Jewish Confederates
Jewish Confederates
The following is a list useful links that the Website Administrator has compiled. If you wish to request that something be added, please send the Website Administrator an e-mail via the "Camp Contacts" page.
Recommended reading: "The Jewish Confederates" by Robert N. Rosen. Purchase this excellent book through the camp's Amazon.com link on the "Important Links" page.
Although Lee was a fervent Christian, he held respect for soldiers other faiths. In one correspondence with the leader of a Jewish congregation, General Lee provided assurance. Lee wrote that he would do everything in his "power to facilitate the observance of the duties of their religion by the Israelites in the army and will allow them every indulgence consistent with safety and discipline." Once a Jewish Confederate soldier's commanding officer did not wish to grant permission aloowing him to attend synagogue. Lee countermanded the denial. On the order he wrote, "Approved and respectfully returned to Captain _____ with the advice that he should always respect the religious views and feelings of others" (Rosen 233).
Rosen, Robert N. The Jewish Confederates. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.
Above: "The Jewish Magazine" article by Gary Ayres
Above: A "Jewish Press" article by Lewis Regenstein
Above: "Virtual War Museum" article on Judah P. Benjamin
Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900), the conceiver and promoter of the first Jewish seminary within the United States (Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio), opposed the North's prosecution of the war. Rabbi Wise believed the following: "For all his theoretical objections to the inhumanity of slavery he was more hostile to the war-mongers in the North . . . and became . . . a defender of the South." Furthermore "One of Wise's major objections to the abolitionists was his suspicion that they were not actually humanitarians who were interested in the progress of mankind, but politicians bent on securing power."
Citation: Bertram W. Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, R. Bemis Publishing Ltd., Marietta, GA, 1995, p. 26.
