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Israelites in the South
By Larry T. McGehee
6/30/2003 

The South of a half century ago was dominated by small towns. Every county seat had a Jewish merchant or two, in almost all instances esteemed pillars of the community. (Our hometown had the Fagenbaums and the Greenstones, and nearby Union City had the Schatz family.) From early on, large enclaves of Jewish families were leading citizens in Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, Atlanta, Birmingham, Mobile, New Orleans, Nashville, and Memphis.

With Jewish presence and influence in the South dating back to pre-Revolutionary times and throughout the years of westward expansion, it came as a surprise to learn that there were only 20,000—maybe 25,000 at the most—Jewish southerners in the eleven Confederate States at the time of the Civil War.

The Confederate-area population was about twelve million people, a fourth of them African-Americans. So, the Jewish presence in 1860 was about two-tenths of one percent of the South’s population. That being the case, the extent of Jewish participation in the Confederacy was all out of proportion to the number of Jewish people living in the region.

Robert N. Rosen has done impressive research on the role of southern Jews in the Civil War. His book, The Jewish Confederates (University of South Carolina), is over 500 over-sized pages long, and includes 31 pages of bibliography. Rosen seems able to provide biographical data (including kinship ties) for almost every Jewish Confederate. They all get personal attention.

Among the most prominent Jewish Confederates are former U. S. Senators Judah Benjamin of Louisiana and David Yulee of Florida. Benjamin served in President Jefferson Davis’s cabinet throughout the War, as Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State. Yulee remained in Florida and tended to railroads there.

Henry M. Hyams served as Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana throughout the War. Abraham Charles Myers served as quartermaster general for the Confederacy from March 1861 until his wife insulted Mrs. Jefferson Davis and Myers was fired by Davis in August 1863. David Camden DeLeon, who resigned his U.S. Army commission when war came, was surgeon general for the Confederate army from May to July 1861, but was relieved from duty.

Simon Baruch (father of Bernard Baruch, the famous financier and presidential advisor of the early 20th century) was a medical student in Richmond when war broke out. He rendered outstanding field service at Second Manassas, South Mountain, Antietam, Gettysburg, and in the Shenandoah Valley. He was twice a prisoner of war, discharged for medical reasons, and then re-enlisted and was serving under Joe Johnston in North Carolina when surrender came in 1865.

Julius Levy of Arkansas and nine other Jewish Confederates died at Shiloh. Julius’s brother, Michael, rose from the rank of private to that of lieutenant. Ezekiel J. Levy of Richmond and his regiment were only 200 yards away from the famous Crater explosion in July 1864, and Levy was promoted to captain for his leadership in turning back the Union assault.

Beyond the several thousand Jewish soldiers and sailors in the rebel armies were civilians in service. Mayer Lehman, a Montgomery merchant, labored hard for the relief of Confederates in northern prisons. (His son, Herbert, would become a New York U.S. Senator and the first Jewish governor of a state.)

Two sisters deserve special notes. Eugenia Levy Phillips, married to an anti-secessionist lawyer and Alabama congressman, was jailed in Washington with Rosa O’Neal Greenhow on charges of smuggling and spying. Freed, she and her family moved to New Orleans, where she encountered the wrath of “Beast” Butler. Imprisoned again, she became a symbol of female resistance.

Eugenia’s sister, Phoebe Yates Pember, a Georgia widow, became famous as a nurse in Richmond’s Chimborazo Hospital (with a 8,000 patients capacity). In one story from her memoir, A Southern Woman’s Story, Mrs. Pember staunched the flow of a pierced artery of a young soldier named Fisher, but a surgeon pronounced it inoperable. Fisher asked how long he had left, and she replied, “Only as long as I keep my finger upon this artery.” He asked her to release it, but she refused. Only when she fainted did the end come for him.

Jewish soldiers died at Seven Pines (7), Seven Days (19), Second Manassas (5), Antietam (7), Vicksburg (6), Chancellorsville (7), Gettysburg (6), Chickamauga (2), the Wilderness (6), Spotsylvania (6), Atlanta (12), Mobile (3), and three at Secessionville (3). They had been neglected in Civil War history, but Robert N. Rosen has corrected that. 

comments: mcgeheelt@wofford.edu
copyright Wofford College, SC