washington Territory was Jewish, the Promised Land was not necessarily in the Pacific Northwest.68 Page 136 →

Kibbutzim on the American Plains With the widespread violence of the 1881 pogroms, the idea of creating communities of self-supporting Jewish farmers on the frontier was gaining ground in Russia as the Am Olam (Eternal People) movement. With a distinctly socialist frame of mind, the young men and women of Am Olam could be considered the forerunners of the Israeli kibbutzim, but their experiments were plagued with problems. Of the nine earliest agricultural settlements established between 1881 and 1883, all but two failed within seven years for a variety of reasons, including poor soil, lack of financing, and settlers' unfamiliarity with farming.69 The merchants, peddlers, and teachers and their families who arrived at the settlement located on twenty-eight hundred acres of swampy land on Sicily Island in Louisiana in 1881 had no experience in farming. “They had nothing to work with; the heat was unbearable; the place was full of swamps and 90 percent of the immigrants were smitten with yellow fever,” wrote Price, and a spring 1882 flood destroyed any hope of success.70 A settlement at Painted Woods, North Dakota, was abandoned after five years, the victim of severe winters, droughts, a prairie fire, and a location so isolated that the colonists had no place to trade or conduct business. The furthest west of the settlements was New Odessa, Oregon, which also came the closest to an attempt to create a socialist utopia on the order of the Fourierist communes of the 1840s. Inspired by socialist and abolitionist Michael Heilprin and the Am Olam movement, settlers at New Odessa shared all work and equally distributed all wealth. The commune lasted only four years, disintegrating amid ideological schisms, jealousies, and its inability to be a self-sustaining farm. It was, in one contemporary description, a commune of “enthusiastic dreamers” and others with nothing to lose. In the end, ideology was not enough to put food on the table.71

At first, the idealists of Am Olam worked with HEAS, which was eager to move as many refugees as possible westward. The New Yorkers of HEAS were strong advocates of dispersal from the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. In 1882, HEAS sent more than twenty-six hundred Eastern Europeans to 160 destinations across the country, including major cities like Boston and Cincinnati as well as much smaller towns such as Huntsville, Alabama, and Johnstown, New York.72 However, the persistent crisis in Russia and failing colonization efforts tested the unity of the American Jewish community. Differences arose between Am Olam's socialists and the pragmatic Germans of HEAS, who opposed utopian schemes and demanded that Jewish communities operate their farms as businesses. Page 137 → As in the years following the Civil War, a fault line opened between the Cincinnati congregations and New York. Wise's Union of American Hebrew Congregations and HEAS disagreed about the best way to raise funds for colonization and who should represent American Jewry in Europe. Although Wise recognized the necessity of dispersal, HEAS accused him of doing little more than making grandiose promises. Wise thought the best way to finance farming colonies would be a lottery that would raise about a million dollars. Some of the money would be used as prizes—scholarships to Wise's Hebrew Union College and funds set aside as a college endowment. HEAS leaders considered that plan a bit self-serving and sent one of their own, New Yorker Moritz Ellinger, to Europe to raise money.73 Wise was indignant: “The Israelites of the United States should have been spared the humiliation of being represented by Mr. Ellinger whose career has been without distinction.” In the final analysis, bickering and uncoordinated fund-raising efforts did little to help the struggling agricultural settlements. Voorsanger declared it “the gloomiest chapter in the history of American Jewish charity.”74 Those committed to agricultural colonies found their only success in the farms established by the German philanthropist and financier Baron Maurice de Hirsch, especially after HEAS folded in 1883. De Hirsch's Oriental Railway linking Constantinople to Western Europe and his ventures in copper and sugar production brought him a fortune estimated at one hundred million dollars by 1891, the year he established the Jewish Colonization Association and the Baron de Hirsch Fund of New York. De Hirsch believed that settlements in North America and even South America would be the only way to rescue Russia's Jews from virtual extermination, especially when the czar turned down De Hirsch's offer of ten million dollars to establish schools to Russify the empire's Jews.75 De Hirsch promised to “try to make a new home [for them] in different lands, where as free farmers, on their own soil they can make themselves useful to the country.” Hopeful that as farmers, the Russians would abandon petty trade, De Hirsch was exceedingly optimistic that “the Jews have not lost the agricultural qualities that their forefathers possessed.”76 His audacious twenty-milliondollar plan called for settling half a million Russian Jews on fertile soil in central Argentina. De Hirsch solicited the help of the Rothschild fortune. However he was stymied by Buenos Aires's reluctance to accept a mass migration.77 De Hirsch enjoyed limited success in the United States, financing and administering the only sustainable Jewish farming communities. Unlike the failed Am Olam experiments, the Baron de Hirsch farms operated first and foremost as businesses.78 Some colonies, such as one founded in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Page 138 → with just four families, would have to prove their viability before being eligible for support from the De Hirsch Fund. Still another, near San Francisco, raised a million dollars by selling shares throughout California.79 Two particularly successful colonies, Woodbine (1891–1903) and Alliance (1882–1908), both of which were located in southern New Jersey, were well capitalized by the De Hirsch Fund. They were also sufficiently diversified beyond farming with a number of well-run commercial and industrial ventures. With about sixty families, Woodbine boasted a small manufacturing business, a hotel, a post office, and an agricultural school. Its location close to markets in Philadelphia also proved an asset.80 However, in the final analysis the number of Jewish farm families never topped the 1909 figure of three thousand, less than 1 percent of the U.S. Jewish population.81 America's Jewish community would face a greater crisis in the first years of the twentieth century that demanded dispersal, even if it meant that farms or agricultural settlements were not the final destination. As the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty began its downward spiral into

extinction, the terror of the Kishinev pogroms did much to change German Jewish sympathies and strategies concerning their coreligionists.

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13 A Judaism for the American Century The 1890s and the first decade of the 1900s saw shifting relations between the yahudim and the Russian diaspora. The established Jewish elite, the children of the Germans who came to the United States before the Civil War, may have felt some embarrassment at their less-than-cultured brethren from the East but did not abandon them. Nevertheless, clear class and ethnic divisions existed between the wealthier Jews of the Reform synagogues in New York, Philadelphia, and other cities and the Orthodox newcomers. In New York, German and Russian Jews occupied two separate geographical spaces, Uptown and the Lower East Side. The same was true in other cities. Even Denver's small communities of Russians and Germans resided on different sides of town. All across the country, American Jewish leaders by the 1890s had established charitable and educational institutions, such as the Jewish Alliance, to aid immigrants in their transition to life in the United States.1 “It is a work of incalculable difficulty,” admitted New Orleans Reform Rabbi Maximilian Heller, but he was hopeful that “under the process of Americanization and with closer mutual acquaintance, [both sides] are drawing ever nearer to appreciation of and co-operation with each other.”2 After William S. Friedman, a prominent Denver Reform rabbi, visited New York's Lower East Side, he returned to say that support for the Russian immigrants was necessary on moral grounds given the decade of mass persecution. In fact, this acculturated German Jewish migrant to the American frontier said that the Russian Jews “had the benefit of kindling with renewed fire the love for Judaism.”3 The Russians and Poles had to be integrated into American Jewry without tarnishing the acculturated German establishment's good reputation. In St. Louis, Isidor Bush was one of the organizers of that city's Jewish Alliance, Page 140 → which was tasked with educating the Russians in the English language as well as in the laws of the land and respect for democracy.4 In New York, immigrants were invited to private homes, where they could “mingle as equals with a number of cultivated and earnest young men and women.”5 The Jewish Messenger expressed the paternalism of the uptown Jews when it argued, “The new immigrants must be Americanized in spite of themselves, in the mode prescribed by their friends and benefactors.” The Messenger recommended that Reform congregations establish branches in Russian neighborhoods, where rabbis would offer “sermons…of such a simple nature that [they] will attract, and of such a Jewish character, that [they] will not offend the class intended to be benefitted.”6 The Jewish Messenger also encouraged the children to learn mechanical trades and other professions. With about 60 percent of the New York Jewish labor force employed in the garment industry by the late 1890s, the needle trades were becoming a stereotypically Russian Jewish occupation in the same way that peddling typified the German Jews who arrived in the 1840s.7 In an 1884 attempt to deflect immigrants away from sweatshops, the United Hebrew Charities founded the Hebrew Technical Institute to train young men in manufacturing.8 Nevertheless, Jews continued to fill the need for tailors and seamstresses on the Lower East Side. The market for ready-made clothing was expanding rapidly as the nation pushed West and as merchant princes established department stores in cities and smaller towns across the country. Jewish predominance in the garment district cut both ways. While many gentiles clung to the unflattering image of the clothes dealer, the yahudim became more accepting of the Russian immigrants by the 1890s because the newer arrivals came with more skills. As the United Hebrew Charities observed in 1893, the Russians coming over were “better material” than those who arrived a decade or two earlier.9

The Battle over Immigration By the early 1890s, the number of people entering the United States—not only Jews but Italians on the East Coast and Chinese on the West—led to demands to put the brakes on immigration. Anti-immigrant feelings in general were fed by fears of radicalism and to a lesser degree by Madison Grant and other race theorists whose ideas were

gaining popularity. Grant's The Passing of the Great Race advocated eugenics and racial segregation, and he pushed for legislation to tighten immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. Grant blamed immigrants for importing socialist ideas and defined Jews as a lower race and alleged that “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Page 141 → Jew.” Echoing the sentiments of men such as Austin Corbin, Grant spoke of “the old stock…crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners…and driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews.”10 For others, opposition to immigration was fueled not by racism but by politics. With the Chicago Haymarket riot in 1886 and the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, a Red Scare prompted many observers to call for shutting the doors to immigrants, all of whom were suspected of carrying alien ideologies in their baggage. It did not help the cause of the acculturated yahudim, who largely rejected radicalism, that prominent anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were Jews. Press accounts from an 1893 rally of several thousand unemployed workers at New York's Union Square referred to “the disorderly element made up almost entirely of Russian and Polish Jews.” In describing one meeting of socialists, the New York Times reported, “A big Hebrew…got up and shouted: ‘To h——l with law and order! The dynamite bomb is the only thing that will accomplish anything for us!’”11 Observant Jews found the machinations and ideological positions of the anarchists offensive. Julius Bogdansky and the editors of the anarchist Fraye Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor) were militantly atheistic and often mocked Judaism, even holding an antireligion celebration on Yom Kippur.12 Historian of anarchism Paul Avrich observes that while the anarchists retained a devotion to the secular aspects of Judaism, they aggressively rejected traditional Judaism.13 The middle-class Jewish Messenger warned Jews to stay clear of radical politics, which made them less patriotic in the eyes of many Americans. The presence of Jewish names among the anarchists and socialists only justified the views of those who saw immigrants as unwelcome foreigners who should be kept away from U.S. shores.14 As political pressure to restrict immigration gained support after the Haymarket bombing, American Jews, now concerned that thousands of people were in jeopardy of dying at the hands of Russian mobs, appealed to Washington for help. Writing on behalf of B'nai B'rith, Simon Wolf eloquently expressed the American idea: “To close the avenues of this fine and liberty-loving country, that has always opened its gates to the downtrodden and unjustly persecuted, would be against the underlying genius and theory of our glorious and beloved Constitution.”15 Like Wolf, uptown yahudim Louis Marshall, Jacob Schiff, and Max Kohler took up the cause of the Russian and Polish refugees. The established Jews did not expect—or desire—the new arrivals to join the same social circles, but the humanitarian need was paramount. In 1891, however, proponents of restricted immigration scored a victory with comprehensive congressional legislation that made it easier to deport undesirables Page 142 → either for political reasons or simply because they lacked the means to support themselves. The law “would practically prevent many of our people who have been driven from their land of birth, from placing a foot on the soil of the United States,” the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) said.16 Of particular concern to Jewish organizations was the provision that allowed immigration officials to deport anyone whose passage had been paid for by others, including private charities. With such a prohibition, the numbers subject to deportation would swell. As many as a third of all fleeing Russians in 1891 were destitute.17 In July 1891, acting on behalf of the UAHC and B'nai B'rith, Wolf wrote to the Treasury Department asking to exempt from the law those refugees assisted by private charities. Treasury Secretary Charles Foster responded by saying that even if their passage was aided by charity, they were still destitute and would eventually become dependent on public assistance. However, the government largely left the matter up to local officials, and the provision was applied loosely. Wolf also said that families were often broken apart if one member was afflicted with a contagious disease and denied entry into the United States. He urged the shipping lines to do more to ensure the safety of their passengers, even the ones in steerage, “packed like sardines in a box. Naturally, their cramped conditions engender and develops disease.” Despite efforts to halt Eastern European immigration, the numbers increased through the 1890s.18

During the next decade, the American Jewish community was tested further by the most violent attacks yet on Jewish villagers in the Russian empire. Dispersal became more than just a good idea to match immigrants with economic need in the American West but a plan for rescuing Jews from genocide. The first signs of a new wave of anti-Semitic hysteria appeared in Romania in 1900 and in Russia the following year.

The Kishinev Pogroms As the violence escalated in 1902, Oscar Straus, then serving on the International Court of Arbitration in the Hague, met with President Theodore Roosevelt. Straus was accompanied by Jacob Schiff, head of the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb, and Company and among the country's wealthiest men. After listening to their descriptions of the renewed violence, Roosevelt directed the State Department to delay signing a treaty with the Romanian government. In the words of Secretary of State John Hay, “This government can not be a tacit party to such an international wrong.”19 The following year, unprecedented brutality in Page 143 → Kishinev forced American Jews to seek creative ways to bring more refugees to safety as the calls for halting Russian immigration intensified. The Kishinev pogroms mobilized a new generation of American Jews, who were prepared to use their growing political influence to save lives in distant Europe. In February 1903, a Christian boy, Michael Ribalenko, was found murdered at Dubossary near Kishinev in the Russian province of Bessarabia (now Romania). The medieval cry of blood libel was raised, unleashing violence on a mass scale. Leaflets were printed urging the populace to drive the Jews out of their homes. In the middle of April, riots claimed fifty lives and destroyed more than fifteen hundred Jewish homes and businesses. The church was silent, and the police refused to intervene to stop the carnage, which continued for more than year.20 A strongly united American Jewry spoke with one voice as a B'nai B'rith delegation led by Straus and Wolf visited President Roosevelt in 1903 with a twelve-thousand-signature petition to the government at St. Petersburg.21 Once again, American Jews sought action from the White House to pull the United States out of the 1832 commercial treaty with Russia. However, Roosevelt and Hay were more interested in remaining on good terms with the czar, viewing Russia as a valuable counterweight to Japanese expansion in the Pacific. Hay told Schiff that abrogating the treaty would only weaken Russia economically and advantage Japan. Roosevelt and Hay did little with the petition and applied no pressure on the court at St. Petersburg. Although the petition was delivered to the Russian embassy, the ambassador predictably refused to accept it.22 Two years later, the Russo-Japanese war broke out. Schiff, who was instrumental in floating nearly two hundred million dollars in Japanese war bonds in the United States, believed a Russian defeat would finally bring down the Romanov dynasty and replace it with a revolutionary government more liberal in its treatment of the Jewish minority. However, Japan's victory brought renewed and even more violent repression. In Zhitomir, twenty-nine Jews were killed in April 1905, followed by one hundred in July in Kiev, and 800 in October in Odessa. By 1906, pogroms became practically uncountable, according to historian Gerald Sorin.23 In November 1905, Straus, a member of Roosevelt's close circle of advisers, again approached the president, who simply said that the government was powerless to restrain the violence.24 An enthusiastic Roosevelt man, Straus sympathized with the president's position. Just months later, Roosevelt appointed Straus secretary of commerce and labor, saying that more than diplomatic pressure, the appointment of a Jew to the president's cabinet would “show Russia and some other countries what we think of the Jews in this country.”25 Page 144 → Washington's hesitancy to press the czar to halt the killing forced the Jewish establishment to look for alternatives. In November 1906, Cyrus Adler, president of the board of the Jewish Theological Seminary and librarian of the Smithsonian, joined attorneys Louis Marshall and Max Kohler and more than fifty other prominent community leaders to form the American Jewish Committee. The committee continued to lobby the government to withdraw the United States from the 1832 treaty, but neither Roosevelt nor his successor, William Howard Taft, would budge.26

