cheka.
24th April 2016, 11:03 AM
http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/04/the-unusual-relationship-between-abraham-lincoln-and-the-jews/
You can see an account of the death and autopsy by Lincoln’s family physician in With Firmness in the Right: Lincoln and the Jews, a fine new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. The handwritten pages are blotched with brown stains— likely Lincoln’s blood. Since it was widely noted that the president had been shot on the day marking the crucifixion of Jesus, the spilling of his blood became imbued with religious resonance. In New York, Congressman James A. Garfield (to become, in 1881, the second U.S. president assassinated) stated: “It may be almost impious to say it, but it does seem that Lincoln’s death parallels that of the son of God.”
Unfortunately, the Christian parallel also prompted some to indulge in the world’s most ancient slander. The Chicago Tribune characterized the assassination as “the most horrid crime ever committed on this globe since the wicked Jews crucified the savior.” Also invoking venerable canards was Lincoln’s successor, Vice President Andrew Johnson. Excoriating Judah P. Benjamin, who had served as attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state in the Confederacy, as “a sneaking, Jewish, unconscionable traitor,” and citing the apostle John’s account of the crucifixion, Johnson placed Benjamin in “that tribe that parted the garments of our savior and for his vesture cast lots.”
For American Jews, Lincoln’s death was associated not with Good Friday but with the simultaneous holiday of Passover and not with Jesus but with Moses, who had liberated his people from slavery but was unable to lead them into the promised land. Many learned of Lincoln’s death on Saturday morning while on their way to Sabbath services. Adolphus S. Solomons, an Orthodox printer and bookseller in Washington DC who had managed Lincoln’s inaugural ball in 1861, noted that “it was the Israelites’ privilege here, as well as elsewhere, to be the first to offer in their places of worship, prayers for the repose of the soul of Mr. Lincoln.” At Temple Emanu-El in New York the congregation rose as one at the news and recited in unison the kaddish memorial prayer. Rabbi Elkan Cohen of San Francisco’s Emanu-El, hearing the news as he mounted the pulpit to deliver his sermon, “was so overcome,” reads one report, “that, bursting in tears, he sank almost senseless.”
The exhibition offers a sampling of synagogue eulogies. “We should regard Abraham Lincoln,” said Rabbi Benjamin Szold of Baltimore, “as a son of Israel.” Another eulogist was Lewis Naphtali Dembitz of Louisville, uncle of the future Supreme Court justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis and a Republican leader so devoted to Lincoln’s political creed that he named one son after Henry Clay, the young Lincoln’s political idol, and another after Lincoln himself. Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, of Cincinnati, who had initially jeered at Lincoln’s election (“one of the greatest blunders a nation can commit”), only to become an ardent admirer (“the greatest man that ever sprung from mortal loins”), claimed that Lincoln had once confided to him that he was “bone from our bone and flesh from our flesh” and supposed himself “a descendant of Hebrew parentage.”
Since there is no other evidence supporting such a statement, Lincoln might have been speaking metaphorically. But his ancestors, as the exhibition points out, included New England Calvinists who bore names straight out of the Hebrew Bible. As the Puritans tended to emphasize Hebrew Scripture in general, alluded to their settling in the New World as a sign of the restoration of Israel (and in some cases even imagined Hebrew as the future American language), some aspect of their feelings of kinship may have passed down through the generations. Although Lincoln himself famously belonged to no church, he quoted the Hebrew Bible (the exhibition records) about three times as often as he did the New Testament, and the rhythms of the King James Version run throughout his speeches, his writings, and, it seems, his conversation.
Lincoln’s first contact with Jews, in the persons of store owners in Kentucky and Illinois, may have been due to such “insinuations.” But his most important Jewish connection was with a fellow lawyer, Abraham Jonas, who was born in England and had come to the United States in 1819. Jonas’s law practice in Quincy, Illinois was in the same building as Congregation B’nai Abraham, which his family had helped establish. The two lawyers became political allies, fellow admirers of Henry Clay. Both campaigned for the Whig party, were elected to the state legislature, and became active in the anti-slavery Republican party after its founding in 1854. Jonas, apparently no mean politician himself, championed Lincoln, helped organize his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, and worked to propel him into the presidency in 1860. Once in office, Lincoln, who called Jonas “one of my most valued friends,” made him a postmaster—a patronage position—in Quincy, and after Jonas’s death appointed his widow to the position lest the family be left without income.
much more at link..
