Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: The nearly simultaneous publication of these two books contributes significantly to a better understanding of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and American Jewish history. Although their appearance might be deceiving—the Zola volume as “only” a documentary collection, the Sarna and Shapell book very much in the coffee table mode—both in fact deliver substantial historical insight. Drawing on hundreds of records, We Called Him Rabbi Abraham documents in roughly its first third the connections between Lincoln and Jews during his own lifetime, and then in its last two-thirds the many Jewish commentaries, celebrations, memorials, and remembrances of Lincoln from April 15, 1865, to very near the present. Lincoln and the Jews limits itself to Lincoln’s contacts with Jews but does so with painstaking scholarship illustrated by period photographs along with a stunning array of reproduced hand-written documents. Many of the latter come from Benjamin Shapell’s personal collection, which is augmented by reproductions from the Library of Congress, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, and several more depositories. A particularly helpful feature of the Sarna-Shapell book is a six-page appendix that records 171 documented personal connections between Jews and Lincoln. The first of these occurred on February 22, 1843, when Lincoln heard a Washington’s Birthday address in Springfield by Abraham Jonas, an English-born retailer, lawyer, Mason, ardent Whig (later Republican), and one of the founders of Congregation B’nai Abraham in Quincy, Illinois. The last came late in the evening of April 14, 1865, when Dr. Charles H. Liebermann, a Russian-born eye doctor and in that year the president of the District of Columbia Medical Society, administered brandy as a stimulant to the unconscious president and joined other attending physicians in diagnosing his wound as mortal.During Lincoln’s lifetime, the number of Jews in the United States increased dramatically, from fewer than five thousand in 1809 to as many as two hundred thousand in 1865, but still at that latter date constituting less than 1 percent of the nation’s population. The extent of Lincoln’s relationships—Sarna and Shapell designate five Jews as “friends,” with another fourteen as “associates and supporters,” fifty-five as “acquaintances,” and forty-eight as recipients of “appointments and pardons”—means that Lincoln in Illinois and Washington enjoyed more involvement with Jewish communities than all but a few of his Gentile peers. Perhaps no American outside New York City, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia sustained as many or such close connections. As set out expertly by Jonathan Sarna’s narrative in Lincoln and the Jews and as documented fulsomely in We Called Him Abraham, awareness of this special relationship significantly modifies conventional depictions of religion in America during the Civil War era. Of many specific features, five matters of fact and three more broadly interpretive conclusions are worthy of special attention.A first important marker was the friendship that Lincoln sustained with Abraham Jonas from the mid-1840s until Jonas’s death in 1864. After immigrating to Cincinnati and living for a brief period in Kentucky, Jonas settled with his large family in Quincy, where he became active in Whig electoral politics, spurred to that calling, as Lincoln was to his, by great admiration for Henry Clay. Jonas and Lincoln cooperated in many campaigns, including Jonas’s local chairmanship of Lincoln supporters for his debate with Stephen Douglas at Quincy in the fall of 1858. In December of that year, when Horace Greeley traveled to Quincy for a speech, Jonas boldly promoted the idea of Lincoln as the next Republican presidential candidate. During the election campaign, Lincoln drew on testimony from Jonas to rebut charges that he had once supported the xenophobic Know-Nothings. After Lincoln’s election, Jonas passed on a warning to the president-elect from one of Jonas’s sons, who lived in New Orleans, that assassins had sworn to prevent his inauguration.When in office, Lincoln appointed Jonas postmaster in Quincy. Then, when Jonas’s health began to fail, the president secured a parole for another of the four Jonas offspring who served with the Confederate army, so that he could visit his ailing father before he died. One of the many letters Jonas and Lincoln exchanged included both a rare glimpse into Lincoln’s closely monitored private life and an indication of the unusual esteem existing between the two Whig lawyers. It came in early 1860, after Jonas had requested a printed copy of the Lincoln-Douglas debate speeches; Lincoln replied, “As you are one of my most valued friends, and have complimented me by the expression of a wish for the book, I propose doing myself the honor of presenting you with one, as soon as I can” (Sarna and Shapell, 52; Zola, 30).Less intimate but considerably more mysterious was Lincoln’s friendship with Issachar (or Isachar) Zacharie, an English-born chiropodist who tended to the president’s corns and bunions in the White House but also served him as a private diplomat. Although uncertainties shroud much of Zacharie’s career, he seems to have been born in 1827 before immigrating to the United States as a teen and gradually gaining training in and a reputation for expert podiatric care. From early in the Civil War he was tending the feet of numerous senators, he offered his services to the Union forces through Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and by the summer of 1862 he was treating the president. On September 22, 1862, the same day Lincoln signed the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, he also wrote a testimonial for his chiropodist: “Dr. Zacharie has operated on my feet with great success, and considerable addition to my comfort” (Sarna and Shapell, 133; Zola, 46). Shortly thereafter, Zacharie followed General Nathaniel Banks to New Orleans, where he lobbied local Jews for the Union cause. A year later, on September 27, 1863, he explored possibilities for a negotiated peace in Richmond with a group of high-ranking Confederates that included Judah