The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  The death of Leeser in 1868 removed from the scene the man with whom he had first tried to collaborate to unite American Jewry. Death seemed to offer the possibility of a new phase in which the differences between the two Isaacs could be relegated to the past. A few months before his passing, Leeser even expressed admiration for Wise for his leadership of his congregation, noting that only the “antagonistic” and “radical” influence of Einhorn prevented American Jews from rallying around him. Wise appears to have been moved by the passing of his longtime friend and occasional antagonist, hailing him as “the banner bearer of American Jewish conservatism,” and adding that for all their disagreements, “We know of no man in America who will replace Isaac Leeser in the orthodox camp. . . . He had a cause to plead, and he did it without fears or favors. He did not yield an inch to anybody. He unfurled his true colors on every occasion, and proved himself by far more consistent and by far more honest than many in that camp who are prudent enough to be everything to everybody.”21

  With Leeser gone, no single figure in the Orthodox community had the stature to stand up to Wise. As a result, the Cincinnati rabbi was fated to engage in combat with those on his left instead of his right.

  DENOUEMENT IN CHARLESTON

  Back in South Carolina, while Leeser and Wise jockeyed for influence in the 1850s, Congregations Beth Elohim and Shearith Israel struggled to overcome their differences with mixed success. Poznanski, after his resignation, evidently lived in Charleston until the Civil War and then went north, spending time in New York, but it is not clear where or when. A son, Gustavus Jr., died defending Charleston during the war. Two other sons became musicians in Europe and later inherited the rabbi’s estate. To this day, Beth Elohim cites his name at its annual memorial service on Yom Kippur.

  Poznanski’s departure from Beth Elohim cleared the way for it to declare its allegiance to reform. The organ was there to stay. Beth Elohim proclaimed that its sermons and some prayers would be in English, and that hymns and psalms would employ both Hebrew and English. The Torah would be read in a three-year cycle, the Haftarah (passages from the Prophets) and some parts of the service were eliminated, and second days of holidays were discarded. In 1855, Beth Elohim held a “confirmation” for students—five females and one male—following the first such adaptation of a church Sunday school practice in New York City in 1846.

  But it was also a period of financial difficulties for both Beth Elohim and Shearith Israel. In 1858, the new rabbi at Beth Elohim, Maurice Mayer, threatened to resign because he was not being paid on time. The congregation continued disputes with him. They complained, for example, that he had not covered his head while appearing in public. His response was to accuse the board of hypocrisy, arguing that if they were that conservative, the synagogue should remove the organ and reinstitute the second day of festivals. Mayer sought permission to leave in 1858, citing ill health, and finally resigned in 1859 after moving to New York. Yet another new hazan, Abraham Harris, began his duties in February 1860, only to resign the following year as Confederates bombarded and seized Fort Sumter.

  As Beth Elohim and Shearith Israel continued their feuds, a new group of Jews recently emigrated from Poland created another new synagogue congregation in 1855, Berith Shalome (today Brith Shalom-Beth Israel), so that by the time of the Civil War there were three synagogues in Charleston. For the most part, they were loyal to South Carolina and the Confederacy.

  Once Charleston was occupied by the Union, Shearith congregants asked Union army authorities for permission to take over their former synagogue, on the ground that the occupants had “no rights in the premises.” The Union forces agreed, notwithstanding its citation of “a decision of a civil court previous to the Union forces occupying the city,” a reference to Judge Butler’s decision approving the organ.22

  The two synagogues decided to reunite in 1866, a development made easier as Shearith Israel grew more receptive to the reformist sentiments of Beth Elohim. The two feuding congregations also sought a unified front against the new Polish upstarts. Of course, disputes over ritual and music continued to flare, as it has at many synagogues in America.

  The organ, meanwhile, continued its perilous and discordant journey into history. When Charleston was bombarded during the Civil War, the organ was taken one hundred miles away for safekeeping to the interior of the state in Columbia, along with the chandelier and Torah scrolls. But these treasures ended up burned by Union forces racing through Columbia under General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864.

  The merger of Shearith Israel and Beth Elohim after the Civil War was accompanied by a new constitution shortening the Orthodox service and discarding the practice of members making offerings in return for the honor of reading from the Torah. No instrumental music was part of the service, but there was to be a choir with women.

  Charles H. Moïse, the new president of Beth Elohim, called himself “an enlightened Orthodox Jew.” He declared that he did not wish to adopt new practices just because they were new—and that he would not reject old practices just because they were old. Jews throughout the country took an interest in the doings of the two synagogues. Before his death, Rabbi Leeser even expressed regret over the discontinuation of selling the honor of reading from the Torah. The practice was reinstated. The synagogue, despite its new unification, fell on hard times, forcing the resignation of its president. But when the five-year contract of union was renewed, an organ was restored to a place of honor in 1872.

