When General Grant Expelled the Jews

by Jonathan D. Sarna

  5. On Brown, see Kenneth H. Winn, “Brown, Benjamin Gratz,” in Dictionary of Missouri Biography (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 121–24, and Norma L. Peterson, Freedom and Franchise: The Political Career of B. Gratz Brown (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1965); quote is from The Reformed Presbyterian and Covenanter 4 (January 1866): 181.

  6. Proceedings of the National Convention to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution … with an Account of the Origin and Progress of the Movement (Philadelphia: James B. Rodgers Co., 1872), 8.

  7. Borden, Jews, Turks and Infidels, 68.

  8. PUSG 19, p. 19.

  9. Senate Executive Journal 17 (April 17, 1869): 202; Panitz, Simon Wolf, 32–33. Panitz claims that this position was actually created for Wolf; however, Grant, in appointing Wolf, said that he was to replace Ohio attorney F. P. Cuppy, who had resigned.

  10. Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 72; Senate Executive Journal 17 (April 20, 1869): 229, 241; Panitz, Simon Wolf, 32–33.

  11. Laurence F. Schmeckebier, The District of Columbia: Its Government and Administration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1928), 707–9; Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 71–73.

  12. New York Times (October 23, 1921); Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Boston: DeWolfe & Fiske Co., 1892), 639; Public Law 379, 82d Congress (66 Stat. 129).

  13. Ross L. Muir and Carl J. White, Over the Long Term: The Story of J. & W. Seligman & Co. (New York: J. & W. Seligman, 1964), 57; Smith, Grant, 470; Joseph L. Grabill, “Straus, Oscar Solomon,” http://www.anb.org/articles/06/06–00632.html, American National Biography Online, February 2000 (accessed February 18, 2010).

  14. [N. Taylor Phillips?], “Solomons, Adolphus Simeon,” Adolphus Simeon Solomons Papers, P-28, box 1, folder 1, AJHS; David de Sola Pool, “Adolphus Solomons,” Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Scribner, 1936), 9:393–94.

  15. On Jewish appointments see, for example, Israelite (January 14, 1870), 10; (February 25, 1870), 9; (June 23, 1876), 5; (October 25, 1877), 5, and, for documents concerning Sterne, SC 12003, AJA. For the claim of “more than fifty appointments,” see American Hebrew (October 20, 1916), 841, and Panitz, Simon Wolf, 35. The claim about Grant having appointed “more Israelites … than any other President” was first made in a toast in June 1870; see London Jewish Chronicle (June 15, 1870), 10.

  16. Edmond S. Meany, Governors of Washington, Territorial and State (Seattle: Department of Printing, University of Washington, 1915), 43–44; Lee M. Friedman, Jewish Pioneers and Patriots (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1942), 353–64; David Gleicher, “From Jewish Immigrant to Union General in Under Ten Years,” Chicago Jewish History 15 (Winter 1992): 1, 8, 9; Alan Rabinowitz, “The Forgotten Governor of Washington Territory: Edward S. Salomon, 1870–1872,” unpublished research note, AJA; PUSG 20, p. 351; Robert E. Ficken, “Figureheads of State,” Columbia Magazine 19, no. 4 (Winter 2005–6), online at http://columbia.washington history.org/anthology/fromtriballands/figureheads.aspx (accessed February 25, 2010); “The Governor of Washington Territory, 1870–1872,” Western States Jewish History 17 (1984):216n6; Israelite (January 14, 1870), 10 (italics added); Archives Israelite 31 (1870): 147.

  17. American Israelite (October 27, 1871) as quoted in “The Governor of Washington Territory,” 216n6.

  18. Letter-report from R. H. Leipold from Olympia, W.T., to the Secretary of the Treasury, dated July 24, 1871, in File Microcopies of Records in the National Archives: no. 26, roll 2, State Department Territorial Papers, Washington Series, vol. 2 (February 18, 1859–December 4, 1872), National Archives (Washington, D.C., 1942), item 744; PUSG 20, pp. 351–52; Rabinowitz, “The Forgotten Governor,” 2–3; Ficken, “Figureheads of State”; Mark W. Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 95–100, esp. 98.

  19. Letter-report from R. H. Leipold from Olympia, W.T., to the Secretary of the Treasury, dated July 24, 1871; Rabinowitz, “The Forgotten Governor,” 3; PUSG 20, pp. 351–52; Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration (New York: Unger, 1957), 2:593 (quoting Fish’s diary, January 9, 1872).

  20. Simon Wolf, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (Philadelphia: Levytype Company, 1895), 169; Nevins, Hamilton Fish, 2:593. Salomon subsequently moved to San Francisco and resumed his political career, serving as district attorney and as a California legislator; L. Sandy Maisel and Ira N. Forman, Jews in American Politics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 412.