At this point, Schiff and Straus devised a plan to divert thousands of refugees to the American West. Individual Northeast cities accounted for up to 60 percent of the nation's one million Jews at the turn of the century. As a result of the Kishinev events, the number of Jews entering the United States rose dramatically from 37,000 in 1899 to 153,000 in 1906. Between 1904 and 1908 alone, a total of 672,000 Jews disembarked on American shores.27 Schiff saw that dispersal westward would make room for the thousands more still seeking refuge. He estimated the western states had room for up to two million additional immigrants, but as one of the directors of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, Schiff saw all too well that the agricultural colonies of the 1880s were unsustainable. Schiff decided to dedicate his time and wealth to settling those fleeing persecution in small towns, where they could apply their trades and prosper. “I am convinced,” Schiff told the Jewish Chautauqua Society in Buffalo, New York, that “the United States can yet receive and absorb for its own advantage a very considerable part of the Jewish emigration from the Slavic countries.”28

The Galveston Plan Schiff proposed diverting large numbers of Eastern Europeans away from the port of New York and sending them to Galveston, Texas. From there, the Russians would travel by rail westward to the “many points in the large territory lying between the Mississippi and the Pacific Coast” where, Schiff promised, jobs would be waiting. Reflecting the anxiety of the yahudim, Schiff said that unless the stream of immigration were “deflected” from New York and the North Atlantic Seaboard, the growing congestion in a few cities “may become a menace to the status of the Jew throughout the country.”29 In cities far from New York, the German Jewish establishment envisioned a new American Jewry arising out of the frontier. To Schiff, Russian Jews “brought up under AngloSaxon influences” would be “imbued with the Americanism of George Washington, Abraham Page 145 → Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.” Denver Reform rabbi William S. Friedman was sure that by sending Jews throughout the country, they would “make of them patriotic Americans.” But the pragmatic Friedman advocated going slowly and methodically so that the new residents would have jobs and argued that settlement should be planned in a way that would not create ethnic ghettos.30 Nothing short of acculturation was the desired goal. The Texas Jewish Herald shared in the initial optimism, declaring, “Texas has room within her borders for all the Israelites in the world, and then some.”31 However, the Galveston Plan involved a complicated process that required support from European Jewish organizations, German steamship lines, the czar, and American immigration officials. Each part of the puzzle was beset by a unique set of difficulties, and the Galveston Plan lasted only seven years and fell far short of Schiff's goal of settling hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the interior of the United States and Canadian West. Schiff's first obstacle was his English partner, writer Israel Zangwill. Zangwill thought that Jews should be resettled in their own autonomous regions—literally small Jewish states within a nation's boundaries. Schiff had no interest in creating Jewish reservations in America, nor was he a Zionist with dreams of a home in Palestine. Schiff and most of the Jewish establishment believed that the Russian expatriates should be part of the greater society, living and working among other Americans throughout the breadth of the United States.32 But Schiff needed Zangwill's Jewish Territorial Organization to manage the Russian end of the emigration. Pledging half a million dollars to get the project under way, Schiff concluded a deal with the North German Lloyd line, which provided regular steamship service from Bremen to Galveston. He also arranged reduced rates with the railroad leading out of Galveston. Zangwill initially cooperated, using the Jewish Territorial Organization to direct immigrants to Bremen, where they would board ships for the journey across the Atlantic and into the Gulf of Mexico. “America, with all of its drawbacks, still represents the best refuge from Russian tyranny,” Zangwill reluctantly conceded.33 On the Galveston end, Schiff established the Jewish Immigrants' Information Bureau, and with Oscar Straus's support a government immigration station was approved. On July 1, 1907, the first boatload of Russian Jews arrived, but the immigration into Galveston never amounted to more than a relative trickle.34 Zangwill insisted on running the operation his way and refused to collaborate with other Jewish relief organizations in Europe, considerably slowing the movement of Russians to Bremen. Moreover, the steamship line handled passengers Page 146 → roughly, and the Russian government suddenly declared that Zangwill's organization was operating illegally. By 1909, however, a reorganized Galveston Committee and the czarist

government's decision to allow the immigration plan to continue gave Schiff renewed hope that he could reach his goal of twenty-five hundred immigrants through Galveston a year.35 The Industrial Removal Office, created in 1901 by the Baron de Hirsch Fund, assisted the effort by acting as an employment agency. While larger numbers of refugees were processed through Galveston after 1909, the project ran into new roadblocks. Many of the immigrants were in poor health and unable to work or lacked any useful trade, a situation that raised serious objections from immigration authorities stationed at the port. Immigrants were supposed to arrive with the means to be productive citizens.36 Schiff's Galveston Committee and government inspector Alfred Hampton clashed over whether some arrivals did indeed have a job waiting. In a 1910 letter to New York congressman William Bennett, Schiff pleaded for help: “We are…now facing governmental methods at Galveston…which…will result in throwing back upon New York and other northern ports the entire stream of immigration which we have been taking such pains to deflect.”37 By this time, Straus was no longer in the cabinet, and Benjamin Cable, the new secretary of commerce and labor under the Taft administration, was less than sympathetic. Cable and Hampton believed that immigration laws to prevent charity cases from entering the United States were unenforced at Galveston. Wolf detected an undercurrent of anti-Semitism as restrictionists gained increasing support. Immigration officials in Galveston and other ports were denying entry to peddlers, glaziers, and others with distinctly Jewish occupations.38 Schiff, Wolf, and Kohler went directly to the White House in an effort to ease the restrictions at Galveston. The oppressive policies of the Romanovs continued to threaten countless lives, and Jewish survival depended on safely bringing refugees to American shores. Marshall told Congress that the condition of Russian Jews in 1911 was lower than the depths of Dante's Inferno.39 President Taft saw the merit in dispersing the Russians westward and gave his support to keeping Galveston open. Still, the refugees were coming to Texas in numbers too small to make an impact on Northeast ports, and many of the arrivals were sent back because of poor health. Running low on money and faced with a new administration in Washington that sought to put the brakes on immigration, the Galveston Plan was exhausted by 1914. The opening shots of World War I ended Schiff's dream of a western port for the Russian diaspora. In the final analysis, only about ten thousand souls were settled in the American hinterland from the port of Galveston over the project's seven years in existence.40 Page 147 →

A Denominational Judaism The Mortara kidnapping and the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Civil War years created the political and religious institutions that accelerated Americanization among the German migration. The Kishinev pogroms tested the maturity and muscularity of these institutions at the dawn of a new century. New Orleans rabbi Maximilian Heller said that the Kishinev pogroms elevated American Jewry “by proving that American Jews have the courage and the public spirit openly to espouse the cause of their brothers.” Heller saw that every “great sorrow…has brought the Jews of the world nearer to one another.” Perhaps, he said, the events in Kishinev have “brought the urgency of the Jewish problem to the attention of the entire world as has no previous event in modern history.”41 To the UAHC, American Jews at the turn of the century were again animated by “the spirit which aroused the civilized world” during the Mortara affair.42 Wolf observed that Jews could now flex their muscle on the national and even world stage, a power he attributed to almost half a century of living and working in America in substantial numbers. In what was a typical overstatement on Wolf's part, he boasted that “Russia today fears more the Jews of the United States, than she does any of the European powers.”43 With the migration of thousands of Eastern Europeans to U.S. shores, American Judaism went through another fracturing based on differences in ritual and the synagogue service. Once again, congregations were split between those who sought to create an American Judaism and those who despaired at the loss of ancient traditions. Between the beginning of the migration in 1881 and the end of the century, American Judaism adjusted to the demands of traditionalists as well as moderate and radical reformers. What emerged was a denominational Judaism uniquely suited to American conditions.

The prosperous and acculturated sons and daughters of the German immigrants who came to the United States before the Civil War believed that Reform Judaism constituted an important tool for Americanizing the Russian migration. Reform Judaism, in the words of San Francisco rabbi Jacob Voorsanger, was “the instrument” of assimilation.44 The Orthodoxy that demanded kosher kitchens and prevented any kind of work on the Sabbath would pose a barrier to success in the competitive capitalism of twentieth-century America. For Voorsanger, Orthodoxy was like so many dead branches, a relic of the ghetto that makes “Americans uncomfortable amidst Jews.”45 Keeping the Sabbath presented a particular problem for the Orthodox arrivals, who also faced laws in many cities that prevented shopkeepers from Page 148 → opening for business on Sunday. Unable to work a sixth day put them at a disadvantage relative to Christian merchants. Gustav Gottheil, one of New York's most prominent rabbis. said that forsaking business on Saturday would lead to “irreparable financial ruin,” especially for men “engaged in importing, banking, or brokerage.”46 Even the Russian Emigrant Relief Fund of New York instructed agents in Europe to “carefully explain to all the men before they start on their journey, all the conditions under which they can expect living here…that a rigid adherence to the rites of Judaism will in many cases be entirely impossible.”47 Wolf, who was adamant that the Russians and Poles learn something about life in the United States before even setting sail, asked, “What can a man do to observe the Sabbath with fourteen children, if he is permitted to work five days only?”48 Typical of the sentiment among the German American congregational leadership was Martin Butzel, president of the Hebrew Relief Society of Detroit, who predicted that Americanization would not come “until the old Orthodox notions they have brought with them from Russia have been modified or eliminated.” Otherwise, he said, “there is little to be expected even from the children.”49 Butzel and his generation also recognized that if the Russians were to prosper in America, they would have to adopt English quickly. The Educational Alliance, started in 1891, saw one of its primary tasks as discouraging the use of Yiddish. To the acculturated German Americans, it was “a mongrel tongue,” and Voorsanger declared Yiddish the “greatest drawback to the progress of the Jew.” In addition, he worried that Christian Americans would fail to distinguish acculturated American Jews from the “Yiddish mumblers.”50 The UAHC and Hebrew Union College continued the work they had started in the 1870s, accommodating Judaism to the general religious culture on the model of liberal Protestantism. Reform congregations were already introducing Sunday services and organ music while abandoning prayer shawls, separate seating for men and women, and even head coverings. The Reform prayer book removed the benediction giving thanks “that I am not a woman.”51 Temple Emanu-El's Rabbi Gottheil defended Sunday services as a way to attract young men back into the synagogue. Calling himself “a firm believer [in the] doctrine of conformity,” Gottheil said, “Jews wherever they may be should adapt themselves to the social and political environment.”52 There were Russian and Polish Jews as well as traditionalists among the Germans who found the Reform movement too extreme a departure from the Judaism they practiced. While traditionalists may have rejected some reforms, simple rejection turned to outrage on July 11, 1883, at a Cincinnati banquet celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Union and the first ordination of Hebrew Page 149 → Union College graduates. Dubbed the treyfa (unkosher) banquet, it featured such fare as littleneck clams on the half shell and frog legs in a cream sauce. While the food was not intended as a deliberate insult, openly flouting the most basic of Jewish religious laws was too much for even the most patient of the traditionalists and moderate Reformers, some of whom immediately withdrew from the UAHC. Wise made matters worse by downplaying the caterer's oversight by condescendingly referring to the “kitchen Judaism” of his detractors.

The Pittsburgh Platform The divisions within Judaism were now wide-open, and a period of experimentation and reaction began. Debate between a champion of a moderate Reform, Hungarian émigré Alexander Kohut, and self-described radical reformer Kaufmann Kohler led to a major reorientation of the UAHC. Faced with an ideological struggle for the future of the Jewish faith in the United States, Kohler and Wise drew up the Pittsburgh Platform in November 1885. The platform called for “united action in all matters pertaining to the welfare of American Judaism.”53 Adding to the confusion was the emergence of Felix Adler's New York Society for Ethical Culture, a movement to

the left of even Kohler's reformers that was as secular in its outlook as Unitarianism is to traditional Christianity. The authors of the Pittsburgh Platform were confident their modern broad, liberal, and truly American Judaism would revitalize Jewish life in the home. The rabbis of the Pittsburgh Platform urged the abandonment of the rituals “not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization.” This new Judaism would be “ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason.”54 The religion was stripped of the superstitions that were a part of the culture of Russian and Galician villagers. Voorsanger viewed kabbalistic mysticism as the “garbage of science” but went further than some in suggesting that among the “irrational [and] senseless orientalisms” was the belief in God's forgiveness on Yom Kippur.55 Even concepts of heaven and hell were jettisoned by the Pittsburgh Platform, along with dietary restrictions. “We live in practical, materialistic times and should not act as though we lived in the Middle Ages,” Kohler said.56 Wolf saw the remade UAHC and the Pittsburgh Platform as quintessentially American, creating a better class of citizenry. Returning to Cincinnati from Pittsburgh, Wise told reporters, “The object of the conference, in a word, is to Americanize the Jew.”57 The UAHC, Wolf said, was now well on its way to “stimulat[ing] patriotic fervor, and elevate the individual Jew to a higher plane of American citizenship.” This new Reform movement would create a homogenous Page 150 → American Jewry—“one great nationality” educated in American schools, speaking perfect English, and “cleansed from the foreign coating” with no memory of the “ghetto Judaism” they had left behind. The Pittsburgh Platform invited women to participate more fully in Jewish life. “Reform Judaism, ” Wolf said, has “destroyed the barriers between husband and wife.”58 The Reform movement at this juncture also made a definitive break with Zionist aspirations for a return to Israel, viewing it as the greatest obstacle to Americanization and assimilation. In 1898, UAHC adopted a resolution, written by Wolf, Philadelphia's Joseph Krauskopf, and David Philipson, one of the primary authors of the Pittsburgh Platform, that affirmed that Jews “are not a nation, but a religious community. America is our Zion.”59 As early as the 1870s, Benjamin Peixotto had parted with the Zionists who sought to settle Romanian refugees in Palestine. Wolf, who was Peixotto's main backer as U.S. consul, remained committed to extolling the virtues of America as the true home for the persecuted of any faith and to the view that the Jewish community should work with other Americans to build and sustain their democratic institutions. “The Jew as an American citizen occupies the same place as any other American,” Wolf told the UAHC in 1898, the twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding.60 Wolf's view was also characterized by his own self-identification: “I am a German by birth, an Israelite by faith, and I trust a thorough American by adoption.” The importance of Wolf's use of the words a thorough American cannot be overstated.61

The “Ziomaniacs” To the faculty of Hebrew Union College, a restored Jewish state in the Holy Land was a fantasy. Jews belonged in an enlightened and liberal Europe—Napoleon's France—or in the United States. America was the end of exile, said Cincinnati Reformer Max Lilienthal, who suggested that Reform synagogues eliminate prayers for the restoration of Palestine. Zionism, Voorsanger said, was a dangerous form of nationalism. The San Francisco rabbi was among the post–Civil War Jewish leaders who warned that a future state in Palestine would force American Jews into a dual loyalty that would call into question their patriotism. American Jews had worked too hard since the dark days of the war to risk the charge that they were less American than their Christian neighbors.62 Isaac Mayer Wise bluntly attacked Theodor Herzl and settlements in Palestine, labeling the Federation of American Zionists “Ziomaniacs” who mislead their followers that anti-Semitism exists in the United States. Just two years Page 151 → after Herzl had convened his First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, Wise called on “every true Jew to take an active part in the efforts to destroy it.”63 These American rabbis were unsparing in their critique of Zionism as “an oriental aberration” guided by men of foreign birth who could never appreciate or understand what Jews had in America. Even if such men lived in America for a half a century, Wise said, they would “still be as foreign as they were the day on which they landed.” Wise was also outraged that Zionists had the temerity to pose as spokesmen for Jewish Americans, and he noted that reports from Palestine confirmed that conditions there were “wretched in the extreme.”64

