...1531, Pope Clement VII gave the Portuguese their very own inquisition, so they could keep up with the Spanish Joneses next door.
...1862, General U.S. Grant decided to stop black marketeering in the areas under his command by issuing General Order No. 11, banishing Teh Jooos from Kentucky and the parts of Tennessee and Mississippi that were currently being shot up by bluecoats.
...1944, the
...1970, government troops opened fire into a crowd of workers in Gdynia, Poland, triggering rioting across the country.
...1973 cowardly Palestinian terrorists shot up Leonardo da Vinci airport in Rome.
...1983 cowardly Irish terrorists bomb Harrod's department store in London.
In re: Grant and General Order No. 11: He was forced to revoke it several weeks later when Lincoln got wind of it. Grant later claimed it was written by a subordinate and he signed it without reading it. Perhaps this is the truth; certainly it seems to foreshadow how his Presidential administration would be run. (While he was a good judge of military character, he was a lousy judge of character in general.)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Grant's original intent in issuing the order was supposedly restricted to Jewish cotton traders (who were in fact causing a problem, because by purchasing cotton from Southerners in Grant's area of operations, they were giving aid and comfort to the enemy). Unfortunately, whoever drafted the order broadened that to Jews in general. Perhaps that was the fault of an overzealous subordinate -- which still doesn't excuse Grant from signing something he didn't read first.
General order #11. Actually, Grant knew exactly what the Southern Jews were doing, which was getting as much hard cash as possible for the country they loved, that had treated them so well.
ReplyDeleteThe trade was conducted exclusively in hard currency rather than military scrip, and paid for the Enfield muskets, the Whitworth sniping rifles, the timed artillery fuses that kept the Confederate army in the field.
Another one of those great History Channel documentaries, about the southern Jews, and how well they'd integrated in the south before the war.
I remember one southern gentleman being interviewed, who explained that in Charleston, one was a southerner and a Jew the way one was a southerner and an Episcopalian or Presbyterian.
Mixed socials between the temple and nearby churches and common good works projects were the norm.
He mentioned how his great-great-grandfather had come to Charleston in the 1840's and opened a drygoods store.
When any of the locals had a bible debate going that couldn't be decided by throwing scripture at each other, it always ended in "All right then, let's go down and let the Jew decide".
You could see him choke up as he showed the picture of the great-grandfather who had lost an arm at Chickamauga, and who had buried a younger brother killed in action a few months later.
He even confessed to a certain annoyance at "pushy" northern Jews who so often acted in an awkward, "unsouthern" way.
I don't doubt for a minute that southern Jews struck the best bargain they could get out of the Yankees, even knowing that most of it would be taxed away from them by a Confederacy desperate for hard cash.
I'm also certain they kept their eyes open for anything of military interest to the south, and kept their Yankee colonels well lubricated and chatting. I would expect nothing less from a people of their intellect.
I was a navy brat as a kid, and moved around quite a bit. When we were stationed at Floyd Bennett Field in New York City, the teachers were fond of quoting Mordechai Sheftel, a Jewish patriot during the revolution.
He died in poverty, after giving America all his fortune and the life of his only son, Sheftel Sheftel.
The south had Judah P. Benjamin holding the government together long after it would have stopped working without him. It had battlefield heroes like Major Adolph Proskauer of the 12th Alabama at Gettysburg, the six Cohen brothers of the 40th North Carolina Battalion, and their cousin Albert Lurie Moses, who died as regimental standard bearer.
The Jews gave their new homeland Generals like West Pointer Abraham Myers, the crafty old indian fighter Fort Myers is named after. And fighting colonels like Ira Moses, S.M.Hymans, and Edwin Kunsheedt.
"The Fighting Surgeon of the 3rd Carolina" at second Manassas was named Simon Baruch. His son Bernard went on to do rather well for himself also. As a reknowned surgeon in New York City after the war, he was well known for his southern simpathies, and even cut loose with a rebel yell in the Metropolitan Opera when the band struck up Dixie at his entrance.
My favorite southern Jew has to be Moses Jacob Ezekiel. He was arguably the greatest sculptor of the 19th century, and was lionized throughout Europe in the 1870's through 1890's.
But to his dying day, he was still one of those desperate young VMI cadets who made that insane bayonet assault on the Yankee artillery at New Market. A confidant of kings and emperors, he remained the son of a woman who said "I would disown any son who declined to fight for the Confederacy".
His dying request was that his body be sent home to Virginia, to be buried in southern soil among his comrades from the war.
His epitaph? "We were not fighting for the perpetuation of slavery, but for the principle of States Rights and Free Trade, and in defense of our homes which were being ruthlessly invaded".
After the Civil War, the influx of radicalized Eastern European Ashkenazic Jews swamped the remembrance of what the southern Sephardic Jews gave their adopted country, what one of them referred to as "My sweet new Jerusalem".
Even today, 80% of American Jews vote Democrat, and the American Jew of eastern European ancestry is the intellectual and financial backbone of the American left.
But this country has a certain charm to it, and as they drift out of their urban European ghettos along the coasts, we'll bring them through the rest of the journey their grandfathers started when they left Kiev and Warsaw. I have great hopes for their grandchildren.
I thought it had more to do with Grant's father, Jesse Grant, who just so happened to be traveling with Jewish traders.
ReplyDeleteGrant did not have a good relationship with his family, or so I hear...
Interestingly, General Grant was quoted in the NY Globe as follows:
ReplyDelete"If I thought this war was to abolish slavery, I would resign my commission, and offer my sword to the other side."
--- Ulysses S. Grant
You can reprise one of these, ten days from today.
ReplyDelete--mariner
And worst of all:
ReplyDelete…1979 Me very own Mum said “I do” and married her “insignificant other.”
As bad as that was, I, the official photographer of said blessed(?) occasion, held my tongue and did NOT speak my peace when the JP asked if there were any objections to said marriage.
As an example of how things were to progress from there: The very first thing Mum’s new hubby did upon being handed the duly certified marriage license was to comment on its lack of an expiration date!