  21. Norton B. Stern, “Herman Bendell: Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Arizona Territory, 1871–1873,” Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly 8 (1975–76):265–82; Abraham S. Chanin, “Herman Bendell,” Western States Jewish History 31 (1999): 336–44.

  22. The text of the inaugural address is available online at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/grant1.asp (accessed March 11, 2010).

  23. McFeely, Grant, 305–18; Smith, Grant, 515–41; Richard R. Levine, “Indian Fighters and Indian Reformers: U. S. Grant’s Indian Peace Policy,” Civil War History 31 (December 1985):329–52; Robert H. Keller, American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 1869–82 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Francis P. Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975).

  24. On Parker, see William H. Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps: Ely S. Parker, Union General and Seneca Chief (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1978), 134–51, 176.

  25. PUSG 21, p. 152; Levine, “Indian Fighters and Indian Reformers,” 333; Francis P. Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 132.

  26. Keller, American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 34–35; Jonathan D. Sarna, “The American Jewish Response to Nineteenth-Century Christian Missions,” Journal of American History 68 (June 1981): 35–51.

  27. Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 80–81; Keller, American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 261n46; Jewish Times (January 6, 1871), 712–13, as quoted in Stern, “Herman Bendell,” 270.

  28. Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 80–81; Stern, “Herman Bendell,” 269–70; Senate Executive Journal 19 (January 12, 1871): 606.

  29. Stern, “Herman Bendell,” 272–76; Bendell’s reports are reprinted in Western States Jewish History 22 (1989–90): 195–206, 306–15, quote from 314–15.

  30. Robert A. Trennert, “John H. Stout and the Grant Peace Policy Among the Pimas,” Arizona and the West 28 (Spring 1986): 54, 56; Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 81–82; Chanin, “Herman Bendell,” 343; Senate Executive Journal 21 (March 25, 1873): 109. Tonner had previously been the Indian agent at the Colorado River indian reservation managed by the Dutch Reformed Church. See Stern, “Herman Bendell,” 279, and Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1875 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1875), 172, online at http://www.archive.org/stream/usindianaffairs75usdorich/usindianaffairs75usdorich_djvu.txt (accessed March 11, 2010). In 1880, the Dutch Reformed Church acknowledged its failure in Indian affairs and withdrew from the field; see Keller, American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 62.

  31. Senate Executive Journal 22 (December 3, 1873): 142.

  5. “This Age of Enlightenment”

  1. New York Times (November 27, 1869), 3.

  2. David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 127; Bertram W. Korn, The American Reaction to the Mortara Case: 1858–1859 (Cincinnati: AJA, 1957).

  3. Evelyn Levow Greenberg, “An 1869 Petition on Behalf of Russian Jews,”American Jewish Historical Quarterly 54 (March 1965): 278–95; Eliyahu Feldman, “First Attempt of American Intervention on Behalf of the Russian Jews, 1869/70,” Zion 30 (1965): 206–23 [in Hebrew]; Ronald J. Jensen, “The Politics of Discrimination: America, Russia, and the Jewish Question, 1869–1872,
” American Jewish History 75 (March 1986): 280–95.

  4. The petition is printed in Greenberg, “An 1869 Petition,” 280–281.

  5. Schuyler’s report is reprinted as an appendix to Feldman, “First Attempt,” 220–21.

  6. Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 72–73; Diary of Hamilton Fish, November 30, 1869, as quoted in Jensen, “Politics of Discrimination,” 282. A slightly different text of Grant’s comments, from the Washington Chronicle, is quoted in PUSG 21, p. 76.

  7. Greenberg, “An 1869 Petition,” 285, 289; Feldman, “First Attempt,” 212–15; Jensen, “Politics of Discrimination,” 282–88.

  8. Feldman, “First Attempt,” 217–19, 222–23; Jewish Times (December 10, 1869), 6, as quoted in Greenberg, “An 1869 Petition,” 283; Charleston Courier Tri-Weekly (December 7, 1869; reprinted from New York World); see Daily Cleveland Herald (December 2, 1869).

  9. New York Times (June 14, 1867), 2.

  10. Carol Iancu, “The Struggle for the Emancipation of Romanian Jewry and Its International Ramifications,” in The History of the Jews in Romania: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Liviu Rotman and Carol Iancu (Tel Aviv: Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, 2005), 2:119–26, quote from 2:121; Max J. Kohler, “The Board of Delegates of American Israelites, 1859–1878,” PAJHS 29 (1925):91–98.

  11. [San Francisco] Daily Evening Bulletin (June 2, 1870); New York Times (June 3, 1870), 1; (June 5, 1870), 4; (June 6, 1870), 5; (June 9, 1870), 1; (June 15, 1870), 2); cf. American Israelite (June 10, 1870), 8.

