September 21, 1861---The Day of Atonement

SEPTEMBER 21, 1861:      

Over 10,000 Jewish soldiers fought for the Union and the Confederacy both. By September of 1861, Judah P. Benjamin had become the Secretary of War of the Confederacy. This made him the first Jewish Cabinet Member in American history. A Louisianan, he had been the first Jewish U.S. Senator before the war. Jewish soldiers in the ranks observed Yom Kippur on this date in 1861.

Most of the Jews in the States of America lived in the North and the majority of Jewish soldiers were Yankees. Nevertheless, anti-Semitism was far more common in the North than in the South, particularly among abolitionists, many of whom were religious leaders or products of the Second Great Awakening. Confederate Jews were deeply committed to the South and its anti-abolitionist politics, due in part to the greater equality and lack of prejudice they experienced in places like New Orleans, Richmond, and Charleston. Although most Jews in America were recent immigrants (many from Germany in the wake of the revolutions of 1848) they considered themselves, and were generally considered, patriotic Americans. Most Jews in the South were not slave owners but they accepted slavery as part of the Southern way of life. This caused a sometimes violent rift in the Jewish community, whose Northern members (often close relatives, friends, and business associates of Southern Jews) maintained deep fealty to the Union and took up the cause of Emancipation, which they saw, because of the Biblical Exodus, as a quintessentially Jewish cause.