P. Benjamin, a fellow Jew and the South’s secretary of state. Because Zacharie was always an accomplished self-promoter who was not averse to expanding on his exploits, it is difficult to gauge exactly the importance of his diplomatic service. Yet as both books show, this self-taught foot doctor enjoyed Lincoln’s confidence in more than just his podiatric skill.Lincoln’s speedy reversal of a notorious dictum from General Ulysses S. Grant is the best-known example of his solicitude for American Jews. With their full documentation of this episode, the two books nicely complement the expert monograph that Jonathan Sarna has recently provided on this incident, When General Grant Expelled the Jews (Schocken, 2012). In late 1862, as Grant prepared to move his army southward from the Upper South toward Vicksburg, he grew increasingly disturbed by the cotton speculators and smugglers, some of them Jewish, who were crossing his lines for their own pecuniary benefit. When his father and a family of Jewish merchants from Cincinnati approached him with a scheme that, in effect, would have allowed them to profit from this illegal trade, Grant on December 17, 1862, blew his stack and issued General Order No. 11. This order banned not only illegal traders and not only Jewish traders but “Jews as a class” from the military Department of the Tennessee.Jews in Kentucky and elsewhere mobilized immediately to petition authorities in Washington to reverse the order. Lincoln did not learn of Grant’s action until a day or two after he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. But when he did, he acted immediately with General-in-Chief Henry Halleck to countermand the order. On January 7, a Jewish delegation that included Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise arrived at the White House to offer thanks for this reversal. According to Wise, Lincoln affirmed that he knew “of no distinction between Jew and Gentile” and that he would not allow any citizen to be “wronged on account of his place of birth or religious confession” (Sarna and Shapell, 118; Zola, 100).A fourth matter of historical significance was Lincoln’s self-consciously even-handed attention to petitions from Jews for federal appointments and military pardons. After Congress passed legislation authorizing military chaplains for “regularly ordained minister[s] of some Christian denomination,” Jewish editors complained loudly, a few individual rabbis served informally, and others petitioned to be accepted for regular appointment (Zola, 72). In response to this agitation and with the president’s approval, Congress passed new legislation limiting the chaplaincy to “a regularly ordained minister of some religious denomination.” After Rabbi Isaac Leeser informed the president that a suitable candidate had been chosen, Lincoln expedited the process for the appointment of the first official Jewish chaplain in the U.S. military on September 18, 1862. For many other presidential appointments or commissions as postmasters, justices of the peace, military officers, and more, Lincoln seemed not only aware of the need to insure a fair representation of Jews but also eager to seek such representation. It was the same with petitions for military pardons. Not all convicted Jews who applied for clemency received it, but Lincoln seemed particularly to notice when those appeals were made by or on behalf of Jews.In light of this carefully documented record, Jonathan Sarna’s conclusion seems completely justified: “Lincoln dramatically improved the status of Jews in the United States” (Sarna and Shapell, 118). In an era when casual but no less dismissive anti-Semitism peppered the rhetoric of editors, generals, cabinet officers, and many members of the general public, the absence of such language in the obsessively documented record of Lincoln’s spoken and written words testifies almost as loudly as the many records of his positive actions.Americans Jews have reciprocated that regard with respect, gratitude, and emotional depth that approaches hagiography. Thus, a fifth historical reality is the exhaustless torrent of positive memorials that have arisen from Jewish communities over the past century and a half. The rich documentation in Zola’s We Called Him Father Abraham outlines an enduring paean of unusual breadth and passionate depth. It began only hours after Lincoln died when in some parts of Jewish America the designated Sabbath reading from Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of the Dry Bones became a lament for the fallen president. It continued through the week that followed when, in a representative statement, a Republican activist Lewis Naphtali Dembitz proclaimed to his Beth Israel Synagogue in Louisville that “of all the Israelites throughout the United States, there was none who more thoroughly filled the ideal of what a true descendant of Abraham ought to be than Abraham Lincoln” (Zola, 1).Thereafter came encomia, memorials, evocations, and exhortations almost beyond number: many sermons and memorial speeches to mark the passage of the Lincoln funeral train from Washington, D.C., to Springfield and his burial at the latter site;extensive explanations after Lincoln’s death from Jews, like Isaac Meyer Wise, who had harshly criticized the president during his life, for why they now held him in such high regard;poems in Hebrew and Yiddish as well as English;a significant number of Jewish children named “Abraham Lincoln”;inspirational speeches to eastern European immigrants urging them to view Lincoln as a model for life in the United States;a flood of memorable centenary speeches on February 12, 1909, including as the most memorable Solomon Schechter’s address at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he recalled marveling at his first awareness of Lincoln conveyed by a Hebrew publication in his native Romania fifty years before;a distinguished line of Lincoln scholars and collectors including Isaac Martens, Emanuel Hertz, Ralph Newman, Bertram Wallace Korn, and not least Benjamin Shapell;the work of a Jewish engraver, Victor David Brenner, who provided the image for the Lincoln penny that first appeared in 1909;portraits, sculptures, sermons, prayers, textbooks, musical compositions, and lithographs