Jews and the Civil War

A Reader

Jonathan D Sarna, Adam D Mendelsohn, Jonathan D. Sarna, Adam D. Mendelsohn

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814708590
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

An "invaluable" collection of essays revealing the experience of Jewish soldiers and civilians during the Civil War: "Essential and illuminating." — Harold Holzer, Moment Magazine At least 8, 000 Jewish soldiers fought for the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War. A few served together in Jewish companies while most fought alongside Christian comrades. Yet even as they stood "shoulder-to-shoulder" on the battlefield, they encountered unique challenges. In Jews and the Civil War, Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn assemble for the first time the foremost scholarship on the subject, little known even to specialists in the field. These accessible and far-ranging essays from top scholars are grouped into seven thematic sections—Jews and Slavery; Jews and Abolition; Rabbis and the March to War; Jewish Soldiers during the Civil War; The Home Front; Jews as a Class; and Aftermath—each with an introduction by the editors. Together they reappraise the war's impact on Jews in the North and the South, offering a rich and fascinating portrait of the experience of Jewish soldiers and civilians from the home front to the front lines.

Part I

Jews and Slavery

The twelve-volume Jewish Encyclopedia (New York, 1901–1906), the first comprehensive work embracing all aspects of Jewish history, religion, and life, contained no article about slaveholding among American Jews but a significant article on the “Antislavery Movement in America.” While the article acknowledged Jewish slaveholding (“it is not hard to account for the fact that so receptive and assimilative a people as the Jews should have adopted it from the people among whom they were living”), it focused on those Jews who opposed the “peculiar institution.” It credited the rise of antislavery sentiments among Jews “for the enormous number of Jewish soldiers who enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War.”

Much twentieth-century scholarship concerning Jews and Blacks echoed the Jewish Encyclopedia. Writers acknowledged that Jews in the Caribbean, in colonial America, and in the antebellum South had owned slaves, but they focused on Jews who opposed slavery. During the heyday of the “Black-Jewish Alliance” in the 1950s and ’60s, this historiography provided activist Jews with the comfortable assurance that they were carrying forward a long and noble tradition.

A tract published in 1991 by the Nation of Islam disturbed this comfort. Entitled The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, it proclaimed that Jews funded, masterminded, and dominated the Atlantic slave trade. Jews, the publication concluded, bore “monumental culpability” for all that slavery wrought.

The controversy over the Nation of Islam’s claims stimulated a bumper crop of fresh scholarship concerning Jews and the slave trade. Although the tract’s overwrought claims were quickly demolished, scholars who looked anew at the evidence painted a more nuanced portrait of Jewish involvement in the slave trade, raised surprising questions, and set forth a whole new way of thinking about Blacks and Jews in the New World.

Seymour Drescher, who spent a lifetime studying the Atlantic slave trade, summarizes much of this new scholarship in his 2001 article reprinted here. “It is unlikely that more than a fraction of 1 percent of the twelve million enslaved and relayed Africans were purchased or sold by Jewish merchants,” he concludes (this volume, 67). In a 1993 article in Immigrants and Minorities, he observed that “the Atlantic slave system was more important to certain segments of early modern Jewry than early modern Jews were to the Atlantic slave system.” Indeed, drawing on Eli Faber’s exhaustively researched Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade (1998), Drescher wonders why, given Jews’ significance in other realms of trade, they actually played so small a role in the slave trade. For example, the great Newport Jewish merchant Aaron Lopez, historian Virginia Platt showed in a 1975 article in the William and Mary Quarterly, dispatched well over two hundred trade voyages between 1760 and 1776, but only fourteen of them went to Africa for the purpose of gathering slaves. Why Lopez and other Jewish merchants traded far fewer slaves than comparable non-Jewish traders remains unclear.

Drescher concludes, as historian David Brion Davis did, that the New World proved highly beneficial to Jews but catastrophic to Blacks. Jews, with their mercantile skills and wide kinship networks, proved highly valuable to New World colonies. As a result, Jews found their “threshold of liberation” in the New World, winning an array of rights in the Americas that they could not have enjoyed back in Europe. By contrast, since New World economies depended on slave labor, Blacks were brought to the New World in chains. They became the principle out-group and objects of prejudice and hatred, while Jews greatly improved their lot, particularly in places where skin color determined status and Jews won acceptance as whites.

