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Lincoln and the Jews
A History
By Jonathan D. Sarna, Benjamin Shapell St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 The Shapell Manuscript Foundation
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6461-0
CHAPTER 1
THE PROMISED LAND ... WHOSE STONES ARE IRON AND OUT OF WHOSE HILLS THOU MAYEST DIG BRASS
1809–1830
In all likelihood, Abraham Lincoln never met a Jew while he was growing up. No Jews lived in Hardin County, Kentucky, where he was born in 1809. Nor is there any record of a Jew living in the wilds of Spencer County, Indiana, where the Lincolns moved in late 1816. The entire Jewish population of the United States at that time did not exceed 3,000, with the vast majority of those Jews living in a small number of East Coast port cities.
A few intrepid Jews, to be sure, had cast their eyes to the west. By 1812, Simon and Hyman Gratz owned Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, just fifty miles from where Lincoln was born. In 1819 Benjamin Gratz settled in Lexington, Kentucky. Samuel Judah, the first Jewish graduate of Rutgers and a respected attorney, moved to Vincennes, Indiana, at about that same time and became active politically. Within a few years, Cincinnati, Ohio, would become the fastest-growing Jewish community in the United States. But no Jewish community or formal Jewish organization existed anywhere in Kentucky or Indiana while the Lincolns lived there, and the family's poverty and isolation probably discouraged any wayfaring Jewish peddlers from stopping at their door. It is most likely, therefore, that Abraham Lincoln only heard stories about Jews during his first two decades of life.
The first Jews that Abraham Lincoln undoubtedly heard about were found in the Bible. He took pride in his own biblical name, Abraham, recalling the biblical progenitor of the Jewish people as well as his paternal grandfather, Abraham, who had been brutally murdered by Indian raiders. His uncle, Mordecai, likewise bore an illustrious name from the Bible. Lincoln, as a youth, also became familiar with the biblical figures of Moses and Job, whose life stories in some ways paralleled his own. Indeed, "Father Abraham," as his countrymen would come to call him, may well have been America's most biblically literate president. Throughout his life, he regularly quoted from the Bible in letters, talks to juries, political speeches, and even in day-to-day conversation. He lauded the Bible as "the best gift God has given to man." Like his Puritan ancestors (and unlike Catholics of his time), he considered the Hebrew Bible an equal partner with the New Testament. He quoted, and referenced, the Old Testament about a third more times than he did the New; and in referencing the Deity some 420-plus times, used the phrase "Savior" but six. Likewise, according to the The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, he mentioned Christ directly only once—"when Christ suffered on the cross—when Moses led Israel through the Red-Sea—nay, even, when Adam first came from the hand of his Maker—then as now, Niagara was roaring here ..." He never referred directly to Jesus.
Lincoln's parents, Thomas and Nancy, like many Old School Calvinists, considered the Bible inerrant and infallible, the source of Divine Truth. "We believe the Old & New Testaments are the words of God," the constitution of his parents' Pigeon Creek Baptist Church declared. The Bible, their church taught, contained everything "necessary for man's salvation" and supplied all that was required for "faith and practice." In Lincoln's home, as in so many others of his day, life was lived by the "Bible alone."
The Bible was also part of Lincoln's more extended patrimony. His earliest American ancestor, Samuel Lincoln, born in 1622 in the village of Hingham, seventeen miles from Norwich, in East England, sided with the Puritan vicars of his village against the Church of England, and like so many others of his time, crossed the ocean in search of greater independence, congregational autonomy, and economic opportunity. Hingham, Massachusetts, where he built his new home (its name serving as a bridge between his old home and his new one), was a Puritan community deeply influenced by the teachings of John Calvin. Its citizens, like those of Boston, felt especially elected by God. They viewed themselves as part of God's new Israel, characterized by devotion to Scripture ("about as close to literal Biblicism," the Puritan scholar Perry Miller once wrote, "as one can come"), rugged individualism, and a religious commitment to hard work and manual labor. They were fascinated by Jews, and many in the town bore names from the Hebrew Bible. This was especially true of the Lincolns in Hingham, whose names included Abner Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, Amos Lincoln, Benjamin Lincoln, Enoch Lincoln, Isaac Lincoln, Jeremiah Lincoln, Josiah Lincoln, Levi Lincoln, Mordecai Lincoln, Perez Lincoln, Samuel Lincoln, and Solomon Lincoln.
Growing up in Kentucky and Indiana, Abraham Lincoln knew next to nothing about his Hingham ancestors, but his world, like theirs, was suffused with the Bible. In fact, he learned the English of the King James Bible long before he could read its words for himself. He recalled listening to his mother as she recited Psalms while she worked. He heard the words of Scripture preached in church and was drilled, as all good children were, in the Ten Commandments.