You can see an account of the death and autopsy by Lincoln’s family physician in With Firmness in the Right: Lincoln and the Jews, a fine new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. The handwritten pages are blotched with brown stains— likely Lincoln’s blood. Since it was widely noted that the president had been shot on the day marking the crucifixion of Jesus, the spilling of his blood became imbued with religious resonance. In New York, Congressman James A. Garfield (to become, in 1881, the second U.S. president assassinated) stated: “It may be almost impious to say it, but it does seem that Lincoln’s death parallels that of the son of God.”
Unfortunately, the Christian parallel also prompted some to indulge in the world’s most ancient slander. The Chicago Tribune characterized the assassination as “the most horrid crime ever committed on this globe since the wicked Jews crucified the savior.” Also invoking venerable canards was Lincoln’s successor, Vice President Andrew Johnson. Excoriating Judah P. Benjamin, who had served as attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state in the Confederacy, as “a sneaking, Jewish, unconscionable traitor,” and citing the apostle John’s account of the crucifixion, Johnson placed Benjamin in “that tribe that parted the garments of our savior and for his vesture cast lots.”
For American Jews, Lincoln’s death was associated not with Good Friday but with the simultaneous holiday of Passover and not with Jesus but with Moses, who had liberated his people from slavery but was unable to lead them into the promised land. Many learned of Lincoln’s death on Saturday morning while on their way to Sabbath services. Adolphus S. Solomons, an Orthodox printer and bookseller in Washington DC who had managed Lincoln’s inaugural ball in 1861, noted that “it was the Israelites’ privilege here, as well as elsewhere, to be the first to offer in their places of worship, prayers for the repose of the soul of Mr. Lincoln.” At Temple Emanu-El in New York the congregation rose as one at the news and recited in unison the kaddish memorial prayer. Rabbi Elkan Cohen of San Francisco’s Emanu-El, hearing the news as he mounted the pulpit to deliver his sermon, “was so overcome,” reads one report, “that, bursting in tears, he sank almost senseless.”
The exhibition offers a sampling of synagogue eulogies. “We should regard Abraham Lincoln,” said Rabbi Benjamin Szold of Baltimore, “as a son of Israel.” Another eulogist was Lewis Naphtali Dembitz of Louisville, uncle of the future Supreme Court justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis and a Republican leader so devoted to Lincoln’s political creed that he named one son after Henry Clay, the young Lincoln’s political idol, and another after Lincoln himself. Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, of Cincinnati, who had initially jeered at Lincoln’s election (“one of the greatest blunders a nation can commit”), only to become an ardent admirer (“the greatest man that ever sprung from mortal loins”), claimed that Lincoln had once confided to him that he was “bone from our bone and flesh from our flesh” and supposed himself “a descendant of Hebrew parentage.”
Since there is no other evidence supporting such a statement, Lincoln might have been speaking metaphorically. But his ancestors, as the exhibition points out, included New England Calvinists who bore names straight out of the Hebrew Bible. As the Puritans tended to emphasize Hebrew Scripture in general, alluded to their settling in the New World as a sign of the restoration of Israel (and in some cases even imagined Hebrew as the future American language), some aspect of their feelings of kinship may have passed down through the generations. Although Lincoln himself famously belonged to no church, he quoted the Hebrew Bible (the exhibition records) about three times as often as he did the New Testament, and the rhythms of the King James Version run throughout his speeches, his writings, and, it seems, his conversation.
Lincoln’s first contact with Jews, in the persons of store owners in Kentucky and Illinois, may have been due to such “insinuations.” But his most important Jewish connection was with a fellow lawyer, Abraham Jonas, who was born in England and had come to the United States in 1819. Jonas’s law practice in Quincy, Illinois was in the same building as Congregation B’nai Abraham, which his family had helped establish. The two lawyers became political allies, fellow admirers of Henry Clay. Both campaigned for the Whig party, were elected to the state legislature, and became active in the anti-slavery Republican party after its founding in 1854. Jonas, apparently no mean politician himself, championed Lincoln, helped organize his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, and worked to propel him into the presidency in 1860. Once in office, Lincoln, who called Jonas “one of my most valued friends,” made him a postmaster—a patronage position—in Quincy, and after Jonas’s death appointed his widow to the position lest the family be left without income.
much more at link..