Philipson, who was among the first graduating class and later an instructor at Hebrew Union College, was confident that most American Jews rejected “the active propaganda…for the so-called Zionistic movement.” Yet not everyone at Hebrew Union College agreed as several instructors left, convinced that Philipson was not properly schooled in biblical history and the promise of the return from exile. A similar debate split the faculty and founders of the Jewish Theological Seminary, with Solomon Schechter defending Zionist aspirations but Schiff and other assimilated Jews taking the view that America was the Golden Land, far more inviting than the Promised Land.65 In a dialogue with Schechter in 1907, Schiff doubted that one could be “at the same time a true American and an honest adherent of the Zionist movement.” Yet by the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Schiff was modifying his position.66 Wolf, in contrast, wrote shortly before his death, “Is Palestine or the United States the solution of all our troubles? I cling to Uncle Sam.” Not until the Holocaust and Israel's creation in 1948 did most Jews of all denominations fully and unconditionally embrace the return.67

Judaism Is Divided into Three Parts While creating a vastly more liberal Reform movement, the Pittsburgh Platform also led to changes within the traditional branches of Judaism. Wolf still held out hope that moderates in the Reform camp and members of the Orthodox faction would unite under the Pittsburgh Platform with the promise that “each and every congregation was to be free in its form of worship.” In fact, Wolf was even willing to allow “Agnostic Jews” to “marshall under one banner” with their Reform and Orthodox coreligionists.68 But the Traditionalists were not interested in aligning with heretics and openly challenged Reform rabbis as they stood at the pulpit. Rabbi Gottheil was unable to silence one woman who rose from her seat to tell the congregation that “the extreme Reform element” was Page 152 → responsible for “an entire departure from the Jewish ritual service.”69 Despite the loud entreaties to unite, the majority of Reformers really had no intention of accepting the Orthodox as equals. Although Kohler favored a rapprochement with disaffected traditionalists, the Israelite appeared less open, calling the Orthodox “strangers in this country”; as far as the president of the UAHC was concerned, “The future of American Judaism is irrevocably ours.”70 At the same time, a number of Orthodox congregations were modifying their synagogue services in the hopes of blunting the Reformers' effects and because maintaining a strict religious life in America was proving difficult. Regular synagogue attendance was low, and young people were increasingly joining the ranks of the nonobservant. Acceptable adaptations to the Orthodox synagogue took the form of late Saturday services and the introduction of cantors to substitute for the organ music of the Reform temples, but the Pittsburgh Platform's introduction of Sunday Sabbath services so Jews could work on Saturdays remained an anathema.71 Like the Reformers, Orthodox leaders sought congregational unity. In New York, the Orthodox came together in 1888 to appoint a chief rabbi, but the effort failed as congregations guarded their independence.72 A similar 1903 effort in Chicago also ended in failure, but Orthodoxy did build a lasting alternative to the UAHC in 1898—the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. Operating today as the Orthodox Union, its primary goal is “to halt the frightening trend of assimilation among New World Jews.” Although progressive in some ways, the Orthodox union was still not fully representative of Jewish American aspirations, especially among the young. American Jews were searching for a middle position between the heresy of the treyfa banquet and an Orthodoxy that despite the accommodations to modern life still was not suited to success in twentieth-century capitalism. Without a middle ground, both the German and Russian Jews of the rising generation might cast religious observance aside in the pursuit of the American Dream. The Conservative movement—American Judaism's third way—started with the establishment of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1887. Conservatism represented traditionalists' direct response to the Pittsburgh Platform. Starting in 1902 under the direction of Schechter and with the support of Marshall, Mayer Sulzberger, and Schiff, the Jewish Theological Seminary developed the ideological framework of Conservative Judaism.73 Although Sulzberger and Schiff were solidly in the Reform camp, they saw Conservative Judaism as meeting the immediate need to draw the Russians closer to an American synagogue that did not differ too radically from tradition but clearly represented a move away from the Orthodoxy of Eastern Europe.74 Page 153 →

As a compromise and bridge between Reform and Orthodoxy, the Conservative movement constituted a unique form of Judaism, the first born on American soil. Here, its founders hoped, was a way to reunite a fractured community and revitalize the faith among young Americanizing Jews, the sons and daughters of the Russian migration. The Americanization of Jews in the United States became in a sense complete with the opening of the twentieth century. By 1913, the Conservative denomination built its own union, the United Synagogues of America.75 The big-tent congregational unity Wolf and Wise had long sought did not come to pass, as Judaism divided in three ways. But American Jews were now equipped to speak with greater consensus on the crises that would confront world Jewry through the rest of the century. Nevertheless, factionalism at times became an issue among America's Jewish population. Serious disagreements arose during World War II over the right strategy for rescuing millions of European Jews during the Holocaust, and until the founding of Israel, a few Jewish leaders still questioned Zionist aspirations. Zionism “was the historic battle of the twentieth century in Reform Judaism,” said Maurice Eisendrath in a retrospective marking the centennial of the UAHC in 1973. Eisendrath, who led the UAHC for thirty years, had no illusions that American Jews would ever be fully unified: American Christians are just as diverse in their beliefs. Yet, today, U.S. Jews—Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, descendants of immigrants from both Bremen and Bialystok—have what Eisendrath called a “mutuality of interests.”76 The road to Americanization was not easy, and bitter debates erupted from time to time among the faithful. Tested by a series of persecutions overseas and occasional spikes in anti-Semitism at home, Jews emerged from the margins of American political and cultural life. They fashioned an authentically American synagogue and a way of life that put the experience of the European ghetto forever behind them. Page 154 →

Page 155 →

Notes Introduction 1. Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, December 13, 1847. 2. Ibid. 3. Diner, “Encounter between Jews and America,” 12. 4. Diner, Time for Gathering, 56. 5. Diner, “Encounter between Jews and America,” 7. 6. Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 3. 7. Wolf, Selected Addresses, 103–4. 8. Jaher, Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 241. 9. Israelite, December 12, 1862. 10. Occident, November 1864. In This Hallowed Ground, Civil War historian Bruce Catton described General Orders 11 as “a blind shotgun blast at the Jewish people” as well as a reflection of the times (221). 11. Korn, American Jewry, 217–19; Israelite, June 16, 1865. 12. Israelite, October 2, 1863. 13. Occident, June 1855, March 1855. 14. New York Times, December 18, 1870. 15. Diner, Time for Gathering, 160. 16. Israelite, January 19, 1899. 17. Philipson, Reform Movement in Judaism, 342; Meyer, Response to Modernity, 241. 18. Jewish Messenger, April 29, 1870. 19. Diner, “Encounter between Jews and America,” 8. 20. Higham, “Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age,” 564. 21. Washington Post, May 15, 1889. 22. Higham, “Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age,” 564. 23. Washington Post, February 3, 1890. 24. Esther L. Panitz, Simon Wolf, 64. 25. Israelite, November 27, 1885. 26. Diner, “Encounter between Jews and America,” 9, 20. Page 156 → 27. Jewish Messenger, February 12, 1886. 28. Israelite, January 19, 1899. 29. Ibid., January 26, 1899. 30. Occident, September 1861.

Chapter 1 1. Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 5. 2. Diner, “Encounter between Jews and America,” 10. 3. Sarna, “Anti-Semitism,” 47. 4. Jaher, Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 124. 5. Ibid., 185. 6. Harap, Image of the Jew, 51–53; Jaher, Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 231. 7. Jaher, Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 237–38; Harap, Image of the Jew, 51. 8. Richmond Examiner, January 15, 1863. 9. Kline, “Jew That Shakespeare Drew?,” 64. 10. Israelite, March 11, 1870. 11. Edward Yates to Abraham Lincoln, February 16, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 12. Harper's Monthly, July 1858, 268. 13. Diner, Time for Gathering, 15–16, 45–46.

14. Kisch, “Revolution of 1848,” 186–94. 15. Ibid.; Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 42. 16. Jaher, Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 186–87. 17. Glanz, “Notes,” 119. 18. Diner, “Encounter between Jews and America,” 15–16. 19. Goodman, “Jewish Peddler's Diary,” 61. 20. Handlin, Adventure in Freedom, 55. 21. Wise, Reminiscences, 38; Glanz, “Notes,” 125–27. One of the principal difficulties traveling peddlers faced was obtaining licenses. Fees could be high and were increased when peddlers traded their packs for wagons. 22. Handlin, Adventure in Freedom, 55. 23. Howe and Libo, We Lived There, Too, 172–73. 24. Glanz, “Notes,” 123. 25. Hirshler, Jews from Germany, 37. 26. Goodman, “Jewish Peddler's Diary,” 61. 27. Israelite, May 6, 1870. 28. Ibid., August 14, 1874. 29. Knox, Rabbi in America, 130. 30. Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 228. 31. Israelite, October 13, 1871. 32. Ibid.; Jewish Messenger, February 12, 1864. 33. Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 58. Page 157 → 34. Jewish Messenger, September 11, 1863. 35. Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 68. 36. Occident, May 1863. 37. Korn, “Isaac Leeser,” 106. 38. Occident, July 1861. 39. Jewish Messenger, July 29, 1864.

Chapter 2 1. Blau and Baron, Jews of the United States, 924–26; Schappes, Documentary History, 200; Jacobs, “Damascus Affair,” 119–21; Ezekiel, “Persecution of the Jews,” 141–42. 2. Schappes, Documentary History, 201–3; Jacobs, “Damascus Affair,” 120–24; Ezekiel, “Persecution of the Jews,” 142–43. 3. Schappes, Documentary History, 621; Jacobs, “Damascus Affair,” 123–25; Ezekiel, “Persecution of the Jews,” 143–45. 4. New York Herald, April 6, 1850. 5. New York Times, April 17, 1893. The myth of Jewish ritual murder even found its way into nineteenthcentury American country ballads. “The Jew's Garden,” from rural Missouri, was collected by the Journal of American Folklore: It rained all night and it rained all day it rained all over the land; The boys in our town went out to play, to toss their ball around, round, round, to toss their ball around. (Repeat thus the last line of each stanza.) Sometimes they tossed their ball too high, and then again too low; They tossed it into a Jew's garden, where no one would dare to go.

Out came the Jew's daughter, out came the Jew's daughter, out came the Jew's daughter all dressed, And said to the boy, “Little boy, come in; and get your ball again.” “I won't come in, I've often heard it said, Whoever goes into a Jew's garden will never come out again.” Page 158 → The first she offered was a yellow apple, the next was a bright gold ring The third was something so cherry red which enticed the little boy in. She took him by the lily-white hand and led him through a hall Into a cellar so dark and dim, where no one could hear him call. She pinned a napkin round his neck, she pinned it with a pin, And then she called for a tin basin to catch his life-blood in. (Belden, “Old-Country Ballads,” 293) 6. Jacobs, “Damascus Affair,” 126–28; Ezekiel, “Persecution of the Jews,” 144–45. 7. Blau and Baron, Jews of the United States, 955. 8. Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 66. 9. Ibid., 67–69. 10. Occident, July 1855. 11. Ibid., December 1863. 12. Buchler, “Struggle for Unity,” 104–5; Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 199. 13. Stroock, “Switzerland and American Jews,” 8–12. 14. Occident, May 1854; Stroock, “Switzerland and American Jews,” 11–16. 15. Occident, May 1854; Stroock, “Switzerland and American Jews,” 15–16. 16. Richmond Daily Dispatch, quoted in Occident, May 1854. 17. Occident, January 1862; Schappes, Documentary History, 316–17. 18. Stroock, “Switzerland and American Jews,” 26–27. 19. Ibid., 21. 20. Cyrus Adler and Margalith, American Intercession, 304–6; Stroock, “Switzerland and American Jews,” 37; correspondence between the Swiss Confederation and Theodore Fay, in the Jewish Messenger, August 23, 1861. 21. Stroock, “Switzerland and American Jews,” 39–40. 22. Israelite, November 25, 1859; Cyrus Adler and Margalith, American Intercession, 307–8. In an 1861 letter to Henry Hart, Secretary of State William Seward called the Swiss restrictions on trade “odious” and advised diplomatic officials to continue pressing the Swiss Confederation to end the prejudicial treatment of “citizens of the United States professing Judaism” (Jewish Messenger, September 18, 1861). 23. Occident, November, December 1855. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., November, December 1855, May 1856; Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 162–63. Page 159 → 26. Occident, December 1859.

27. Ibid., December 1855. 28. Israelite, May 27, 1864, August 28, 1868. 29. Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 171–72; Israelite, May 27, 1864, August 28, 1868. 30. New York Times, November 9, 15, 1858; Korn, American Reaction, 4–5, 28–31. 31. New York Times, August 1, 1859; Occident, April 7, 1859. 32. Schappes, Documentary History, 676. 33. Korn, American Reaction, 118. 34. Boston Evening Traveller, quoted in Korn, American Reaction, 118–20. 35. Brooklyn Eagle, November 23, 1858. Edgar Mortara was never returned to his parents. He rejected his Jewish heritage, entered the priesthood, and toured the United States and England in the 1890s in an effort to convert Jews to Catholicism. 36. New York Times, August 1, 1859; Korn, American Reaction, 32–34, 79. 37. Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 169–70. 38. New York Times, December 6, 1858. 39. Occident, August 4, December 15, 1859; Whiteman, “Isaac Leeser,” 225. 40. Occident, August 4, December 15, 1859. 41. Ibid., August 4, December 15, 1859, February 1863. 42. Jewish Messenger, July 26, 1861, June 8, 1877. 43. Israelite, February 24, 1860; Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 171–72. 44. Tarshish, “Board of Delegates,” 20–21. 45. Israelite, January 17, 1862. 46. Ibid., April 13, 1860. 47. Occident, August 4, 1859. 48. Israelite, April 13, 1860; Tarshish, “Board of Delegates,” 21; Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 163. 49. Israelite, February 24, 1860; Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 168–69. 50. Israelite, February 24, 1860; Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 168–69. 51. Jewish Messenger, August 28, 1863. 52. Occident, February 16, 1860; Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 168–69. 53. Occident, August 1859. 54. Israelite, February 24, 1860. 55. Jewish Messenger, July 26, 1861. 56. Occident, December 15, 1859. 57. Jewish Messenger, July 26, 1861.

Chapter 3 1. Fein, “Baltimore Jews,” 80. 2. Schappes, Documentary History, 436. 3. Ibid., 440. 4. Jewish Messenger, November 4, 1864. Page 160 → 5. Israelite, April 19, 1861; Temkin, “Isaac Mayer Wise,” 161–66. 6. Ibid., August 19, 1864. 7. Ibid., April 19, 1861; Korn, “Isaac Mayer Wise,” 641–42. 8. Israelite, December 14, 1860. 9. Korn, American Jewry, 16–17. 10. Occident, November 1861. 11. Ibid. 12. Schappes, Documentary History, 480. 13. Wax, “Isidor Bush,” 191–93; Isidor Bush to Abraham Lincoln, October 1, 1861, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 14. Straus, Under Four Administrations, 4. Another Jewish 1848er, Michael Heilprin, was a partisan of the

Hungarian nationalist and revolutionary Louis Kossuth. Once in the United States, Heilprin joined the early Republican Party as a committed opponent of slavery. 15. Marx and Engels, Civil War, 81, 279–81. 16. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 3, 1:157; Korn, American Jewry, 57–59. 17. Barish, “American Jewish Chaplaincy,” 10; Korn, American Jewry, 59–60. 18. Israelite, July 11, 1862. 19. Ibid., November 29, 1861. 20. Waxman, “Arnold Fischel,” 337–39. 21. Schappes, Documentary History, 464; New York Times, December 13, 1861. 22. Israelite, November 15, 1861. 23. Occident, December 1861; New York Tribune, quoted in Israelite, November 29, 1861. 24. New York Times, December 13, 1861; Lincoln quoted in Myer S. Isaacs, “Jewish Army Chaplain,” 133; Korn, “Lincoln and the Jews,” 184. 25. Occident, August 1862. 26. Ibid., February 1862. 27. Report of Rev. Dr. Fischel to the Board of Delegates, April 3, 1862, in Occident, August 1862. 28. Occident, August 1862. 29. Philadelphia Inquirer, January 14, 1862. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Jewish Messenger, February 21, 1863. 33. Korn, American Jewry, 77.

