The Jewish Confederates.(Review)

The Jewish Confederates By Robert N. Rosen University of South Carolina Press, 517 pages, $39.95

The Jewish Confederates--Charleston, South Carolina attorney Robert Rosen's timely, well-sourced, and accurate record of Southern Jewry's participation in the War Between the States--will break against the walls of academia like the shot from a brace of well-placed Parrot rifles.

Among other things, the author shatters one of the more egregious myths of history: "That the `Wandering Jew' was citizen of no country, that they were cowards and they were disloyal."

Rosen notes that there was no state-or church-sponsored anti-Semitism in the antebellum South. Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms and wars of Europe found "Palestine" in such remote places as South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. They were welcomed as neighbors, afforded the rights and privileges of freemen, and allowed to practice their religion. Rosen points out that the first Jewish senators were elected from the South even though fewer than 25,000 Jews lived in Dixie. And while anti-Semitism "was a fact of life in the nineteenth century," it was a prejudice that many Southerners did not embrace.

By contrast, Rosen documents virulent anti-Semitism in Massachusetts, where "the first known Jew in Boston was `warned out' in the 1640s." When the war broke out in 1861, the Boston Evening Transcript blamed the Jews for secession.

Rosen writes that those Jews who established themselves in the South had "nowhere else in America ... experienced such fullness of opportunity or achieved comparable political and social acceptance." Not only did Jews whose families had settled in the South in the eighteenth century flock to the Confederate banner, but recently arrived immigrants did so as well. And while many Jews, along with their neighbors, opposed secession, most shared the patriotism that was the trademark of Southern resistance.

Rosen shares the Lincolnite belief that the "Civil War was brought about by the ...