Weekly Chasidic Story #1263 (s5782-25)
20 Adar I 5782/Feb. 21, 2022) "President
s Day" In the American experience, anti-Semitic
federal government decrees have been virtually unthinkable
But in December
1862, it happened for the first time. Connection: "President s Day",
a USA national holiday, falls this year [2022] on February 21. Story
in PDF
form for more convenient printing Presidents Day
and the Jews
In the American experience,
federal anti-Semitic decrees have been virtually unthinkable. Religious liberty
is enshrined in the Constitution, and early in his presidency George Washington
went out of his way to assure the young nation's Jews that "the Government
of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."
During the long centuries of Jewish exile, powerful officials had often
promulgated sweeping edicts depriving Jews of their rights or driving them from
their homes. In America, that could never happen. But 160 years ago, in
December 1862, it did. With the Civil War raging, the Union Army's efforts
to control the movement of Southern cotton was bedeviled by illegal speculation
and black marketeers. Like many of his contemporaries, Major General Ulysses
S. Grant then commanding a vast geographic swath called the Department of
the Tennessee shared a crude stereotype of all Jews as avaricious, corner-cutting
swindlers. That ugly prejudice boiled over in General Orders No. 11, the
most infamous anti-Semitic injunction in American history: "The Jews, as
a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department
and also department orders, are hereby expelled from this department within 24
hours from the receipt of this order. The region commanded by Grant was
home to several thousand Jews (including men in uniform serving under him). Fortunately,
General Orders No. 11 had little direct impact on most of them. Jews were driven
out of Paducah, Ky., and some towns in Mississippi and Tennessee, and there were
accounts of Jewish travelers being imprisoned and roughed up. But a breakdown
in military communications slowed the spread of Grant's directive, and at least
some officers had qualms about enforcing it. Brigadier General Jeremiah C. Sullivan,
the Union commander of Jackson, Tenn., commented tartly that "he thought
he was an officer of the Army and not of a church." What stopped the
expulsion order cold, however, was the commander-in-chief. When word of Grant's
edict reached President Abraham Lincoln on January 3, 1863, he immediately
countermanded it. "To condemn a class is, to say the least, to wrong the
good with the bad," the president declared. "I do not like to hear a
class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners." End of
the story? In some ways it was just the beginning. As historian Jonathan
Sarna relates in a recent book, When General Grant Expelled the Jews, Grant's
order did his military career no harm. Within a few years he was commander of
all Union armies and the Confederate surrender at Appomattox made him a national
hero. He was elected president in 1868, and re-elected four years later. Yet
for the rest of his life, Grant was ashamed of having attempted to evict "Jews
as a class" for offenses most of them had never committed. "What his
wife, Julia, called 'that obnoxious order' continued to haunt Grant up to his
death," Sarna writes. "The sense that in expelling them he had failed
to live up to his own high standards of behavior, and to the Constitution that
he had sworn to uphold, gnawed at him. He apologized for the order publicly and
repented of it privately." Not surprisingly, Grant's order got a good
deal of attention in the 1868 presidential campaign the first time a "Jewish
issue" played a role in presidential politics. Grant didn't deny that General
Orders No. 11 had grossly violated core American values. "I do not sustain
that order," he wrote humbly. "It would never have been issued if it
had not been telegraphed the moment it was penned, and without reflection." But
it was as president that the full extent of Grant's regret became clear. He opposed
a movement to make the United States an explicitly Christian state through a constitutional
amendment designating J. as "Ruler among the nations." He named more
Jews to government office than any of his predecessors including to positions,
such as governor of the Washington Territory, previously considered too lofty
for a Jewish nominee. Grant became the first American president to openly
speak out against the persecution of Jews abroad. In response to anti-Jewish pogroms
in Romania, he took the unprecedented step of sending a Jewish consul-general
to Bucharest to "work for the benefit of the people who are laboring under
severe oppression." All in all, the eight years of Grant's presidency
proved to be a "golden age" in US Jewish history. When he died in 1885,
he was mourned in synagogues nationwide. It was a remarkable saga of atonement.
From scourge of the Jews to their great friend in Washington; from the general
who trampled Jewish liberty to the president who made protection of their rights
a priority. Only in America. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Source: Reprinted
from an article by Mr. Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, in
the December 6, 2012 email of JewishWorldReview.com--as posted in the same month
in "Shabbat Stories for the Parsha." Connection: Presidents Day,
a USA national holiday, falls this year [2022] on Feb. 21.
Yerachmiel
Tilles is co-founder and associate director of Ascent-of-Safed, and chief editor
of this website (and of KabbalaOnline.org). He has hundreds of published stories
to his credit, and many have been translated into other languages. He tells them
live at Ascent nearly every Saturday night.
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