A lush portrait of a president and Jewish Americans

Lincoln and the Jews: A History  by Jonathan Sarna and Benjamin Shapell St. Martin’s Press

The “friend of the Jews” is a familiar figure in popular Jewish commentary on mainstream culture. Non-Jewish friends are presented as models, both for their own sake and in contrast with those who oppose Jewish attainment or influence. American presidents are singled out for special status (in some cases without warrant) based upon the dramatic influence they wield in relation to events that either threaten or favour Jews. 

Harry Truman’s “friend” status was cemented by his early willingness to support the declaration of the State of Israel. Franklin Delano Roosevelt – beloved by Jews in the 1930s for his social policies and personal polish – proved, with scrutiny, to have failed in his wartime efforts to respond to the German onslaught on European Jews.

Abraham Lincoln is treated within this context in Lincoln and the Jews: A History, which is largely the work of Benjamin Shapell, founder of the California-based Shapell Manuscript archives, whose strengths are Americana and documents associated with 19th- and 20th-century Jewish history.

The 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination is in the wings, and this milestone has motivated a variety of Lincoln-related projects, including an exhibition mounted at the New-York Historical Society, set to travel to Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Ill., and then to California.

The narrative offered in Lincoln and the Jews includes the broader movements of mid-19th-century America, a crucial time in the nation’s history, encompassing civil war and the abolition of slavery. The Jewish story in America at this time is by no means momentous, but it is in itself of interest.

Lincoln’s upbringing in Illinois and his rise to the presidency placed him in the vicinity – both intimate and casual – of Jews of varied stripes. Among these were clothiers in small Illinois towns, masons, resourceful retailers who became sutlers supplying Union soldiers, and substantial political figures like the first Jewish congressman and governor from Pennsylvania and Louisiana. Some of these men were pro-abolition, while others were pro-slavery (certain influential rabbis also spoke out in favour of slavery).

The relationship that proves most mysterious – presented in the weakest chapter of the book – is Lincoln’s friendship with a Washington-based Jewish chiropodist named Issachar Zacharie. Known otherwise as Isachar, Issacher, Issachor, Zacharie, Zacharia and Zachariah, the foot doctor may have been a quack, and he may have served as a Union agitator in the south, but according to Lincoln, he treated the president’s foot and back ailments “with[out] producing the slightest pain.”

The value of Lincoln and the Jews lies in its reproduction of Lincolniana of every imaginable kind. The documents reproduced in lavish colour convey America in the mid-19th century; Lincoln’s career; the lives of Jews in American towns and cities as well as in the military; and modes of correspondence, business transaction and portraiture of the era.  The Shapell Lincoln collection includes many handwritten letters headed “Executive Mansion” – calling cards, texts of speeches and government proclamations. 

The notable fact regarding Jews depicted in these documents – beyond their social and economic status in America – is their German background. Their European upbringing often included substantial education and sophistication developed in Prussia’s economic and cultural mainstream. 

Jews in Lincoln’s America were part of an early wave of European immigration to North America, which would be swamped in four decades by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of eastern European Jews leaving the collapsing Russian Empire.

One senses an element of earnest overreach in the repeated lesson offered by Lincoln and the Jews, as it stresses presidential interaction and favour for Lincoln’s Jewish constituents. In its epilogue, we are reminded that he “interacted with Jews, represented Jews, befriended Jews, admired Jews, commissioned Jews, trusted Jews, defended Jews.”

But one can’t argue with the proposition that Lincoln’s idiosyncratic relationship with Christianity, his numerous opportunities to meet and know Jews, and his major project – the emancipation of the American slaves – predisposed him to thoughtful attitude and action with regard to a major European-born minority whose history was rooted in the Bible.

At Lincoln’s death, Jews numbered about 150,000 in America. He could not have imagined how this ethnic group would be transformed in number and status by the early years of the next century.