Judah Benjamin was the most politically powerful, and arguably the most important, American Jew of the nineteenth century. He was also the most widely hated one, not only in the North but in portions of the South. Benjamin does not deserve our admiration; but like some other figures who have yoked their lives to deplorable causes, he nevertheless deserves our attention. Benjamin was an immigrant striver, like Alexander Hamilton, born like Hamilton in the West Indies and raised in poverty. And he was a Jew in a country where Jews did not occupy important public positions. Yet he shot to the highest levels of law and politics through the sheer force of his brilliance, charm, and bottomless capacity for work. Under other circumstances we would regard Benjamin as an exemplar of the American art of assimilation; but it was to the South, and to the culture of slaverv. that he assimilated. Book jacket.

This biography was acclaimed by The New York Times as "deeply interesting" and "an absorbing account" of the life of the man called "the brains of the Confederacy". 16 pages of illustrations.

A rare Sephardic Jew in the Old South and a favorite of Jefferson Davis, Judah P. Benjamin has been described as “the brains of the Confederacy.” He held three successive Confederate cabinet posts—attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state—but some have questioned Benjamin’s loyalty to Davis and the extent of his influence. More than 140 years after Benjamin first appeared on the Confederate scene, historians still debate his place in the history of the Lost Cause. Robert Douthat Meade’s absorbing account of the life of this enigmatic Civil War figure, who built a second brilliant career in England after the war, remains the definitive study of Benjamin.

Reveals the breadth of Jewish participation in the American Civil War on the Confederate side. Rosen describes the Jewish communities in the South and explains their reasons for supporting the South. He relates the experiences of officers, enlisted men, politicians, rabbis and doctors.

An easy-to-read description of the basic tools found in a toolbox.

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A moral examination of one of the first Jewish senators, confidante to Jefferson Davis, and champion of the cause of slavery Judah P. Benjamin (1811–1884) was a brilliant and successful lawyer in New Orleans, and one of the first Jewish members of the U.S. Senate. He then served in the Confederacy as secretary of war and secretary of state, becoming the confidant and alter ego of Jefferson Davis. In this new biography, author James Traub grapples with the difficult truth that Benjamin, who was considered one of the greatest legal minds in the United States, was a slave owner who deployed his oratorical skills in defense of slavery. How could a man as gifted as Benjamin, knowing that virtually all serious thinkers outside the American South regarded slavery as the most abhorrent of practices, not see that he was complicit with evil? This biography makes a serious moral argument both about Jews who assimilated to Southern society by embracing slave culture and about Benjamin himself, a man of great resourcefulness and resilience who would not, or could not, question the practice on which his own success, and that of the South, was founded.