Chapter 4 1. Jaher, Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 170. 2. Korn, “Isaac Mayer Wise,” 653–54. Page 161 → 3. Ibid., 653. 4. Ibid.; Korn, American Jewry, 164. 5. Israelite, March 6, 1863; Detroit Commercial Advertiser, quoted in Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 31. 6. Edward Yates to Abraham Lincoln, February 16, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 7. Korn, American Jewry, 292. 8. Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 333–45; Mayo, Ambivalent Image, 112. 9. Occident, June 1855. 10. Cincinnati Enquirer, quoted in Israelite, February 20, 1863. 11. Korn, American Jewry, 168. 12. Southern Punch, October 10, 1863. 13. Washington Chronicle, quoted in Occident, February 1863; Jewish Messenger, April 24, 1863. 14. New York Times, November 30, 1862, August 29, 1865. 15. Ibid., November 30, 1862; Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, January 23, 1864. 16. New York Times, July 29, 1863. The Jewish Messenger condemned camp followers for defrauding the government and argued that most Americans' feelings of outrage were justified. But the Messenger observed that it seemed that any merchant or contractor with a foreign surname was assumed to be a Jew and consequently a scapegoat for every criminal act (Jewish Messenger, January 9, April 24, 1863). 17. Washington Chronicle, quoted in Occident, February 1863; Bunker and Appel, “Shoddy Anti-Semitism, ” 47–49. 18. Civil War Cartoons, Caricatures of War. 19. New York Times, July 2, 1862; Bunker and Appel, “Shoddy Anti-Semitism,” 47–49. 20. Sherman, Personal Memoirs, vol. 1, 295. 21. Rosen, Jewish Confederates, 275. 22. New York Times, March 15, 1862; Jewish Messenger, March 21, 1862.

23. New York Times, March 28, 1862. 24. Ruchames, “Abolitionists and the Jews,” 145. 25. Israelite, March 9, 1860. 26. Simon Wolf to Washington Chronicle, January 8, 1863, in Occident, February 1863; Simonhoff, Jewish Participants, 147–48. 27. Vanity Fair, December 1861, 253. 28. Korn, American Jewry, 163–67; New York Times, February 15, 1863. 29. Israelite, February 20, 1863. 30. Occident, February 1863. 31. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 322–24; U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 3, 2:483. 32. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 3, 2:802–5; New York Times, October 16, 1862. 33. Lincoln, quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 323. 34. Ibid., 318. Page 162 → 35. Brooklyn Eagle, January 13, 1863. 36. Brandes, Warhogs, 68, 74, 80; Morford, Days of Shoddy, 177–78. 37. Civil War Cartoons. Caricatures of War. 38. Vanity Fair, September 21, 1861, 144. 39. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 325. 40. Pope, Clothing Industry, 8–9; Diner, “Encounter between Jews and America,” 17. 41. Shannon, “Life of the Common Soldier,” 473. 42. Morford, Days of Shoddy, 174, 191–93. 43. Shannon, “Life of the Common Soldier,” 473. 44. Morford, Days of Shoddy, 193. 45. Vanity Fair, November 23, 1861, 230. 46. Ibid., September 21, 1861, 142. Some minstrel tunes played in the working-class theaters of big cities reflected the popular anger at contractor fraud. One song was titled, “How Are You Shoddy?” (Nathan, “Two Inflation Songs,” 247–52). 47. New York World, August 18, 1863. 48. Morford, Days of Shoddy, 174, 193; Brandes, Warhogs, 67–69. 49. Brandes, Warhogs, 71; Morford, Days of Shoddy, 189–90. 50. Morford, Days of Shoddy, 191; Brandes, Warhogs, 72–73. 51. Hirshler, Jews from Germany, 60–61; Diner, Time for Gathering, 79–80. 52. Diner, Time for Gathering, 79–80. 53. Hirshler, Jews from Germany, 62. 54. Michael, “Origins,” 175–77. 55. Ibid., 177–79; Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 39. 56. Rich, “Henry Mack,” 266–67, 273–74; Chyet, “Clothing for the Army,” 174–75. Henry Mack took an interest in politics and was elected to the Cincinnati City Council in 1859 and 1860 as well as to a seat on the Board of Education in the 1880s. After a cholera epidemic that took the life of one of his children, he led the effort to improve the city's sewer system. Although he lost his first bid for state office in 1869, Mack was elected to the Ohio Legislature in 1888. 57. Morford, Days of Shoddy, 178, 182. 58. North American Review, October 1864, 559. 59. Bunker and Appel, “Shoddy Anti-Semitism,” 56; Atlantic Monthly, November 1867, 603. 60. New York Times, August 14, 1863. 61. Bunker and Appel, “Shoddy Anti-Semitism,” 47–48. 62. Ibid., 67. 63. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, January 23, 1864, March 21, 1863. 64. Vanity Fair, August 10, 1861, 71. 65. Bunker and Appel, “Shoddy Anti-Semitism,” 56–57; Israelite, August 14, 1863. 66. Harper's Monthly, July 1858, 267–68. 67. Schappes, Documentary History, 466. 68. Israelite, January 23, 1863. Page 163 →

Chapter 5 1. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 6–7, 39. 2. Ibid., 100. 3. Roberts, “Federal Government,” 275. 4. Memphis Daily Appeal, November 17, 1862; U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 39, pt. 2, p. 23. 5. Roberts, “Federal Government,” 262. 6. O'Connor, “Lincoln and the Cotton Trade,” 20–21. 7. Marx and Engels, Civil War, 85. 8. Roberts, “Federal Government,” 274–75. 9. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 4, 2:151. 10. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 622. 11. O'Connor, “Lincoln and the Cotton Trade,” 26–27. 12. Abraham Lincoln to William Kellogg, June 29, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 13. Coulter, “Commercial Intercourse,” 379; Lewis, Sherman, 247. 14. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 2, p. 186. 15. Ibid., ser. 3, 2:350. 16. Catton, Grant Moves South, 347–49; Coulter, “Commercial Intercourse,” 389. 17. Ash, “Civil War Exodus,” 507. 18. Catton, Grant Moves South, 349. 19. O'Connor, “Lincoln and the Cotton Trade,” 32. 20. Dana, Recollections, 38–39; U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 52, pt. 1, p. 331. As an editor of Horace Greeley's influential New York Tribune, Dana was one the era's outstanding intellectuals, but he harbored an anti-Semitism that became virulent during the Civil War years. He attacked Jews as disloyal to the Union and as upstart peddlers climbing the social and economic ladder. 21. Dana, Recollections, 38–39. 22. Brockett, Camp, 399. 23. New York Times, May 24, 1863; Major General Samuel R. Curtis to Abraham Lincoln, November 9, 1862, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 24. New York Times, May 24, 1863. 25. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 46, pt. 2, p. 445. 26. Ash, “Civil War Exodus,” 507. 27. Parks, “Confederate Trade Center,” 295–96. 28. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 24, pt. 3, p. 538; Coulter, “Commercial Intercourse,” 391. 29. Roberts, “Federal Government and Confederate Cotton,” 275. 30. Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 5:255–56; Ulysses S. Grant, Letters, 97. 31. Ulysses S. Grant, Letters, 57, 96. 32. Ibid. 33. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 3, 2:349. Page 164 → 34. New York Times, November 30, 1862. 35. Catton, Grant Moves South, 351; Russell Jones to Elihu Washburne, January 6, 28, 1863, Washburne Papers. 36. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 10, pt. 2, p. 638. 37. Abraham Lincoln to William Kellogg, June 29, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 38. Coulter, “Commercial Intercourse,” 385–89. 39. Ibid. 40. Dana, Recollections, 40; U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 52, pt. 1, p. 331. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise allowed that some Jews might have been guilty of illegal trade, but he also alleged that for every Jew, ten Yankee traders were shipping gold south for cotton: “The Jew is no more bent on making money than the Yankee.” Louis Dembitz, a Jewish Republican leader from Louisville, Kentucky, whose nephew, Louis Brandeis, would rise to the Supreme Court, took the Louisville Journal to task for its

accusations of Jewish smuggling and disloyalty to the Union cause (Israelite, September 8, 1865; Korn, American Jewry, 163–64). 41. Richardson, Personal History, 276. 42. Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 9:388–89. 43. Samuel Curtis to Abraham Lincoln, November 9, 1862, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 44. Sherman, Home Letters, 155, 229–30. 45. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 2, p. 141, ser. 3, 2:349–50; Brooklyn Eagle, July 31, 1862. 46. New York Times, October 30, November 19, 23, 1862, August 14, 1863. 47. Ibid., August 14, 1863.

Chapter 6 1. Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 5:238; Korn, American Jewry, 129–32. 2. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 2, p. 330. 3. Korn, American Jewry, 129–32; New York Times, November 30, 1862. 4. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 2, p. 337. 5. Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 6:393–95. 6. Sarna, When General Grant, 28. Expulsions were long a part of European Jewish history and were usually explained by religious fanaticism or Jews' European role as financiers. Jews in nations as historically liberal as France and England were not immune from periodic expulsions. France expelled its Jews several times from the end of the twelfth century to the end of the fourteenth century. In England, King Edward I also forced Jews out in 1290 after pressure from small landowners who sought to cancel their debts to Jewish money lenders. See Ovrut, “Edward I,” 224–35; Schwarzfuchs, “Expulsion of the Jews,” 482–89. The American expulsion, occurring under vastly different conditions than those in Europe, was quickly revoked by President Lincoln, but Jewish leaders still wondered how it was possible for one man to deny the basic rights of a peaceful community in violation of the Constitution. And they wondered whether it Page 165 → could happen again. “Have we a Constitution or not? Is there a law above the arbitrary will of civil or military rulers or not?,” asked “an indignant Israelite” in the February 1863 issue of the Occident. 7. New York World, August 10, 1868; New York Tribune, September 19, 1872. 8. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 2, p. 424. 9. Jesse R. Grant to Elihu Washburne, January 20, 1863, Washburne Papers; New York Tribune, September 19, 1872; Sarna, When General Grant, 47. Jonathan Sarna finds the sour deal between Jesse Grant and the Mack brothers to be the best explanation for the expulsion order. In my opinion, the evidence overwhelmingly points to pressure from Grant's superiors in Washington and other battlefield commanders such as General William Tecumseh Sherman. 10. Catton, This Hallowed Ground, 220. 11. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, January 19, 1863. 12. Ibid. 13. New York Herald, June 23, 1868; Korn, American Jewry, 141. 14. Ash, “Civil War Exodus,” 511. 15. Jesse R. Grant to Elihu Washburne, January 20, 1863, Washburne Papers. 16. Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 7:8–9; Israelite, December 26, 1862; Eisenschiml, “Anti-Semitism in Lincoln's Time,” 11. 17. Israelite, December 26, 1862; Joakim Isaacs, “Candidate Grant,” 5. 18. Anbinder, “Ulysses Grant, Nativist,” 124. 19. Korn, American Jewry, 139–40. 20. Ulysses S. Grant, Letters, 97. 21. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 2, pp. 421–22. 22. Ibid. 23. Israelite, January 30, 1863; Salmon P. Chase, Salmon P. Chase Papers, 251–52.

24. Jewish Messenger, January 16, 1863. 25. Israelite, January 23, 1863; Ash, “Civil War Exodus,” 513. 26. Spiegel, Your True Marcus, 191. 27. Israelite, January 2, November 6, 1863. 28. New York Times, November 30, 1862; Israelite, January 23, November 6, 1863. 29. Israelite, November 6, 1863. 30. Ibid., January 2, 1863; Ash, “Civil War Exodus,” 512. 31. Captain Philip Trounstine to Major C. S. Hayes, March 3, 1863, Civil War Letters Collection. 32. Korn, American Jewry, 123–24; Ash, “Civil War Exodus,” 514; Sarna, When General Grant, 17. 33. Ulysses S. Grant, Letters, 56; Robertson, “Paducah,” 120–21. 34. O. P. Weigart to Andrew Johnson, June 3, 1862, in Papers, 5:437; Robertson, “Paducah,” 121. 35. Ash, “Civil War Exodus,” 517. 36. Bernheim, History, 32–33. Page 166 → 37. Paducah City Council Minutes; Bernheim, History, 15–16, 23. In 1871, Paducah elected a Jewish mayor, banker Meyer Weil. He was reelected in 1877 and in the 1880s served in the Kentucky Legislature. Bernheim's history of the Jews of Paducah, published in 1912, makes no mention of General Orders 11, saying only that during the federal occupation, “a period of unrest and insecurity took hold of the citizens and chaos prevailed everywhere…. [D]read and apprehension lay like a pall upon the town” (History, 32–33, 53–54; Robertson, “Paducah,” 124). 38. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 2, p. 506; Sarna, When General Grant, 9. 39. Korn, American Jewry, 124–25; Markens, “Lincoln and the Jews,” 118. 40. Korn, American Jewry, 124–25; Sarna, When General Grant, 21. Sarna and most other historians think that this conversation is apocryphal. 41. Occident, quoted in Markens, “Lincoln and the Jews,” 122. After the war, Cesar Kaskel left Paducah and set up a clothing store on New York's Fifth Avenue (Bernheim, History, 24). 42. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 2, pp. 530, 544; Jewish Messenger, January 16, 1863. 43. Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 7:54. 44. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 24, pt. 1, p. 9. 45. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, January 17, 1863; Israelite, January 16, 1863. Wise had written earlier to Stanton but had not received an answer (Records of the Office of the Secretary of War). 46. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, January 17, 1863; Israelite, January 16, 1863. 47. New York Times, January 7, 1863; Korn, American Jewry, 127. In 1864, Pendleton ran on the Democratic ticket as George McClellan's vice presidential running mate. 48. Elihu B. Washburne to Abraham Lincoln, January 6, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 49. New York Times, January 6, 1863; Occident, February 1863. 50. Israelite, January 23, 1863; Markens, “Lincoln and the Jews,” 120–21. 51. Ash, “Civil War Exodus,” 522; Korn, American Jewry, 128. Americans viewed their country as that one haven from the despotism of Europe, but during the war, some observers feared that military rule was not far off. On January 13, 1863, under the headline “The Jews,” the Philadelphia Ledger cautioned its readers that citizens of the United States “have never experienced political oppression. It is hoped we shall not begin now.” 52. Markens, “Lincoln and the Jews,” 120. 53. Occident, February 1863. 54. Israelite, February 28, 1868. 55. Jewish Messenger, January 16, 1863. 56. While a few in the press and the government applauded Grant's actions, most Americans agreed with the general's wife, Julia, who termed it in her memoirs as “that obnoxious order” (Julia Dent Grant, Personal Memoirs, 107; Sarna, When General Grant, 26). Page 167 → 57. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, January 6, 1863. 58. Markens, “Lincoln and the Jews,” 121; Israelite, January 9, 1863. 59. Ash, “Civil War Exodus,” 521. 60. New York World, quoted in Korn, American Jewry, 141–42.

61. Washington Chronicle, quoted in Occident, February 1863; Washington Star, January 7, 1863. 62. New York Times, January 18, 1863. 63. Ibid. 64. Philadelphia Ledger, January 13, 1863. 65. Indianapolis Sentinel, quoted in Israelite, January 16, 1863. 66. Louisville Journal and Louisville Democrat, quoted in Israelite, January 9, 1863. 67. Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 9:141–42. 68. Ibid. 69. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 31, pt. 3, pp. 289–90; Wax, “Jews of Memphis,” 74–75. 70. Wax, “Jews of Memphis,” 76, 88; Israelite, December 11, 1863. 71. Jewish Messenger, September 30, 1864. 72. Augusta (GA) Daily Chronicle and Sentinel, July 17, 1862, quoted in Coulter, Confederate States, 228. 73. New York Times, July 29, 1863.

