{"id":70104,"date":"2015-06-26T08:31:36","date_gmt":"2015-06-26T16:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=70104"},"modified":"2015-06-26T08:37:46","modified_gmt":"2015-06-26T16:37:46","slug":"are-jews-gays-typically-on-the-side-of-equality-or-hierarchy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=70104","title":{"rendered":"Are Jews & Gays Typically On The Side Of Equality Or Hierarchy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Sailer writes<\/a>: “Like Jews, gays down through history have typically been more likely to be on the side of inequality and hierarchy.”<\/p>\n

Comments to Steve Sailer:<\/p>\n

* Given that the South has apparently been the least anti-semitic region of the U.S. historically, when and why did the meme start that the South is full of Jew-hating rednecks? This impression persists strongly in the minds of Jews to the present day.
\nMy first exposure to it was when I, as child in the 70s, saw a made-for-TV movie about the murder of two Jewish civil rights workers in Mississippi.<\/p>\n

* It\u2019s probably due to the strong Christian religiosity of Southern culture that\u2019s automatically assumed to be anti-Semitic in the minds of Jews, specially liberal, culturally Jewish types.<\/p>\n

Christianity is sorta like psychological Kryptonite to Jewish people; it weakens their ability to think logically and reasonably.<\/p>\n

Personally, I never could understand why so many Jews continues to move to \u201cChristian\u201d countries full of symbols and history they detest so much when they have their own country that is fully Jewish and prosperous.<\/p>\n

* Southerners found obnoxious the post-World War II Jewish interference with the Southern cultural structures that were designed to curtail Black crime. The Jewish attitude toward the South changed before the Southern attitude toward the Jews did.<\/p>\n

* Homosexuality has never been approved of, because most societies want to produce more children. But yes, they do have superior social skills (on average), being feminine, and they can often use those to be manipulators\u2013just like many straights would like to.<\/p>\n

* Big difference between the handful of Sephardic Jews who inhabited the antebellum South and the Russian Jews who flooded the north in the 2oth century.<\/p>\n

* It was not a meme, the South became more anti-Semitic when anti-South Jews showed up. When Jews instead of supporting the justice system used their money and power to get Leo Frank off death row and when left wing northern Jews came south to oppose everything that Southerners believed.<\/p>\n

From Forward.com, Jews either supported slavery or kept silent<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Whenever I told someone that I was working on an exhibition called \u201cPassages Through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War,\u201d I typically got two responses. Both reflect the need for the exhibit (now on display at Yeshiva University Museum in New York), which presents the widely forgotten story of the full participation of Jews in the nation\u2019s great existential crisis.
\nMy sister\u2019s reaction was typical: There were Jews in the Civil War? Who knew?
\nThe second most common response was in some ways more interesting: The Jews who fought in the Civil War were against slavery, right? The discomfiting answer: not so much.<\/p>\n

Some Jews owned slaves, a few traded them, and the livelihoods of many, North and South, were inextricably bound to the slave system. Most southern Jews defended slavery, and some went further, advocating its expansion.
\nNotable among these was Judah P. Benjamin, labeled by the abolitionist Ben Wade, who served with Benjamin in the U.S. Senate, as \u201can Israelite with Egyptian principles.\u201d Even in the North, many sympathized with the South and only a very few were abolitionists. Almost all Jews sought peace above all else. Until the war was at hand, they remained silent on the subject.<\/p>\n

* NEW YORK\u2019S PRO-SLAVERY RABBI<\/a><\/p>\n

Next week, thousands of people will crowd into Congregation B\u2019nai Jeshurun at 88th Street in Manhattan for Kol Nidre services. It\u2019s a safe bet that the rabbis at one of the country\u2019s most politically progressive synagogues will sermonize about social justice, the stagnant Israeli-Palestinian peace process, or the upcoming presidential election: After all, this is a congregation that hung an anti-torture banner in the sanctuary during the Bush Administration.<\/p>\n

