Editorial about Jews in the American Civil War

Warsaw, August 15, 1861 [in the weekly journal Jutrzenka (Dawn), August 16, 1861]

Everyone knows the reason behind the fratricidal war between secessionists and unionists in the United States. We touch upon the war in this weekly, to the extent that the subject falls into our sphere of interest.

We previously communicated a short message about the war zeal that has overwhelmed our fellow-believers in America and about how everybody is flocking under the banner of the unionists (no. 2, p. 15). We cited this as proof that Jews always and everywhere unite with the nation that does not restrict them in the enjoyment of civic rights, as proof that they can be fit for military service just like any other race; and we were glad to see our American coreligionists who, not by futile declamations but with weapons in their hands, defended humanity’s cause to abolish the bondage of Negroes, connected to the cause of the nation of which they are a constituent part. To complement that message, we moreover add that among the men who, after the ghastly scenes of murder committed on the 19th and 20th in Baltimore, had to seek refuge in flight, was a local rabbi Dr. Einhorn [Rabbi David Einhorn] who edited a pamphlet in which he challenged the hypocritical statement of Rabbi Raphael [Rabbi Morris J. Raphall], in New York, that slavery was permissible according to Divine Law: a statement that would be more typical of a cruel plantation owner than of a rabbi professing the thoroughly humane teachings of Moses.

Lack of bias requires that we do not pass over in silence the acts of our American coreligionists, who oppose the abolition of slavery, all the more because such acts are occasionally supported by armed action. The New York German commercial daily of May 8th reports as follows: In Westpoint, Georgia, a company of Jewish insurgents was formed, who have sworn the oath: “Erect the banner of slavery on the Capitol in Washington, or die!” With love toward our coreligionists, adds our editor, Mr. Mayer, who is a Jew, we wish that the second part of this oath be fulfilled. Reporting on these occurrences, a reporter with the Journal of Judaism states, inter alia: “Were those people willing to identify with Judaism, they would better remember that their conduct deviates from the religion that binds them to act against bondage, and betrays the union that was the first on the globe to utter and announce equal rights in religion not only as domestic law but as a natural law of humankind, and that this very fact marked a turn toward our better fortune. Every Jew who raises his hand against the union should be regarded as participating in patricide.”

For us, unbiased judges of the American cause, the events—although we are indignant to the quick at the sight of the downtrodden prestige of sanctity of the Divine Law, which is used and abused by a rabble of impudent empty-hearted people as a pretense to oppress their fellow-creatures—what I am saying is that for us, these sorrowful events are consoling in that, at least, they offer us new proof that confutes the old charge that Jews, dispersed all around the world, form a homogeneous force of personal views that are inimical to all nationalities.

And so we can see a part of this formidable power, with which reactionaries are wont to frighten us, in a country where personal liberty has reached the remotest edges of possibility, and where, therefore, such power could develop with the least restraint: it is there that we can see it divided into two hostile camps, each of which, with the Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, is defending the cause of the province to which it belongs, not even being forced to do so by the law of military conscription, which is unknown in the United States. Each of them, following the traces of their fellow-citizens of other denominations, demonstrates the reasonableness of his cause out of Moses himself, and both support these demonstrations with the strength of weaponry; and we can see the followers of Judaism fighting against one another regardless of the community of faith, as we have every so often seen Christians of diverse nationalities standing up to fight in opposing ranks despite their religious identity.

Where is, therefore, the conjectured solidarity among all the Jews in the world? Such phantasms and such suspicions could only have been hatched in the morbid brain of fanatics. As for us, we hold it as a sacred obligation toward our country to confute such extravagancies of fantasy at every single opportunity, and, remaining mindful of the importance of the subject, we shall incessantly repeat, and incessantly demonstrate, repeat and demonstrate ad nauseam, that Jews, merely forming a religious association that is less permanent, less cemented and less organized, as is the case with all associations of this sort, cannot be a nation within the other nation, in no country and upon no condition, whatsoever!