The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen

The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen

In December, 1891, there was printed in the North American Review a letter in reply to certain statements of a contributor to a previous number of the same magazine regarding the services of American Jewish citizens as soldiers in the Civil War. Under the caption "Jewish Soldiers in the Union Army," the writer, after denying the statement that Generals Rosecrans and Lyon were of Jewish birth, proceeds as follows: A statement of this nature, logically inconclusive and practically absurd as it is, might well, under ordinary conditions have been left unnoticed. Under ordinary conditions a reply of any kind to such a tissue of misstatements, would but have dignified it beyond reason, and but helped, perhaps, to save it and its author from oblivion. But the conditions were[2] not ordinary, but most unfortunately, otherwise. It was at a time when the public mind throughout the civilized world was wrought to a high pitch of excitement by the flaunting villainy of the Russian government in the outrageous persecution of its Jewish subjects, when the wave of anti-Semitism was at floodtide in Germany, and was flowing high in France, and when bigots like Stoecker, fools like Ahlwardt, and knaves like Drumont, were finding imitators on both sides of the Atlantic. Here in our country, public attention was being centered on the Jewish refugees from Russia, and the Jewish people throughout the land were massing their strength to cope with the problems which Muscovite tyranny had set before them. In the midst of this agitation, the magazine article referred to, slurring the Jewish people as it did, attracted unusual attention, and being widely quoted and commented on by the newspaper press, it attained a degree of publicity out of all proportion to its merits or its authorship. Under these circumstances I felt myself impelled to reply to the writer in the North American Review, and at once sent to that magazine a letter embodying a statement of a few indisputable facts bearing on the subject. This statement the publishers of the magazine declined to print on the ground that they had received so many articles on the subject that they could not undertake to discriminate in favor of any one of them, and that they would therefore publish none. My cursorily compiled citations were, however, published at the time in the Washington Post, and as germane to my present subject I reprint them in the main, as follows: ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 47135
Author: Wolf, Simon
Release Date: Oct 16, 2014
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Editor: Levy, Louis Edward, 1846-1919