When General Grant Expelled the Jews

by Jonathan D. Sarna

  Grant, the first American president ever to set foot on Jerusalem’s holy soil, privately agreed with Mark Twain. “Our visit to Jerusalem was a very unpleasant one,” he confided to Adam Badeau. “The roads are bad and it rained, blew and snowed all the time. We left snow six inches deep in Jerusalem.” Journalist James Russell Young, who accompanied Grant and authored the best-known account of his journey, recalled that “from the time of landing until we left there was rain and snow—the heaviest snowstorm that had been known in Jerusalem for twelve years.” To avoid alienating pious readers, however, Young and all of the others who produced books about Grant’s round-the-world tour, glossed over these negative experiences and sentiments in their published accounts. They emphasized instead the country’s exotic and sacred sights.6

  General Grant and his wife in the Middle East (illustration credit ill.32)

  That, in a sense, is just what Grant did. Rather than be diverted by the poor weather, he maintained his pace and visited as many holy sites as he could. In Jaffa, which he described, amusingly, as the place “where Jonah was swallowed by the whale,” he and his wife marched through “one of the dirtiest streets in the world” and visited the reputed home of Simon the Tanner, the friend of Peter mentioned in the book of Acts. In Jerusalem, they hastened to the Via Dolorosa, “deeply interested,” as Julia Grant put it, “to visit the places so familiar to us and so full of sacred import.” In the Garden of Gethsemane, they pressed the knotted bark of “the Tree of Agony,” and according to an accompanying journalist, “all thoughts turned to the sacred and sorrowful scenes which Christian men believe here took place.”7

  America’s vice consul, Ernest Hardegg, a German Templar, accompanied Grant on his tour, and at his suggestion the party hired Rolla Floyd, a follower of the American religious enthusiast George J. Adams (both of them associated with the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), to guide them through Jerusalem. Hardegg and Floyd had come to Palestine fired with the dream of colonizing the Holy Land to spur the millennium, and their intense religious convictions shaped the tour that they devised. “Your thorough knowledge of Bible references, History & Tradition of all points of interest in the Holy Land and your clear and concise explanation of the same,” Grant wrote in a thank-you note to Floyd, “has very much added to the interest and pleasure of our visit.”8

  Rabbi Haim Zvi Sneersohn tried to add his bit to the pleasure of Grant’s visit as well. He met with Grant at the governor’s residence and, predictably, offered him a heartfelt blessing. Probably at his initiative, a “committee for distributing relief to American Jewish citizens” in the Holy Land likewise held a meeting with the former president. “The deplorable condition of our community was made known to the General,” Sneersohn reported to the New York Herald. Since the one hundred or so American Jews in the country were not formerly organized into an independent community (kollel), they received no funds from the central Jewish Vaad Ha-Klali charity fund, and were both poorer and more degraded than their European counterparts. They hoped that Grant would aid them in their battle to gain their fair share of communal distributions of aid. The general, having listened patiently, “kindly promised to inform some of his friends, leaders of Israel in America, of the facts.” Whether he actually understood the “facts” concerning the convoluted politics of Jewish philanthropy in the land of Israel seems doubtful, nor is there any evidence that he followed through on his promise. Nevertheless, the publication in the New York Herald of this story, with its mention of Grant’s friendship with “leaders of Israel in America,” was significant. It underscored the image of himself that the former president strove mightily to cultivate.9

  An anecdote preserved by Simon Wolf looked to reinforce that image. While in Jerusalem, according to Wolf, Grant was greeted by an unnamed Jew who “prostrated himself before him, kissing his hand.” Years earlier this same man had written to Wolf in Yiddish requesting that he go to see the “King of the United States” and “bring to his attention the fact that he, the Jew of Jerusalem, had a daughter whom he wished to be married.” In the best tradition of a Jerusalem schnorrer (distinguished from an ordinary beggar by his limitless chutzpah), the man had offered America’s “king” “the honor” to contribute to his daughter’s dowry. Grant, upon learning of this unusual request, wrote out a check for $25—equivalent to more than $400 in today’s money.a In gratitude, according to Wolf, the schnorrer now personally appeared before the former president in Jerusalem, “near the walls where the pious Jew offers his prayers,” and fell at his feet. To be sure, published accounts of Grant’s tour make no mention of this incident, which surely would have made for good journalistic copy. But even if Wolf embellished his account, it conveyed the same central message that Grant’s meeting with Rabbi Sneersohn and so many of his other encounters with Jews did—a reassuring message of friendship and generosity toward Jews in America, the Holy Land, and everywhere else in the world.10

