During the real confederacy, Jews were loyal citizens and played an important role in that society.
Steve Sailer writes:
One group of whites, however, has been immune from the blame game. Everybody knows there were no Jews in the South in 1860, and if there had been any, they no doubt would have all been fierce abolitionists standing up fearlessly for the ancient Jewish value of universalism.
Except …
I was struck by a posting on the New York Times’ blog devoted to the Civil War, “Passover in the Confederacy,” that takes a rare critical rather than kitschy approach to Jewish history.
Sue Eisenfeld writes:
“For many American Jews today, particularly those descended from immigrants coming through Northeast corridors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea that Confederate Jews fought on the side of slavery offends their entire worldview, rooted so deeply in social justice. Even the idea of there being so many Jews in the American South, decades before Ellis Island opened its gates, is a strange idea.”
And yet, the more Eisenfeld digs into her subject, the more she discovers that the assumptions that come so naturally to 21st-century commentators are largely historical myths invented for their ancestors’ political purposes. The reality turns out to be richly ironic.
She turns to Rabbi Lance J. Sussman, a visiting professor of Jewish history at Princeton. Surely Jews, with their ancient regard for the rights of mankind, led the way in protesting black slavery? No, Rabbi Sussman tells her: “Southern Jews and many Northern Jews had no issue with slavery.”
For example, the most prestigious Northern rabbi of the period, Morris Raphall of New York, whose father had been banker to the King of Sweden, defended property rights in slaves as “expressly placed under the protection of the Ten Commandments.”
Indeed, the one pan-Jewish political protest of the Civil War era was their successful appeal against the anti-slavery Union general Ulysses S. Grant for cracking down on Jewish merchants who were undermining the Northern blockade on Confederate cotton exports.
What about Passover as an allegory for the fight against the enslavement of blacks? Surely 19th-century Jews viewed African-Americans much as 21st-century Jews do: as surrogate Jews, oppressed by white gentile power…
Weren’t Jews in the South more victimized by all the bigoted Southern anti-Semites? No. Actually, the slaveholding states were far ahead of the northern states in electing Jews to high office, such as Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin.
In general, Jews were more welcomed by Southern elites. Much as in medieval Poland, where the nobles invited in Jewish merchants to provide them the financial services that their own people were too innumerate to undertake, rich Southern Protestants generally saw themselves as an agrarian warrior class. So Jewish commercial facilitators, such as the slave-owning Lehman Brothers, who founded the future investment bank in Alabama in 1855, tended to be welcomed as complementary to the landowners.
In contrast, rich Northern Protestants, who were generally descendants of literate Puritans, were more likely than their Southern counterparts to be in commerce rather than plantations. So WASP firms competed with Jewish firms on Wall Street. Relations between Jews and Protestants tended to be relatively cordial in both the North and the South, but there was more rivalry in the North, where the Yankees of New England had similar commercial and intellectual skills.
People like Jared Taylor are neo-confederates. According to Wikipedia: “Neo-Confederate is a term used by some to describe the views of various groups and individuals who view the Southern secession, the Confederate States of America, and the Southern United States in a heroic light.”
Wikipedia summarizes neo-confederates beliefs:
Honor of the Confederacy and its veterans — Much of the Neo-Confederate movement is concerned with giving honor to the Confederacy itself, to the veterans of the Confederacy and Confederate veterans’ cemeteries, to the various flags of the Confederacy, and to Southern cultural identity.[1]
Economics — neo-Confederates usually advocate a free market economy which engages in significantly less taxation than currently found in the United States, and which does not revolve around fiat currencies such as the United States Dollar.[2]
History — many neo-Confederates are openly critical of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln to varied degrees, and of the history of Reconstruction. Various authors have written critiques of Lincoln and the Union. Slavery is almost never defended, but it is usually denied as a primary cause of the American Civil War. Critics often accuse Neo-Confederates of “revisionism” and of acting as “apologists”.[3]
The Civil Rights Movement — Historian Nancy MacLean states that Neo-Confederates used the history of the Confederacy to justify their opposition to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.[4] Historian David Blight writes that current neo-Confederates are “driven largely by the desire of current white supremacists to re-legitimize the Confederacy, while they tacitly reject the victories of the modern civil rights movement”.[5]
Black Confederates — The book The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader notes that toward the end of the Twentieth Century, in order to support the idea that the Civil War was not about slavery, Neo-Confederates began to claim that “thousands of African Americans had served in the Confederate army.” A Neo-Confederate publication, Confederate Veteran, said in 1992 that “the overwhelming majority of blacks during the War Between the States supported and defended, with armed resistance, the Cause of Southern Independence.”[6] Historian Bruce Levine says that “their [“neo-Confederates”] insistent celebration these days of ‘Black Confederates’ … seeks to legitimate that claim” that the war “had never [italics in original] been fought on behalf of slavery; loyalty to the South, southern self-government, southern culture, or states rights — rather than to slavery and white supremacy — fueled the southern war effort.”[7]
Culture — many neo-Confederates promote an unabashed Christian culture. They support, for example, public displays of Christianity, such as “Ten Commandments” monuments and displays of the Christian cross.[8] Almost all Neo-Confederates strongly support the right to keep and bear arms, present in both the United States Constitution and the Confederate States Constitution. Generally they oppose unmitigated illegal immigration of foreign nationals into Southern states.[9] Some Neo-Confederates view the Civil War as a conflict between a secular North and a Christian South.[10] Certain Neo-Confederates believe in an Anglo-Celtic identity theory for residents of the South.[11]
Secession — many neo-Confederates openly advocate the resecession of the Southern states and territories which comprised the old Confederate States of America. The League of the South, for example, promotes the “independence of the Southern people” from the “American empire”.[2] Most neo-Confederate groups do not seek violent revolution, but rather an orderly separation, such as was done in the division of Czechoslovakia.[12] With Constitution Act 542, passed on 25 November, they agreed to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia as of 31 December 1992.[12] Many Neo-Confederate groups have prepared for what they view as a possible collapse of the federal United States into its 50 separate states, much like the Soviet Union collapsed, and believe the Confederacy can be resurrected at that time.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center:
The term neo-Confederacy is used to describe twentieth and twenty-first century revivals of pro-Confederate sentiment in the United States. Strongly nativist and advocating measures to end immigration, neo-Confederacy claims to pursue Christianity and heritage and other supposedly fundamental values that modern Americans are seen to have abandoned.
Neo-Confederacy also incorporates advocacy of traditional gender roles, is hostile towards democracy, strongly opposes homosexuality, and exhibits an understanding of race that favors segregation and suggests white supremacy. In many cases, neo-Confederates are openly secessionist.
Neo-Confederacy has applied to groups including the United Daughters of the Confederacy of the 1920s and those resisting racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s. In its most recent iteration, neo-Confederacy is used by both proponents and critics to describe a belief system that has emerged since the early-1980s in publications like Southern Partisan, Chronicles, and Southern Mercury, and in organizations including the League of the South, the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Overall, it is a reactionary conservative ideology that has made inroads into the Republican Party from the political right, and overlaps with the views of white nationalists and other more radical extremist groups.
Most people think that Jews are super pro-black and pro-civil rights. Leftists Jews tend to be pro-black and pro-civil rights. The more religious the Jew, the less he cares about civil rights.
