Abolitionists and Confederates: On the Complex History of American Jews During the Civil War
Strictly speaking, the book of Exodus tells the story of national liberation. Seen in that light, the Hebrews’ escape from slavery gave them the freedom to enslave and conquer others, which, in the text, they promptly began to do. It was this narrow reading of the tale that allowed some American Jews to sit down to Passover seders cooked and served by their very own slaves, without the slights sense of contradiction or unpleasant pang of guilt.
Yet the story’s radical emphasis on lowly origins and the brutalities of despotism has always invited a broader interpretation, even the adoption of its language and liberators message by other maligned and oppressed groups. As the philosopher Michael Walzer has written, “Many men and women, believing in God’s mighty hand, have nevertheless girded their lions, challenged the pharaohs of their own time, marched into the wilderness—and understood what they were doing by reading Exodus.”
In this view, it is an uplifting tale of human liberation and the obligations it entails. Remembering that we were slaves in Egypt, Rabbi David Einhorn said nearly two centuries ago, should be a spur to fight not only for ourselves, but “for the whole world.”
It struck me then that what in part made Jews distinctive as a people—our origins in slavery—was also what helped make the United States distinctive as a country.
I have been thinking about American Jews, slavery, and the Civil War ever since I was an undergraduate at McGill University in Montreal. It struck me then that what in part made Jews distinctive as a people—our origins in slavery—was also what helped make the United States distinctive as a country. People who celebrated their deliverance “out of the house of bondage” had found refuge in another, only this time they were not the ones who were enslaved. I wrote a paper on the handful of Jewish abolitionists who, drawing on their own people’s history of enslavement and oppression, felt they could not keep silent while others suffered the same.
But the topic continued to gnaw at me, not least because I was surprised to find how rarely it came up at Passover seders I attended. Given that the point of the holiday is to commemorate the Jews’ liberation several thousand years ago, did it not make sense to consider how slavery also shaped the country in which we lived? Should we not grapple with the fact that Jews in early America benefited from slavery in direct and indirect ways, and that only a few unsung and forgotten men, and at least one woman, had felt compelled to fight for its abolition?
Nudnik that I am, I would pester my fellow seder guests, between reciting the Four Questions and joyfully incanting Chad Gadya, to reflect further on the themes of Exodus and their relevance in the American past and present. One year I passed around copies of a letter from a Confederate solider detailing his preparations for observing Passover while at war. The next year I read from a moth-eaten volume of local history I found at a thrift store, which showed that the very land on which we sat, in the verdant foothills of the Catskills, pouring each other wine and munching on matzah, imagining ourselves as having been personally delivered from Egypt, had once been worked by people who did not need to use their imaginations to know the terrors of bondage.
I also began seeing signs that a fresh examination might prove useful. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement seemed to make the task of confronting America’s history of racial injustice all the more pressing and ignoring the Jewish angle to the story all the more inexcusable. The subject of Jews and race kept cropping up in the news and in the culture, often in bizarre viral moments and occasionally in gruesome outbursts of violence. In 2018, a racist shooter massacred eleven Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue because he opposed the work of groups like HIAS, formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Originally founded to help late ninetieth-century immigrants find their footing, the group now works with refugees of all kinds, “not because they are Jewish, but because we are.” On that occasion, Jews were killed because they were not white enough.
The following year, the problem was that they were not Jewish enough. A radicalized devotee of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a century-old religious group that claims Black people are the true descendants of the biblical Jews and that those who call themselves Jews today are imposters, killed three people at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City. In 2022, the rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, endorsed that claim and told his more than thirty million Twitter followers that he was going “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” In the romantic comedy You People (2023), an excruciating dinner-table argument between a Black Muslim couple and a white Jewish couple whose children are dating culminated with David Duchovny’s character calling Jews “the original slaves—OG slaves,” while Nia Long’s counters that American Jews’ success was based on their profits from the slave trade. “No mainstream voice asks anymore, ‘Is the Jew white?’” the scholar Leonard Rogoff observed in 1997. Now that question is once again hotly debated.
Some Jews of color, meanwhile, have demanded long-overdue recognition from the larger Jewish community, while others reject the term itself as marginalizing. Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023 and the subsequent bombardment of Gaza raised a new round of discourse—often simplistic and unenlightening—about whether Jews ought to be classed primarily as victims or as oppressors.
The experience of living as Jews in America has been shaped by the legacy of slavery and by the ideas and laws devised to defend and then replace it.
These events encouraged me to return to the topic of my paper, to dig deeper and ask more difficult questions. As I did so, I was surprised to find that the book I wanted to read, tracking the Jewish encounter with Black slavery and the debate over its future from the colonial period through the Civil War and beyond, did not yet exist. Bertram W. Korn, a rabbi and historian (and, as a rear admiral in the Naval Reserve, the first Jewish chaplain to attain flag rank in the US military), came the closest with his landmark 1951 work American Jewry and the Civil War. Yet Korn mostly focused on the war itself, especially the home front, and kept to a narrow definition of who counted as Jew; Ernestine Rose goes unmentioned, August Bondi only in passing. Decades of subsequent research and argumentation, moreover, have complicated some of his findings.
While the publication of the Nation of Islam’s pseudo-scholarly Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews in the early 1990s spurred impressive refutations, that work tended to focus on the slave trade itself, not the fight over slavery and the Civil War. Incredibly, some books about Jews in the period have even managed to avoid including an entry for slavery in the index—they talk about the war but not what the war was about—while Robert N. Rosen’s The Jewish Confederates (2001), otherwise an invaluable resource, is marred by its unapologetically pro-Southern bent. Books about the formation and subsequent fraying of the “Black-Jewish alliance” skip quickly over everything before the twentieth century.
Surveys of American Jewish history often mention the dispute over Morris J. Raphall’s sermon defending slavery but tend to obscure the context and leave out important details. Perhaps the most insightful recent exploration of the theme appeared in a work of fiction, Dara Horn’s All Other Nights (2009), which begins with a Confederate seder attended, quite improbably, by Judah Benjamin.
In 2017, on the celebrity genealogy program Finding Your Roots, the comedian Larry David learned that his great-grandfather, a German-Jewish immigrant in Mobile, Alabama, owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy. Stunned, playing for laughs, David awkwardly blurted to the show’s host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., “I’m so sorry,” while Gates gave voice to his guest’s embarrassment and confusion: “What part of the Jewish experience is this?!”
As it turns out, a rather important one. Even for the huddled masses who arrived decades after the Civil War, even for those of us who are their descendants, the experience of living as Jews in America has been shaped by the legacy of slavery and by the ideas and laws devised to defend and then replace it. They protect and threaten us still, in this otherwise blessed land.
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Excerpted from Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery by Richard Kreitner. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan. Copyright © 2025 by Richard Kreitner. All rights reserved.