Actual copies of the Bible were expensive and scarce in the frontier regions of Kentucky and Indiana when Lincoln was a boy. Whether his parents owned one at that time is uncertain. In any case, his father and many of the Lincolns' neighbors were functionally illiterate. So an oral culture prevailed. Churches encouraged the repetition of Scripture word for word following the preacher. Storytelling, in which Thomas and later Abraham Lincoln excelled, consumed a good deal of leisure time. Schools—known as "blab schools"—required students to repeat their lessons aloud, relying heavily upon memory and rote learning. The goal of preachers and teachers was to train the memory, to instill it with lessons for life; Abraham Lincoln's own life was shaped by those lessons.
FIRST LECTURE ON DISCOVERIES AND INVENTIONS
The three most important advances in human development, Lincoln said in a nine-page lecture first delivered early in 1858—and repeated, with small revisions, four times over the next year—were writing, printing, and the discovery of America. What most impresses is that while delivered at the invitation of Christian groups, the lecture evidences that the basis of Lincoln's thinking on the world's most important discoveries and inventions was overwhelmingly rooted in the Old Testament; the New Testament is mentioned a scant twice. With commanding ease, Lincoln refers to Old Testament characters and events—including Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Jerusalem—nearly fifty times and spans four out of what he called "the five books of Moses." On describing God's hidden gifts in "the promised land," Lincoln invokes a passage from Deuteronomy: "a land whose stones are iron and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass." Meisei University, Tokyo
Lincoln was also deeply influenced by the schoolbooks that he read and studied as a youngster. Precisely because they were few in number and he read them aloud to himself, those books became deeply imprinted upon his memory. One of them, which he is said to have described as "the best schoolbook ever put into the hands of an American youth," was Lindley Murray's The English Reader (1799). Written by a Pennsylvania Quaker who settled in England, it included well-chosen selections of prose and poetry, many by Scottish Enlightenment writers, and was designed to train students in reading as well as in "some of the most important principles of piety and virtue." A selection that summarized the biblical Book of Esther, for example, described Haman ("a very wicked minister") as "an Amalekite, who inherited all the ancient enmity of his race to the Jewish nation." It contrasted him with "Mordecai the Jew" who, "with virtuous indignation," refused to pay Haman homage. Haman's passions, the text explained, were "so violent and black ... that he resolved to exterminate the whole nation to which Mordecai belonged." Fortunately, the "conspicuous justice of God" resulted in Haman's "fall and punishment."
The positive estimation of the Jews found in this selection, especially as contrasted with the fate meted out to Haman, reflected the tone of the volume as a whole. Even as it trumpeted Christianity and the New Testament, The English Reader also promoted the virtues of religion in general, as well as values like gratitude, integrity, and gentleness to which all could aspire. It praised the beauties of the Psalms ("delivered out as services for Israelites under the Law, yet no less adapted to the circumstances of Christians under the Gospel") and raised up as an example the "clemency and amiable character" of Joseph in the Book of Genesis. It expressed "indignant sentiments" against slavery ("human nature's broadest, foulest blot") and preached "the duty of forgiveness." The absence of overt anti-Jewish sentiments here—in contrast, for example, to those found in William McGuffey's Eclectic Third Reader(1837)—may have influenced Lincoln's later attitude toward the Jews. The values he gleaned from Lindley Murray's English Reader became ones that, as president, he would internalize and espouse.
As for living, breathing Jews, what most distinguished Abraham Lincoln's upbringing from that of most other Americans of his day was that his parents and members of their church evinced no interest whatsoever in converting Jews to Christianity (or, for that matter, in bringing the gospel to the unchurched anywhere). Instead, they fatalistically believed in predestination, in "election by grace given us ... before the world began." While America as a whole blazed with religious awakenings and witnessed the creation of countless benevolent organizations that encouraged missions and conversions to promote "truth and righteousness," the Calvinist Baptist church to which Lincoln's parents belonged disdained such movements and considered them utterly futile. One "not elected from the foundation of the world," these so-called Primitive Baptists believed, "was as changeless and as hopeless as if he were already in the bottomless pit."
"FOR MRS. LUCY G. SPEED, FROM WHOSE PIOUS HAND I ACCEPTED THE PRESENT OF AN OXFORD BIBLE TWENTY YEARS AGO."
In 1841, a young and depressive Lincoln had been counseled by Lucy Speed, mother of his best friend Joshua, about the healing effects of the Bible—and faith. Remembering her advice to him twenty years later and now one month into his first term as president, Lincoln, for the only known time in his life, personally inscribes a photograph, here with a twenty-word note of gratitude to Lucy. Shapell Manuscript Collection
"THE [MEXICAN] WAR IS NOW TO THEM, THE GALLOWS OF HAMAN," JUNE 12, 1848
A line showing Lincoln's familiarity with a portion of Judaic literature less known to most Christians; here Lincoln uses the metaphor of Haman hanging on the gallows, the first of two times that Lincoln would do so in his writings. The Abraham Lincoln Association
The American Society for Evangelizing the Jews, established in 1816 in the very month that the Lincolns settled in Indiana, optimistically believed that Jews could be changed. It called upon Americans to "make every possible and proper exertion ... to bring the Jews to the acknowledgement of Jesus Christ of Nazareth as the true Messiah." Reorganized as the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, in 1820, the missionary organization attracted support from the likes of Elias Boudinot, former president of the Continental Congress; John Quincy Adams, a future president of the United States; the heads of Yale, Princeton, and Rutgers universities; and countless other Americans, most of whom had never actually met Jews but worked tirelessly to promote their conversion.
