The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  Wise was never a personal fan of Lincoln, who stopped in Cincinnati on his way to his inauguration. The rabbi said the president-elect came across as “a country lawyer” likely to be overwhelmed by the job. “We have no doubt he is an honest man, and, as much as we can learn, also quite an intelligent man,” Wise wrote. “But he will look queer in the White House, with his primitive manner.”23 But Wise’s deeper concern was that the war would shatter the support systems for his own people and impede the cause of a unified Judaism sheltered by a secular American government. He thus held that peace was more important than using force to keep the South from seceding. Throughout the war, Wise sought to keep in touch with Jewish congregations in the North and the South and was determined to inform his own community in Cincinnati of how both sides were faring.

  Isaac Leeser, Wise’s traditionalist rival, had similar views, trying to straddle the middle in a conflict that spiraled down beyond compromise. Leeser was fearful that Jews taking anything like a collective stand on the issue would send a wrong message and jeopardize Jewish status. But his attempts at conciliation and discretion only drew fire from the combatants. “If anyone tried with desperate sincerity to occupy the unhappy, sad position of neutrality during the entire war period, it was the bachelor rabbi of Philadelphia,” writes the historian Bertram Korn. Slavery proved another issue in which Leeser lacked the diplomatic skills to avoid antagonizing people. He tried to offer prayers for both sides in the war, while maintaining starchily that Jews must participate in politics individually but not collectively. But when he commended Confederate Jews for their loyalty to their cause, he was rebuked by a prominent Jewish lawyer in Philadelphia, Moses A. Dropsie. “You better take care what you say,” Dropsie warned. “You are already on the suspected list, and you may be compelled to quit the city before long!” Leeser was so shaken by the warning that he wrote a letter to the mayor of Philadelphia suggesting that he might leave the country altogether if the atmosphere was that hostile, and he sought reassurance that he would not be expelled. The mayor replied that he should have no such fears.24

  SERMONS IN CONFLICT: RABBI RAPHALL “MUST KNOW”

  The interregnum following Lincoln’s election in November 1860 heightened fears of war throughout the soon-to-be disunited States. President James Buchanan, hapless in the face of catastrophe, including the seizure of Fort Sumter, proclaimed a National Fast Day on January 4, 1861, to pray for the survival of the Union. There followed an extraordinary set of sermons by rabbis that argued the cause of slavery on both sides. The debate stands out as testimony not only to the division among Jews but to the divergent ways that Jews in the mid-nineteenth century were hewing to their Talmudic traditions of literal interpretation of Scripture.

  On one side, the pro-slavery argument was forcefully delivered by Rabbi Morris Raphall, the renowned German-educated orator, linguist, translator, and lecturer who had debated Poznanski about the Messiah in Charleston. His New York congregation, B’nai Jeshurun, was a citadel of tradition, and Raphall’s speech recapitulated his literalist take on the Talmud and Scripture, impervious to modern conditions, rationality, and even, it could be argued, common sense. It echoed the arguments he had outlined when debating with Poznanski and in front of Wise a decade earlier.

  Raphall’s sermon, delivered to honor the day of fasting and sponsored by the American Society for Promoting National Unity, was highly influential because of the rabbi’s stature and because its arguments were widely seen as effectively giving God’s blessing to the very concept of slavery. The remarks were a great comfort to slavery supporters and stirred more attention than any other sermon ever delivered by an American rabbi up until that time. Many non-Jewish slavery advocates hailed Raphall for supposedly settling the matter, an implicit (if ironic) endorsement of the authority of Jewish scholars over biblical interpretation, as if to say, “He’s Jewish—he must know.” The sermon was widely disseminated in the press. The Richmond Daily Dispatch praised it as “the most powerful argument delivered” by a clergyman. The Virginia governor, Wyndham Robertson, cited it as vindicating the South’s battle for legitimacy, and it persuaded some clergy in the South to defend Jews as loyal citizens of the Confederacy.

  On the other side of the debate were Rabbi Michael Heilprin, a Polish-American scholar, and Rabbi Einhorn, the militantly reformist leader based in Baltimore. Their arguments revealed how reformers and liberals were trying to apply broader interpretations to Jewish texts.