B\u2019nai Jeshurun is justly proud of its liberal pedigree\u2014and a look at the synagogue\u2019s website indicates that it has always been on the right side of history. The synagogue was formed in 1824-25 when a group of Ashkenazi members of Shearith Israel, which had been New York\u2019s only synagogue for nearly 100 years, split off to create a fully egalitarian community by drastically lowering required contributions and instituting an executive committee whose membership rotated every three months. Rabbi Israel Goldstein carried that mantle in the first half of the 20th century, and later the synagogue hosted Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and Abraham Joshua Heschel.<\/p>\n

But missing from this history is the congregation\u2019s first prominent spiritual leader: Rabbi Morris Raphall. A celebrated biblical and rabbinic scholar, during the mid-1800s Raphall was the leading rabbi not only in New York\u2014then the home of a quarter of the nation\u2019s Jews\u2014but in the country. He lectured extensively across the United States and was the only rabbi prior to the Civil War to be invited to make a congressional benediction. So, why has B\u2019nai Jeshurun all but forgotten him?<\/p>\n

Perhaps because Raphall was an outspoken proponent of slavery.<\/p>\n

I encountered Raphall and his many sermons, lectures, and toasts\u2014he seemed to appear at every religious and fraternal Jewish event\u2014in researching the early history of New York Jewry for a new book. So, I was intrigued with his near disappearance from American Jewish history, and from the history of such an important synagogue. To understand this historical gap, we must return to Jan. 4, 1861, a bitterly cold day in New York City.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

That evening, the chill outside only highlighted the contrast with the nation\u2019s sizzling political temperature. South Carolina had already seceded, and six more states were poised to do so in the following weeks. President Buchanan\u2019s efforts at preservation of the Union were weak and unavailing, while President-Elect Lincoln would not budge from his position against the extension of slavery into the American territories. The nation was beginning to unravel.<\/p>\n

Into this breach stepped Raphall. Perhaps fearing what national disunion would do to America\u2019s Jewish community, Raphall stood in his sanctuary on that blustery Friday evening and delivered a sermon that would resound throughout the United States. Addressing his congregants on the issue of the Bible and slavery, Raphall stated that while he was no \u201cfriend to slavery in the abstract\u201d and even less \u201cto the practical working of slavery,\u201d his personal feelings were not germane. Slavery, he argued, was the oldest form of social relationship aside from family ties.<\/p>\n

Raphall\u2019s position on the subject wasn\u2019t surprising in the context of his overall conservative bent. He opposed the nascent women\u2019s rights movement, publicly encouraging women to \u201cmeekly rest content with [the] humble lot\u201d that God chose for them. Though a follower of Moses Mendelssohn\u2019s belief in the Jewish enlightenment\u2014a doctrine that allowed Jews to participate in modern society within a traditional framework\u2014he vehemently preached that the Reform movement, which in the early 1850s was headquartered in New York, posed a mortal threat to the survival of Judaism.<\/p>\n

And his politics very likely reflected the views of his congregants. From its modest beginnings as a congregation of a few hundred Jews, the congregation grew larger and wealthier over time. By 1850 it had moved to Greene Street in the fashionable Washington Square neighborhood, where its members raised $50,000 (churches in that day generally cost less than $20,000 to build) to erect a sanctuary with a 56-foot-high dome featuring windows with ornamented paintings. By 1861, a community founded under the aura of Jewish Jeffersonian republicanism had been replaced by an affluent, conservative membership\u2014one that was able to pay Raphall the princely salary of $2,000 per year.<\/p>\n