Such was the case in the Old South, the subject of Bertram W. Korn’s classic article reprinted in chapter 2. First published in 1961 for the Civil War centennial, the article anticipated many themes of subsequent research and remains the single best study of Jews and Black slavery in the antebellum United States. Korn exhaustively surveyed “Jews as planters, and as owners of slaves; the treatment of slaves by Jews; the emancipation of slaves by Jews; Jews as harsh taskmasters; business dealings of Jews with slaves and free Negroes; Jews as slave dealers; cases of miscegenation involving Jews and Negroes; and opinions of Jews about the slave system” (this volume, 87–88). New documents have subsequently appeared, and thanks to Jonathan Schorsch’s Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (2004) we also now know much more about the period prior to the American Revolution. Korn’s basic conclusion, however, remains unchallenged. When it came to slavery, Jews “were in no appreciable degree different from … their non-Jewish neighbors” (this volume, 115).

1
Jews and New Christians in
the Atlantic Slave Trade

Seymour Drescher

In studying the westward expansion of Europe after 1500, “the development of an Atlantic economy is impossible to imagine without slavery and the slave trade.”¹ During three and a half centuries, up to twelve million Africans were loaded and transported in dreadful conditions to the tropical and subtropical zones of the Americas. This massive coerced transoceanic transportation system was only one element of a still broader process. Probably twice as many Africans were seized within Africa for purposes of domestic enslavement or transportation to purchasers in the Eastern Hemisphere during the same period. The coerced movement of Africans long exceeded the combined voluntary and involuntary migrations of Europeans. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, between two and three Africans had been landed in the Americas for every European who crossed the Atlantic.²

This major human migration involved the direct and indirect participation of many individuals and institutions in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It required an enormous number of interlocking activities, within and between continents. Although tens of thousands of direct participants involved Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others who could be classified by religion, and scores of groups that could be classified by ethnic affiliation, the history of the slave trade is usually considered in terms of geography and state sponsors. Geographically, the trade is analyzed in terms of a triangular trade in which Europeans provided capital, organization, and the means and manpower of transoceanic transportation; Africans provided the captives and the means of intra-continental movement; and Europeans in the Americas provided the means for redistributing transported captives to productive occupations in various regions.³

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Reprinted, without accompanying maps, with permission of Seymour Drescher from The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800, ed. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 439–470, copyright © 2001 by The John Carter Brown Library.

Politically, the slave trade is usually framed in terms of a succession of national entities drawn into and dominating the trade as suppliers, carriers, and purchasers. Although every European polity bordering the Atlantic attempted to enter into the Atlantic slave trade between 1450 and 1800, a small number of states dominated the European-sponsored enterprises. Chronologically, the trade as a whole is generally broken down into three phases. Each succeeding phase of the slave trade was numerically larger than its predecessor. In the century and a half of the first phase (1500– 1640), 788, 000 Africans were embarked on the “Middle Passage,” or about 5, 600 per year. During the course of the second phase (1640–1700), 817, 000 left Africa, or about 13, 600 per year. In the final phase, between 1700 and British abolition in 1807, 6, 686, 000 were exported, or about 62, 000 per year. Thus, four out of every five Africans transported to the New World between 1500 and 1807 were boarded in the final phase.⁴

For most scholars of the slave trade, economic, demographic, and political categories are the most significant variables in determining the coerced movement of Africans. They look to economics or political economy to explain the flow of people from Europe to the coast of Africa and of captive Africans from the coast of Africa to the Americas. Price, mortality, health, age, sex, provenance, destination, and occupation are the key variables. Economic and demographic conditions, inflected by political attempts to bend those conditions in favor of one nation or another, define the priorities of analysis.⁵

This essay, however, deals with the impact of a particular religious minority upon economic and demographic developments in the Atlantic world over three centuries. Analyzing the role of religious or ethno-religious groups in the African slave trade within the familiar framework of nations and regions presents unusual methodological difficulties. Historians are acutely aware that the trade involved tens of thousands of perpetrators. Among them were pagans, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Those who were involved may be further divided into scores of groups by ethnic designation, including every major entity ever defined as a “race.” Scholars incorporate these entities contingently as they analyze the core processes of the trade itself. Even in regard to the study of slave trading collectivities, it is rare that historians regard the religious affiliation of the European participants as of more than limited significance, compared with economic relationships. The trade flowed easily from one religious and commercial entity to another. Culturally defined identities may have had some impact upon the fundamental choice of viewing Africans as enslavable, but over the whole period of its rise the transatlantic slave trade appears to have been an activity extraordinarily responsive to cost-benefit calculations.⁶

