Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

80 // JASON H. SILVERMAN
criteria. For in truth, very few southerners of any race, religion, or creed stepped
forward to challenge the planters' slavocracy. And when they did, such as in the
case of Hinton Rowan Helper who attacked slavery in his controversial yet racist
The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), they usually found themselves either
figuratively or literally exiled. Still, such southern Jews as Judah P. Benjamin,
David Levy Yulee of Florida, and Davis S. Kaufman of Texas are consistently heralded
as prototypical pro-slavery advocates, an accurate if not somewhat parochial
point.
Viewing the antebellum southern Jews as a historical monolith in regard to
their attitude toward slaves and slavery runs the risk, of course, of being unfair, if
not outright inaccurate. Rather than launch an ill-fated and very dangerous abolitionist
assault from within the South, some southern Jews chose to fight a quiet
and individual battle against the institution of slavery around them. For instance,
Major Alfred Mordecai, brother to slaveowning planters, purchased only one slave
in his life and then simply to manumit her. Unable to overtly oppose slavery in
the South, Mordecai, in a melancholy tone, wrote that slavery was "the greatest
misfortune and curse that could have befallen us." New Orleans merchant Judah
Touro emancipated all of the slaves he purchased and then placed them within his
employ to ensure their financial security. And North Carolinian Marx E. Lazarus
wrote stinging critiques of slavery published in Moncure Conway's journal, The
Dial. Thus, as Bertram Korn has perceptively noted, "Probably many Jews as well
as non-Jews were caught in the dilemma of purchasing slaves just because
they did not believe in slavery; since emancipation was virtually impossible
all they could do was to become the most generous masters possible under the
circumstances." 19
The loudest Jewish voices against slavery were safely ensconced outside the
South, where most of the more numerous and recent immigrants arrived in the
1830s and 1840s. Then, too, northern Jews, like their southern brethren, did not
speak with one mind. Jewish critics of slavery ranged from the fierce Kansas editor
Moritz Pinner and the Jews who marched with John Brown to Rabbi Morris
Raphall of New York, who defended the biblical sanction of slavery and merely
called for a humanization of slavery "from the Roman chattel model to the
Hebraic humanistic model, that is from a system that callously treated the slave
as an animated tool to one that looked compassionately upon the slave as a bonded
human being endowed with protections against ill-treatment." More likely,
most northern Jews were similar in attitude to such moderate abolitionists as Max
Lilienthal, Isaac Wise, and Isaac Lesser. Articulate anti-slavery rabbis included
David Einhorn of Baltimore and Sabato Morals of Philadelphia, who "contrary to
the wishes of their nervous or opposing congregants, attacked slavery as a menace
to the rights of Jews and all other minorities and preached support of the Union
as the sole bastion of liberty." 20
For the Jews who lived in the South, however, slavery was not a reprehensible
"theory" to be opposed in speech, sermon, essay, or letter. Rather, it represented a