  Grant returned from his historic trip late in 1879. His journey, one writer gushed, was “the most remarkable ever made by any human being” and “one of the most important events of Modern History.” He returned from it as something of a world statesman, commanding an international following. As a result, friends urged him to seek the presidency again in 1880, building upon his new status as a global celebrity. “I am not a candidate for any office,” Grant replied, “nor would I hold one that required any manoeuvring or sacrifice to obtain.” While this did not prevent his name from being entered into nomination, his unwillingness to appear at the convention or to further his candidacy in a public way doomed his chances of victory. After leading the voting through thirty-five contested ballots, he lost to James Garfield on ballot number thirty-six.11

  Thanks to wealthy friends, Grant at age fifty-eight returned to private life, settling into a handsome brownstone in New York City. With help from the Seligmans, he entered the field of investment banking, joining his son as a silent partner in the firm of Grant and Ward, managed by the young Ferdinand Ward, known in his day as the “Napoleon of Wall Street.” With Grant’s illustrious name and Ward’s illustrious reputation, the firm quickly succeeded. On paper, at least, Grant became rich.12

  The new wealth, however, did not dim Grant’s humanitarian instincts. The attention of the country, and especially of American Jews, was at that time focused upon Russia. The assassination there of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 sparked an orgy of anti-Jewish violence. Some 169 Jewish communities were attacked, twenty thousand homes destroyed, and tens of thousands of Jews economically ruined. New York Jews clamored for action to help their brethren abroad, and according to the Jewish Messenger, “U. S. Grant was the first to sign the call for a public meeting of citizens of New York.” Grant, as part of his world tour, had visited both with the subsequently murdered tsar and with the son who succeeded him, and came away convinced that “the Russian empire was one of the worst governed in the world.” Now, in keeping with the human rights policies that he articulated as president, he signed his name atop a call urging his fellow citizens, “without distinction of creed,” to meet at New York’s Chickering Hall “for the purpose of expressing their sympathy with the persecuted Hebrews in the Russian Empire.” His endorsement helped make the public meeting held on February 1, 1882, a rousing success.13

  Although Grant himself did not attend the meeting, “many persons of the highest social and intellectual status” in the city did. New York’s mayor, puffed up for the occasion as “the chief magistrate of the greatest City in the Western world,” chaired the proceedings. According to the New York Times, which devoted extensive coverage to the event, one speaker, Reverend Dr. John P. Newman, described Grant as being one of “three names associated with this mass-meeting that would have great influence with the Russian authorities.” So significant, indeed, was Grant’s association with the event that “many persons having the erroneous idea that Gen[eral] Grant was present, lingered for a moment or two [after the meeting closed],
and repeated calls for ‘Grant’ were uttered.” While those calls “received no response,” Grant’s connection with the meeting was preserved both in a widely circulated commemorative pamphlet and in the Jewish Encyclopedia. Meanwhile, the satirical journal Puck published a cartoon critical of Grant, accusing him of shameless hypocrisy. Recalling General Orders No. 11, which the general could never live down, it portrayed him shedding crocodile tears over the persecution of Jews in Russia while pandering toward the Jewish vote in the 1884 presidential election.14

  Grant shedding crocodile tears over the persecution of Jews in Russia. The quote is from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, act 3, scene 3. (illustration credit ill.33)

  By the time the 1884 election rolled around, however, Grant was destitute and largely out of politics. His business partner, Ferdinand Ward, the Bernard Madoff–like swindler of his day, borrowed against securities, paid out inflated dividends, used funds from one investor to pay off another, and, inevitably, proved unable to cover his debts. At that point, the bubble burst and the firm of Grant and Ward went bankrupt. Grant’s entire net worth, along with that of much of his family, vanished into thin air.