  12. New York Times (June 3, 1870), 1; (June 6, 1870), 5; Max J. Kohler and Simon Wolf, Jewish Disabilities in the Balkan States (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1916), 8.

  13. New York Times (June 3, 1870), 1; Lloyd P. Gartner, American and British Jews in the Age of the Great Migration (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2009), 171 (Gartner’s article earlier appeared in American Jewish Historical Quarterly 58 [1968]: 25–117).

  14. Kohler and Wolf, Jewish Disabilities in the Balkan States, 2.

  15. David Assaf, Caught in the Thicket: Chapters of Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism (Jerusalem: Mercaz Shazar, 2006), 70n69 [in Hebrew]; David Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 76; Shalom D. Levin, Toildois Chabad B’Eretz Ha’Koidesh (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Kehot, 1988), 78 [in Hebrew].

  16. Israel Klausner, Rabbi Hayyim Zvi Sneersohn (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1973) [in Hebrew]; H. Z. Sneersohn, Palestine and Roumania: A Description of the Holy Land and the Past and Present State of Roumania, and the Roumanian Jews (New York: Arno, 1977 [1872]).

  17. Sneersohn, Palestine and Roumania, xii, xiv; Klausner, Rabbi Hayyim Zvi Sneersohn, 62; San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (May 20, 1870); Norton B. Stern and William M. Kramer, “A Pre-Israeli Diplomat on an American Mission, 1869–1870,” Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly 8 (1976): 232–42; Ruth Kark, American Consuls in the Holy Land, 1832–1914 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1994), 159, 213, 315–17; Mordecai Eliav, “The Sarah Steinberg Affair,” Sinai 64 (1969): 78–91 [in Hebrew].

  18. New York Times (February 19, 1869).

  19. Sneersohn, Palestine and Roumania, xii, 85–86; PUSG 19, pp. xxiv, 436; Klausner, Rabbi Hayyim Zvi Sneersohn, 64–67; [London] Jewish Chronicle (May 26, 1869), 13; Archives Israelites 30 (1869): 375–77; Yitzchok Levine, “The Jerusalem Rabbi Who Met President Ulysses S. Grant,” http://personal.stevens.edu/~llevine/sneersohn.pdf (accessed March 28, 2010); prayer for the president retranslated according to Jonathan Saxe, The Koren Sidder (Jerusalem: Koren, 2009), 1002.

  20. Lloyd P. Gartner, “Peixotto,” EJ, 15:713; Lloyd P. Gartner, “Peixotto, Benjamin Franklin,” http://www.anb.org/articles/04/04–00771.html; American National Biography Online, February 2000 (accessed March 28, 2010); Albert A. Woldman, “A Hard-Hitting Leader,” National Jewish Monthly (November 1940): 82–83; unpublished biographical sketch of Peixotto, Philip Lax Archive, B’nai B’rith, Washington, D.C.

  21. Benjamin F. Peixotto to Myer Isaacs (June 7, 28, 1870), Board of Delegates of American Israelite Papers, AJHS, reprinted in Ava F. Kahn, ed., Jewish Voices of the California Gold Rush: A Documentary History, 1849–1880 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 479–83; Kohler and Wolf, Jewish Disabilities in the Balkan States, 10–11.

  22. Sneersohn to Grant (January 19, 1870) in Sneersohn, Palestine and Roumania, 86–89; Wolf to Peixotto (June 14, 1870) in Gartner, American and British Jews in the Age of the Great Migration, 177; New York Times (December 12, 1868); Senate Executive Jour-nal 19 (June 17, 1870): 479–81, (June 29, 1870): 499 (the name was consistently misspelled as “Piexotto”); Israelite (June 24, 1870).

  23. Gartner, American and British Jews in the Age of the Great Migration, 180.

  24. The text in Benjamin F. Peixotto, “Story of the Roumanian Mission,” The Meno-rah 1 (1886): 26, which is quoted here, is practically identical to the text in Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 74–75.

  25. PUSG 21, p. 74; the handwritten original is in the AJHS, New York.

  26. Benjamin F. Peixotto to Joseph Seligman (January 4, 1871), SC-9476, AJA.

  27. PUSG 21, p. 77.

  28. Ibid.; Panitz, Simon Wolf, 41–51.

  29. B. F. Peixotto to A[lbert] Cohn (April 21, 1872) in Carol Iancu, “Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, L’Alliance israélite universelle et les Juifs de Roumanie: Correspondance inédite (1871–1876),” Revue des Etudes Juives 137 (January–June 1978): 77–147, quote from 126; Carol Iancu, Les Juifs en Roumanie 1866–1919 (Provence: Editions de l’Université de Provence, 1978), 106–18; Gartner, American and British Jews in the Age of the Great Migration, 183–230; Lloyd P. Gartner, “Documents on Roumanian Jewry: Consul Peixotto and Jewish Diplomacy, 1870–1875,” in Salo Wittmayer Baron Jubilee Volume (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 1:467–90; Benjamin F. Peixotto, “The Story of the Roumanian Mission,” The Menorah 1–4 (1886–1888), passim.