TABLE 1.1
Coerced African Migrants Leaving for the Americas by National Carrier (in thousands)

1500–1700 (Phases I and II)

Carrier	Before 1580	1580–1640	1640–1700
Spanish	10	100	10
Portuguese	63	590	226
British	1	4	371
Dutch	0	20	160
French	0	0	50
Total	74	714	817

1700–1800 (Phase III)

Carrier	Totals
British	3, 120
Portuguese	1, 903
French	1, 052
Dutch	352
American	208
Danish	51
Total	6, 686

Sources: David Eltis, The Rise of the African Slave Trade in the Americas (Cambridge, U.K., 2000), 9, table I-I; and David Richardson, “Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700–1810: New Estimates of Volume and Distribution,” Journal of African History 30 (1989): 10, table 4.

Analyzing the specific relation of Jews to the Atlantic slave trade is warranted by a peculiar historiographical tradition. “Scarcely were the doors of the New World opened to Europeans,” declared the economist and historian Werner Sombart, “than crowds of Jews came swarming in. … European Jewry was like an ant-heap into which a stick [expulsion from Spain] had been thrust. Little wonder, therefore, that a great part of this heap betook itself to the New World. … The first traders in America were Jews,” as well as “the first plantation owners” in African Saõ Tomé and the first transplanters of sugar and slaves across the Atlantic. Jews were the “dominant social class [die herrschende Kaste]” of Brazil. Along with Portuguese criminals, they constituted almost the entire population of that colony, which reached its peak of prosperity only with “the influx of rich Jews from Holland.” In support of his interpretation, Sombart drew heavily upon accounts by Jewish historians and encyclopedists. As Jewish migration to the Americas swelled at the end of the nineteenth century, writers sought to establish the earliest possible Jewish presence of their ancestors in the New World and to magnify their role in the grand narrative of European westward expansion. The search for Jewish preeminence in Atlantic development continues to find supporters among authors with dramatically contrasting motives.⁷

Sombart’s hyperbolic account was correct in one respect. Three centuries of cumulative expulsions of Jews from Atlantic maritime states reached their climax as Europe’s great westward expansion began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The simultaneous departure of both the Columbian expedition and Jews from Spain in 1492 was merely emblematic of a broader movement in European Jewish history. By 1500, Jews had been expelled from the kingdoms of England, France, Spain, and Portugal. Two generations later they had also been excluded from most of the Habsburg Netherlands, from the Baltic seacoast, and from large parts of Italy. This meant that by the time Africans began to be exported to the Americas in significant numbers (ca. 1570), Europe’s rulers had forced the overwhelming mass of European Jewry eastward to Poland, Lithuania, and the Ottoman Empire. Neither the rulers nor the merchants (including the Jewish merchants) of those new regions of settlement were involved or interested in the Atlantic slave trade.⁸

Jews could not live openly or securely anywhere along the European Atlantic seaboard during the first century after the Columbian expedition, the century in which the Euro-African coastal supply systems and the Iberian-American slave systems were created. Jews were consequently prohibited from openly participating in co-founding the institutions of the slave trade at any terminus of the triangular trade, or in the transoceanic “Middle Passage.” One characteristic of this “religious cleansing” of Europe’s Atlantic littoral also carried over into the second phase of the slave trade (1604–1700). African forced migration was dominated by political entities that tried to limit the slave trade to their own sponsored contractors in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Success in long-distance and long-term voyages, as Europeans discovered, was initially enhanced by access to politically privileged monopolies in Europe, trade enclaves on the African coast, and colonial settlements in the Americas. Until the end of the seventeenth century, governmental ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Before Korn: A Century of Jewish Historical Writing about the American Civil War
• Overview: The War between Jewish Brothers in America
• PART I Jews and Slavery
• PART II Jews and Abolition
• PART III Rabbis and the March to War
• PART IV Jewish Soldiers during the Civil War
• PART V The Home Front
• PART VI Jews as a Class
• PART VII Aftermath
• For Further Reading
• Index
• About the Editors