It was in that domed sanctuary that Raphall delivered his notorious sermon. After his opening disclaimer, he turned to Jewish scripture, declaring that the biblical verse where God commands an owner to give Sabbath rest to \u201cthy male slave and thy female slave,\u201d clearly condoned slavery. He also stated that the Bible differentiated between Hebrew bondsmen, whose servitude was limited, and non-Hebrew slaves and their progeny, who were to remain bondsmen during the lives of their master, his children, and his children\u2019s children. Non-Hebrew slaves, he argued, could be compared to black slaves in the American South. Hebraic law permitted masters to discipline their slaves, short of murder or disfigurement, and required that a slave absconding from South Carolina to New York must be a restored to his owner as would a slave who had fled from Dan to Beersheba. The Jewish law that forbade Hebrews from returning an escaped slave, by Raphall\u2019s lights, only referred to slaves fleeing from foreign lands.<\/p>\n

Responding to Reverend Henry Ward Beecher\u2019s assertion that the Bible actually opposed slavery, Raphall proclaimed: \u201cHow dare you, in the face and sanction and protection afforded to slave property in the Ten Commandments, how dare you denounce slaveholding as a sin?\u201d What right \u201cdo you have to insult and exasperate thousands of God-fearing, law-abiding citizens,\u201d he said, equating a citizen of the South with the status of a murderer. While he cautioned southerners to guard their bondsman from sexual aggression, hunger, and excess demands of their labor, Raphall emphatically contended that the biblical sanction of slave property remained relevant in 1861.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

His words created a sensation. Three New York newspapers printed the complete sermon, and the New York Times published lengthy excerpts. The Rev. Hugh Brown of East Salem, N.Y., observed, \u201cthe impressions on the minds of some is, that he must know the Hebrew of the Bible so profoundly that it is absolutely impossible for him to be mistaken on the subject of slavery; and that what he affirms respecting it is as true almost as the world of God itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two weeks later, Raphall gave his sermon as a speech before members of the Democratic Party and the pro-South American Society for Promotion of National Unity. In attendance were advocates of national reconciliation in harmony with southern demands, including the banker August Belmont, and prominent pro-slavery Jews from Richmond, Montgomery, and New Orleans. The artist and inventor Samuel B. Morse presided. Dr. Bernard Ilowy of Baltimore, highly respected for his biblical expertise, endorsed Raphall\u2019s position. Rabbi Simon Tuska of Mobile, Ala., stated that his sermon contained \u201cthe most forceful arguments in justification of the slavery of the African race.\u201d Southern sympathizers dispersed the discourse throughout the nation.<\/p>\n

