Slavery, War, and the American Jewish Citizenship Reformer

• In Event: Jewish Citizenship and the State in the Modern Era

Abstract

In the 1850s, the future of slavery became the focal issue in American politics. Controversial legislation like the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), and the Dred Scott decision (1857) demonstrated that the federal government must soon take a definitive stance on the institution that enslaved some four million Black people. For Jewish intellectuals, however, who debated the issue fervently that decade, the crisis over slavery was seldom about the Black population itself. Rather, it was an ideological battle tied directly into the future of Jewish citizenship rights in the United States. If the state could muster the unprecedented power to abolish an entire political, economic, and social regime, how might it in turn recast its relationship with minority groups like Jews?

This paper argues that a new era of American Jewish political history emerged during the turbulent decade of the 1850s. As Jews around the nation saw it, the state limiting or even abolishing slavery could have dire consequences for a population which tied its emancipation since 1790 to the constitutional norms of small government and equality for white men. Citing dangerous state overreach, even those whom Jewish historians have long called abolitionists, such as David Einhorn (1809-1879) in Baltimore, did not in fact support the total abolition of slavery. Rather, as this paper will explore, Jews largely divided themselves into “liberal” and “compromise” positions, with both sides placing limits on the power that the state should have to regulate the institution.

Through the writings of Einhorn, Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900) in Cincinnati, Isaac Leeser (1806-1868) in Philadelphia, as well as lesser-known figures like Ernestine Rose (1810-1892) in New York and Maurice Mayer (1821-1867) in Charleston, this paper recasts mid-nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals as entrenched in a broader struggle for Jewish citizenship reform. No matter where they stood politically, they saw slavery’s legal future as intimately tied to their own. Consequently, when slavery debates broke down and the unified American state collapsed in the winter of 1861, Isaac Mayer Wise made a bold prediction about the future of Jewish citizenship in America: “The beginning of the end has come.”

Author

• Jacob Morrow-Spitzer, Yale University