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Overview
Details Jewish participation on the Civil War battlefield and throughout the Southern home front
In The Jewish Confederates, Robert N. Rosen introduces readers to the community of Southern Jews of the 1860s, revealing the remarkable breadth of Southern Jewry's participation in the war and their commitment to the Confederacy. Intrigued by the apparent irony of their story, Rosen weaves a complex chronicle that outlines how Southern Jews—many of them recently arrived immigrants from Bavaria, Prussia, Hungary, and Russia who had fled European revolutions and anti-Semitic governments—attempted to navigate the fraught landscape of the American Civil War.
This chronicle relates the experiences of officers, enlisted men, businessmen, politicians, nurses, rabbis, and doctors. Rosen recounts the careers of important Jewish Confederates; namely, Judah P. Benjamin, a member of Jefferson Davis's cabinet; Col. Abraham C. Myers, quartermaster general of the Confederacy; Maj. Adolph Proskauer of the 125th Alabama; Maj. Alexander Hart of the Louisiana 5th; and Phoebe Levy Pember, the matron of Richmond's Chimborazo Hospital. He narrates the adventures and careers of Jewish officers and profiles the many Jewish soldiers who fought in infantry, cavalry, and artillery units in every major campaign.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781643362489 |
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Publisher: | University of South Carolina Press |
Publication date: | 08/30/2021 |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 544 |
File size: | 27 MB |
Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Robert N. Rosen was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. Three of his grandparents were emigrants from the "Pale of Settlement"—Russia, Poland, and Belorus. The other grandparent was born in this country just after her parents arrived from Austria in the 1890s. Rosen attended public schools in Charleston, where his high school history teacher was the Charleston historian Solomon Breibart. He studied at the University of Virginia and at Harvard University, where he received an M.A. in history, as well as at the University of South Carolina Law School. The author of A Short History of Charleston and Confederate Charleston: An Illustrated History of the Place and the People During the Civil War, he practices law in Charleston and is listed in The Best Lawyers in America. Rosen has served on the boards of the South Carolina Historical Society and Historic Charleston Foundation, and has chaired the Arts and History Commission of the City of Charleston.
Table of Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
List of Illustrations xix
List of Abbreviations xxv
Prologue Our Sons Will Defend This Land 1
Part 1 This Happy Land, Our Palestine
Freedom and Equality in the Old South 7
Chapter 1 The Free Air of Dixie 9
Chapter 2 Two Sephardic Senators 55
Part 2 Be Strong and of a Good Courage
The Soldiers 87
Chapter 3 Hebrew Officers and Israelite Gentlemen 89
Chapter 4 Jewish Johnny Rebs 161
Part 3 Sympathetic Soul and Busy Hands
The Jewish Confederate Home Front 217
Chapter 5 This Most Suffering Land 219
Chapter 6 Two Jewish Confederate Sisters 280
Part 4 In Our Unhappy Land
The End of an Era 305
Chapter 7 Lead Out the Pageant: Sad and Slow 307
Chapter 8 We Are Passing through Another Captivity 332
Epilogue It Seems like a Dream As We Look Back 355
Notes 379
Glossary 447
Bibliographical Note 451
Bibliography 465
Index 483
What People are Saying About This
Robert Rosen's exceptional coverage of southern Jewry during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras stand as a testament to depth, breadth, and length. Jews are actors in the drama unfolding before them as well as the victims of forces beyond their control. Rosen weaves a captivating tale of allegiance, sacrifice, and Jews' ethnic identity and minority status in the South
The Jewish Confederates is the story of a people defining themselves. Robert Rosen has a wonderful capacity to describe people and their character in capsule. He's given us an important book on a very significant topic—felicitously written and festooned with photographs.
Perhaps no identifiable group of Southerners represented a greater paradox than the Jewish community spread all the way from Richmond to New Orleans. In The Jewish Confederates Robert N. Rosen opens a window on the unlikely story of a people apart, with their own religion and cultural customs, functioning within a Southern community that regarded itself as separate and distinct from other Americans. Through the lives of people as diverse as the Confederate statesman Judah Benjamin and the Louisiana teenager Clara Solomon, Rosen reveals the surprising tolerance in the South for this one minority, and the sacrifices they made to prove themselves full citizens of the supposedly xenophobic Southern republic
Perhaps no identifiable group of Southerners represented a greater paradox than the Jewish community spread all the way from Richmond to New Orleans. In The Jewish Confederates Robert N. Rosen opens a window on the unlikely story of a people apart, with their own religion and cultural customs, functioning within a Southern community that regarded itself as separate and distinct from other Americans. Through the lives of people as diverse as the Confederate statesman Judah Benjamin and the Louisiana teenager Clara Solomon, Rosen reveals the surprising tolerance in the South for this one minority, and the sacrifices they made to prove themselves full citizens of the supposedly xenophobic Southern republic.
An eye-opening, myth-shattering, stereotype-breaking work of originality, elegance, and wisdom. A must-read for Civil War buffs, Jewish history fans, and all Americans interested in learning—and you will learn much—about Jewish southerners who placed loyalty to their adopted states above the moral teachings of their tradition (at least as we now interpret them). You may not agree with these Jewish Confederates, but you will surely understand them better.
In this fascinating book Robert N. Rosen illuminates a long-neglected dimension of Confederate history, and, in so doing, makes an important contribution to the debate over the depth of southern white unity and Confederate loyalty. Meticulously researched, The Jewish Confederates makes clear that across the social and economic spectrum Jewish southerners overwhelmingly supported the Confederacy. With fascinating detail about well-known and little-known men and women, Rosen demonstrates that on both the battlefield and the homefront Jewish Confederates proved their loyalty, a loyalty they maintained after 1865 in their embrace of the Lost Cause. All who want to understand the nineteenth-century South should read this book.
Apart from a few prominent individuals such as Judah P. Benjamin and Phoebe Yates Pember, Jewish Confederates have been virtually invisible in the massive body of published work on the Civil War. Robert N. Rosen's impressive study illuminates the world of southern Jews and their role in the Confederacy's bid for independence. It is a major contribution to Confederate studies, and to the broader literature on the Civil War.
Robert N. Rosen has continued in an admirable way his work on assembling information that is necessary to developing a realistic view of the lives of Jews in the South. Thanks to him, we can now take another step in answering the basic questions of why did Jews feel comfortable in the nineteenth-century South, and why was the South so accepting of Jews?