Chapter 7 1. Rosen, Jewish Confederates, 265. 2. Berman, Richmond's Jewry, 140. 3. Ibid., 148–49. 4. Thomas Jordan to M. Michelbacher, September 1, 1861, in New York Times, February 8, 1863. 5. Richmond Examiner, July 16, 1863, quoted in Coulter, Confederate States, 225. 6. Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism, 52–54. 7. Ibid., 49–50; Rosen, Jewish Confederates, 266. 8. Emma Holmes, Diary, 209. 9. Jones, Rebel War Clerk's Diary, 128, 150. 10. Mobile (AL) Daily Advertiser and Register, November 5, 1863, quoted in Korn, American Jewry, 296. 11. Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism, 52. 12. Jones, Rebel War Clerk's Diary, 164. 13. Richmond Examiner, December 20, 1862. 14. Ibid. 15. Southern Illustrated News (Richmond, VA), quoted in Jaher, Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 224–25. 16. Confederate States of America, Congress, Proceedings, 122–23. Page 168 → 17. Ibid., 123. 18. Coulter, Confederate States, 227. 19. Richmond Examiner, December 5, 1863. 20. Ibid., July 16, 1863. 21. Confederate States of America, Congress, Proceedings, 213. 22. Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism, 42–43. 23. Southern Punch, October 17, 1863. 24. Jones, Rebel War Clerk's Diary, 221. 25. Southern Punch, October 17, 1863. 26. Jones, Rebel War Clerk's Diary, 78. 27. Rosen, Jewish Confederates, 271. 28. Confederate States of America, Congress, Proceedings, 122; Jewish Messenger, November 4, 1864; Korn, “Judah P. Benjamin,” 170. 29. Jones, Rebel War Clerk's Diary, 221; Jewish Messenger, February 26, 1864; Israelite, March 11, 1864. 30. Richmond Examiner, January 5, 1863. 31. Charleston (SC) Courier, quoted in Korn, American Jewry, 186. 32. Richmond (VA) Sentinel, quoted in Rosen, Jewish Confederates, 272. 33. Berman, Richmond's Jewry, 188–89. 34. Ibid.

35. Schmier, “Notes and Documents,” 9–10; Mark Greenberg, “Ambivalent Relations,” 14. 36. Schmier, “Notes and Documents,” 9; Mark Greenberg, “Ambivalent Relations,” 23. 37. Schmier, “Notes and Documents,” 13; Rosen, Jewish Confederates, 267. 38. Schmier, “Notes and Documents,” 14; Schmier, “Act Unbecoming,” 21–22. 39. Schmier, “Notes and Documents,” 13–14. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 11. 42. Ibid., 13. 43. Ibid., 19–20. 44. Ibid., 21. 45. Mark Greenberg, “Ambivalent Relations,” 25–26. 46. Ibid., 22; Rosen, Jewish Confederates, 270. 47. In his memoirs published in 1922, Oscar Straus fondly recalls his family's earlier years in Talbotton without mention of the incident that sent them north. “Our parents were made to feel at home in Talbotton. We were the only Jewish family in town. This at first aroused some curiosity among those who had never met persons of our race or religion before,” he wrote. Straus said his father originally sought a peddler's license but found the price too high, so he shared space in the store of a tailor. “This was a pioneer business in a pioneer country,” Straus said. Returning to Talbotton while serving in the Roosevelt administration, Straus was honored with a dinner by town leaders (Straus, Under Four Administrations, 5–16, 243). Page 169 → 48. Rosen, Jewish Confederates, 273. 49. In some parts of the Deep South, farmers had to put liens on their crops before buying on credit from merchants in town. Merchants often demanded high interest rates, and the system eventually resulted in bankruptcy for most farmers as cotton prices dropped and conditions in the rural economy worsened. In southern Mississippi, merchants who tried to collect on debts or take possession of foreclosed farms encountered violence. (William Holmes, “Whitecapping,” 246–49; Washington Post, May 5, June 27, 1893). 50. New York Times, November 21, 1892. 51. Press reports from Jackson, Mississippi, in late 1892 and early 1893 described burned homes and “negroes driven from all plantations owned by Jews.” One Jewish merchant singularly targeted was Henry Hiller, who owned a number of small farms in Pike and neighboring counties. In late 1892, Whitecaps burned down more than twenty-five tenant houses on his land and sent black farmworkers fleeing (William Holmes, “Whitecapping,” 247–49, 259). 52. Selig Adler, “Zebulon B. Vance,” 357–59. 53. Vance, Scattered Nation, 41. 54. Ibid., 50–54.

Chapter 8 1. Korn, American Jewry, 217–19; Sarna, When General Grant, xiv. 2. Jewish Messenger, December 4, 1863. 3. Israelite, October 2, 1863. 4. Wolf, Selected Addresses, 105. 5. Joakim Isaacs, “Candidate Grant,” 3. 6. Israelite, October 2, 1863. 7. Ibid., June 16, 1865. 8. Jewish Messenger, June 29, 1877. 9. Israelite, October 2, 1863. 10. Ibid. 11. Occident, June, March 1855. 12. Ibid., February 16, 1860. 13. Ibid., March 1855.

14. Ibid., March 8, 1860. 15. Israelite, March 7, 1862. 16. Occident, June 1855. 17. Yarbrough, American Virtues, 56. 18. Isaac Mayer Wise to Adolph Huebsch, July 30, 1868, Wise Correspondence; Israelite, May 6, 1870. 19. Israelite, July 12, 1861, May 6, 1870; Wise, Reminiscences, 331. 20. Israelite, May 6, 1870; Wolf, Selected Addresses, 18. Page 170 → 21. New York Herald, quoted in Schappes, Documentary History, 554–56. 22. Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 72. 23. Rabinowitz, Assembly, 70; Wise, Reminiscences, 331. 24. Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 144–45. 25. Ibid. 26. Vance, Scattered Nation, 15, 45. 27. Jewish Messenger, December 9, 1864, September 30, 1868. 28. Wolf, Selected Addresses, 105. 29. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 240–42; Wise, Reminiscences, 193; Israelite, July 21, 1871. 30. Israelite, June 16, 1865, March 27, 1863. 31. Jewish Messenger, January 16, 1863; Occident, April 1861. 32. Foner, Jews in American History, 74. 33. Jewish Messenger, January 16, September 11, 1863. 34. Ibid., May 23, 1862. 35. Ibid., January 16, 1863. 36. Ibid. 37. St. Louis B'nai B'rith to Abraham Lincoln, January 5, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 38. Jewish Messenger, January 9, 1863. 39. Ibid., January 16, 1863. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., January 23, 1863. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Israelite, February 6, 1863; Board of Delegates of American Israelites to Abraham Lincoln, January 8, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 45. New York Times, January 18, 1863. Sarna notes, “The Board took far more credit than it was due for its response to Grant's order. Events overtook it” (When General Grant, 17). 46. Israelite, October 4, 1872. 47. Ibid., September 13, 1872; Jewish Messenger, January 16, 1863. 48. Spiegel, Your True Marcus, viii. 49. Washington Post, December 16, 1889. 50. Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 41. In 1891, American Jewish leaders were aroused by a letter in the North American Review alleging that Jews were not among those fighting in the Civil War on either side. Almost thirty years since the war ended, the author, J. M. Rogers, also resurrected the charge that Jews were either illegal traders or Confederate spies. He then challenged Jewish leaders to supply the names of Jewish soldiers and their regiments. The editors of the Washington Post called Rogers's assertions “a barefaced perversion of fact” and gave Wolf space to refute the charges (Washington Post, December 10, 1891). Wolf also responded four years later with his book, The American Page 171 → Jew as Patriot, Soldier, and Citizen, which included the names of Jews who served in the Union and Confederate Armies. Wolf believed that a book-length answer was necessary at a time when Jews were under attack in Russia and antiSemitism was seeing a revival in France and Germany. With “imitators on both sides of the Atlantic,” Wolf “felt myself impelled to reply” (American Jew, 2). 51. Israelite, September 13, 1872. 52. Occident, May 1863. 53. Allan Nevins, quoted in Korn, American Jewry, x. 54. Israelite, October 2, 1863.

Chapter 9 1. Occident, November 8, 1860, December 1861. 2. Ibid., December 1861. 3. Ibid., February 1855, December 1861. 4. Ibid., December 15, 1859, November 8, 1860. 5. Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 136. 6. Occident, November 8, 1860. 7. Ibid., February 1855; Cohen, “Pioneers of American Jewish Defense,” 126. 8. New York Herald, November 27, 1859; Occident, December 15, 1859. 9. Occident, November 8, 1860, August 14, 1859; Cohen, “Pioneers of American Jewish Defense,” 133. 10. Israelite, June 26, 1863; Occident, February 1863. 11. Friedman, Jewish Pioneers and Patriots, 269. 12. Israelite, November 4, 1864. 13. Evansville (IN) Journal, quoted in Jewish Messenger, June 24, 1864. 14. Israelite, September 23, 1864; Korn, American Jewry, 160. 15. New York Times, November 9, 1864; Sarna, When General Grant, 63. 16. Chicago Tribune, quoted in Israelite, September 23, 1864. 17. Israelite, December 16, 1864. 18. Isachar Zacharie to Abraham Lincoln, November 3, 1864, Abraham Lincoln Papers; Jewish Messenger, September 30, 1864. 19. Isachar Zacharie to Abraham Lincoln, November 3, 1864, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 20. Jewish Messenger, October 28, September 30, 1864. 21. Ibid., September 9, 1864. 22. Ibid., October 28, 1864. 23. Myer Isaacs to Abraham Lincoln, October 26, 1864, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 24. John Hay to Myer Isaacs, November 1, 1864, ibid. 25. Samuel A. Lewis to Abraham Lincoln, October 26, 1864, ibid. 26. Andrew Johnson, Papers, 7:168–69. 27. Andrew Johnson to Herman Moos, September 25, 1864, The American Jew in the Page 172 → Civil War, Catalog of the Exhibit of the Civil War Centennial, Jewish Historical Commission, entry 34. 28. Jewish Messenger, November 4, 1864. 29. Ibid., October 28, 1864. 30. New York World, July 18, 1868. 31. Diner, Time for Gathering, 160. 32. von Bort, General Grant and the Jews, 16. 33. New York Times, November 30, 1868. 34. Israelite, February 28, 1868. 35. New York World, July 18, 1868. 36. von Bort, General Grant and the Jews, 16. 37. Ibid., 9, 16. 38. La Crosse Daily Democrat, June 23, 1868; New York Times, June 14, 1868. 39. La Crosse Daily Democrat, August 12, 1868. 40. New York Times, July 16, 1868; Jewish Messenger, July 24, 1868; Israelite, March 27, 1868. 41. Korn, American Jewry, 134. 42. Norton Stern, “Los Angeles Jewish Voters,” 179–80. 43. Israelite, February 28, 1868. 44. Adolph Moses to the editor of the Quincy (IL) Herald, in New York Times, October 13, 1868; Jewish Messenger, July 24, 1868; Israelite, June 26, 1868. 45. Israelite, June 26, 1868. 46. Jewish Messenger, October 30, 1868. 47. Ibid. 48. New York Sun, July 10, 1868.

49. Brooklyn Eagle, June 6, September 18, 1868. 50. Cincinnati Commercial, August 26, 1868; Joakim Isaacs, “Candidate Grant,” 12–13. 51. Chicago Tribune, August 29, 1868. Wolf had consistently defended the general through both the Lincoln and Johnson administrations. Writing in the Chicago Tribune in August 1868, Wolf said, “I know General Grant and his motives…. [H]e never intended to insult any honorable Jew.” Searching for a rationale for the expulsion order, Wolf explained that Grant was under incredible pressure to halt illegal cotton trade with the enemy that was putting his military operations at risk. 52. Jewish Messenger, September 25, 1868. 53. New York Herald, quoted in Joakim Isaacs, “Candidate Grant,” 7. 54. Joseph Medill to Elihu Washburne, June 16, 1868, Washburne Papers. 55. Cutler, Jews of Chicago, 26; Brooklyn Eagle, October 20, 1868. 56. Joseph Medill to Elihu Washburne, June 16, 1868, Washburne Papers. Jews gravitated to the abolitionist party from the beginning. The first call for a German mass meeting in Chicago to join the Republican Party was signed by five activists, four of them Jews. 57. Ibid. Page 173 → 58. Chicago Tribune, September 2, 1868. 59. New York Times, June 12, 1868. 60. Israelite, “A Word with the Republican Press,” March 27, 1868. 61. Ibid., August 31, 1868. 62. Joakim Isaacs, “Candidate Grant,” 6. 63. Norton Stern, “Los Angeles Jewish Voters,” 181. 64. New York Times, September 10, 1868. 65. Ibid., September 10, September 18, 1868. 66. Cincinnati Commercial, July 28, 1868, quoted in Joakim Isaacs, “Candidate Grant,” 13. 67. Newburg (IN) Herald, quoted in Israelite, June 19, 1868. 68. New York World, July 18, 1868. 69. Occident, April 7, 1859. 70. La Crosse Daily Democrat, August 12, 1868. 71. Ibid. 72. La Crosse Daily Democrat, July 29, 1868. Like any modern presidential campaign, the 1868 race for the White House had its share of humor at the expense of the candidate. A campaign song that implicated Jesse and Ulysses Grant in a conspiracy to exclude Jewish merchants from the lucrative cotton trade was printed in several Democratic newspapers. Who drove the Hebrews from his Camp, Into the Alligator swamp Where everything was dark and damp? Ulysses Who wrothy at those faithless Jews Who kept “pa's” share of Cotton dues, All further permits did refuse? Ulysses Who licensed chaps that would divide With father Jesse, Argus-eyed, Who claimed the hair and eke the hide? Ulysses. (Joakim Isaacs, “Candidate Grant,” 9) 73. Isidor Bush to Edward Bates, January 6, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 74. Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 64–67. 75. John Rawlins to Louis Dembitz, May 6, 1868, in New York Herald, June 23, 1868. 76. New York Herald, June 23, 1868.

77. Ulysses Grant to Isaac Newton Morris, September 14, 1868, in New York Times, November 30, 1868. Morris was active in the Grant campaign, having written, “He should be made our next President by acclamation.” As president, Grant appointed Page 174 → Morris as a commissioner of the Union Pacific Railroad (Isaac Newton Morris, “Grant: Why He Should Be Elected President” (speech, June 1, 1868), Morris Family Papers). 78. Ulysses Grant to Isaac Newton Morris, September 14, 1868, in New York Times, November 30, 1868; Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 6:393–95. 79. New York Times, November 30, 1868; Occident, January 1869. 80. New York Herald, October 23, 1868; Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 19:27. 81. Ibid.; Korn, American Jewry, 278. 82. Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 19:26–27. 83. New York Tribune, August 10, 1872. 84. New York Times, November 1, 1870, August 17, 1872. 85. Ibid., July 26, 1872. 86. New York Tribune, August 10, 1872. 87. Israelite, May 10, 1872, December 6, 1872. 88. Ibid., September 13, October 4, 1872. 89. Ibid., September 20, 1872. 90. Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 23:437. Was Ulysses Grant an anti-Semite? Whether Grant had a change of heart on his own after the war or was influenced by Wolf, he did not express anti-Semitic sentiments during his presidency or after. If anything, he seemed willing to make amends for General Orders 11. According to Sarna, during Grant's administration, “Jews achieved heightened status on the national scene” (When General Grant, xiii). Grant commended Wolf for his chairmanship of the B'nai B'rith convention in 1874 and for a Washington lecture to the Schiller Bund, “The Influence of the Jews on the Progress of the World,” that Grant said would “educate the many who are prejudiced because they are ignorant” (Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 92). As president, Grant, along with his son and Vice President Thomas Ferry, attended the dedication of Washington's newly built Adas Israel synagogue on June 9, 1876. After the service, the president made a ten-dollar donation to the congregation's building fund. Writing in the Messenger, Wolf, a member of Adas Israel, said, “This is the first instance in the history of American Judaism” when a president and vice president had attended a consecration service, “and it is worthy of record on this centennial year of our beloved country” (Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 27:161; Jewish Messenger, June 16, 1876; Washington Evening Star, June 8, 10, 1876). Diner notes that as the first president to sit in the pews of a synagogue, Grant “demonstrated the respectability achieved by the Jews as an American religious community and their growing presence in the American polity”(Jews of the United States, 163). On July 11, 1876, just a month after visiting the synagogue, Grant welcomed to the White House leaders of the newly formed Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which superseded the Board of Delegates. A statue dedicated to religious liberty, commissioned by the B'nai B'rith, was unveiled in Philadelphia in 1876 for the nation's Centennial Exposition. “You Jews are certainly a great people and patriotic Americans,” Grant told Wolf when he heard of plans to erect the twenty-five-foot marble statue at Page 175 → a cost of twenty thousand dollars (Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 88–92; Washington Evening Star, July 12, 13, 1876). Other, smaller acts, largely of a personal nature, reveal a more liberal Grant. While on a celebrated 1878 world tour, he visited Rabbi Zvi Sneersohn in Jerusalem and affirmed his support for the Jewish diaspora under Ottoman rule. He approved the appointments of Jewish students to West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy. One was the son of Colonel Marcus Spiegel, who had fallen during the Red River Campaign. Wolf, who took the younger Spiegel's case before the president, told Grant that aside from honoring the

