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Jews and the Civil War: A Reader. Edited by Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn. (New York and London: New York University Press, c. 2010. Pp. x, 435. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8147-4091-0.)
For students of American Jewish history, the Civil War presents many compelling questions. Given their own ancient history of enslavement, how did American Jews feel about the enslavement of others? How involved were they, as a largely mercantile people, in the slave trade? Did their continual suffering at the hands of European autocrats incline them toward abolition, states' rights, or both? Did the universality of Jewish identity supersede sectional division, or did Jews support their home regions even though doing so brought them into conflict with other Jews? As a primarily immigrant group, how might their support for the North or the South serve as a kind of assimilation meter, a gauge of how rapidly Jews adopted American ideologies?
This antiiology of essays first published between 1948 and 2007 shows that historians have made great inroads toward answering diese important questions. It is perhaps less obvious why such questions should interest scholars of the Civil War or of the American South - that is, what can the Jewish experience teU us about the war itself or about Civil War-era America? Jews and the Civil War: A Reader offers valuable information on this point and shows clearly that the Jewish experience sheds light on many otherwise dark comers of die...