The Jewish people in America have long punched above their demographic weight. Consider how deprived our science, music, letters, film and law would be absent the contributions of Abraham’s stock. Owing to this and all the discredited drivel about the American slave trade’s supposed Jewish hub, a fresh, thoughtful treatment of Jews and America’s original sin seems fitting. Richard Kreitner has delivered that in Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery.
This superb and richly discursive work foregrounds six individuals, all Jewish immigrants: three rabbis; a young, battle-tested veteran of Europe’s 1848 revolutions; a rabbi’s atheist daughter; and a brilliant slaveholding lawyer and politician. The intertwined stories will leave a reader of any faith with a more nuanced appreciation for our nation’s history and abundant kindling for moral reflection.
Kreitner’s rabbinical triptych both illustrates his claim that, in the mid-19th century, there was no one correct Jewish position on slavery and renders unsurprising the fact that slave labor built America’s oldest surviving synagogue building, the same building in which fugitive slaves later found refuge.
The Orthodox rabbi Morris Raphall of New York defended slavery in principle. For him, disallowing what Scripture plainly countenanced meant refashioning ancient truth to fit current politics and fell “very little short of blasphemy.” Raphall faulted only America’s failure to observe the mitigators and safeguards of Mosaic law on slavery.
Raphall thus foreshadowed those Catholic thinkers who, fixed on the immutability of Catholic teaching, challenge 20th-century conciliar and papal condemnations of slavery as intrinsically evil. Raphall also prefigured the Anglican clergy in the American South who sought Jim Crow’s redemption through calls to belatedly upgrade Black institutions and facilities.
Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, founder of American Reform Judaism, mostly sought calm. He favored slavery’s territorial containment but opposed its eradication. Abolitionism’s explicit (Protestant) religiosity repelled him, and he said its adherents thrived “on excitement and delight[ed] in civil wars.” Above all, he felt, U.S. Jews taking a side on slavery threatened his people’s claim to whiteness, a prerequisite for enjoying America’s “sunlight of freedom.”
Credit Wise for recognizing what so many deny today under the anti-woke banner: Whiteness, though a fiction biologically, has always carried inestimable value in America.
Rabbi David Einhorn of Baltimore, long on erudition and occasionally short on tact, shunned the course of “pseudopeace.” He condemned slavery outright as “immoral”; its abolition was not optional. He felt that Raphall’s biblical defense of bondage represented a “deplorable moral farce.”
Einhorn’s moral witness cost him his Baltimore pulpit and nearly won him a tar-and-feathers cloak. Still, he only grew in his faith-rooted belief in human equality. A century later, the universalistic Judaism he helped foster accounted for the outsized Jewish presence among the Freedom Riders of the 1960s. Today it echoes in those Jewish voices summoning Israel back from illiberalism and from Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal brand of Zionism.
Rabbi Einhorn’s moral courage found a match in the physical courage of August Bondi, a layman. Bondi arrived in the United States as a teenager who had struggled and bled in Vienna during a failed uprising against the Austrian emperor. Once here, the self-described “political fugitive” immersed himself in American politics. While still a young man, he packed up two Colt revolvers and traveled to “Bleeding Kansas.” There he joined John Brown’s forces.
In 1861, Bondi, now a husband and father, enlisted in the Union Army. He barely survived grievous wounds and a pack of feral hogs looking to feed off a battle’s aftermath. Through it all, Bondi remained “an enthusiastic Jew,” a “lover of humanity” and a conscience-pricking reminder that personal sacrifice must accompany true conviction.
Polish-born Ernestine Rose demonstrated both physical and moral courage. Sharp enough in mind and tongue to appear alongside Frederick Douglass, Rose challenged slavery even in places like Charleston, S.C., the country’s largest slave port. More, she challenged women’s subjugation wherever she found it—that is, everywhere.
Though a rabbi’s child, Rose gave religion no quarter—despite the fundamental religiousness of both her adopted country and the causes she championed.
Rose suffered for her beliefs. Through her relentless and rugged travels, she repeatedly spent herself unto dangerous exhaustion. Sniping from allies who found her too uncompromising or less American by dint of foreign birth and Jewish blood took an added toll.
She also suffered for her unbelief. When her beloved husband died, Rose fell into despondency, forbidding herself any hope of seeing him again. A believer might lament Rose’s unbelief—but might also acknowledge her gritty (if spiritually adrift) trueness to self.
Last, Kreitner presents Judah Benjamin, who emerges as the most challenging figure in Fear No Pharoah. A preternaturally charming but self-concealing lawyer, Benjamin displayed staggering intellect, industry and resilience. He ascended in New Orleans society unhindered by either his Jewish ancestry or his tenuous claim to heterosexuality in a homophobic culture.
Benjamin was a man of many contradictions. He demonstrated a powerful empathy for the enslaved in courtroom argument. Yet he also owned a large slave-driven sugar plantation. When conflict over slavery erupted into civil war, Benjamin readily enlisted in the Confederate cause. Formerly a U.S. senator, Benjamin took up duties as Jefferson Davis’s attorney general during Secession, then as his secretary of war and finally as secretary of state. On the eve of defeat, Benjamin unsuccessfully proposed arming slaves who could fight in return for their freedom. This, though, bespoke desperation, not moral awakening.
Benjamin makes an easy villain but better serves as a cautionary figure. True, his empathetic imagination bars any defense of ignorance as to slaves’ humanity. Still, Benjamin might exemplify how, in all times and places, an institutionalized iniquity will deaden the individual conscience.
Such (im)moral acclimation explains a lot. Despite annual Passover reminders of Israelite servitude in Egypt, the attitudes of American Jews toward slavery in the 19th century hinged mostly on geographic region, leaving the Jewish landowner as likely a slaveholder as the Gentile.
Individuals who fully discern and defy the ambient sins of their time stand as exceptions; we call them heroes, prophets and saints. We can only hope that, immersed in the same moral madness, we would have differed from Benjamin and others who told themselves they could own people—including the Society of Jesus, whose slave-holding plantation outside New Orleans is unmentioned in Kreitner’s account.
Some quibbles: The publisher saddled Kreitner with a misleading book title. Kreitner is no ethnic cheerleader. He manifests the warm love for the Jews that the scholar Gershom Scholem believed absent in Hannah Arendt. But Kreitner fits no group or even individual for a halo (or hooves).
Also, at points, the author abides too easily the view that in some “zero sum” sense Jews risked changing places with Blacks as the most oppressed Americans. Asians and Native Americans would surely have figured in the competition.
Some today look to soften our history of slavery. Kreitner should have felt especially free therefore to remind his audience in most graphic terms that the enslavement of millions of human beings depended on a ruthless regime of terrorism and brutality.
These all, however, are minor off-notes in a work of fabulous sweep and grace.
This article appears in January 2026.
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