  Raphall was hardly an outlier in his own community. His pro-slavery (or anti-abolitionist) stance probably reflected those of many Jews in New York City, a pro-Confederacy outpost at least at the outset of the war. New York was a Democratic-controlled commercial center with an economic base dependent on financing the cotton trade in the South. The mayor, Fernando Wood, a Tammany Hall sachem, spoke of the city seceding from the Union to side with the Confederacy. The New York City draft riots of 1863, in which white working-class protesters ransacked neighborhoods and murdered scores of blacks, were an outgrowth of the city’s antipathy toward the Union cause. The city at the time was also the home of some forty thousand Jews on the eve of the conflict, or 5 percent of the city’s population. Like commercial operations in the city as a whole, Jewish businesses were often tied to the South. The banking sector facilitated transactions between the regions, and the garment industry, where many Jews worked, produced 40 percent of the nation’s clothing, dependent on cotton from the South and on Southerners (including slaves) as consumers of their goods. A prominent Jewish politician, Emmanuel Hart, who served in Congress in the early 1850s, was a leader of Wood’s Tammany Hall and allied with its opposition to the abolitionist movement. But not everyone was pro-slavery. A cluster of anti-slavery Jews worshipped at Temple Emanu-El, already known as a reform-oriented congregation. Among its leaders were the Seligman family, which played a role in financing the war on the Union side, including the sale of bonds in their native Germany. After the war broke out, many Jewish leaders in the city like the Seligmans rallied patriotically to the Union’s side.25

  Raphall’s sermon bears additional significance because of its explicit attack on rationalism as antithetical to religious faith, turning the teachings of Maimonides (among others) upside down. Beginning his sermon with a recollection of various biblical injunctions to humanity to cover itself in sackcloth to repent for its sins, Raphall noted the Southern slogan, “Cotton is King.” But he had a telling riposte. The North, he charged, was asserting in effect: “Thought is King,” as if rational thought would lead to a condemnation of slavery. “No, my friends, ‘Cotton’ is not King, and ‘Human thought’ is not King. . . . Hashem alone is King!” he declared, using a Hebrew word for God. He added that God countenances humans enslaving their fellow humans; it was a “pernicious fallacy” to argue otherwise.

  Raphall’s explication of the Bible included a discussion of the conditions of slaves in biblical times. Slavery in antiquity, he noted, is usually associated with wars, in which the victor had the right to enslave the conquered. One could also sell oneself into slavery to pay off a debt, and the Bible distinguishes between a Hebrew and a Canaanite slave. In Scripture, those in captivity in such circumstances were sometimes referred to as eved (sometimes spelled ebed), which is translated as both “slave” and “servant.” “Facts are facts,” he said, adding that there was not a single biblical text “which directly or indirectly denounces slaveholding as a sin.”

  To buttress his claims, Raphall began with the story of Noah’s cursing his grandson Canaan, as recounted in Genesis 9:20–25. According to the biblical account, Noah planted a vineyard, got drunk from the wine it produced, and passed out naked in his tent. Noah’s son Ham then saw his father’s condition and related the fact, apparently disparagingly, to his brothers outside. Realizing what Ham had done, Noah mysteriously cursed Ham’s son Canaan (rather than Ham himself), condemning Canaan to be “the slave of slaves” to his brothers. The passage is generally viewed by scholars as
an ex post facto justification of the Israelites dwelling in the land bearing the name of Canaan. But traditional biblical interpretation at the time of Raphall held that, since Noah had granted much or all of the African continent to Ham (Genesis 10:620), the Canaanites of contemporary time were none other than “the African race,” as Raphall put it in his sermon. In other words, Ham’s descendants were the American slaves of modern times, Raphall reasoned—though a literal reading of Scripture makes no such claim.

  If one could pick an example of Raphall’s manipulation of scriptural interpretation, it would be his acknowledgment that Noah condemned an entire race to slavery without even knowing about slavery, since no slavery existed at the time of Noah. Taking the Bible’s truth to be inviolable, Raphall theorized that Noah must have recalled slavery from an unnamed era before the Flood. The proof of the Bible’s truth, he asserted, is the fact that the Jews did indeed conquer the Land of Canaan, just as the Bible predicted.

