“Father Abraham”: Abraham Lincoln and the Jewish Community
by: Nathan Weissler

Last month, I wrote an article for the Megillah about Judah P. Benjamin, the prominent Jewish Confederate statesman during the American Civil War. This month, I would like to take a different angle, and examine Union President Abraham Lincoln‘s relationship with the Jewish Community.

Throughout his Presidency, Lincoln not only had cordial relations with the nation's Jewish Community but openly demonstrated his friendship on numerous occasions. Perhaps the best known example occurred when Union General Ulysses S. Grant issued Order No. 11 of December, 1862, evicting all the Jewish residents of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi within 24 hours. Jewish leaders appealed the decision to President Lincoln. On January 3, 1863,ironically exactly two days after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Jewish leaders including Cesar Kaskel, a prominent Jewish leader from Paducah, Kentucky, and Adolphus S. Solomons, a prominent member of the Washington D.C. Jewish Community (whom I will discuss in more detail later,) met with President Lincoln. Kaskel described himself as coming “to Father Abraham to ask his protection.“ Lincoln immediately responded, “And this protection they shall have at once.“ Thus, the President overturned Grant’s anti-Semitic order. 

On another occasion in 1864, when poet William Cullen Bryant, who was also editor of the New York Evening Post, printed articles critical of Jewish loyalty to the Union, President Lincoln came to the Jews' defense. “No class of citizenship in the United States,” he asserted, “was superior in patriotism to those of the Jewish faith.” The President was defending the Jews against allegations made in the New York Evening Post which were critical of Jewish loyalty to the Union. President Lincoln was also instrumental in the fight for Rabbis to be recognized as chaplains in the American military forces amidst anti-Semitic prejudice in the U.S. military. Lincoln appointed Rev. Jacob Frankel, of Rodeph Shalom Congregation of Philadelphia, as the first Jewish military chaplain. In March 1863, President Lincoln met with Henry Wentworth Monk, a Canadian-Christian Zionist to express his support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Lincoln lauded a Jewish state as “a noble dream, and one shared by many Americans.”

President Lincoln also had warm relations with individual Jews. For instance, Adolphus S. Solomons, a prominent Washington Jewish businessman, was friends with President Lincoln. Solomons took the last photograph of Lincoln, five days before his assassination. Equally significantly, Solomons helped plan every Presidential Inauguration, from Lincoln to William Taft, in 1909.  Another Jewish friend of Lincoln’s was Isachar Zacharie, a British-born Jewish podiatrist, who occasionally treated the president’s feet. Zacharie also functioned as an unofficial envoy for the president from time to time. In January 1863, Lincoln sent Zacharie to New Orleans to assess military prospects and the chances of peace negotiations with the Confederacy. (Ironically, Zacharie met with Judah P. Benjamin, the Jewish Confederate Secretary of State.) The President was also friendly with Abram J. Dittenhoefer, a prominent Jewish lawyer and jurist, who was also a staunch abolitionist. As a young man, Dittenhoefer worked on Lincoln’s 1860 Presidential campaign. Dittenhoefer later published a memoir, How We Elected Lincoln, which is the only first-hand account of Lincoln’s political campaigns. Dittenhoefer maintained that Lincoln’s greatest act was fighting for the abolition of slaves.

Lincoln’s assassination was mourned by Jews throughout the nation. Rabbi David Einhorn of Baltimore, eulogized Lincoln as “the High Priest of Freedom. We should all understand the eulogy of another Civil War era Baltimore Rabbi, Benjamin Szold's eulogy to Lincoln: “To us Jews Lincoln has a special meaning. In the course of history we found many fatherlands. We never knew freedom. It was here in the United States that we found freedom. It was Lincoln, who was so devoted to freedom, that we may, indeed, consider him a son of Israel…Because of his love for freedom, we Jews must honor his memory.”

For more information, read an article about Lincoln, and his relationship with the Jewish Community, particularly focusing on his revocation of Gen. Grant’s Order No. 11 of 1862