In celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month, Richard Kreitner, author of Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery, and Shari Rabin, author of The Jewish South: An American History, join Jeffrey Rosen for a wide-ranging discussion on the Southern Jewish experience from the Revolutionary era to the Civil War. They discuss how American Jews reckoned with religious discrimination and slavery, explore Jewish participation in the Civil War, and remember some of the notable American Jews who helped shape this tumultuous era.
This conversation was originally streamed live as part of the NCC’s America’s Town Hall program series on May 29, 2025. It was presented in partnership with the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History and in celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month.
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Today’s episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Tanaya Tauber, and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by David Stotz and Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari and Gyuha Lee.
Participants
Richard Kreitner is the author of BOOKED: A Traveler’s Guide to Literary Locations Around the World (2019); BREAK IT UP: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union (2020); and FEAR NO PHARAOH: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery (2025). He is a contributing writer to The Nation and Hudson Valley magazines, and hosts a podcast, Think Back, about American history.
Shari Rabin is an associate professor of Jewish studies, religion, and history at Oberlin College, where she chairs the Jewish studies program. Her first book, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (New York University Press, 2017), was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She is a co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of American Jewish History. Her latest book, The Jewish South: An American History, was published in 2025 by Princeton University Press. She holds a B.A. in religion (summa cum laude with distinction) from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Richard Kreitner, Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery, (2025)
- Shari Rabin, The Jewish South: An American History, (2025)
Excerpt from interview: Shari Rabin recounts fights for Jewish inclusion in the early republic through the lens of a letter from George Washington to a Savannah congregation.
Shari Rabin: Yeah. So my favorite of these letters is the Savannah letter, which predates Newport by several months. Newport just has better PR. But I think the Savannah letter is also really fascinating, and it's earlier, and it talks memorably about incorporating Jews into the mass of the legislative mechanism of the country, and speaks powerfully about citizenship. And yeah, what's happening is, of course, there's the First Amendment and the 1790 Naturalization Bill, which together give Jews a lot of confidence in their status as white citizens. But of course, right, the first word of the First Amendment is, Congress, right. It's a federal principle at that point. And the states are a different story. So there's the gradual legal disestablishment, but then the continuation of what historian David Sehat calls, "a moral establishment," that intensifies as evangelical Christianity strengthens in the early 19th century. Probably the most frustrating to Jews, up until the New Deal, is the Sunday closing laws. And so there's fascinating cases from the Antebellum South of a Jew being arrested for selling gloves to a black man on a Sunday, for instance. So that's kind of an ongoing struggle that Jews push back against, and have to struggle with, because, of course, they observe a Saturday Sabbath.
And this is a period where everybody's working six days a week. So to forfeit... You can only forfeit one day of labor. And when it's legally mandated as Sunday, that's a problem for Jews. Then another, the office holding, is another branch of this moral establishment that Jews have to fight against. Maryland has an important fight. There's a fight in North Carolina. There's a powerful statement by a Jewish legislator in North Carolina who wants to push back against this. It doesn't get removed until 1868, when North Carolina, like other southern states, has to draft a new constitution. And Jews do celebrate that as a victory, that that was eliminated in the North Carolina Constitution. And there's also moments where religion, Christianity in particular, pops into public life in other ways. There's governors declaring days of fasting in the name of Jesus Christ. And in 1812, South Carolina Jews protest and they get a concession. In 1844, they protest such a declaration. And at that point, the governor says basically like, "That's your problem. We are a Christian country." So it's not a story of upward, inexorable progress towards greater inclusion of non-Christians. It's a messy and ongoing struggle that Jews are constantly being forced to grapple with, and to make the case for the inclusion of Jews within a Christian majority society.
Excerpt from interview: Richard Kreitner explains debates surrounding the Jewish view of slavery surrounding the Civil War, highlighting the three rabbis he examines in his book Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery.
Richard Kreitner: Sure. I mean, the book begins with this well-known speech that Morris Jacob Raphall gives in Manhattan at B'nai Jeshurun in January of 1861, right before the Civil War begins, in the middle of the secession crisis, in which he is intervening in this ongoing and intensifying debate over what the Bible says about slavery. Is it anti-slavery, as abolitionists like Garrison, Wendell Phillips argued? Or did it defend slavery, like Christian slave owners throughout the South had always claimed? And Raphall, although he lives in Manhattan, he's born in Sweden, lives for many years in London, develops this lush, posh accent. And he's Orthodox, but he is interested in bringing a modern sensibility to Orthodox Judaism. And he intervenes and he says that the Bible endorses slavery, that it's actually blasphemy to suggest otherwise. That all the patriarchs owned slaves. That even though the Exodus is a story of the Hebrews escaping slavery, they don't then turn around and ban slavery in their own kingdom. And so it's blasphemy to say that the Bible is anti-slavery.
In response to that, David Einhorn, who is a Reform rabbi, fairly radical Reform rabbi from Germany, steeped in the Enlightenment, in the Haskalah, who has come to Baltimore, invited by a Reform temple there in 1855, and immediately begins denouncing slavery, which is a fairly bold thing to do in the largest city in a slave state. And he denounces Raphall's sermon and says that this is a shanda, this would be a terrible thing to allow the larger world to accept as the Jewish opinion on this. That would be handing... One of my favorite things that he says is that, it would be handing a gift to our enemies, a rhetorical gift, where they could turn around and they could say, "Ah, such are the Jews. Where they are oppressed, they denounce slavery and say that everybody should be free. Where they are free, they say that slavery is sanctioned by God." A damning quote.
And then in response, Isaac Mayer Wise, who as Professor Rabin mentioned, lives in Cincinnati, right on the border between slave states and free states, and half of the subscribers of his newspaper live in the South. He says, let's not get involved. Silence should be our policy. You're only going to read in my newspaper nothing about slavery, nothing about abolition. It seems that he himself had moral qualms with slavery, but did not think that Jews should, in any way, make a political issue out of it. And certainly not draw on their own history of oppression.
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