  It is difficult not to see Raphall’s reading of the Bible as fundamentally racist. “To this day it remains a fact which cannot be gainsaid that in his own native home, and generally throughout the world, the unfortunate negro is indeed the meanest of slaves,” Raphall said, just as Noah had predicted. “Much has been said respecting the inferiority of his intellectual powers, and that no man of his race has ever inscribed his name on the Pantheon of human excellence, either mental or moral,” Raphall asserted. “But this is a subject I will not discuss. I do not attempt to build up a theory, nor yet to defend the moral government of Providence. I state facts.” As for the fact that the Hebrews were for at least four hundred years slaves in Egypt, he cited various biblical passages to suggest that the particular enslavement of Jews was not willed by God.

  One of the contemporary figures condemned by Raphall in his sermon was the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, of Brooklyn, a distinguished abolitionist and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Beecher, Raphall declared, was especially ignorant of both the Old and the New Testaments, which authorized slavery by “all Christian nations during many centuries.” He further noted that the Ten Commandments as reviewed in Deuteronomy 5:14 commanded a day of rest for “thy male slave and thy female slave,” and because the Ten Commandments had also prohibited coveting a neighbor’s slaves (Exodus 20:14, Deuteronomy 5:18), slavery must be legitimate in the eyes of God. As if speaking to Beecher, Raphall demanded: “How dare you, in the face of the sanction and protection afforded to slave property in the Ten Commandments—how dare you denounce slaveholding as a sin?” By what right, he went on, did Beecher have to insult the many God-fearing, law-abiding people of the South and denigrate their moral worth and patriotism, equating them with murderers, adulterers, thieves, and other sinners?

  And yet the rabbi, perhaps feeling ill at ease over the subject, offered a note of caution. Scripture, he concluded, makes clear that slaves must not be coveted, mistreated, or subjected to cruelty and lust of the slave owner—protections not prevailing in the United States. In effect, he seemed to be saying that though slavery exists in the Bible, the South’s system did not necessarily deserve biblical approbation. “This, indeed, is the great distinction which the Bible view of slavery derives from its divine source,” Raphall said. “The slave is a person in whom the dignity of human nature is to be respected; he has rights. Whereas, the heathen view of slavery which prevailed at Rome, and which, I am sorry to say, is adopted in the South, reduces the slave to a thing, and a thing can have no rights.”26 His sermon is thus seen by some as a plea for mutual tolerance between North and South, though it is most remembered for its defense of the peculiar institution.

  SLAVERY AS A “MORAL EVIL”

  There were two major rebuttals to Raphall’s defense of slavery. One by Michael Heilprin—a scholar descended from generations of rabbis, and an editor at the New American Cyclopaedia, who had supported the 1848 revolution in his native Hungary—probably gained the wider audience. Published in the New York Daily Tribune less than a week after Raphall’s Sermon, it presented a sweeping rejection of his analysis.27

  “I had read similar nonsense hundreds of times before,” declared Heilprin. But now he was dismayed to find that Christian churches were validating Raphall’s conclusions. “Day after day brings hosannahs to the Hebrew defamer of the law of his nation; and his words are trumpeted through the land as if he were the messenger of a new salvation,” Heilprin lamented, tarring Jews as worshippers of a “God of Slavery.” The idea that the curse of Ham justifies slavery is no more logical, he said, than saying that the story of Cain and Abel justifies murder. He asserted that the proper translation of the word eved was as “servant” rather than “slave,” and that such people were in any case accorded a variety of protections and privileges under Jewish law. Under some circumstances, depending on whether a slave was a Hebrew or a Canaanite, a runaway had to be returned to his or her master, he noted, alluding implicitly to the divisive issue of the rights of runaways in the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court.

  The depiction of Ham as the progenitor of “the negro,” Heilprin declared, was “full of falsehood, nonsense, and blasphemy!” Condemned throughout history as “cursed” killers of Christ, Jews especially should see the dangers of such calumnies, he said. If slavery should be considered legitimate, why not also condone biblically sanctioned practices, such as prostitution, polygamy, and incest? Or even the rule of kings, since the prophets appeal to Israelites not to install a king—described as a sin against God. Must Jews see all kings in that light, or only the kings described in Scripture?

