A random perusal of the Internet will disclose a plethora of wacky theories purporting to prove that Abraham Lincoln was actually from “the seed of our father Abraham.”
Some point to the fact that Lincoln’s grandfather was named Mordechai and, of course, that the name Abraham itself is a Jewish biblical name. That argument overlooks the fact that biblical names were very popular among non-Jews in colonial America and through the 19th century and that, under this theory, an argument could be made that, for example, Zebulon Pike was Jewish.
Others argue that the president’s ancestors came from Lincoln, England, which was well known for its many Jewish communities and Jewish history. By that reckoning, Louis Farrakhan, who was born in the Bronx, is also Jewish. Some even argue that Lincoln was subject to melancholia, a Jewish trait, and was therefore most likely Jewish; no response to such nonsense is necessary.
Nonetheless, it is fascinating that Lincoln, whose birthday we marked this week, is the only American president never to have declared himself a member of any particular religious faith, and rumors regarding his “Judaism,” which persist even to date, may be attributable to his close friendships with individual Jews and to his policies, which evidenced great sympathy for American Jews – even though when Lincoln was elected president, only 150,000 of America’s 31 million people (less than half a percent) were Jewish.
Isaac Markens (1846-1928), a renowned writer and Civil War scholar, is perhaps best known for publishing The Hebrews in America (1888), a series of historical and biographical sketches considered to be the first of their kind in American Jewish history. In his seminal study, Abraham Lincoln and the Jews (1909), he cites the following claim made in the April 20, 1865 issue of the Cincinnati Commercial by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a leading 19th century American Reform rabbi:
Abraham Lincoln believed himself to be bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. He supposed himself to be of Hebrew parentage, he said so in my presence, and indeed he possessed the common features of the Hebrew race both in countenance and features.
Many pundits insisted that Lincoln had Jewish features. See, for example, Exhibit 1 on this page, an original Currier & Ives print. The text on back (presumably written by a previous collector) reads: “This rare Currier and Ives print shows Lincoln as a Jewish gentleman. Here the artist has made subtle changes from the actual likeness so that Lincoln appears as a member of the Hebrew race.”
However, Markens rejected all claims that Lincoln was Jewish, concluding that “As a matter of fact, Lincoln’s knowledge of his ancestry was vague – so much so that his statement to Dr. Wise must be accepted as nothing more than a pleasantry.” (It is interesting to note that the fickle and publicity-seeking Wise, who portrayed himself as a great friend of Lincoln and led American Jews in mourning the late president, had opposed Lincoln’s candidacy and joined the Democratic Party’s vicious attacks on the president). Moreover, Lincoln’s son, Robert, who later denied having any Hebrew ancestry, told Markens that he had “never before heard that his father supposed he had any Jewish ancestry.”
In American Jewry and the Civil War (1951), Bertram W. Korn, an American historian and rabbi who became the first Jewish chaplain to receive flag rank in the United States armed forces, concludes that there is not a shred of evidence to support Wise’s assertion. He further persuasively argues that Lincoln had many Jewish friends and acquaintances with whom he frequently corresponded – including Abraham Jonas, to whom Lincoln wrote in 1860 “you are one of my most valued friends” – and there is no record of his having ever said or written anything about his religious faith, let alone about being Jewish.
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The nature and remarkable extent of Lincoln’s relationships with individual Jews is beyond the scope of this article, but according to Markens – and most commentators agree – the two most noteworthy acts of Lincoln’s administration affecting American Jews were The Jewish Chaplain question and General Grant’s infamous General Oder No. 11.
The chaplain issue grew out of Secretary of War Simon Cameron’s 1861 refusal to appoint Rabbi Arnold Fischel as chaplain of the Cameron Dragoons, a New York regiment largely composed of Jews. Cameron cited a law enacted only months earlier that provided that “chaplains must be regular ordained ministers of some Christian denomination.” This gave rise to broad protest by Jewish leaders – most notably Lewis N. Dembitz (Justice Louis Brandeis’s uncle) – who were later joined by others, including Senator Lyman Trumball of Illinois, who introduced a senate bill supporting Jewish chaplaincy.
On December 14, 1861, Lincoln wrote to Rabbi Fischel promising to “have a new law broad enough to cover what is desired by you in behalf of the Israelites.” On March 12, 1862, Congress authorized the appointment of Brigade Chaplains “one or more of which shall be the Catholic, Protestant or Jewish religion,” and Lincoln subsequently personally appointed several Jewish hospital chaplains.
Shown here as exhibit 2 is a short but historic handwritten note by General Ulysses S. Grant regarding his father’s religious affiliation:
My father has been a member of the M.E. [Methodist Episcopal] Church since 1832.
This was undoubtedly written in response to a query regarding one of the most shameful and reprehensible anti-Semitic events in American history. Grant’s overt perpetration of Jew-hatred had its origins in his father’s relationship with Jewish traders, the very people whose patriotism, Grant believed, “was measured in dollars and cents.” Though anti-Semitism was quite common in Civil War America, Grant was the only army officer to officially codify it.
