This Chanukah season contains two significant anniversaries of events in the history of the U.S. Jewish community. Both of them involved struggle for Jewish freedom, embodying much of the historical theme of the holiday’s story.
This month includes the 150th anniversary of the greatest act of official anti-Jewish prejudice ever committed in the United States. During the Civil War, on Dec. 17, 1862, Union General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No. 11, which stated:
“The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.”
Grant apparently issued this order in anger over an incident that exemplified a phenomenon he hated. Because of the blockade of the Confederacy, cotton was scarce in the north and elsewhere, its price was high, and the rebel states had tons of it just sitting around. The temptation to profit from this situation proved irresistible to many northern businessmen — and even to political officials and some soldiers — although the trade was illegal because it helped finance the Confederate war effort. Grant and most other Union generals despised this trade and its participants, but it continued despite all efforts to stop it.
One businessman seeking to participate was Grant’s father, Jesse. He showed up in Grant’s camp — then in Holly Springs, Miss. — with some members of the Mack family, Cincinnati clothing manufacturers. Apparently, Jesse had made a deal with the Macks that involved getting the general to provide a permit to purchase cotton. Grant was furious at this attempt to exploit him; and that the Macks were Jews seemed to add something to his rage.
The measure was meant to cover a huge area under Grant’s command, but apparently — as described in Bertram W. Korn’s 1951 book “American Jewry and the Civil War” — it was enforced only in some areas of Mississippi and Kentucky. Moreover, the offense didn’t last long. A delegation of Jews from Paducah, Ky., met with President Abraham Lincoln; and at Lincoln’s command a telegram revoking the order was sent to Grant on Jan. 4, 1863.
Several features of this story leap out at us today. It is remarkable that Grant targeted all Jews, instead of all the illegal cotton traders, most of whom were not Jews. Civil War historian Bruce Catton in “This Hallowed Ground” wrote that Grant was reflecting a stereotypic view of Jews common in the whole country at that time.
It is remarkable that Grant later on made clear that he regretted issuing this order. After he won the presidency in 1868, he released a letter stating: “I have no prejudice against sect or race, but want each individual to be judged by his own merit. Order No. 11 does not sustain this statement, I admit, but then I do not sustain that order.” He proved a friend of the Jewish community during his White House tenure.
It is remarkable that this incident, shocking as it was then and now, was as relatively mild as it was compared to the outrages Jews were suffering at that time in Czarist Russia, where anti-Semitism was official government policy.
But perhaps most amazing of all is that American Jews even then were not afraid to go to the nation’s capital, confront the U.S. President, make a demand for just treatment, and receive it. No Jew in Russia, then or later, could have gone to Moscow to demand justice from that country’s leaders.
And that brings us to the second anniversary. On Dec. 6, 1987, 25 years ago, about 250,000 Jews from all over the U.S. and from Canada gathered in Washington to demand justice and freedom for the Jews trapped and discriminated against in the then Soviet Union.
This event — officially the National Mobilization for Soviet Jews, but also known as “Freedom Sunday” — was organized by the Summit Task Force, a coalition of seven national Jewish organizations, on the occasion of a summit meeting between President Ronald Reagan and then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It proved to be the largest demonstration of Jews in all of American Jewish history. Indeed, more Jews were there on that day than lived in the whole United States during the Civil War.
Some 450 of them came from Wisconsin. The Milwaukee Jewish Council — the ancestor organization of today’s Jewish Community Relations Council of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation — chartered two airplanes to bring 331 from Milwaukee. Another 70 came by bus and van from Madison, and another 50 came by private means.
And I was there, traveling with the Milwaukee group to cover the event for The Chronicle (issue of Dec. 11, 1987). In my journalism career, I have met some history-making people — composer Aaron Copland, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel, Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kolleck, American Jewish feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, among others. But “Freedom Sunday” was the only time I saw history happening before my eyes. It was one of the high points of my career and life.
However, according to an opinion article by Daniel Eisenstadt and Michael Granoff provided by JTA this past September, “this success story” of the movement to liberate Soviet Jewry that climaxed on that day “has not been integrated into our contemporary Jewish narrative or our understanding of American history. Few under the age of 30 know it ever happened.”
And so Eisenstadt and Granoff created an organization called Freedom 25, a coalition of more than a dozen organizations “committed to help refocus Americans generally and North American Jewry specifically on this history and its lessons.” Its website is www.freedom25.net.
Chanukah this year begins the evening of Dec. 8. As we light the first of the eight candles, it would be good to remember not just the recapture, cleansing, and rededication of the Second Temple in 164 B.C.E., but also these two more recent events. There are common lessons in all of them. As Eisenstadt and Granoff wrote, “As a community, we are strongest when we stand together. As a people, we must never stay silent when Jews are in need.”
Chag same’ach.
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