The Civil War:

Why Would a ‘Nice Jewish Boy’ Join the Confederate Army?

By Marcia Levy

When examining the early history of the Jews in the South, some questions inevitably arise: What motivated Jews to enlist in the Confederate army? Why, with a long history of persecution including enslavement in Egypt, were southern Jews ready to fight for a cause that believed in the perpetuation of slavery?

Most Jews came to America to seek the freedoms which were not granted to them in their native countries. At the time of the Civil War, there were approximately 150,000 Jews living here. Of these, the majority lived in the North and supported the Union; however, about 25,000 lived in the South and were supporters of the Confederacy. One explanation for this loyalty to the Confederacy may be found in the words of the eminent Jewish historian Rabbi Jacob Rader Marcus, who wrote that the southern Jew was a “regional type … He could not escape his environment; the pattern he followed was the pattern of a host of Southerners.”

By the 1860s, many southern Jews had achieved a degree of financial security—some were themselves slaveholders. In addition, they benefited from the fact that prejudice which might have been directed toward Jews was focused primarily on blacks in the Old South. Like other members of their white communities, the southern Jews did not want to jeopardize their socio-economic position; thus they supported secession and were willing to contribute both men and money to the war effort.

A. E. Frankland, a prominent Jew who lived in Memphis during the Civil War, recorded the participation of a number of Memphis Jews in the Confederate army in his Fragments of History. The following excerpt is taken from this document, dated 1889-1890.

“At the outbreak of the civil war each section furnished as many Jews, according to ratio of population, as did any other class, of course. As was quite natural, they sided with the section that was their birthplace and their home. They volunteered as cheerful and served as patriotically as any other citizen, and were always to be found at the front. Many of them, alas, too many, gave up their lives in the struggle.

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