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Should Jews Have To Pay Reparations for Slavery?
Should Jews Have To Pay Reparations for Slavery?
Looking Back 150 Years, Jewish Record Far From Admirable
By Richard Kreitner
The 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the United States — Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in late January 1865 — comes at an fraught moment in the history of race relations. Considering that black men are being killed by police at the same rate as they were lynched in the era of Jim Crow, it can be depressing to reflect on how many promises of 1865, not to mention 1776, have not yet been fulfilled. But it can also be edifying to probe into some of the lesser-known aspects of the story of how the emancipation of slaves was finally accomplished. The history of the abolitionist movement is of more than antiquarian interest: it should serve to inspire us to finish the job today.
Nobody can argue that the balance of the Jewish record on the question of American slavery and the Civil War is anything but regrettable. If the career of Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin were not enough, the overwhelming complacency of the antebellum Jewish community, even in the North, provides a record sufficiently embarrassing to warrant official acknowledgement — even, perhaps, reparation.
But there were American Jews before the war who risked everything to fight the South’s “peculiar institution.” Familiar with the story of Exodus, they knew it was not actually all that peculiar. Now, 150 years after the end of slavery, when the unfinished work of emancipation and Reconstruction is announced daily in the headlines, it is worth lighting a yahrtzeit candle to those Jews who found in Judaism the imperative to line up, every time, with the oppressed. Before Selma, before socialism, the Jewish abolitionists were the first to map that once-fertile, now neglected terrain: the intersection of the identities of radical, American and Jew.
By the middle of December, 1860, the Union was disintegrating. Abraham Lincoln had won every state in the North and none in the South. South Carolina had just elected delegates to a secession convention and the other Southern states seemed poised to follow. The lame-duck president, James Buchanan, issued a desperate proclamation, “in view of the present distracted and dangerous condition of our country,” declaring January 4th, 1861, a national day of prayer. He asked that “the People assemble on that day, according to their several forms of worship, to keep it as a solemn Fast.”
On the appointed day, the congregation of B’nei Jeshurun in New York saw Morris Jacob Raphall, a Swedish-born rabbi, rise to the bima. “How dare you, in the face of the sanction and protection afforded to slave property in the Ten Commandments–how dare you denounce slaveholding as a sin?” Raphall asked of Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Beecher, brother of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Considering that the Patriarchs themselves owned slaves, Raphall continued, “Does it not strike you that you are guilty of something very little short of blasphemy?
Raphall’s sermon divided American Jews. “I felt exceedingly humbled, I may say outraged, by the sacrilegious words of the Rabbi,” Michael Heilprin, a veteran of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, wrote in the New York Tribune. “Must the stigma of Egyptian principles be fastened on the people of Israel by Israelitish lips themselves?”
In the decades before the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe, there was no organized Jewish community, and thus no identifiably Jewish position on the most burning political question of the day. Surveying the views on slavery of American religious groups in 1853, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society had reported that Jews “deem it their policy to have every one choose whichever side he may deem best to promote his own interest and the welfare of his country…They do not interfere in any discussion which is not material to their religion.”
Yet the report concluded with a sly taunt, implying that the question of slavery was perhaps not as immaterial to Judaism as many of its American adherents preferred to admit. “The objects of so much mean prejudice and unrighteous oppression as the Jews have been for ages,” the report lamented, “surely they, it would seem, more than any other denomination, ought to be the enemies of caste and the friends of universal freedom.”
Monotheism. The scourge of humanity.