Union officers, angered by the activities of traders infesting Tennessee, used the term “Jew” as a general catch-all epithet to epitomize anyone deemed without conscience, and the terms “Jew,” “profiteer,” “speculator” and “trader” were used interchangeably. Grant had often singled out Jews as offenders in the unsavory business of cotton speculation. On November 9, 1862, for example, he told General Hurlbut to let no civilians travel south of Jackson, “particularly those Israelites,” and the next day he told General Webster that “no Jews, who seem to think they are a privileged class, are permitted to travel south on the railroad; they are such an intolerable nuisance that the department must be purged of them.”
The proximate cause of the Grant’s order to expel the Jews was the dire cotton shortage in the North, which gave rise to a wild black market in Southern cotton. Notwithstanding the centrality of cotton to the northern economy, and despite demand by Union military commanders for a total ban on trade with the Confederacy, Lincoln decided to allow limited trade in Southern cotton, to be licensed by the Treasury Department and the army.
Grant, who was charged with issuing trade licenses in his area, became inundated with merchants seeking trade permits and, with the mercurial increases in cotton prices, unlicensed traders would bribe Union officers to permit them to purchase Southern cotton without a permit. A deeply frustrated Grant was furious to discover that his father, Jesse, had formed a partnership with the Mack Brothers – three Jewish merchants – for the purchase of cotton through which the partnership sought to cash in on the authority of Jesse’s son, the general.
On December 17, 1862, an enraged Grant responded by issuing his infamous General Order No. 11:
HEADQUARTERS, 13th ARMY CORPS
DEPARTMENT OF THE TENNESSEEThe Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department within 24 hours from the receipt of this Order.
Post commanders will see that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters. No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application of trade permits.
Grant’s Order was brought to President Lincoln’s attention by Cesar Kaskel, a Kentucky Jew. When Lincoln asked, “And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?” Kaskel responded “Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, seeking protection.”
Lincoln revoked the Order on January 4, 1863, three days after signing the Emancipation Proclamation. In a telegram to Grant, Lincoln’s general-in-chief, H. W. Halleck, explained that “as it in terms proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.” At a meeting with a subsequent Jewish delegation, Lincoln assured the group that “to condemn a class is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad.”
(For more on this fascinating and significant event in Jewish American history, see Jonathan D. Sarna’s excellent and definitive When General Grant Expelled the Jews.)
Shown here as Exhibit 3 is a famous letter by Grant published in the November 30, 1868 New York Times, which he wrote in response to a letter from Adolph Moses of B’nai Brith about the General Order:
…In regard to Order No. 11, hundreds of letters have been written to me about it, by persons of the faith affected by it. I do or did not answer any of the writers, but permitted a statement of the facts concerning the origin of the order to be made out and given to some of them for publication. I do not pretend to sustain the order.
At the time of its publication, I was incensed by a reprimand received from Washington for permitting acts which Jews within my lines were engaged in. There were many other persons within my lines equally bad with the worst of them, but the difference was that the Jews could pass with impunity from one army to the other, and gold, in violation of orders, was being smuggled through the lines, at least so it was reported. The order was issued and sent without any reflection and without thinking of the Jews as a sect or a race to themselves, but simply as persons who had successfully (I say successfully, instead of persistently, because there were plenty of others within my lines who envied their success) violated an order, which greatly inured to the help of the rebels.
Give Mr. Moses assurance that I have no prejudice against sect or race, but want each individual to be judged on his own merit. Order No. 11 does not sustain that statement, I admit, but then I do not sustain that order. It never would have been issued if it had not been telegraphed the moment it was penned, and without reflection.
Yours, truly, U.S. Grant
Grant ultimately did “teshuvah” for what his wife, Julia, characterized as “that obnoxious order.” The order became a campaign issue in the 1868 presidential election – the first time a Jewish issue played a role in presidential politics – and the popular belief was that the order would cost Grant the Jewish vote and possibly the presidency. Nonetheless, Grant actually won a significant majority of the Jewish vote, and many commentators maintain – persuasively, in my opinion – that it is a measure of Grant’s sincerity that he publicly disseminated this letter not before the election, when it could easily have been seen as a crass political move designed to capture more of the Jewish vote, but some three weeks after election day, when he no longer had anything to gain.
Grant went on as president to be one of the greatest friends the Jews have ever had in the White House. Among his other accomplishments, he opposed a constitutional amendment that would have made the United States a Christian nation; named a significant number of Jews to government office, including high positions; and became the first American president to speak out against the persecution of Jews abroad, particularly with respect to anti-Semitic pogroms in Romania and Russia.
After he left office, he became the first president to visit Eretz Yisrael (1881) and to attend a synagogue dedication (Adas Israel in Washington, June 9, 1876).