memory of Spiegel's father, the West Point appointment would “convince many admirers that you aim to do justice to all men irrespective of color or religion.” Grant sided with Jewish leaders in a controversy with the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Henry Bergh, on whether the kosher slaughtering of livestock was humane. Grant also sent a twenty-five dollar check to an individual in Jerusalem who was seeking a dowry for his daughter. The request had been addressed to the “King of the United States.” (Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 94; Joakim Isaacs, “Candidate Grant,” 15). Grant reflected American society's ambivalent attitude toward Jews when he told one rabbi in 1875 that Jews had longer life spans than other Americans: “I think the Jew lives longer because he loves his life more. It is certain that the Jew takes no risk of life and limb…. And yet I have found Jewish soldiers among the bravest of the brave. The Jew risks his life only to show his patriotism and then he is fearless” (Korn, American Jewry, 281). Even up to Grant's death, the circumstances of General Orders 11 were debated. Those who eulogized him continued to assert that the order had been issued from Washington. On August 5, 1885, shortly after Grant's death, the Philadelphia Press insisted, “He was not a bigot. Bigotry was not part of his generous nature…. The order…excluding certain Jewish traders…did not originate with him, but came from higher authority…. [H]e was not against the religion of the Jews.” 91. Israelite, November 15, 1872. At Grant's request, Wolf took to the campaign trail in 1872, speaking to largely German audiences in Ohio and Indiana. In Chicago, banker and former alderman Henry Greenebaum mobilized the German and Jewish vote for Grant's reelection. Greenebaum had emerged as a political leader of the city's German immigrants by 1872, having been considered a candidate for mayor in the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire.

Chapter 10 1. Tarshish, “Jew and Christian,” 573–75. 2. Occident, July 1861. 3. Cohen, “Christian Agenda,” 83–85. 4. New York Times, February 26, 1870, January 19, 1871. 5. Ibid., February 28, 1873. Page 176 → 6. Markens, Hebrews in America, 174; Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 176. 7. New York Times, December 18, 1870. 8. Higham, “Social Discrimination,” 7. 9. Ibid., 8; Sorin, Time for Building, 4. 10. Sorin, Time for Building, 7–8. 11. Higham, “Social Discrimination,” 8–11. 12. New York Times, March 29, 1867; Israelite, April 19, 1867. 13. Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 145. 14. Schappes, Documentary History, 511; Israelite, March 1, May 10, 1867; Tarshish, “Jew and Christian,” 572; New York Times, March 31, 1867. 15. Sorin, Time for Building, 8–9. 16. Diner, Time for Gathering, 192; Diner, “Encounter between Jews and America,” 22–24; New York Times, April 23, 1893, January 17, 1886. 17. New York Times, September 20, 1870. 18. Jewish Messenger, November 22, 1872; Schappes, Documentary History, 559–60. 19. Higham, “Social Discrimination,” 11; New York Times, June 19, 1877. 20. New York Times, June 19, 20, 1877; Brooklyn Eagle, June 19, 20, 1877; Diner, Time for Gathering, 191. 21. Friedman, Jewish Pioneers and Patriots, 274; New York Times, June 20, 1877. 22. Brooklyn Eagle, June 19, 1877; New York Times, June 20, 1877. 23. McCullough, Good Old Coney Island, 42, 123; Brooklyn Eagle, July 22, 23, 1879.

24. Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 40. Corbin and Hilton were certainly not alone in restricting their clientele. Resort owners in Long Branch, New Jersey, said they agreed with Hilton but failed to mention that Seligman already owned a seaside cottage formerly owned by his close friend, Ulysses S. Grant (New York Times, June 20, 1877). 25. New York Evening Post, quoted in Jewish Messenger, August 1, 1879; Brooklyn Eagle, June 19, 1877. 26. New York Times, June 22, 1877. 27. Ibid., June 20, 1877. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid.; Jewish Messenger, June 22, 1877; Brooklyn Eagle, June 19, 1877. 30. New York Times, June 22, 1877, April 17, 1882. 31. Washington Post, August 1, 1886. 32. Brooklyn Eagle, July 22, 1879, June 19, 1877. 33. Higham, “Social Discrimination,” 12–13. 34. Brooklyn Eagle, July 23, 1879. 35. New York Times, April 5, 1890. 36. Jewish Messenger, September 17, 1880. 37. Washington Post, December 16, 1889. 38. Cyrus Adler, American Jewish Year Book 5664, 35–36. 39. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 5:3996. Page 177 → 40. Simon Wolf to New York Evening Post, November 22, 1864, in Israelite, December 16, 1864. 41. Jewish Messenger, October 29, 1868. 42. Israelite, August 2, 1872. 43. Brooklyn Eagle, May 6, 1865, March 5, 1872. Adolphus Solomons, a Washington printer and a founding member of the American Red Cross in 1881, was among those who persuaded the publishers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the publishers of Worcester's Dictionary to eliminate derogatory terms and definitions. For example, there was the entry: “Jew, v.a. To cheat or defraud; to swindle (colloq.).” At first the publishers of Webster's objected, saying such dictionary entries were no worse than Jesuitical to mean artfulness and cunning. No offense was intended. However by the mid-1870s, the publishers agreed to delete the objectionable definitions, which the New York Times described on July 15, 1877, as the “footprints of hatred…upon the yielding surface of language.” 44. Kohler, “Board of Delegates,” 118–20; Israelite, March 11, 1864. 45. Adolph Moses to Isaac Mayer Wise, September 26, 1864, in Israelite, October 7, 1864. 46. Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 8–9. 47. Kohler, “Board of Delegates,” 118–20. 48. Ibid., 118; Jewish Messenger, March 4, 1864; Israelite, March 11, 1864. 49. Kohler, “Board of Delegates,” 118. 50. Ibid., 119. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 121. 53. Korn, American Jewry, 172. 54. Schappes, Documentary History, 493. 55. Butler, Speech, 5. 56. Mayo, Ambivalent Image, 121. 57. Diner, Time for Gathering, 183–85. 58. Occident, October 1865. 59. Richmond (VA) Whig, quoted in Diner, Time for Gathering, 186. 60. New York Times, June 19, 1877. 61. Eaton, Hour with the American Hebrew, 42; Butler, Speech, 3. 62. Beecher, Jew and Gentile, 23. When Oscar Straus's appointment as Grover Cleveland's ambassador to the Ottoman court was opposed by some strictly on the grounds that a Jew was representing the United States at the heart of Islam, Beecher told Cleveland, “It is because he is a Jew that I would urge the appointment as a fit recognition of this remarkable people who are becoming large contributors to American prosperity” (New York Times, March 25, 1887).

63. James C. Rice to Henry Wilson, November 11, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 64. Atlanta Constitution, June 24, 1868. Page 178 → 65. Hebrew Journal, August 1, 1890. 66. Isaac Leeser, quoted in Rabinowitz, Assembly, 34. 67. Eaton, Hour with the American Hebrew, 33. A few Christians saw conversion as both combatting antiSemitic prejudice and saving Jews' souls. Groups such as the Society for Ameliorating the Condition of the Jews, founded in the 1820s, considered themselves missionaries and sought even deathbed conversions. In 1868, the organization decided to extend its work to Chicago, where recently baptized Jews would extol the virtues of Christianity. Alderman and banker Henry Greenebaum reacted indignantly, saying the converts were only going through the motions. To Greenebaum, only God could convert the Jew. The Board of Delegates took a strong stand against the conversion societies, comparing their attempts to baptize Jewish youngsters to the abduction of Edgar Mortara (Schappes, Documentary History, 539–41; Mayo, Ambivalent Image, 115; Israelite, May 29, 1868). 68. Diner, Time for Gathering, 164. 69. Mayo, Ambivalent Image, 120. 70. Ibid., 115. 71. Ibid., 103. A few Jews went so far as to assign blame for anti-Semitism to themselves. During the 1868 presidential campaign, Austrian-born Noah Green rallied the Jewish vote in Iowa for Grant, saying that General Orders 11 was the result of what he termed “Jewish exclusivity.” In a speech in Keokuk, the twenty-seven-year-old Green said that Jews would have been spared discrimination during the war if they were not so readily identifiable as merchants. Failure to assimilate into American Protestant culture was a sure way to invite the suspicions of disloyalty that led to the expulsion order, he said, “when soldiers saw a Jew their assumption was that he was a trader.” But Green did not stop there in his call for assimilation, making a bizarre argument that implied that if Jews would only intermarry, they would after several generations be physically indistinguishable from their Christian neighbors. In Green's line of thinking, through intermarriage Jews would lose “the same facial expression for which we were distinguished thousands of years ago.” In short, without Jews, there would be no anti-Semitism (Chicago Tribune, August 29, 1868).

Chapter 11 1. Diner, Time for Gathering, 20–21. 2. Yedidya, “Orthodox Strategies,” 68–70. 3. Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 15–16. 4. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 5:3927–32. 5. Sorin, Time for Building, 8. 6. Eisen, “In the Wilderness,” 34. 7. Occident, December 1855. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., June 1854, August 1855. Page 179 → 10. Israelite, July 21, 1871; Raphael, “Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger,” 190. 11. Israelite, November 12, 1869. 12. Jewish Messenger, October 28, 1864. 13. Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 50. 14. Jewish Messenger, October 28, 1864. 15. Philipson, Reform Movement in Judaism, 542; Jewish Messenger, October 28, 1864. 16. Occident, September 1855. 17. Ibid., August 1855. 18. Ibid., September 1855. 19. Ibid. 20. Philipson, Reform Movement in Judaism, 481. 21. Occident, February 16, 1860.

22. Brooklyn Eagle, October 2, 1868. 23. New York Times, August 19, 1870. 24. Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 182–83. 25. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 242; Israelite, November 15, 1872. 26. Israelite, July 7, 1876. 27. Philipson, Reform Movement in Judaism, 483. 28. Israelite, December 29, 1865. 29. Isaac Mayer Wise to Adolph Huebsch, July 30, 1868, Wise Correspondence; Israelite, March 5, 1869; Israelite, September 9, 1870. 30. Wise, World of My Books, 23. 31. Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 156. 32. Wise, Reminiscences, 31, 64. 33. Korn, Eventful Years and Experiences, 192. 34. Jewish Messenger, January 16, 1863. 35. Ibid., May 1, 1868. 36. Buchler, “Struggle for Unity,” 113. 37. Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 168. 38. Isaac Mayer Wise to Adolph Huebsch, July 30, 1868, Wise Correspondence. 39. Israelite, March 5, 1869; Isaac Mayer Wise to Adolph Huebsch, July 30, 1868, Wise Correspondence. 40. Bitter adversaries for decades, Einhorn and Wise often traded insults. Wise had pretensions of being a Jewish Pope, Einhorn said, while Wise denounced the radical Reformer as a Deist and a Unitarian. “Einhorn,” Wise said mockingly, “you should not have so far forgotten that your father was a Jew” (Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 165). 41. Isaac Mayer Wise to Congregation B'nai Jesherun, August 1, 1871, Wise Correspondence. 42. Israelite, June 2, 1871, November 19, 1869. 43. Michael, “Origins,” 155–56. 44. Ibid., 155. Page 180 → 45. New York Times, June 9, 1871. 46. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1:4–7. 47. Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 159. 48. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1:70–71, 90. 49. Ibid., 1:64; Meyer, Response to Modernity, 258. 50. Israelite, October 24, 1873. 51. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1:6, 18, 78; Israelite, June 19, 1874. 52. Jewish Messenger, June 11, 1875. 53. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 261. 54. Israelite, August 28, 1874. 55. Bernheim, History, 67–69. 56. Simon Wolf to Israelite, June 30, 1876. 57. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1:578; Meyer, Response to Modernity, 261. 58. Jewish Messenger, February 16, 1877. 59. Ibid., July 4, 1879; Tarshish, “Board of Delegates,” 32. During its nineteen years of representing American Jewry, the Board of Delegates did not achieve the international influence of its British or French counterparts. Some cooperation was demonstrated when the board joined the French to raise money for a school in Palestine, but proposals to closely link the two organizations met resistance. While Myer Isaacs viewed the formation of the French organization in 1860 as a step toward a united world Jewry, he also realized that most Americans were already suspicious of unity efforts in their own country, let alone with their coreligionists in Europe. An 1865 attempt to form a chapter of the French Alliance in New York that would coordinate work with the Board of Delegates was opposed by board members who feared that the French would not view them as equals (Isaac Mayer Wise to Adolphe Cremieux, July 13, 1865, Wise Correspondence). 60. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1:10; Israelite, April 5, 1867.

61. Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 158–60; Wise, Reminiscences, 325–27. 62. Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 224; Israelite, August 21, 1868. 63. Israelite, September 5, 1873. 64. Ibid., August 14, 1874, March 25, 1876. 65. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1:11. 66. Ibid., 1:36. 67. Meyer, “Hebrew Union College,” 12. 68. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1:vii. 69. Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 190; Esther L. Panitz, Simon Wolf, 64. 70. Israelite, July 7, 1876. 71. Washington Star, July 13, 1876; Israelite, August 14, 1874. Wise was definitely encouraged by his followers and friends. For his efforts, Wise was praised as not just the Page 181 → leader of Hebrew Union College or of American Judaism but as “the central sun [of American Judaism] around which the planets…are moving” (Meyer, Response to Modernity, 263). 72. Israelite, July 3, 1874. 73. Israelite, August 4, 1874.

Chapter 12 1. Evelyn Levow Greenberg, “1869 Petition,” 279; New York Times, November 27, 1869. 2. New York Tribune, December 1, 1869. 3. Evelyn Levow Greenberg, “1869 Petition,” 280. 4. New York Tribune, December 2, 1869. 5. Simon Wolf to Jewish Times, December 7, 1869, quoted in Evelyn Levow Greenberg, “1869 Petition,” 283–84. 6. Ibid. 7. Washington Star, April 19, 1869; Esther L. Panitz, Simon Wolf, 37. 8. Hamilton Fish to Myer Isaacs, December 3, 1869, in Jewish Messenger, December 10, 1869. 9. Ibid. 10. Esther L. Panitz, Simon Wolf, 37. 11. Adolphe Cremieux to Simon Wolf, December 20, 1869, in Israelite, December 31, 1869. 12. Simon Wolf quoted in Panitz, Simon Wolf, 37; Evelyn Levow Greenberg, “1869 Petition,” 289. 13. Ibid. 14. Jewish Messenger, February 4, 1870; Evelyn Levow Greenberg, “1869 Petition,” 293. 15. Evelyn Levow Greenberg, “1869 Petition,” 294. 16. Eugene Schuyler to Hamilton Fish, September 29, 1872, Fish Papers. 17. Ibid.; “Memorandum on the Legal Position of the Hebrews in Russia, Fish Papers. 18. A lawyer and leader in the German Jewish establishment, Wolf saw no greater goal than making Jews into model American citizens. In 1869, Wolf was rewarded for his support of the Republican Party during the presidential election with an unsalaried federal post created specifically for him, recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. Wolf demonstrated his commitment to the ideals of the postwar Republican Party by promising Frederick Douglass's son a job as a printer in Washington. He told the younger Douglass that as a Jew, “I have a feeling of common cause” (New York Times May 22, 1869). In 1881, President James Garfield sent Wolf to Cairo as U.S. consul, an appointment one Republican leader called a prudent step given that Wolf's German and Jewish constituencies “represent many voters and much wealth.” On June 27, 1881, the Washington Post called Wolf's posting in Egypt “a fit recognition of the German element” in the United States (David H. Panitz and Panitz, “Simon Wolf,” 82). Page 182 → 19. Israelite, May 13, 1870. 20. Kohler and Wolf, “Jewish Disabilities,” 117. 21. Ibid. 22. Sharfman, First Rabbi, 527–28. 23. New York Times, February 19, 1869.