depicting Lincoln as the ideal American;evocative literary references, as when Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy contrasted his feelings for George Washington with his feelings for Lincoln: “Washington, I must confess, leaves me cold. Maybe it’s the horse, that he’s leaning on a horse. At any rate, he is so obviously a goy. But Lincoln! I could cry. Look at him sitting there, so oysgemitchet [exhausted]. How he labored for the downtrodden—as will I” (Zola, 392);and humor: An immigrant Thai couple who established a restaurant in Chicago had admired Lincoln in their native land and so took an early opportunity to visit the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, whence they brought back a small statue of Lincoln to display in their restaurant, which seemed to have greatly improved business. Out of gratitude they set a full meal before the statue at the opening of the restaurant each day, with “everything, but no pork.” And why no pork? “He is Abraham Lincoln, yes? . . . Jewish people, they don’t eat pork” (Zola, 361).* * *The two books’ unusually full record of Jewish engagement with Lincoln nicely supplements standard historical accounts. Yet they also do more by prompting broader reconsiderations of Lincoln himself, the character of American public religion, and the place of Jews in the national narrative. For Lincoln, they raise the distinct possibility that Jews contributed to his own religious development. It is of course necessary to underscore the speculative character of any claim about Lincoln’s personal faith, since that subject remains enigmatic, ambiguous, or simply beyond the reach of historians. Yet Jonathan Sarna’s careful account suggests a pattern of deepening theism combined with greater caution about evoking an explicitly Christian understanding of American civilization. To begin, near the close of his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861, Lincoln drew on conventional themes concerning the divinely chosen, but also Christian, character of the United States: “Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty.”1But then by December 1861, at the same time that he commended plans by the recently founded Christian Commission to distribute Bibles and promote Christian observance in the army, Lincoln was also supporting Jewish efforts to have the requirement for military chaplains changed from “Christian denomination” to “a religious denomination.” In other words, at this early stage, Lincoln seemed to be moving beyond a narrow construal of the nation’s religion.A year later, when he issued an executive order urging military commanders to let troops whenever possible observe the Christian Sabbath, Sunday, Jewish editors like Isaac Leeser complained about the absence of an equivalent provision for those who honored the Hebrew Sabbath, Saturday. Although there is no record of Lincoln’s response to these complaints, he may well have taken them to heart. In Sarna’s words, “One suspects . . . that the Jewish community’s complaints reached Lincoln’s ears. Significantly, he never again, in his official correspondence, referred to Americans as a ‘Christian people’” (Sarna and Shapell, 112).At the same time, a deepening religious sensibility can be traced over the course of Lincoln’s time in the White House. His appreciation for the prayers and spiritual consolation he received from many individuals after the death of his son Willie in February 1862 is well recorded.2 He also seemed to be speaking from the heart when on September 7, 1864, he told a visiting contingent of African American clergymen, who had presented him with an that a rare Christian he as best has to the the to the was through this as he such Christian it is that Lincoln efforts by the to the with an of the nation’s on in the memorable words of the from and the of 1865, Lincoln and in the latter with great from the to documentation that in March 1863, Lincoln told a visiting Jewish Henry myself have a regard for the (Sarna and Shapell, Zola, that regard beyond the to the it the that Lincoln’s with Jews a in him more but not in an Christian the of Lincoln’s personal faith, these two books also public religion during the Civil War A by has that to the in the first of the United only to significantly from about other books have recently the fact that Christian rhetoric almost all of the Christian the of a of the in both as well as many who on the with that both Zola and Sarna and Shapell a public in which to the Hebrew also in the years of national the of Jewish editors, and who joined other Americans by the in religious It also in no small from Abraham the Lincoln’s numerous of the Hebrew as when in February he that several Jewish merchants be “a from that he as (Sarna and Shapell, As it his memorable opening to the and years a that Rabbi of Israel in Philadelphia had four in a on the of (Sarna and Shapell, Zola, Lincoln and or both individuals drew from the of of our years are three years and the president’s a in the Hebrew soon after the national day of on April 1865, Isaac Wise was to that on that to or Lincoln to like and (Zola, Wise since on that in fact drew from the New more than their did in memorial sermons for George Washington years Wise concerning the great of the for those to be made is that the Hebrew served as a between Lincoln and his Jewish and In that was so public, a Hebrew of from the and applied to the United States, its its and its of a in that in substantial of the third significant which Zola’s thoroughly Lincoln’s large place in the process by which Jews became reach nearly the of Zola’s almost all of his are Jews born in As immigrants at least once and Christian, not or from the nation’s Lincoln served as a for others who Lincoln could be as an who through and his place in a that was but but In religious Lincoln’s life a great could Jews not only in of American of religious but also by a rare to the and of their to the historical record but also for deepening understanding of Lincoln and his both Lincoln and the Jews and We Called Him Father Abraham a beyond the Jewish in which they will be
Author: Mark A. Noll
Language: English
Topic: Jewish Identity and Society
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4408323142