“He,” a somber Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise intoned after the assassination
of Abraham Lincoln, “is a sin-offering for our iniquities.” This
sentiment, expressed in a black-draped congregation in Cincinnati, was
echoed in countless other memorial services across the North. Peace had
been declared but days before; now, synagogues recited the Kaddish for
the fallen president.
In New York City, Shearith Israel broke with custom by
chanting a Sephardic mourning prayer it had never before said for a
gentile. Jews were in the midst of celebrating Passover; now Lincoln,
like Moses, had succumbed at the threshold of the Promised Land. In
Cincinnati, Wise ended his sermon with words that may have stunned his
hushed audience (we have no record of the response). “Abraham Lincoln,”
he proclaimed, “believed [himself] to be bone from our bone and flesh
from our flesh. He supposed [himself] to be a descendant of Hebrew
parentage. He said so in my presence. And, indeed, he preserved numerous
features of the Hebrew race, both in countenance and character.”
Those who seek to cultivate this claim will find it to be rooted in
thin soil. Efforts to construct a Hebraic lineage that connects
Lincoln’s lonely log cabin in Kentucky with Mount Sinai must rely more
on wishful thinking than on fact. Likewise, there are more parochial
explanations for Lincoln’s rhetoric, lush with biblical imagery, than a
Jewish upbringing. Lincoln’s friendship with Jews reveals relatively
little beyond an absence of prejudice.
His most intimate Jewish acquaintance seems to have
been Isachar Zacharie, his self-promoting chiropodist, whom he entrusted
with a secret diplomatic mission during the war (in subsequent
retellings, Zacharie has become the most, perhaps the only, celebrated
foot doctor in Jewish history). And Lincoln’s responsiveness to Jewish
concerns during the Civil War — his support for efforts to amend a
congressional statute that barred non-Christians from the military
chaplaincy, and his rapid countermanding of an anti-Semitic order issued
by his most successful general — bespeak his genius as a president
rather than tribal solidarity.
Instead, Wise’s words — almost certainly one of his
occasional flights of fancy — are more intriguing for what they reveal
about how Jews have thought about Lincoln since his death than for what
they can tell us about Lincoln himself. Wise’s efforts to claim the
departed president as a Jew were an early example of an incipient “cult
of Lincoln” that has been embellished over time.
Although Jews are far from alone in idolizing Lincoln, he has been,
as Beth Wenger (director of the Jewish Studies program at the University
of Pennsylvania and historian of American Jewry) has demonstrated, a
versatile symbol for synagogues, socialists and Zionists since 1865.
American Jews have imagined and reimagined Lincoln in a
variety of ways to demonstrate their patriotism, belonging and
alignment with American values. Others have focused their attention on
the handful of Jews who entered Lincoln’s orbit, basking in the
reflected rays of his greatness. Why else, for example, do we know (and
care) that it was Edward Rosewater, a Jew, who transmitted the
Emancipation Proclamation by telegraph from the office of the War
Department? By associating themselves with the revered figure of “Father
Abraham,” Jews (and others) have burnished their own image and
self-perception.
Indeed Wise’s memorial sermon itself suggests how
fickle and malleable memory and commemoration can be. After all, his
eulogy represented a striking volte-face. In 1860, Wise had opposed
Lincoln’s candidacy for president, describing him as a “country squire
who would look queer in the White House with his country manner.” As
recently as a year and a half before the assassination, the rabbi had
publicly identified with the “Copperhead” faction of the Democratic
Party, known for the ferocity of its attacks on Lincoln’s
administration.
Although his politics were more radical than those of
many of his co-religionists, his preference for the Democratic Party
(rather than Lincoln’s Republicans) was not atypical of American Jews,
particularly in the election of 1860. During Lincoln’s lifetime, Jews,
and many others in the Union, were ambivalent about their wartime
president; following his death, they joined their countrymen in
pronouncing Father Abraham a sainted martyr, and at times claimed him as
one of their own.
Adam Mendelsohn is the co-editor, with Jonathan D. Sarna, of “Jews and the Civil War: A Reader” (NYU Press, 2010).
http://forward.com/articles/166698/abraham-lincoln-the-jew/