24. Washington Star, April 16, 17, 1869. 25. Gartner, “Roumania, America, and World Jewry,” 34. 26. New York Times, June 3, 1870; Israelite, November 20, 1874. 27. Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., 4045. 28. Ibid. 29. Ulysses S. Grant, Papers, 21:74; New York Herald, May 25, 1870. 30. Gartner, “Roumania, America, and World Jewry,” 44–45. 31. Benjamin Peixotto to Leon Horowitz, July 19, 1873, quoted in Gartner, “Roumania and America, 1873,” 80. 32. Simon Wolf to Hamilton Fish, December 21, 1870, Fish Papers. 33. Benjamin Peixotto to Abraham Seligman, January 14, 1871, Fish Papers. 34. Israelite, July 28, 1871; Gartner, “Roumania, America, and World Jewry,” 68. 35. New York Times, March 21, 1872; Israelite, March 8, 1872. 36. Ibid., May 15, 1872; Schappes, Documentary History, 546. 37. New York Times, March 23, 1872. 38. Hamilton Fish to Benjamin Peixotto, April 10, 1872, in Kohler and Wolf, “Jewish Disabilities,” 18. 39. Gartner, “Roumania, America, and World Jewry,” 93; Kohler and Wolf, “Jewish Disabilities,” 14. 40. Jewish Messenger, September 27, 1872. 41. Ibid., December 6, 1872. 42. Ibid., May 4, 1877. 43. Kohler, “Board of Delegates,” 94–95. 44. Israelite, August 5, 1881. 45. Secretary of State James G. Blaine threatened to abrogate a U.S.-Russian commercial treaty when American Jews were told they could not enter Russia. It seemed like a repeat of the discrimination against American Jews by Swiss cantons forty years earlier. Unfortunately, Blaine said, the 1832 treaty guaranteed the rights of American citizens only “on condition of submitting to the laws and ordinances there prevailing.” As Blaine told his ambassador in Russia, the czar's actions were a “source of regret,” considering the strong historical ties between the two nations (Washington Post, May 3, 1882; Sorin, Time for Building, 202). 46. By 1891, another seven hundred thousand people had been driven into the Pale (Sorin, Time for Building, 23). 47. New York Times, February 2, 1882; Price, “Russian Jews in America,” 34. 48. New York Times, February 2, 1882. 49. Cassedy, To the Other Shore, 50. Page 183 → 50. Sorin, Time for Building, 32; Price, “Russian Jews in America,” 38. 51. Jewish Messenger, January 7, 1870, May 20, 1884. 52. Kohler, “Board of Delegates,” 101; Esther L. Panitz, “Polarity,” 114. 53. Jewish Messenger, February 11, 1881; Szajkowski, “Attitude of American Jews,” 257–58. 54. Russian Emigrant Relief Fund to Alliance Israelite Universelle, October 31, 1881, in Szajkowski, “Attitude of American Jews,” 264–66, 226. 55. Esther L. Panitz, “Polarity,” 114; Szajkowski, “Yahudi and the Immigrant,” 18–19. 56. Israelite, August 5, 1881. 57. Sorin, Time for Building, 42. 58. Jewish Chronicle, January 27, 1882. 59. Sorin, Time for Building, 50; Grinstein, “Efforts of East European Jewry,” 79. 60. Grinstein, “Efforts of East European Jewry,” 76; Price, “Jewish Agricultural Colonies,” 116. 61. Raphael, “Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger,” 194–98. 62. Russian Emigrant Relief Fund to Alliance Israelite Universelle, October 31, 1881, in Szajkowski, “Attitude of American Jews,” 271. 63. Ibid., 265. 64. Sorin, Time for Building, 86. 65. Szajkowski, “Attitude of American Jews,” 232. 66. Sorin, Time for Building, 137.

67. Raphael, “Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger,” 196. 68. Sorin, Time for Building, 63; Jewish Messenger, December 10, 1869; Schappes, Documentary History, 724. During the Civil War, Salomon fought at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Chattanooga and was appointed brigadier general. He also marched with Sherman through Georgia, leading his regiment of mostly German, Jewish, and Polish immigrants from Atlanta to Savannah. 69. Berry, America's Utopian Experiments, 131–33; Cassedy, To the Other Shore, 53. 70. Price, “Jewish Agricultural Colonies,” 85. 71. Ibid., 87–91; Szajkowski, “Attitude of American Jews,” 245. 72. Szajkowski, “Attitude of American Jews,” 272. 73. Jewish Messenger, January 29, 1882; Israelite, January 20, 1882. 74. Israelite, January 20, 1882; Voorsanger, quoted in Israelite, July 14, 1882. 75. Berry, America's Utopian Experiments, 135–36. 76. de Hirsch, “Refuge for Russian Jews,” 627–29. 77. Washington Post, January 1, September 1, 1891. At the same time, the Ottoman Empire closed Jerusalem to emigrating Jews as well as restricted the movement of Greek Orthodox pilgrims in the Holy City. 78. Berry, America's Utopian Experiments, 135. 79. New York Times, February 7, 1891. 80. Ibid., May 28, 1894. 81. American Jewish Yearbook, vol. 18 (1916–1917): 276. Page 184 →

Chapter 13 1. Washington Post, February 21, 1891. 2. Cyrus Adler, American Jewish Year Book 5664, 35. 3. William S. Friedman, quoted in Livingston, “Industrial Removal Office,” 439. 4. New York Times, July 6, 1891. 5. Ibid., March 19, 1892. 6. Jewish Messenger, September 17, 1880, September 25, 1891. 7. Ibid., September 17, 1880. 8. Esther L. Panitz, “Polarity,” 117. 9. New York World, June 5, 1881; Esther L. Panitz, “Polarity,” 120. 10. Madison Grant, Passing of the Great Race, 16, 81. 11. New York Times, August 20, 1893. 12. Ibid., September 21, 1893. 13. Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 180. 14. Jewish Messenger, January 10, 1890. 15. Sorin, Time for Building, 60. 16. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 5:3777. 17. New York Times, September 25, 1890; Esther L. Panitz, “Polarity,” 126. 18. Simon Wolf to T. V. Powderly, November 25, 1901, in Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 5:4479; New York Times, May 15, 1893. 19. Straus, Under Four Administrations, 168–69. 20. Cyrus Adler, American Jewish Year Book 5665, 19–20; New York Times, June 16, 1903; Sorin, Time for Building, 203. 21. New York Times, June 26, 1903. 22. Straus, Under Four Administrations, 170–72; Cyrus Adler, American Jewish Year Book 5664, 22. 23. Sorin, Time for Building, 34. For a sense of the scope of the brutality, see New York Times, April 10, August 28, 1904, November 4, 1905. 24. New York Times, November 7, 1905; Straus, Under Four Administrations, 210. 25. Straus, Under Four Administrations, 210. Oscar Straus served in Grover Cleveland's administration but switched his party affiliation in 1904 to campaign for the Progressive Roosevelt. Straus had been on “both

sides of the fence,” he said of leaving the Democratic Party; “it was not my fault; the fence was moved.” He may have been referring to a more conservative shift in the Democratic Party with the nomination of Alton Parker for president in 1904. During the 1908 presidential race, Straus supported the Republican candidate, William Howard Taft, and campaigned for him in cities in the Midwest and on the East Coast. In 1909, Straus was appointed the first U.S. ambassador to Turkey (Straus, Under Four Administrations, 242–43, 253–55; New York Times, July 20, 1904). Theodore Roosevelt expressed his belief that prejudice was an anathema to republican ideals. When asked by the American Hebrew for his views on anti-Semitism, Roosevelt Page 185 → responded, “We should act on the cardinal doctrine of American citizenship and treat a man simply as such” (New York Times, April 5, 1890). Roosevelt also counted among one of his closest friends Otto Raphael, a Jewish policeman who walked the beat on the Lower East Side. Roosevelt encouraged Raphael to join the force in 1895, when Roosevelt was serving as president of the New York Police Commission. They kept up a correspondence through Roosevelt's presidency (Schoenburg, “Officer Otto Raphael,” 71–77). 26. Harris, “Century of Involvement,” 33–34; Sorin, Time for Building, 205–6. 27. Sorin, Time for Building, 58. 28. New York Times, July 19, 1909; Best, “Jacob H. Schiff's Galveston Movement,” 43–47. 29. New York Times, July 19, 1909. 30. Ibid.; William S. Friedman quoted in Livingston, “Industrial Removal Office,” 440. 31. Texas Jewish Herald, September 24, 1908. 32. Best, “Jacob H. Schiff's Galveston Movement,” 45–47; Livingston, “Industrial Removal Office,” 452. 33. New York Times, July 3, 1907; Best, “Jacob H. Schiff's Galveston Movement,” 48–49. 34. New York Times, July 3, 1907, July 19, 1909; Best, “Jacob H. Schiff's Galveston Movement,” 54–56. 35. New York Times, July 19, 1909, November 6, 1907; Best, “Jacob H. Schiff's Galveston Movement,” 59–61. 36. Best, “Jacob H. Schiff's Galveston Movement,” 60–63. 37. Ibid. 38. Szajkowski, “Yahudi and the Immigrant,” 34. 39. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Termination of the Treaty of 1832, 50. 40. Best, “Jacob H. Schiff's Galveston Movement,” 62–65, 74–77. In 1912, the American Jewish Committee finally convinced Congress to abrogate the 1832 treaty with Russia. As early as 1882, American Jews conducting business had been denied visas to enter Russia. Even the American representative of the Singer Sewing Machine Company was told to leave the country and that “being an American citizen made no difference” (Harris, “Century of Involvement,” 35; New York Times, November 9, 1890). When Wolf received a tepid response from the State Department about this case and others like it in the early 1890s, he vowed to keep up the fight in Congress. That fight ultimately lasted more than a decade (Simon Wolf to John Hay, November 23, 1901, in Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 5:4476–77). 41. Cyrus Adler, American Jewish Year Book 5664, 5:38–39. 42. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 5:4324. 43. Wolf, Selected Addresses, 198. 44. Raphael, “Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger,” 195. Page 186 → 45. Sorin, Time for Building, 170; Raphael, “Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger,” 192–93. 46. New York Times, January 23, 1887. 47. Szajkowski, “Attitude of American Jews,” 243. 48. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 5:3996. 49. Szajkowski, “Attitude of American Jews,” 232–33. 50. Raphael, “Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger,” 192–93, 197. 51. Sorin, Time for Building, 171. 52. New York Times, January 23, 1887. 53. Israelite, November 13, 1885. 54. Pittsburgh Platform, in Washington Post, November 18, 1885. 55. Raphael, “Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger,” 193. 56. Sorin, Time for Building, 172; New York Times, January 23, 1887. The late nineteenth century saw the

acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection by both Christians and Jews. The Pittsburgh Platform clearly stated, “We hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domains of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism” (Washington Post, November 18, 1885). In addition, Voorsanger wrote, “No man with a logical mind finds any difficulty in accepting the law of evolution as a competent expression of the divine order of things” (Raphael, “Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger,” 188). 57. New York Times, November 20, 1885. 58. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 5:3984, 3995; Raphael, “Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger,” 194–95. As Reformers drew up the Pittsburgh Platform, Chicago rabbi Emil Hirsch insisted on a plank that addressed “the relations between rich and poor” and a commitment to solve societal problems “on the basis of justice and righteousness” (Washington Post, November 18, 1885). In 1890, Wolf told Washington, DC, congregants, “I trust that we, as Jews, are the last to throw a stone in the way of the advancement and moral progress of the negro.” Prejudice of any kind, Wolf told his audience, was “repugnant to the principles of our religion” (Washington Post, February 3, 1890). American Jews' strong support for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was a natural outcome of this early commitment to American liberalism (Diner, “Encounter between Jews and America,” 8). 59. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 5:4002. 60. Ibid., 5:3992–94. 61. Diner, Time for Gathering, 164. 62. Wolf, Selected Addresses, 105. Wolf, Straus, Schiff, and others not only publicly defended American Jews from accusations that as a people they were less than patriotic but were equally adamant that Jews not accentuate their ethnicity in public life. When some congregations considered having a Jewish exhibition at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, a furious debate followed. Washington rabbi Louis Stern was clear in his opposition that “it is taken for granted that we as a people are patriotic. Why should we seek to participate in the Fair as Jews?” (Washington Post, June 27, 1891). 63. Israelite, January 19, 1899. Page 187 → 64. Ibid., January 19, 26, 1899. 65. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 5:3981. 66. Friesel, “Jacob H. Schiff,” 68. 67. Simon Wolf quoted in Szajkowski, “Yahudi and the Immigrant,” 19. 68. Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 5:3983–85, 3992. 69. New York Times, May 31, 1894. 70. Israelite, November 27, 1885; New York Times, July 7, 1892; Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 5:4289. 71. Sorin, Time for Building, 183; Cyrus Adler, American Jewish Year Book 5661, 2:500. 72. Jewish Messenger, September 28, 1888. 73. Cyrus Adler, American Jewish Year Book 5664, 5:34. 74. Friesel, “Jacob H. Schiff,” 66. 75. Grinstein, “Efforts of East European Jewry,” 88. 76. Eisendrath, “Union of American Hebrew Congregations,” 142. Page 188 →

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Newspapers and Periodicals Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (Leipzig) Atlanta Constitution Atlantic Monthly (Boston) Brooklyn (NY) Eagle Chicago Tribune Cincinnati Daily Commercial Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (New York) Page 201 → Harper's Monthly (New York) Hebrew Journal (New York) Israelite (Cincinnati) Jewish Chronicle (London) Jewish Herald (Houston, TX) Jewish Messenger (New York) La Crosse (WI) Daily Democrat Memphis (TN) Daily Appeal Missouri Democrat (St. Louis) New York Herald New York Sun New York Times New York Tribune New York World

North American Review (Boston) Occident (Philadelphia) Philadelphia Inquirer Philadelphia Ledger Philadelphia Press Richmond (VA) Examiner Southern Punch (Richmond, VA) Vanity Fair (New York) Washington Evening Star Washington Post Page 202 →

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Index Adler, Cyrus, 144 Adler, Felix, 149 Adler, Samuel, 114 Alexander II, 123–25, 131–32 Allen, Michael, 29 Alliance Israelite Universelle, 25, 90, 125, 133 Am Olam movement, 136–37 Anarchism and Haymarket riot, 141 Anti-Semitic cartoons and caricatures, 4, 9, 10, 33, 36–38, 43–44, 53, 76 Army chaplaincy, 28–32, 84, 97 Baker, Lafayette, 37 Bates, Edward, 48, 94 Beauregard, Pierre, 66 Beecher, Henry Ward, 108, 177n62 Belmont, August, 85–86 Benjamin, Judah, 36–37, 66, 68, 69–70, 97, 106 Bennett, William, 146 Berkman, Alexander, 141 Bernheim, Isaac, 59, 166n37 Bijur, Martin, 60 Blair, Francis, 89 B'nai B'rith, 37, 79, 126, 141–43, 174n90 Board of Delegates of American Israelites, 23–25, 30–32, 76, 84, 86, 98, 113, 178n67, 180n59 Army chaplaincy and, 30–32 General Orders 11 and, 62, 79–81 conflict with Reform congregations, 23–24, 113 dissolution and creation of Board of Delegates on Civil and Religious Rights, 115–20

