Thomas Dunne
March 2015
On Sale: March 17, 2015
Featuring: Abraham Lincoln
ISBN: 1250059534 EAN: 9781250059536 Kindle: B00N04JOZA Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
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.
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