Book #113 of 2021:
Lincoln and the Jews: A History by Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell
A quintessential deep dive into a narrow topic, this 2015 book on Abraham Lincoln’s relationships with various Jewish Americans contains a lot of interesting information not often included in accounts of his life, but also a fair bit of padding that isn’t entirely relevant to the stated matter at hand. I hadn’t realized just how open-minded the president was compared to the typical antisemitism of his time, and it’s heartening to hear how he personally intervened to allow rabbis to serve as army chaplains and overruled General Grant’s controversial order expelling all Jews from within the boundaries of his military district.
Authors Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell show too how their subject’s language evolved from describing the U.S. as a Christian nation to naming it a more nebulously pious one, likely due to the influence of several prominent Jewish acquaintances. And they explore an unfortunate division among members the faith regarding slavery and the Civil War, with most seeing the black cause for freedom that Lincoln championed as equivalent to the Israelite exodus from Egypt, but a minority taking the Confederate side under the justification that enslavement and property rights in general had biblical support.
It’s a short text, but probably better encountered in print due to the many scans of letters and other primary documents that the researchers include. (The audio version that I borrowed from the library opts to simply read all the captions out loud, to mixed effect.) This doesn’t strike me as a definitive resource, but I’d say it’s still worth checking out for such a niche area of study.
[Content warning for racism including slurs.]
★★★☆☆
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