  Penina Moïse, Charles’s aunt and a celebrated poet regarded as the first woman of Jewish letters in America, whose hymn was sung when Beth Elohim opened with its new organ in 1841, fared less well in these years. Having published a collection of sixty poems in 1833, many of which first appeared in South Carolina newspapers, she was famous for her rhapsodic paeans to nature, heroism, Jewish faith, and loyalty to the people of South Carolina and their traditions.

  In her heyday, Moïse wrote poems that lamented the death of the ardent slavery advocate and white supremacist John C. Calhoun and that praised the Confederate forces of the Palmetto State. She wrote poems about the fire that destroyed Beth Elohim and its rebuilding: “Behold, O Mighty Architect, / What love for Thee has wrought; / This Fane arising from the wrecked, / Beauty from ashes brought.” When the schism opened up and traditionalists seceded, she wrote a poem, “Lines on the Issue of the Late Hebrew Controversy,” that expressed “the sound of a brother’s farewell.” She rejoiced when the struggle was resolved.

  During the Civil War, Penina Moïse fled from Charleston and then returned after the war, by then blind from old age, impoverished, and forced to teach school to make ends meet. But her legacy remained in Charleston for evoking the American sounds of Protestant church music, a fusing of traditions that would mark the journey of Jews toward the mainstream of American religion. She saw the Jews as forever yearning for their God-given destiny—for example, in her poem evoking Israel at the Red Sea, before crossing to a life in the Promised Land:

  Hallelujah! Symbol bright

  Of divine, impartial light

  Is the sun that taketh heed

  Of the flower and the weed.

  Hallelujah! Even so

  Mercy beams on all below;

  Nor to Saints its smiles confines

  But on guilt forgiving shines.

  Hallelujah! May our race,

  Heirs of promise and of grace,

  Enter Heav’n beyond Life’s goal,

  Blessed Canaan of the soul!23

  Moïse’s poetry echoed with themes of freedom and redemption for Jews, but it was also a voice of the Old South. That voice gave poetic eloquence to the stormy efforts in Charleston to reconcile tradition and change in an ancient religion. American Judaism on the eve of the Civil War was to become as divided as the rest of the Union. Jews, citing Scripture as their basis, could not help but be divided, not only over their own practices but over the greatest moral issue of the era and one that would sunder a nation and its Jewi
sh community.

  Nine

  JEWS IN THE CIVIL WAR

  South Carolina, home of one of the largest concentrations of American Jews, had many reasons to distrust the North, well beyond the issue of slavery. It was in South Carolina that the doctrine of nullification—in which the state argued it was entitled to abrogate federal laws imposing tariffs on imports—provoked a constitutional crisis in the 1830s. Tariffs were anathema to the state’s trade-based economy from which many Jews prospered.

  The state’s rebellious tendencies boiled over with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Immediately following the vote, a South Carolina state assembly, fearing that slavery would soon be abolished, voted to secede. Federal property was taken over by Confederate forces throughout the South. Union troops defending Charleston retreated to Fort Sumter, on a small island offshore. Once in office in 1861, Lincoln sent a fleet of unarmed ships to relieve the island garrison, provoking the rebels to open fire and seize the outpost, forcing Union troops to surrender. The Civil War had begun.

  Socially and politically, the Civil War marked a turning point for American Jews, in ways beneficial and baleful. The conflict hastened Jewish integration into the military and, in the process, into the fabric of American society. Yet war also brought forth a new and virulent wave of American anti-Semitism in both the North and the South, underscoring the detestable but indestructible stereotype of Jews as obsessed with money and material possessions, and willing to pursue them at the expense of the war effort. Above all, Jewish loyalty to their regions—both North and South—was a sign that Jews were proclaiming their identity as full Americans, shedding their affinities with the countries they left behind.

  “For Jews in America, the Civil War was a watershed that involved Jewish soldiers from all over the nation,” writes the historian and biographer Eli N. Evans. “Jews served in both armies and helped in the war effort in many other ways. Serving their countries under fire and fighting side by side with their Gentile comrades in arms accelerated the process of acculturation, not only through their self-perceptions, but also because of the reactions of the community around them.”

  Of the 150,000 Jews living in at least 160 identifiable Jewish communities in the United States (25,000 of them in the South), Evans estimates that the number of Jews serving in the South was 2,000 to 3,000 and 6,000 in the North—more than 5 percent of the total population, a remarkably high number. In addition, this number included generals, surgeons, and medal winners. David Urbansky, a Union soldier who had emigrated from Prussia, was the first American Jew to be awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor. It was for his heroism at the Battles of Shiloh and Vicksburg. On the home front, Jews supported myriad relief activities, and Jewish women made clothes, prepared bandages, and treated the wounded.1

  Diaries and journals attest to the experience of Jews feeling at home in military service but also struggling with the pain of a war that split Jewish families and relations, just as it did for the rest of Americans. “I have now become a respected man in a respected position,” Louis Gratz, a peddler, wrote upon becoming a first lieutenant in the cavalry of the Union. “I move in the best and richest circles and am treated with utmost consideration by Jews and Christians.” But the children of Abraham Jonas were divided—four for the South and one for the North. Septima Levy Collis’s brother died fighting for the South while her husband was wounded fighting for the North. Southern Jews were chagrined that Northern Jews were among the invaders—in one case guarding the house of a Southern Jew. A memoirist recounted how Northern soldiers attended services in Natchez, Mississippi, giving offense to the Jews of that congregation.2