  Of interest in Heilprin’s critique is its implication for the role of the Talmud itself. Echoing the comments of “reformers” seeking to overthrow the authority of rabbinical rules, he noted that the Talmud itself commands scholars not to take every passage of the Bible literally—for example, the prescription of an eye for an eye in punishment. Rather than endorsing slavery, people must instead embrace the “divine spirit of truth, justice, and mercy” pervading the Bible, rejecting those parts of it that are “contradictory, unjust, and even barbarous.”

  If Heilprin’s stirring appeal can be read as filled with compassion and scholarship, Rabbi David Einhorn’s rebuttal comes across as argumentative, sarcastic, and contemptuous. Underlying his sermon is the familiar argument that interpretation of the Bible must rest not on universal or immutable meaning of words, but on the cultural context of the historical period in which the words were written. We do not sit in judgment on Abraham and his slaves, not to mention polygamy, he said, “because we look upon him from the standpoint of his time.”

  But that does not mean that slavery is anything less than a “moral evil,” he noted. Unjustly subjugated across the globe, Jews must not shrink from labeling it as such. At stake, he said, is the very concept that humanity is capable of achieving progress, eradicating disease, and correcting injustices, including no longer burning witches and heretics at the stake or sacrificing children—practices sanctioned in ancient times. Freeing the Jews from slavery in Egypt would have made no sense if God intended slavery as it existed to be continued in perpetuity. Freedom, he said, must triumph over ancient prejudices and the “hallowed atrocities” of the past.

  Raphall’s attempt at humility—he had said he was not making a personal judgment about slavery, only discerning God’s intent—was derided by Einhorn as an attempt to replace his head covering with a glittering “crown of martyrdom.” By implication, Einhorn was declaring a nearly existential redefinition of the foundations of Judaism. Yes, Judaism is a religion based more than any other on the reading of text. But what is that text? Is it the word of God? Is it history? Is it something that must guide human relations for a Jew even if one has to torture the reading of it to find justification? If Noah’s curse applies to Canaanites, what could one make of the fact that Canaanites—as modern ethnologists had begun to note—were also Semites, like Hebrews? The “negro” slaves “must decline the honor of havin
g been destined by Noah,” said Einhorn. And if the Ten Commandments outlaw coveting a neighbor’s property, including servants or slaves, did it then mean that the neighbor’s wife was also his property, just as his house, field, ox, or ass were his property? And if the Bible was so sacrosanct, did that mean that a man could acquire a second wife of his own free will, as the Bible allowed? If so, Scripture would seem to have justified the acquisition of twenty wives!

  Raphall’s supposed high-minded criticism of the Confederacy for its cruel treatment of slaves was also dismissed in withering terms by Einhorn as a “gross contradiction” of everything he said to justify the practice. A Bible declaring that God created man in His image, and that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, can never approve of slavery, Einhorn said at last. A book that commands man not to deprive the mother bird of the birds in her nest cannot be the same book that forces a human mother to be deprived of her child.

  “The [Ten Commandments], the first of which is: ‘I am the Lord, thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt—out of the house of bondage’ can by no means want to place slavery of any human-being under divine sanction,” Einhorn declared. Raphall, he added, had further “entangled himself in his own net” by trying to lay out rules for extradition of runaway slaves, inadvertently strengthening the case for a ban on slavery.

  In conclusion, Einhorn acknowledged that some in his own Baltimore congregation might disagree with him about these issues. Such concern about speaking out as war clouds gathered was justifiable. “The Jew has special cause to be conservative, and he is doubly and triply so in a country which grants him all the spiritual and material privileges he can wish for,” Einhorn said, with evident feeling. “He wants peace at every price and trembles for the preservation of the Union like a true son for the life of a dangerously sick mother. . . . From the depth of my soul, I share your patriotic sentiments, and cherish no more fervent wish than that God may soon grant us the deeply yearned-for peace.”