  Soon afterward, in 1885, just as Grant was busy writing his Civil War memoirs so as to provide for his family, he was struck down by cancer. An iron will sustained him as his health deteriorated. He spent hours writing and dictating, determined to finish his narrative. Meanwhile, messages from around the country flowed into the Grant home wishing the general well in his illness. On April 13, “the Rabbis of New York and adjacent States” conveyed their “sympathy to the stricken household” and offered prayers “to the Father of all to send strength to the sufferer to enable him to fight this great battle with the heroism worthy of so great a soldier.” Subsequently, the council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations extended its “heartfelt sympathy and best wishes for his early restoration to health.” At least one rabbi, Edward Benjamin Morris Browne of Congregation Gates of Hope in New York, personally visited with Grant at his home.15

  Grant took great pride in these expressions of sympathy from people of different faiths. “The [P]rotestant, the Catholic, and the Jew appointed days for universal prayer in my behalf,” he boasted in a letter to his eldest son. In response to a Catholic priest who wished him well, he again expressed great pleasure in the fact that “Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, and all the good people of the Nation, of all politics as well as religions, and all nationalities seem to have united in wishing or praying for my improvement.” That he explicitly included Jews in these letters, written just weeks prior to his death and decades before such expressions of religious inclusiveness had become commonplace, bespeaks the transformation that he had undergone since his Civil War days. In the heat of battle, as generals so often do, he had submerged individuals, focusing instead on armies and military objectives and categories of people, Jews among them. In the interim, remorseful over his wartime order expelling “Jews as a class” from his war zone, he had become a champion of racial and religious inclusiveness at home and human rights abroad. One of his longtime colleagues, General Adam Badeau, went so far as to describe him in the final sentence of a memoir tracing Grant’s career from “Appomattox to Mount McGregor” as “the foremost representative of the rights of the individual man.”16

  Mount McGregor in the Adirondacks was the place where, thanks to the generosity of banker Joseph W. Drexel and his family, who made available their commodious summer cottage, Grant spent his final days. By then he was unable to speak and communicated largely through written notes. He spent most of his time in bed. On the morning of Thursday, July 23, 1885, his heroic struggle came to its sad but inevitable end. He was pronounced dead at 8:08 a.m.

  News of the death spread quickly. “None will mourn his loss more sincerely than the Hebrew,” the Philadelphia Jewish Record declared in its Friday edition, “and tomorrow in every Jewish synagogue and temple in the land the sad event will be solemnly commemorated with fitting eulogy and prayer.”17 “Tomorrow,” the Saturday following Grant’s demise, coincided with what is known in the Jewish calendar as Shabbat Nahamu, the “Sabbath of Consolation.” It follows the fast of the ninth of Av commemorating the destruction of the Temple. The prophetic reading set aside for that day, from Isaiah 40, begins, “Comfort ye, comfort ye O my people.” Many a rabbinic sermon in Grant’s memory opened with that text.

  “Comfort ye, comfort ye O my people saith the Lord,” Reverend Joseph Hayim Mendes Chumaceiro of Isaac Leeser’s old congregation, Beth El Emeth in Philadelphia, sang out. He eulogized General Grant as God’s “anointed messenger to wipe out the crime of ages from your sacred institutions so that slavery might be blotted out from this fair land forever.” Opening with the same biblical text, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, once a sworn enemy of Grant’s, declared that “the whole nation stands in need of consolation.” He credited Grant with saving “his country for its own sake, without any selfish thirst after fame and self-aggrandizement” and concluded that in the history of humanity, Grant’s name stood “high above Caesar and Napoleon.” Rabbi Benjamin Szold of Baltimore, who also preached on consolation, predicted that volumes would in time “be devoted to the great work of [Grant’s] life, and posterity will ever revere in him the man who rescued a nation from the abyss of war and contention, and who having won glory and fame in war, aimed only at securing peace. His memory will remain among us as a blessing forever.”18b