Romanian pogroms and, 130 Russian immigration and, 132 Board of Deputies of British Jews, 16–17, 22, 25 Booth, Edwin, 10 Boutwell, George, 124 Brooks Brothers, 41–42 Brownlow, William, 37, 89 Buchanan, James, 19, 22–23, 93 Bush, Isidor, 11, 94, 139 John Fremont and, 28 Butler, Benjamin, 36, 66, 70, 87, 89 Myer Isaacs correspondence with, 105–7 Cable, Benjamin, 146 Cameron, Simon, 29, 38–39 Cameron Dragoons, 29 Camp followers, 35–36, 41, 44, 54, 56–58, 68, 96 Cass, Lewis, 19–20, 22–23 Catton, Bruce, 55, 155n10 Charleston, South Carolina, 24, 66, 67, 69, 118 Charleston Courier and, 70 Chase, Salmon, 48–51, 57–58 Ulysses Grant and, 50–51 Chatham Street, 9, 41–44, 76, 104, 107 Chicago Hebrew Institute, 135 Chickering Hall, 131 Cincinnati, 9, 17, 58, 91–92, 101, 127 clothing industry in, 42, 55 Jewish population of, 62, 91, 92, 117, 120–21 partisan press and, 35, 38, 62, 90, 93

Reform movement and, 15, 20, 26, 114, 116–18, 120–21, 148, 150 Russian immigration to, 6, 136–37 Page 204 → Civil War anti-Semitism during, 2–4, 9, 25, 33, 35–38, 41–45, 52–53, 54–65, 76, 79, 81, 84, 87, 88, 96, 122, 147, 166n51 corruption during, 39–43 Jewish population at time of, 11, 91, 100 Jewish press and, 26, 38 Jewish soldiers and, 26, 60, 66, 71, 81, 91, 170–71n50, 175n90, 183n68 mobilization and, 38–39 as transformational, 2 uniforms and, 39–43 Cohen, Gratz, 70 Colfax, Schuyler, 92, 93 Confederate States anti-Semitism in, 9, 35, 66, 67–69, 70–73, 105 border states and, 28, 59, 64 cotton trade and, 46–53 economic conditions in, 3, 39, 67–68 ideology of, 35, 69–70 Jews in government of, 36–37, 66, 70 Conkling, Roscoe, 49 Conservative Judaism, 152–53 Corbin, Austin, 102–4, 141, 176n24 Cotton trade anti-Semitism and, 3, 36–37, 52–53, 54, 60–61, 64, 164n40, 172n51 camp followers and, 35 Confederate war effort and, 47–50, 53, 56, 59 corruption and, 48–49, 51–52

General Orders 11 and, 55–57, 94, 96 Northern economy and, 46–47 profits from, 3, 49–50 Union foreign policy and, 47–48 Union officers and, 49–52 Union war effort and, 46, 47–48, 50–51 Cremieux, Adolphe, 90, 125 Curtis, Samuel, 50, 53 Damascus blood libel, 16–17, 34, 157n5 Dana, Charles A., 49, 51–52, 109, 163n20 Davis, Jefferson, 37, 47, 68 Days of Shoddy, 40–41, 43 De Hirsch, Maurice, 137–38 De Hirsch Fund, 144, 146 Dembitz, Lewis, 94, 164n40 Dennison, William, 42 Diner, Hasia, 1, 2, 4, 41, 88, 174n90 Douglas, Stephen A., 27 Douglass, Frederick, 181n18 Dubois, John, 56–57 Eckstein, David, 95–96 1848 uprisings, 2, 13, 27, 28, 109 Einhorn, David, 20, 25, 30–31, 78 slavery and, 26, 27 German language and, 77 radical Reform and, 112–16, 179n40 Eisendrath, Maurice, 153 Ellinger, Moritz, 137 Evarts, William, 131

Ezekiel, M. J., 89 Fay, Theodore, 20 Felsenthal, Bernard, 135 Filene, Edward, 12, 100 Fischel, Arnold, 29–32 Fish, Hamilton, 123, 127 Romanian pogroms and, 129–31 Russia persecution of Jews and, 124–26 Foner, Philip, 78–79 Foote, Henry S., 68–69 Forrest, Edwin, 10 Foster, Charles, 142 Fremont, John, 28 Friedman, Max, 29 Friedman, William, 139, 145 Galveston Plan, 144–46 Baron de Hirsch Fund and, 146 North German Lloyd Line and, 145 President William Howard Taft and, 146 Garment trade, 40, 41–43, 76, 140 Geary, John, 95–96 General Orders 11, 3, 55–63, 74, 78, 80, 81, 84, 89, 92, 94, 103, 155n10, 166n37, 174n90 General Orders 162, 64 Gimbel, Adam, 12, 100 Goldman, Emma, 141 Gootmann, A. H., 19–20 Gottheil, Gustav, 148, 151 Grand Union Hotel, 102–3, 107 A. T. Stewart and, 102, 103

Grant, Jesse Root, 55–56, 96, 165n9, 173n72 Grant, Julia Dent, 166n56 Grant, Madison, 140 Grant, Ulysses, 3, 4, 19, 135 anti-Semitism and, 54–56, 63–64, 66, 74, 79, 80–81, 108, 174n90 Civil War mobilization and, 38–39 Page 205 → Congress and, 60–62 cotton trade and, 48, 50–51, 53, 54 election of 1868 and, 87–96, 172n51, 173n77, 178n71 election of 1872 and, 96–97, 175n90 as General, 57 General Orders 11 and, 55–58, 80–81 Romanian pogroms and, 127–31 Russian persecution of Jews and, 123–27, 130–32 Lincoln and, 57 Military District of Tennessee and, 50–51 occupation of Paducah, Kentucky, 59 religious liberty and, 174n90 Gratz, Rebecca, 17 Greeley, Horace, 30, 96–97 Greenebaum, Henry, 91, 175n91, 178n67 Gurley, John, 60–61 Halleck, Henry W., 48, 52, 57, 60, 80 Hampton, Alfred, 146 Hart, Abraham, 23, 158n22 Hay, John, 142, 143 Hebrew Colonization Society, 76 Hebrew Emigrant and Aid Society (HEAS), 133, 136–37

Am Olam movement and, 136 Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), 134 Hebrew Relief Society of Detroit, 148 Hebrew Technical Institute, 140 Hebrew Union College, 121–22 Reform movement and, 122, 148 Isaac Mayer Wise and, 108, 121, 137, 180n71 Zionism and, 150–51 Heilprin, Michael, 136, 160n14 Heller, Maximilian, 105, 139, 147 Hellman, Herman, 89 Herzl, Theodore, 7, 150–51 Hilton, Henry, 102–4, 107, 108, 176n24 Hilton, Robert, 68 Holly Springs, Mississippi, 50, 56, 57, 58 Holmes, Emma, 67 Horowitz, Leon, 128 Hurlbut, Stephen, 3, 54, 64 Industrial Removal Office, 146 Isaacs, Myer, 14, 15, 69, 74, 79, 180n59 Benjamin Butler correspondence with, 105–6, 108 election of 1864 and, 86–87 election of 1868 and, 89–90 General Orders 11 and, 80 General Orders 162 and, 64 Reform movement and, 112, 115–16, 120 Romanian pogroms and, 128 Zionism and, 78 Isaacs, Samuel, 15

Jefferson, Thomas, 76 Jewish colonization efforts, 4, 76, 135–38 in New Odessa, Oregon, 136 in Painted Woods, North Dakota, 136 in Woodbine and Alliance, New Jersey, 138 Jewish Theological Seminary, 144, 152 Johnson, Andrew, 37, 59, 85, 87, 119 Jones, John Beauchamp, 9, 67, 69–70 Jones, Russell, 51 Kaskel, Cesar, 59–61, 166n41 Kaskel, J. W., 59 Kaufmann, Sigismund, 101, 109 Kelton, John, 60 Kent, Loren, 64 Kishinev, 125 Kishinev pogroms of 1903, 6, 138, 142–44, 147 B'nai B'rith and, 143 Theodore Roosevelt and, 142–43 Oscar Straus and, 142–44 Know Nothing party, 85, 87 Kohler, Kaufmann, 149, 152 Kohler, Max, 141, 144, 146 Kohn, Abraham, 12–13 Kohut, Alexander, 149 Korn, Bertram Wallace, 3, 22, 32, 33, 74, 115 Krauskopf, Joseph, 81, 105, 150 Kursheedt, Manuel A., 133–34 Lazarus, Emma, 131, 135 Leeser, Isaac, 4, 7, 17, 18, 19, 22, 24, 25, 34, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 105, 120

Army chaplaincy and, 30–31 Civil War anti-Semitism and, 3, 33, 38, 60, 63 Damascus blood libel and, 17 Maimonides College and, 120 peddling as an occupation and, 75–76 Reform movement and, 15, 20–21, 111–13, 116 slavery and, 27 Leslie, Frank, 36, 44 Levy, Jonas, 20 Lilienblum, Moses, 132 Page 206 → Lilienthal, Max, 60, 150 Lincoln, Abraham, 10, 28, 37, 106, 108, 124, 145 attitudes toward Jews, 34, 58, 61 Army chaplaincy and, 28–30 Civil War mobilization and, 39 cotton trade and, 47–48, 50, 52–53 General Orders 11 and, 3, 54–61, 62, 79, 80, 92 Jewish vote and, 84–87 support for Ulysses Grant, 57 Mack, Henry, 42–43, 55, 96, 120, 121, 127, 162n56, 165n9 Macy, R. H., 72 Maimonides, Moses, 111 Maimonides College, 120 Mallory, Stephen, 70 Mann, Ambrose Dudley, 18–19 Marcus, Jacob Rader, 81 Marshall, Louis, 141, 144, 146 Marx, Karl, 28, 47

McClellan, George, 85 McKinley, William, 141 Medill, Joseph, 91–92 Mehmet Ali, 16 Meigs, Montgomery, 39, 40 Melville, Herman, 9 Memminger, Christopher, 70 Mendelssohn, Moses, 111 Minhag America, 5, 115–16 Moldavia, 123, 126–27 pogroms in, 127–29 Montefiore, Moses, 16–17, 22, 130 Moos, Herman, 87 Morais, Henry, 14 Morford, Henry, 40–41, 43 Morris, I. N., 95, 96, 173n77 Mortara, Edgar, 2, 21–23, 24, 31, 79, 93, 115, 122, 147, 159n35, 178n67 Moses, Adolph, 88, 89, 95, 106 Muhlhauser, Sigmund, 20 Myers, Abraham, 70 Nevins, Allan, 81 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 34 “On to America” movement, 10–11 Orthodox Judaism, 5, 6, 7, 13–14, 18, 20–21, 24, 77–79, 83, 119, 132, 134, 139, 147–52 political participation and, 83–84 Reform Judaism and, 15–18, 20–21, 111–13, 116, 118–19, 147, 152–53 religious ritual and, 110–14, 119, 147–49, 151–52 Talmud and, 21, 78, 110–11, 115 Paducah, Kentucky, 58–61, 119, 166n37

Peixotto, Benjamin F., 128–30, 150 Pendleton, George, 61, 85 Philipson, David, 150, 151 Pittsburgh Platform, 149–52, 186n56, 186n58 Pomeroy, Brick, 93–94 Pope Pius IX, 22 Powell, Lazarus, 61–62 Randolph, George, 47 Raphall, Morris, 27, 37, 66, 84, 93 Rawlins, John, 56, 94–95 Reform Judaism, 5, 20–21, 26, 31, 69, 70, 116–18, 145, 149–52 Americanization and, 13, 27, 77–79, 90, 111–15, 119, 120–22, 147–48 Russian immigration and, 6–7, 139–40 secular, scientific thought and, 110–12 slavery and, 27 Temple Emanu-El and, 24, 114, 148 Republican party, 27, 84, 93 German/Jewish support for, 28, 42, 62, 87–89, 91–92, 94–95, 97, 101, 103, 109, 160n14, 164n40, 172n56, 181n18 Isaac Mayer Wise and, 57, 120 Ribalenko, Michael, 143 Roosevelt, Theodore, 7, 72, 142–44, 184–85n25 Rosecrans, William, 36, 58, 94 Rosenwald, Julius, 135 Rothschild family, 10, 22, 63, 85, 137 Russian Emigrant Relief Fund, 148 Russo-Japanese war, 6, 143 Salomon, Edward, 91, 135, 183n68 Sandwich Islands, 4 Sarna, Jonathan, ix, 8, 59, 60, 74, 164n6, 165n9, 174n90

Schechter, Solomon, 151–52 Schiff, Jacob, 7, 141, 151, 152 Galveston plan and, 144–46 Kishinev pogroms and, 142–44 Schurz, Carl, 131 Seligman, DeWitt, 131 Page 207 → Seligman, Joseph, 99, 100, 102–4, 107, 176n24 Seligman, Theodore, 101 Seward, James L., 71 Seward, William, 47–48, 158n22 Seymour, Horatio, 89, 91, 92, 93 Sherman, William T., 36, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 66, 95 Sneersohn, Hayyim Zvi, 127–28, 174–75n90 Society for Ethical Culture, 149 Solomons, Adolphus, 128, 131, 177n43 Spiegel, Marcus, 175n90 Sprague, William, 128 Stanton, Edwin, 37, 39, 48–49, 52, 57, 80 Straus, Isidor, 72, 100 Straus, Lazarus, 28, 72 Straus, Oscar, 7, 28, 145, 146, 168n47, 184n25 Henry Ward Beecher and, 177n62 Kishinev pogrom and, 142–44 Strauss, Levi, 12 Stuyvesant, Peter, 8 Sullivan, Jeremiah, 58 Sulzberger, Mayer, 152 Sumner, Charles, 62, 128

Sunday Laws, 98, 112, 148 Talbotton, Georgia, 72, 168n47 Thomasville, Georgia, 71–72 Savannah Daily News and, 71 Tatnall Guards and, 72 Treyfa banquet, 149 Tuska, Simon, 89 Underwriters' conspiracy, 101 Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 118–22, 135, 142, 147, 148, 152, 153 Pittsburgh Platform and, 149 Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, 152 United Hebrew Charities, 133, 140 United Jewish Charities, 135 Van Buren, Martin, 17 Vance, Zebulon, 72–73, 77 Voorsanger, Jacob, 112, 134, 135, 137, 147, 148, 149, 150, 186n56 Vulture image, 9, 33, 34, 36, 63, 67, 68, 109 Wade, Benjamin, 85 Washburne, Elihu, 51, 53, 56, 61, 91 Washington, George, 8, 27 Webster, Daniel, 19 Webster, Joseph, 54 Wessolowsky, Charles, 71 Whitman, Walt, 9 Wilson, Henry, 30, 35, 37, 62, 87, 96–97 Wise, Isaac Mayer Americanization and, 4, 7, 13–14, 76, 108, 122 American ideas of democracy and, 1, 77, 78, 81, 99, 121 Board of Delegates of American Israelites and, 24–25, 30–31, 79–81

Civil War and, 26, 38, 45, 84, 106 Democratic party and, 85, 89 General Orders 11 and, 3, 57–62, 74, 75, 88, 92 Isaac Leeser and, 18, 20–21, 33, 111 Edgar Mortara and, 22 Reform Judaism and, 14, 24, 111–17, 149 Russian Jews and, 133, 137 Union of American Hebrew Congregations and, 118–19, 121–22 Zionism opposition to, 7, 150–51 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 111 Wolcott, Christopher P., 57 Wolf, Simon Americanization and, 6–7, 77, 78, 81, 109, 141–42, 147–48 anti-Semitism and, 33, 74–75, 105–6, 146 Board of Delegates of American Israelites and, 119 Civil War and, 37–38, 85–86 Ulysses Grant and, 3, 90, 94, 124, 126, 129 Jewish colonization efforts and, 135, 146 Kishinev pogroms and, 143 Reform Judaism and, 149–50, 151 Russian Jews and, 124–26, 131, 133 Romanian persecutions and, 128–30 Zionism and, 151 Yates, Edward, 10, 34 Yulee, David, 36–37, 66 Zacharie, Isachar, 86 Zangwill, Israel, 145–46 Zion College, 120 Zionism, 7, 78, 145, 150–51, 153