The parents and neighbors of Abraham Lincoln, in contrast, were known as anti-missionary Protestants and complained that missionary societies improperly arrogated to themselves powers that properly lay with God alone. One anti-missionary journal specifically charged that the work of the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews was "at variance with the providence of God" and that "nearly all the conversions yet affected through the instrumentality of men have proved only worthless." The fate of everyone, including Jews, had long since been decided by God and was not subject to change, missionary opponents like Lincoln's parents believed.
Abraham Lincoln never joined his parents' church or, for that matter, any church in his lifetime, but the Baptist Calvinist atmosphere that pervaded his adolescence left an indelible mark upon him. The conviction that all was predetermined, that "what is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can reverse the decree," shaped his worldview. That may be why he never associated himself with those who sought to Christianize the Jews or the Constitution. Skeptical of those who "knew" what God wanted, he preferred to make decisions based upon careful reasoning and then to let destiny play out on its own.
Whether missionized or left alone, Jews knew that negative images of themselves and their faith circulated widely in the United States. Jews, even if few in number, commonly experienced prejudice on the part of their neighbors. The Constitution, of course, guaranteed Jews the free exercise of their faith and legal equality on the federal level. President George Washington, in a celebrated letter in 1790, promised Jews that in America they would not just be tolerated but would enjoy religious liberty as an "inherent natural right." "The Government of the United States," he forcefully declared, "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." But the people of the United States, many of them raised in places where Jews were hated and distrusted, did not always follow the government's lead.
LINCOLN TO ROBERT H. MILROY, JUNE 29, 1863
Lincoln, having for months been frustrated by General Milroy's disobedience and battlefield failures, reprimands him here by employing the Old Testament (Numbers 20:11). Referencing when Moses had faulted in his judgment upon hitting the rock in the desert, Lincoln tells Milroy, "This, my dear general, is I fear, the rock on which you have split." Like Moses, Milroy's mistake had thus irreversibly sealed his own fate. Courtesy of the Library of Congress
How much popular anti-Jewish prejudice reached the ears of Abraham Lincoln growing up in Kentucky and Indiana cannot be known, but a rare admission of the general situation facing Jews appeared in a German-American newspaper, The Correspondent, in 1820, when he was eleven years old. "The Jews are not generally regarded with a favorable eye; and 'Jew' is an epithet which is frequently uttered in a tone bordering on contempt," the newspaper reported. "Say what you will, prejudices against the Jews exist here, and subject them to inconveniences from which other citizens of the United States are exempt." In some cases, such prejudices stood in tension with more positive personal experiences with Jews—a dichotomy, as it were, between the "mythical Jew" and the "Jew next door." Still, as non-Christians, Jews regularly were cast as outsiders in America; they stood apart from the mainstream and were deeply suspected. Lincoln, we shall see, would work to change that. By the time of his death, he had done more than any previous president to promote Jews' advance in American society.
The painful position of Jews was illustrated, in 1809, just a few months after Lincoln was born, in North Carolina, when a legislator named Jacob Henry, married to a Christian, was threatened with expulsion from his seat in the House of Commons because, as a Jew, he did not accept the divine authority of the New Testament, as required by the state constitution. In a long, celebrated response, Henry declared that "if a man fulfills the duties of that religion, which his education or his conscience has pointed to him as the true one, no person, I hold, in this our land of liberty, has a right to arraign him at the bar of any inquisition." His colleagues, who liked him, agreed to let him keep his seat after that speech, but they refused to change the test oath that should legally have barred him. That remained on the books until after the Civil War.
In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, in the early nineteenth century, concluded from his wide readings that Jewish ideas of God and His attributes "were degrading and injurious" and that Jewish ethics "were not only imperfect, but often irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason and morality." Writing to John Adams in 1813, he decried Jews' "wretched depravity of sentiment and manners"—a widely held view in America of that time. To be sure, he did not generalize from this ugly stereotype to the few Jews whom he knew personally. He saluted his friend Joseph Marx, for example, "with sentiments of perfect esteem and respect." He expressed what Marx described as "liberal and enlightened views" on Jewish affairs. In a remarkable letter to the Jewish leader Mordecai Noah, he even admitted that "the prejudice still scowling on your section of our religion ... cannot be unfelt by ourselves." But so far as he was concerned, Jews were still outsiders. Though they remained so into the mid and late nineteenth century, Lincoln would never treat Jews as such, nor would he ever deride them in any of his writings as Jefferson had done in his letter to Adams.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lincoln and the Jews by Jonathan D. Sarna, Benjamin Shapell. Copyright © 2015 The Shapell Manuscript Foundation. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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