  Just as the rabbis were eulogizing Grant and preaching consolation, word was received from England of the passing (at age one hundred) of Sir Moses Montefiore, the most famous Jew in the world at that time and a leading Jewish philanthropist and public figure. His death, coming just five days after Grant’s, inevitably called forth comparisons. Such would have been unimaginable two decades earlier, when Montefiore was revered and Grant reviled, but now joint commemorations took place. “Grant conquered with the sword, Montefiore with the gentle weapons of peace,” Alfred Jones of the Jewish Record declared in Atlantic City. “Both were of worldwide fame, yet both singularly free from pride.…Both men died with the work of their lives fully performed.” Moses Klein, writing from Philadelphia in the European Hebrew journal Hamagid, found a “wonderful similarity” between the two men: “The first fought with the sword for the freedom of thousands of slaves; the other with the arrows of his tongue for the freedom of a nation; in the first, we see the picture of ‘stern justice,’ in the other that of ‘sweet charity’; the name of the first will go down the ages as a man of war, and that of the second as the old philanthropist.” Yet, as the editor of the Jewish Messenger insisted, both heroes shared similar characteristics. They were “men of profound religious convictions, resolute in action, firm in their respective lives of duty; men who knew not fear [and] achieved success; men who alike drew strength and inspiration from the same Providence.” At Covenant Hall in Philadelphia and at an Orthodox synagogue in Wilmington, portraits of Montefiore and Grant hung side by side.19

  In reality, of course, Montefiore and Grant differed strikingly in their approaches to Jewish problems. Montefiore, spurred by traditional Jewish religious teachings, promoted Jewish rights around the world, made repeated visits to Zion, and passionately believed that “Palestine must belong to the Jews.” Grant reached out to Jews from a sense of guilt, promoted human rights as an extension of his national vision, found Zion “unpleasant,” and assumed that if a foreign country (like Romania) failed to grant Jews equal rights, they would find refuge in America. Each man spoke the language of human rights, but each did so from different motivations. Montefiore drew upon a religious tradition that shaped humanitarian politics in England. Grant drew upon a liberal tradition that held up the United States as an object lesson for the world. The two men, moreover, propounded opposing solutions to the problems of world Jewry: the one centered on the Promised Land (Zion), the other on the Golden Land (America). In the twentieth century, Jews would debate these issues lustily, ultimately voting with their feet o
n where to settle. But in 1885, both of these deceased heroes were simultaneously idolized. In city after city, Isaac Mayer Wise retrospectively observed, Jews “gloried in the idea that Moses Montefiore was a Jew and General Grant one of their fellow citizens.”20

  A few rabbis did courageously note blemishes on Grant’s record. Sabato Morais delicately observed that the general’s “brilliant qualities” had “partly been dimmed by ill-advised actions.” Wise, with typical bluntness, recalled “the notorious order No. 11, which President Lincoln characterized as an ‘absurdity,’ and General Grant himself called in aftertimes ‘a foolish piece of business.’ ” Reverend Elias Eppstein of Adath Jeshurun in Philadelphia likewise addressed Grant’s anti-Jewish order. For the most part, though, rabbis, like their ministerial and secular colleagues, focused upon Grant’s virtues and achievements. Indeed, a great many synagogues (including Wise’s) recited the traditional Jewish mourner’s kaddish in the former president’s memory. “Seldom before,” the Jewish Record reported, “has the kaddish been repeated so universally for a non-Jew as in this case.”21

  The Jewish address that received the greatest nationwide attention was delivered by the rabbi who visited with Grant during his illness, Edward Benjamin Morris Browne. A Hungarian who immigrated to the United States in 1865, Browne was fluent in six languages and, alongside rabbinic ordination, boasted degrees in law and medicine. Since he proudly displayed all of his degrees after his signature—E. B. M. Browne, L.L.D, A.M., B.M., D.D., M.D.—he became known as Alphabet Browne. His difficult personality and self-centered conceit, compounded by health problems, impeded his career. He bounced from pulpit to pulpit—fifteen of them in a career that spanned half a century.22

  Back in 1871, when he was all of twenty-six years old, Browne had recommended himself to Grant as chaplain to West Point Military Academy. Episcopalians and Methodists were publicly vying for that position, so Browne put his own name forward as a compromise candidate (“it seems to me that the Jews have perhaps more just claims … because no Jewish minister has yet been given a single office while the Christian clergy is very well represented in the offices of the U.S.”). He was not seriously considered.23