In his opinion on Lincoln and the issue of slavery, Raphall was not alone among Jewish leaders. Diplomat, playwright, and journalist Mordecai M. Noah, the \u201cmost important Jew in America\u201d during the 1830s and 1840s, according to his biographer Jonathan D. Sarna, wrote that blacks were \u201canatomically and mentally inferior to the white\u201d and could find contentment only in servile labor. Noah dreaded the thought of a slave revolt and viciously condemned abolitionists. Emmanuel Hart, the first Jewish congressman from New York in the 1850s, was a leader of the conservative \u201chunker\u201d Democrats, a faction that opposed any agitation against slavery and worked to uphold the interests of the slaveholding states. Editor Robert Lyon of the Asmonean, a self-described progressive who hired Reform Judaism\u2019s leading proponent, Isaac Mayer Wise, as his literary editor, endorsed James Buchanan in 1856 as a \u201cprogressionist,\u201d defended the Fugitive Slave Act, and called abolitionists \u201cthe foul Fiend which stalks among us.\u201d Lyon included among the abolitionists both \u201cFrederick Douglass the ******,\u201d and a \u201cheterogeneous stew of fanatics and imposters.\u201d The notion of black suffrage was, he said, \u201cpreposterous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, many in the North were outraged by Raphall\u2019s view. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison published a poem that asked Raphall \u201cHas thou forgot the sorrows of thy race.\u201d Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, recommended that Raphall endure \u201ctwenty-four hours of the Spanish inquisition\u201d to \u201cmaterially open his eyes\u201d to the realities of slavery. And a significant minority of Republican Jews hazarded their careers to take on the Democratic establishment. Many, though not all, were centered at Manhattan\u2019s Reform synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, whose beliefs no longer required either a literalist or rabbinic interpretation of Jewish scripture. Michael Heilprin of Brooklyn, a biblical scholar versed in the new biblical criticism central to the Reform movement, expressed regret that Raphall\u2019s \u201csacrilegious\u201d ideas had not vanished among the \u201cscum.\u201d Heilprin termed the morals of slavery\u2019s defenders \u201cdepraved\u201d and the minds of their \u201cmammon\u2013worshiping followers \u2026 debauched.\u201d Citing German Jewish scholars, Heilprin challenged the literalist, ahistorical approach to Jewish texts behind Raphall\u2019s reasoning. Raphall, he contended, misconstrued even the biblical word for servant. (The word Raphall translated as slave also designated court officers and royal ambassadors.) B\u2019nai Jeshurun\u2019s rabbi also overlooked Moses\u2019 words to the Israelites: \u201cForget not that ye have been slaves in Egypt.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Heilprin represented a minority outlook. Raphall\u2019s sermon reflected the interests of a majority of New York Jewry\u2019s interests: New York\u2019s booming economy, the cause of the recent wealth of many of the city\u2019s most prominent Jewish citizens, including many members of B\u2019nai Jeshurun, was tied to the southern trade; a civil war threatened personal catastrophe. Moreover, many Jews were in the garment industry, a trade directly attached to the South. Jews also resented the seemingly ever-present Protestant missionaries bent on converting the Jews. Strong-willed Protestantism and the Republican Party were seen as deeply conjoined. Furthermore, Jews feared that their political liberty, greater in America than any other part of the world, would be threatened if the Constitution, which they identified with the Union, were to fall. Compromise was the better solution, even if it meant giving in to Southern demands. Thus, along with the rest of New York City, Jews in 1860 voted more than two to one against Lincoln and the Republican Party.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

After war broke out, Raphall strongly condemned rebellious southerners as committing \u201ca sin before God.\u201d He met personally with Lincoln, and his son enlisted and was badly wounded. However, as hostilities continued, month after month and then year after year, Raphall\u2019s early patriotism turned to blame for both sides: \u201cDemagogues, fanatics and a party press\u201d of North and South had, he said, mired the republic in \u201cthe third year of a destructive but needless sectional war which has armed brother against brother and consigned hundreds of thousands to an untimely grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was no great meaning to the conflict, according to Raphall, only a tragic failure of American politics. This was far different the viewpoint of Dr. Samuel Adler of Temple Emanu-El, who considered the combat not a failure of the Constitution, but an opportunity to fashion a grand transformation, to purge the nation of its greatest sin, to \u201cdiscover the root of our national malady [slavery] and, having found it, tear it from the body.\u201d In crushing the \u201cunholy rebellion,\u201d Jews shared in the responsibility to advocate \u201cthe eternal immutable principles of liberty and the inalienable rights of man.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following the death of Rabbi Raphall in 1868, B\u2019nai Jeshurun began a move toward reform, joining the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and its politics began to shift. Today, it is unaffiliated, and it is famously charitable, having helped the mass immigration of hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews.<\/p>\n

Morris Raphall clearly does not represent B\u2019nai Jeshurun in the 20th or 21st century. His views on race and women\u2019s place in society are the opposite of those embraced by today\u2019s members. Yet in omitting from its website its first eminent leader, a rabbi-scholar who arguably became the nation\u2019s most prominent Jew of the 1850s and 1860s, B\u2019nai Jeshurun gives an incomplete picture of both its evolution\u2014and that of the American Jewish community as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Sailer writes: “Like Jews, gays down through history have typically been more likely to be on the side of inequality and hierarchy.” Comments to Steve Sailer: * Given that the South has apparently been the least anti-semitic region of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homophobia","category-jews"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70104"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70113,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70104\/revisions\/70113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}