Adam Mendelsohn
Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War
Summary
A compelling look at the little-known experiences of Jewish soldiers during the American Civil War and their efforts to preserve their Jewish identity amidst the rigors of military life.
Adam Mendelsohn
Adam Mendelsohn is a historian of Jewish life in English-speaking lands. Much of his work focuses on the adjustment of Jews to living in challenging societies, whether liberal and laissez-faire antebellum America and Victorian London or the racialized southern United States and South Africa. Adam is the author of The Rag Race (2014), an award-winning comparative history of Jews and the clothing trade in America and the British Empire. He is also coeditor of the journal American Jewish History. He directs the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town and is an associate professor in the Department of Historical Studies. The Centre, the only of its kind in South Africa, conducts research focused on Jews in South Africa, past and present.
Absolutely. There’s a much smaller Jewish population in the South and in the Confederacy during the Civil War than there is in the North. There were roughly 125,000 Jews in the Union and about 25,000 in the Confederacy. And we know that the Jews enlisted in high numbers in the Confederacy. What I’m less sure about is whether they all did so willingly. There are Jews in Charleston, Savannah, and elsewhere, who grew up in southern society and were very proud of their southern identities and saw it as their patriotic duty. But the majority of the Southern Jewish population in 1861 were immigrants.
All sorts of motives. Some did so because they were true believers, that they were committed to the Union or committed to the Confederacy. In many cases, they were pragmatic, and there was an economic crisis in the early stages of the war and the wages paid by the military were attractive. Some of them were desperate. They had no other choice.