The Rabbi Who Seceded From the South

jewish-pride:

Jewish communal leaders, worried about provoking an anti-Semitic
reaction against their exposed congregations, tried to keep a low
political profile in an America increasingly prone to explode in
political violence. They were religious refugees in a place that offered
them shelter and they did not want to relive the strife of Europe.

An exception to this rule was Rabbi David Einhorn of Baltimore.
Einhorn had moved to the United States when the Austrian authorities
closed his synagogue. Einhorn was a Reformed rabbi, and the government
saw his preaching as endorsing the democratic ideas of the Revolution of
1848. So Einhorn had to go.

…

Against this background of violence from pro-slavery mobs and
disapproval from some in his own congregation, Rabbi Einhorn took the
wolf by the ears when he learned that a New York rabbi had published
remarks endorsing slavery as authorized by God in the Torah.

In an act of bravery that exposed him to great personal risk, Einhorn
wrote in response to the use of the Holy Bible to endorse slavery:

Is it anything else but a deed of …rebellion against God to enslave
human beings created in his own image and to degrade them…? Is it
anything else but an act of ruthless and wicked violence to reduce
defenseless human beings to a condition of merchandise and relentlessly
to tear them away from the hearts of husbands, wives, parents, and
children?

It has ever been a strategy of the advocate of a bad cause to take
refuge from the spirit of the Bible [in] its letter. Can that book
hallow the enslavement of any race… Can that book justify the violent
separation of a child from its human mother?²

Einhorn dismissed the New York rabbi’s argument that slavery was
justified by its long history stretching back to Abraham. “Does a
disease,” he asked, “cease to be an evil on account of its long
duration?”³

Einhorn would be one of the first rabbis to connect the fight for
racial equality to the protection of all minorities. He saw
abolitionism, the protection of the Irish against anti-immigrant Know
Nothings, and the struggle of the Jews for civil equality as being all
of the same cloth. No minority could be safe as long as it was safe to
attack another minority. His words were published widely and he
attracted the notice of Southern partisans.

In April 1861, following the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in
Charleston Harbor, riots enveloped Einhorn’s city and the rabbi became a
target of the mob. Rioters destroyed the printing press that had
published his anti-slavery essay and the rabbi’s life was threatened. He
was forced to flee north.

When order was restored, Einhorn’s synagogue told him that he would
only be welcomed back if he agreed to stay as silent as the other rabbis
on the slave question. He refused, and instead embarked on a rabbinic
career in Philadelphia and New York that made him a leading light of the
Reform movement in American Judaism.

The Rabbi Who Seceded From the South