Stuart Schoffman
Jewish Review of Books, Feb. 12, 2019
“There the learned consensus stands: Lincoln spoke to Wise metaphorically, and the Jewish roots are merely a tantalizing rumor, like Ulysses S. Grant keeping kosher.”
In my Jerusalem neighborhood, there are three quiet streets named for historic Hebrew newspapers. Ha-Melitz (The Advocate), founded in 1860 in Odessa, fostered vigorous debate about social and political issues. Ha-Tzfira (The Clarion) began life in Warsaw in 1862 as an ideologically pareve marketplace of ideas, with an emphasis on science. Ha-Magid (The Storyteller), published in Lyck, East Prussia, specialized in news of Jews around the world, such as the following story of February 19, 1863:
Permit me a florid translation:
The ruler Abraham Lincoln, head of government of the Lands of the North (president [transliterated]) in America, during a recent visit of the learned rabbis, Messrs. Wise and Lilienthal from Cincinnati, and attorney (advocat) Martin Ligur [sic: the man’s name was Bijur] from Louisville, who had come to vent their spleen upon General Grant (see Ha-Magid No. 7), and ask him to reverse the evil decree issued by the general upon all the Jews in the territory of Tennessee, told them in the course of conversation, after promising to reverse the decree, that he (the president) sprang from the belly [lit. “bowels”] of Judah, and his forefathers were Jews; and these emissaries indeed report that the facial features of the president are evidence of his descent from the loins of the Hebrews.
The story of the “evil decree,” Ulysses S. Grant’s “General Orders No. 11” of December 17, 1862, aimed outrageously at “Jews as a class,” has been compellingly told by Jonathan Sarna in his sesquicentennial study, When General Grant Expelled the Jews. (Sarna has also coauthored a history called Lincoln and the Jews.) Sarna explains that Isaac Mayer Wise and his companions were on their way to Washington to protest—perhaps a hundred Jews were expelled, some of them speculators and smugglers—when they learned that Lincoln had revoked Grant’s order; they decided to continue their journey and thank him in person. Sarna quotes from the Hebrew account of the expulsion in Ha-Magid No. 7, but doesn’t identify its author or relate the astonishing scoop of yichus in Ha-Magid No. 8. Following that strange Lincoln story, the dispatch concluded with a litany of real and alleged Jewish notables in the armies of the South and North, and was signed only with the Hebrew letter vav. … [To read the full article, click here]