  30. PUSG 28, p. 69; Joan Waugh, U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 137; Benjamin F. Peixotto to A[lbert] Cohn (September 20, 1872) in Iancu, “Benjamin Franklin Peixotto,” 133.

  31. Gartner, American and British Jews in the Age of the Great Migration, 29–52, 201–10, quotes from 202–3; Sneersohn, Palestine and Roumania, 166; Klausner, Rabbi Hayyim Zvi Sneersohn, 98–103; Leon Horowitz, Romaniah va-’Amerikah (Berlin: n.p., 1874); Israelite (November 15, 1872); Hamagid 16 (December 11, 1872): 518; North American and United States Gazette (November 4, 1872); Cleveland Morning Daily Herald (October 16, 1872); Iancu, “Benjamin Franklin Peixotto,” 91–95.

  32. Adolphus Solomons to Myer Isaacs (May 9, 1872), Board of Delegates of American Israelites Papers, AJHS.

  33. Daily Arkansas Gazette (July 16, 1872); William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, act 1, scene 3; the Morgan cartoon was graciously made available to me by Arnold Kaplan, from the Arnold and Deanne Kaplan American Judaica Collection. For the Nast cartoon, see Harper’s Weekly (July 6, 1872), 528, available online at http://elections.harpweek.com/1872/cartoon-1872-large.asp?UniqueID=22&Year=1872.

  34. Israelite (July 12, 1872); Jewish Messenger (August 2, 1872); Hebrew Leader, as quoted in North American and United States Gazette (August 1, 1872); New York Times (August 25, 1872).

  35. Smith, Grant, 552; George Templeton Strong, as quoted in William Gillette, “Election of 1872,” in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Fred L. Israel, 4 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), 2:1316; Grant, as quoted in McFeely, Grant, 384.

  36. Smith, Grant, 552; American Israelite (July 7, 1876), 4.

  37. Benny Kraut, “Frances E. Abbot: Perceptions of a Nineteenth-Century Religious Radical on Jews and Judaism,” in Studies in the American Jewish Experience, ed. J. R. Marcus and A. J. Peck (Cincinnati: AJA, 1981), 99–101.

  38. David Philipson, Max Lilienthal (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1915), 456–57, cf. 109–25.

  39. PUSG 22, p. 394. Jesse Lilienthal n
ever attended West Point.

  40. PUSG 26, p. 344; http://www.infoplease.com/t/hist/state-of-the-union/87.html; James S. Clarkson, “General Grant’s Des Moines Speech,” The Century Magazine 55 (March 1898): 785–89.

  41. American Israelite (November 9, 1875), 5; Smith, Grant, 569–71; Tyler Anbinder, “Ulysses S. Grant, Nativist,” Civil War History 43 (June 1997): 119–42.

  42. Stanley Rabinowitz, The Assembly: A Century in the Life of the Adas Israel Hebrew Congregation of Washington, D.C. (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1993), esp. 32–33; see Journal of the Senate, 34th Congress, 1st Session (June 10, 1856): 373. On European synagogue dedications attended by leaders, see, for example, Carol H. Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 265.

  43. Rabinowitz, The Assembly, 143–46; American Israelite (June 23, 1876), 5; London Jewish Chronicle (June 30, 1876), 196; PUSG 27, p. 161.

  44. American Israelite (July 21, 1876), 5; (July 28, 1876), 4; Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 88; Steven A. Fox, “On the Road to Unity: The Union of American Hebrew Congregations and American Jewry, 1873–1903,” AJA 32 (November 1980): 145–93.

  45. The New Era 1 (October 1870): 1–2; Isidor Kalisch, Studies in Ancient and Modern Judaism (New York: Dobsevage, 1928), 61; Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 124–34.

  46. Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 71.

  6. “Then and Now”

  1. McFeely, Grant, 450; Michael Fellman, “Introduction,” in John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), xi–xix; PUSG 28, p. 333; Smith, Grant, 607.

  2. W. H. Hicks, General Grant’s Tour Around the World (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1879), 57, 77; Ross L. Muir and Carl J. White, Over the Long Term: The Story of J. & W. Se-ligman & Co. (New York: J. & W. Seligman, 1964), 58, 81; George S. Hellman, The Story of the Seligmans (typescript, Jacob R. Marcus Papers, box 476, AJA) I, 124 (quoted); PUSG 28, p. 242.