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Published Mar 2015
288 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln's death, the full story of his extraordinary relationship with Jews is told here for the first time. Lincoln and the Jews: A History provides readers both with a captivating narrative of his interactions with Jews, and with the opportunity to immerse themselves in rare manuscripts and images, many from the Shapell Lincoln Collection, that show Lincoln in a way he has never been seen before.
Lincoln's lifetime coincided with the emergence of Jews on the national scene in the United States. When he was born, in 1809, scarcely 3,000 Jews lived in the entire country. By the time of his assassination in 1865, large-scale immigration, principally from central Europe, had brought that number up to more than 150,000. Many Americans, including members of Lincoln's cabinet and many of his top generals during the Civil War, were alarmed by this development and treated Jews as second-class citizens and religious outsiders. Lincoln, this book shows, exhibited precisely the opposite tendency. He also expressed a uniquely deep knowledge of the Old Testament, employing its language and concepts in some of his most important writings. He befriended Jews from a young age, promoted Jewish equality, appointed numerous Jews to public office, had Jewish advisors and supporters starting already from the early 1850s, as well as later during his two presidential campaigns, and in response to Jewish sensitivities, even changed the way he thought and spoke about America. Through his actions and his rhetoric - replacing "Christian nation," for example, with "this nation under God" - he embraced Jews as insiders.
In this groundbreaking work, the product of meticulous research, historian Jonathan D. Sarna and collector Benjamin Shapell reveal how Lincoln's remarkable relationship with American Jews impacted both his path to the presidency and his policy decisions as president. The volume uncovers a new and previously unknown feature of Abraham Lincoln's life, one that broadened him, and, as a result, broadened America.
"Starred Review. Even Lincoln experts are likely to learn something from this fascinating and comprehensive study of the president's relationship with American Jews, which is being published to coincide with a travelling exhibition of original documents." - Publishers Weekly
"Sarna and manuscript collector Shapell offer a vivid, fresh perspective on Lincoln's life and times." - Kirkus
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jonathan D. Sarna is a historian and leading commentator on American Jewish history, religion, and life. Dubbed by the Forward newspaper in 2004 as one of America's fifty most-influential American Jews, Sarna is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, and the eighteenth president of the Association for Jewish Studies. The author of hundreds of scholarly articles, Sarna may be best known for his acclaimed American Judaism: A History, winner of the Jewish Book Council's Jewish Book of the Year Award.
Benjamin Shapell is the founder of the Shapell Manuscript Foundation, an independent educational organization whose collection includes original documents of world-renowned individuals. Shapell has written articles on Lincoln, other American presidents, and Mark Twain. The author also initiated and oversaw the creation of exhibitions and films relating to the central themes of the collection. The foundation has partnered in exhibitions with major institutions, including the Library of Congress, the Morgan Library & Museum, the New-York Historical Society, the National Library of Israel, and the Smithsonian Institution.
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