Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery

by Richard Kreitner

Overview

“Despite their own legacy of torment in Egypt, Jews in the U.S. varied in their attitudes toward the slave system, even after it provoked secession and rebellion in their new promised land. This discomfiting anomaly has been probed by scholars . . . but the topic has never been dissected with the depth, panache and feel for character that animate Mr. Kreitner’s revelatory Fear No Pharaoh . . . [An] engrossing book.” —Harold Holzer, The Wall Street Journal

“Riveting . . . While surfacing fascinating new details . . . Kreitner also points to intriguing ways in which the slavery debate spurred reflection on assimilation vs. insularity that defined the next century of Jewish American thought. Readers will be engrossed.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A dramatic history of how American Jews reckoned with slavery—and fought the Civil War.

Since ancient times, the Jewish people have recalled the story of Exodus and reflected on the implications of having been slaves. Did the tradition teach that Jews should speak out against slavery and oppression everywhere, or act cautiously to protect themselves in a hostile world?

In Fear No Pharaoh, the journalist and historian Richard Kreitner sets this question at the heart of the Civil War era. Using original sources, he tells the intertwined stories of six American Jews who helped to shape a tumultuous time, including Judah Benjamin, the brilliant, secretive lawyer who became Jefferson Davis’s trusted confidante; Morris Raphall, a Swedish-born rabbi who defended slavery as biblically justified; and Raphall’s rival rabbis—the celebrated Isaac Mayer Wise, who urged Jews to stay out of the slavery controversy to avoid attracting attention, and David Einhorn, whose fiery sermons condemning bondage led to a pro-slavery mob threatening his life. We also meet August Bondi, a veteran of Europe’s 1848 revolutions, who fought with John Brown in “Bleeding Kansas” and later in the Union Army, and the Polish émigré Ernestine Rose, a feminist, atheist, and abolitionist who championed “emancipation of all kinds.”

As he tracks these characters, Kreitner illuminates the shifting dynamics of Jewish life in America—and the debates about religion, morality, and politics that endure to this day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374608453
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/01/2025
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Richard Kreitner is the author of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union and Booked: A Traveler’s Guide to Literary Locations Around the World. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Nation, Slate, Raritan, The Baffler, and other publications. He lives in the Hudson Valley, New York.

Editorial Reviews

2025-01-16
Historical examination of a dilemma facing 19th-century Jewish immigrants to the U.S.: Did assimilation require supporting slavery?

As Kreitner observes in opening, many Jews in both the North and the South supported slavery as biblically endorsed, with one New York rabbi asking abolitionists, “Does it not strike you that you are guilty of something very little short of blasphemy?” It did not help that many abolitionists were also fervent evangelists who sought to convert as well as liberate, some of whom “called for altering the Constitution to make America an officially Christian nation.” Kreitner follows the lives of six representative figures, three of them rabbis. Of them, one was opposed to abolition, one wanted Jews to stay out of the argument for their own security, and one was wholeheartedly opposed to slavery. Adding to these are three secular Jews, not especially religious, who took different paths: one a veteran of the European revolutions who came to America in 1848 and fought with John Brown in Bloody Kansas; a socialist named Ernestine Rose, who combined her opposition to slavery with a strong denunciation of “women’s subjugation”; and, best known of all, Judah Benjamin, the slave-owning Louisiana senator who became the most powerful member of Jefferson Davis’ cabinet but who, Kreitner notes, is also “conspicuously absent from the Lost Cause pantheon.” Though it is difficult to generalize from so small a sample, Kreitner makes clear that each was sincere in his or her beliefs: The antislavery rabbi David Einhorn, for instance, held that “Jews fortunate enough to have found refuge in the United States should work to make it better, for everyone,” while Benjamin sought to protect his financial interests even as he recognized that sooner or later the South would have to abandon slavery—and who wisely fled the country at the Civil War’s end.

A welcome contribution to the literature of slavery, the Civil War, and American immigration.

Kirkus Reviews

"If the story of race, slavery and disunion is an old one, Kreitner has found a fresh way to tell it, and he manages to compress a historical panorama of decades into an efficient narrative that never feels rushed or confusing . . . By embracing rather than avoiding such complexities, Kreitner has produced the best book I have ever read about the Jews in 19th-century America." —Benjamin Moser, The New York Times

“Comprehensively researched and vividly written . . . Richard Kreitner’s excellent book displays both our predecessors’ weaknesses and their strengths; it provides more food for thought than ammunition for debate.” —Allan Arkush, Jewish Review of Books

"Engaging . . . Kreitner reminds us as well in his fine book, “we will be even greater here, if we bring about an aristocracy of the spirit, rather than an aristocracy of gold.”" —Stuart Halpern, Commentary

“Richard Kre­it­ner decries the dual­is­tic think­ing that under­lies many con­tem­po­rary reck­on­ings with the role of Jews in the racial his­to­ry of the Unit­ed States . . . enlight­en­ing.” —Michael Hober­man, Jewish Book Council

“[An] excellent work of history . . . Skillfully researched and written . . . Kreitner’s account is vivid, dramatic, peopled with many more closely observed characters than the six protagonists.” —David Mehegan, The Arts Fuse

“Fear No Pharaoh breaks new ground in Civil War history. A superb detective and storyteller, Kreitner not only illuminates the complex lives of nineteenth-century American Jews but also challenges his readers to reflect on the enduring intersection of faith, ethics, and national identity.” —Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

“Not just brilliant—which it is—Fear No Pharaoh eloquently recounts how Jewish Americans, haunted by enslavement, variously responded to America’s besetting sin. Timely, superb, heartrending, not to be missed.” —Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith and The Impeachers

“Lucid and wise, this is the first book to show that the history of Jews and the history of slavery are intersecting stories—tragic as well as heroic. Kreitner leaves no doubt that Jews’ encounter with slavery typified their Americanization. Kreitner has a gift for grabbing the third rails of nineteenth-century American politics and not letting go until it makes sense as well as story.” —David Waldstreicher, author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley

“Nuanced, deeply researched, and engagingly written, Fear No Pharaoh is a work of evenhanded historical narrative that will grip anyone interested in the Civil War or the American Jewish experience.” —Noah Feldman, author of To Be A Jew Today and The Broken Constitution

“Fear No Pharaoh is a marvel of scholarly investigation and humane storytelling. Like all necessary historical narratives, it makes the past look new even as it illuminates secret depths in our own troubled moment.” —Sam Tanenhaus, author of Buckley and Whittaker Chambers

“Fear No Pharoah is a thrill to read. The book is well paced, elegantly composed, and packed with unforgettable characters—some heroes, some villains, most somewhere in between. It’s a rare thing to be able to say with confidence that a nonfiction book ‘needed to be written.’ But: Fear No Pharaoh needed to be written. And we are lucky Richard Kreitner was the writer to do it.” —Samuel Adler Bell, cohost of Know Your Enemy podcast and contributor to The New York Times, New York, and The New Republic

From the Publisher