Outline:
- Introduction.
- Story of
Judah Benjamin.
- Historical
Context.
- Stories
of American Jews in the South.
- Phoebe
Pember and the lives of women.
- Marcus
Spiegal and life in the military.
- Clara
Solomon and the youth experience.
- Franklin
Moses and the Jews who supported racial equality.
- The
stories tied together.
- How do
they fit?
- How do
they misalign?
- Can we
draw an overall conclusion of the “Jewish Experience”?
Phoebe Pember:
Too
often in the stories of historical actors are left out of the broader narrative
of a particular period because they do not fit the cultural, ethnic, or other
type of profile that colors the discussion for generations. Women’s
contributions to the war effort (on both sides) in particular can be glossed
over in favor of continuing description of men in the North and the South who
nominally held power. However, this method of description and the assignation
of historical importance to a select group is both dishonest and irresponsible,
for not only were women vital to the war effort and the cultural composition of
the two sides of the United States’ most bloody conflict, but they were also
acknowledged to be so at the time. For the South in particular, women stoked
the fires of the Confederacy, using their unique position in a patriarchal plantation
society that regarded women as people to be respected and protected to support
the Confederate States, both through active aid as nurses and supply workers
and through support of husbands, sons, and fathers who were socially bound to
actually fight.
The
story of Jewish women in the South is very similar to the story of the
significantly more numerous Christian women in the South; indeed, for many Jewish
women, their identity as Southern women trumped any religious conflict. This
rings true for Phoebe Pember, who was born to a wealthy Jewish family in
Charleston, South Carolina. Her story is of particular note because she served
as one of the chief administrators and nurses at Chimborazo Hospital in
Richmond, Virginia, and after the war wrote a memoir of her life’s work, giving
historians a glimpse into a very human aspect of an extraordinary time period.
At
the start of the war, military hospitals refused to hire women. The strong
desire to keep women away from the gruesome reality of war held fast for many
southerners, but ultimately reality wore them down. The Confederate Congress,
seeing that doctors were needed on the battlefield, passed the “Matron Law,”
allowing women to be hired as nurses and administrators in hospitals, freeing
up space for male doctors to embed in military units and serve as combat medics.[1]
Phoebe Pember was one such administrator. She was approached by Mary Pope, the
wife of the contemporary Secretary of War, George Randolph, and asked to serve
her new nation. Though startled and hesitant, thinking that running a hospital
would be a significant shock to “a woman used to all the comforts of luxurious
life,” she soon accepted.[2]
Nowhere in her recollection of this offer and her consideration for the
position of hospital matron did Pember mention her religion. Though potentially
a result of her wealthy upbringing, as rich Jewish Southerners found themselves
more accepted by broader Southern society, Pember did find herself drawn to the
Southern cause by her identity as both a Southerner and a woman.[3]
Nursing
was a truly unique way for Southern women to contribute to the war effort, as
it put women in the position of caring for the thousands of wounded men going
to and from the battlefields, dropping them into the highly masculine world of
the military but giving them immense power and giving them the ability to help
more than many others. For Pember, working as an administrator and nurse was a
natural and vital way of helping a war that she believed right, for she, like
many women at the time, supported the Confederacy as much if not more than
slave-owners and men. In the first few pages of her memoir, she asserts that
support of the war was common among Southern women, whom she claimed “had been
openly and violently rebellious from the moment they thought their States’
rights touched.”[4]
Though
the women who served as nurses acknowledged themselves as and in all truth were
necessary to the continued treatment of Confederate soldiers, a task both grim
and difficult, they still faced the general and institutionalized sexism of the
all-male core of doctors and military officials who questioned their abilities
and who could be openly hostile to the idea of serving with women in a
hospital. Pember was cognizant of her status in a patriarchal environment,
acknowledging the difficulties sexism forced her to confront and determining to
overcome them. At the end of her memoir, she hopes to inspire other women to
become nurses or continue to support their nation (writing after the war had
ended), arguing that in response to hardship, including “man’s fierce hate, a
woman must soar beyond the
conventional modesty considered correct.”[5]
Pember believed that only the continued strength of women together and alone
could be a tool in good nursing, a strong war effort, and undermining the
barriers to women working. This is similar to her stance on the other aspects
of her identity for which her society oppressed her, including her Judaism.
One
intriguing aspect of Pember’s memoir is the almost utter lack of any mention of
religion, either of her own or of Christianity. This is likely not an
expression of her irreligiousness or the unimportance of her religion on her
life, but rather an intentional attempt to engage her readership without them
dismissing her and her Judaism, as anti-Semitism, during and after the war, was
rising in both the North and South. Pember presents the possibility that Jewish
Americans lived and worked among Christians who likely knew of their religion,
but in ardently supporting the Confederacy some Southern Jews “proved” their
loyalty or worth to anti-Semitic or suspicious Christians.[6]
In the same vein as Pember’s insistence on women being more composed and more
dignified in the face of patriarchal oppression, it is likely that her service
to the Confederacy and her loyalty to its institutions was driven in part by a belief
that Jews would find more acceptance within broader Southern society by continuing
to work within it.[7]
This was possible for women especially, as the anti-Semitism in the South was
primarily targeted at wealthy Jewish business owners, who could be targeted
with legislation, political cartoons, and violence.[8]
This anti-Semitism was not solely confederate in origin, as Ulysses S. Grant’s
Army Order #11, intending to forcefully remove all Jews in the Union controlled
areas of Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee, proves.[9]
Jewish Americans like Pember did not live unaffected by anti-Semitism’s role in
shaping the culture of their home, and their actions were often based upon
limiting that anti-Semitism, either in their own lives or in the general
population.
Pember
served as a well known, extremely likeable, and successful representative of
her religion. She saw her work in Chimborazo Hospital as her honest and sacred
duty to her nation and her people, and it gave her the chance to present
herself as a supportive Jewish American and a successful woman. She achieved some
amount of fame for her work towards the end of the war, when she began to
appear in newspaper articles, received a large stipend from the Confederacy
itself, and appealed to the Confederate Congress itself to provide more funds
to maintain the hospital’s quality of care and decrease patient mortality.[10]
Fewer areas of 19th century history are as gruesome as a Civil War
hospital, and Pember’s service in such a difficult environment was recognized
by her contemporaries, if not immediately. Though she fought both sexism and
anti-Semitism, her letters and memoirs consistently remind their readers that her
primary concern was for her patients and the country for which they fought, but
fail to consider racial factors in her Civil War story. Slavery is unmentioned
in her memoir, likely due to her acceptance at the time of it as an institution
without being well acquainted with it. Referring to one black carriage-driver
as “[an] old darkey,” and “like all his species…kindly disposed and
respectful,” she reveals her own racism that comes second nature to many in
this period, something to be accepted and assumed to be true.[11]
The racism of Southern white women, with Pember as one example, could often be
so internalized that they did not realize it as one of their motivations. Her
assertion of the “States’ Rights” at the beginning of her memoir reveals that
though Pember attempted to undermine the oppression of sexism and anti-Semitism
in the South and in hospitals in particular, she too was complicit in a
racially oppressive and hierarchical structure where deviance from the
oppressive norm was inconceivable to her.
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