  Jewish themes also abounded in the statements of Jews praying for victory for the sides on which they fought. A Jewish Confederate captain compared the North to Egypt and the South to the Israelites seeking freedom from Egyptian slavery. Rabbi Maxmilian J. Michelbacher of Richmond charged that the enemy of the North had “dissolved fraternal love” and threatened “to desecrate our soil, to murder our people, and to deprive us of the glorious inheritance which was left to us by the immortal fathers of this once great Republic. . . . O Lord, God of Israel, be with me in the hot season of the contending strife; protect and bless me with health and courage to bear cheerfully the hardship of war. . . .” Rabbis in the South had a special difficulty when the Union Army captured their cities. In New Orleans, Rabbi James K. Gutheim, who had earlier served in New York and Cincinnati, refused to take an oath of allegiance to occupying forces. Ordered to leave, he installed himself in Montgomery, Alabama, where he remained loyal to “our beloved country, the Confederate States of America,” which he hailed for defending “our liberties and rights and independence, under just and equitable laws.”3

  In the North, religious figures, such as Rabbi David Einhorn of Baltimore, prayed for victory and condemned slavery by invoking the story of Exodus. It was not always easy for Jews to serve and remain faithful to their traditions, but the evidence suggests that Jews in the military sought to keep their identities and beliefs in the field, including attempts on both sides to keep kosher and observe the Sabbath and at least the major Jewish holidays. General Robert E. Lee, a devout Christian, pledged in 1864 to try “to facilitate the observances of the duties of their religion by the Israelites in the army.” The historian Jonathan Sarna poignantly cites two accounts of Passover in 1862, one on the Union side and the other Confederate, as they sought to obtain matzo and kosher meat for the Seder. On the other hand, some Jews serving in the army hid their identities, to the disappointment of rabbis who sought to reach out to them.

  As if by Providence, news of the Union victory and Lee’s surrender coincided with the arrival of Passover in 1865. Jews in the North readily compared the victory to their own freedom from slavery celebrated by that holiday. But then five days later Lincoln was dead—the eve of the fifth day of Passover—and also Good Friday. Sermons in synagogues compared Lincoln not only to Moses but also to Abraham and King David. Some three thousand Jews marched in Lincoln’s funeral pageant in New York and mourned his loss as one of their own.

  In defeat, the Confederacy’s Jews mourned the looting and burning of some of their synagogues. Southern rabbis compared the rout of their forces to the fall of the Temple and the Jews’ expulsion in ancient Jerusalem. “As Israelites, we are passing through another captivity which relives and reenacts all the troubles so pathetically poured forth by the inspired Jeremiah,” Henry Hyams of Louisiana wrote of the Northern occupation, in 1868. A group called the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association, founded in 1866 after the war, distributed a circular echoing the emerging sense of grievance and loss that was to characterize the South for decades after the war. The association said that because of their history of suffering, Jews had a special reason for remembering those who had “so nobly perished” for the “glorious cause” of the Confederacy. The Jewish sculptor Moses Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran, created sculptures and busts of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Confederate Memorial at Arlington Cemetery.4

  ANTI-SEMITISM IN NORTH AND SOUTH

  Despite their service and loyalty to both North and South, and perhaps because they were heavily integrated into the war efforts on both sides, anti-Semitism reared its ugly visage and caused great pain for Jews both ordinary and prominent.

  On the Union side, anti-Jewish prejudice flared over the role of Jews in businesses that profited from the war, often featured in news stories and cartoons depicting Jews as avaricious, disloyal, and greedy. These focused especially on poorly made uniforms made from shredded or discarded fiber known as “shoddy.” Shoddy became an anti-Semitic slur, so widespread was the assumption that it was Jews who produced such goods. “In the media, the theme of ‘shoddy,’ the purported manipulation of financial institutions, the alleged subversive complicity with the Confederacy, the supposed exploitation of military personnel by Jewish camp followers, and the claims of foreign intervention against the interest of the North continued
unabated to plague the image of Jews,” the historians Gary L. Bunker and John J. Appel write.5

  Some anti-Semitism in the North was also driven by the conspicuous role of Jews in the South. A particular target of such hatred in the North was the Confederate secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin (1811–1884), a former senator from Louisiana and a close confidant of the Confederate president Jefferson Davis. A number of damaging episodes in the military were also painful. In 1861, the Union Army decreed that chaplains had to be of “some Christian denomination.” (The Confederate law was more inclusive, specifying only that a chaplain had to be a “minister of religion.”) Jewish chaplains in the North were even barred from ministering to soldiers in the field. But the ruling was overturned in 1862, with Lincoln’s support, in a historically significant milestone for all religions other than Christianity.