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T HE WARTIME UPSURGE of anti-Jewish sentiment plainly drew from older, folkloristic wellsprings. One of these was the Shylock stereotype. It remained widespread throughout nineteenth-century America, for The Merchant of Venice was a popular offering on the early American stage. Edmund Kean toured with a production of the work during the 1820s; later, the renowned actors Edwin Booth and Henry Irving took Shylock by wagon and flatboat through the South and Midwest. Popular literature similarly reinforced the image of the Jew as usurer and speculator, whether in the sinister Gabriel Van Gelt of George Lippard's The Monks of Monk Hall (see this page ), the repellent Molochs of Joseph Holt Ingraham's dime novels, or Albert Aiken's prolific Abrahams, Oppenheims, and Solomons, who “always gif half as much as a thing is worth, and never charge more as five hundert pershent interest.” In the same fashion, the Isaacs and Alberts of Edward L. Wheeler's spectacularly successful Deadwood Dick series exploited their clients and were “shrewd ones to deal with.” So were the “hook-nosed Israelites” of Prentiss Ingraham, son of Joseph Holt, famed for his Buffalo Bill adventure stories.
Of even more pressing concern to American Jews than these stereotypes, however, were persistent efforts to legislate Christ into American public law. In the prewar years, individual clergymen preached, pamphleteered, and petitioned Congress and the president for a constitutional amendment that would recognize “the rulership of Christ.” Then, in the midst of the war, an assembly of clergy and Christian laymen gathered in Sparta, Illinois, to found the National Reform Association. Under their pressure, the Senate in March 1863 issued a resolution calling on the president to declare a day of “fast and prayer,” to ensure “[God's] appointed way through Jesus Christ.” Lincoln acquiesced, although using a more general reference to “the sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures.” Convinced now that they were on the threshold of their amendment, the leaders of the National Reform Association similarly drew encouragement from the continuing penetration of Christian doctrine into the jurisprudence of individual states, the growing acknowledgment of Christianity as part of the common law.
If these threats to Jewish religious equality became particularly flagrant in wartime, it was evident that the Christianization of a nominally secular republic also constituted an ongoing, postwar danger. Manifestly, some form of Jewish representative organization was needed for political self-defense, even for psychological security. In fact, the Jews had launched a serious effort at unity even before the war. The immediate catalyst was the Mortara Affair of 1858, the abduction by papal police of a Jewish child, Edgar Mortara, in Bologna, Italy. Unknown to the child's parents, years earlier a Christian servant girl had clandestinely arranged for the child to be baptized. Apprised of the fact, papal authorities now decreed that the child be turned over to a surrogate family who would ensure his “Christian upbringing.” The episode predictably appalled European Jewish leaders, who hurried off to Rome to seek redress. They received none; the Church held firm. American Jews shared in the outrage. They, too, gathered in emergency meetings in New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and other communities to seek official United States intercession with the Vatican. And they, too, failed. Although sympathetic, President James Buchanan explained that he was helpless to intervene in the internal affairs of a foreign government. More probably, he did not wish to offend American Catholics.
Disgruntled by their people's evident powerlessness, Isaac Leeser and several of his Philadelphia constituents then mooted a plan for a national organization. In the manner of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the structure would unite all Jewish congregations, all Jewish philanthropic, mutual-benefit, and fraternal organizations. The idea was sufficiently attractive to other Jewish communities to warrant a series of exploratory meetings. These were followed, in November 1859, by the establishment of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites (not “Jews” or “Jewry,” but “Israelites,” the preferred self-designation of German and French Jews). By 1861, the number of affiliated congregations was twenty-four. By 1868, it would reach sixty-eight. Notwithstanding the board's far-ranging statement of purposes—educational, spiritual, cultural—everyone understood that it functioned essentially as a watchdog agency. Its unofficial (and unsalaried) lawyer-representative in Washington, Simon Wolf, although rather palpably a self-promoter among important government circles, remained endlessly on the qui vive for Jewish interests before the White House and Congress. Thus, during the war, Wolf secured President Lincoln's intercession in behalf of mistreated Jewish soldiers and met with newspaper editors to protest libelous allegations of Jewish smuggling or profiteering. Above all, Wolf achieved decisive leverage in his postwar relationship with Ulysses S. Grant. When Grant campaigned for the presidency in 1868, Wolf chose to proclaim his confidence in the general's lack of bias. Thereafter, he enjoyed unlimited access to the White House. Indeed, the president acted as godfather at the circumcision ceremony of Wolfs infant son “Grant.” On all Jewish matters, Wolf was the court of last resort for the administration. Upon his advice, key posts occasionally were offered to Jewish public figures. Among these were Edward S. Salomon, the Civil War hero, as governor of the Washington Territory, and the eminent merchant banker Joseph Seligman as secretary of the treasury (Seligman declined).
Belatedly, too, American-Jewish intercession at the government level began to reap dividends for Jews abroad. A case in point was Washington's commercial treaty with Switzerland. When the agreement first was negotiated in 1840, it was not generally known that individual Swiss cantons, each of them denying citizenship to local Jews, also reserved the right to deny entry and business privileges to foreign Jews. The information surfaced only in 1857, when a visiting American importer, A. H. Gottman, was “invited” to depart the canton of Neuchâtel, explicitly because he was a Jew. Hereupon American Jews engaged in protest meetings, adopted resolutions, published indignant editorials, petitioned the White House and Congress. The issue was not a Jewish but an American one, they insisted. This time President Buchanan agreed. At his instructions, Secretary of State Lewis Cass formally protested to the Swiss minister. Soon after, the expulsion order against Gottman was rescinded; and eventually, in 1866, the Swiss constitution itself was amended to ensure equality to citizens of all religions—and, by extension, to visitors of all religions. Unrecognized at the time, an important United States trade precedent was being established.
By the post-Civil War era, too, with spokesmen like Simon Wolf permanently ensconced in Washington, intercession in behalf of Jews overseas became even more feasible. It also became more crucial. In 1870, the Romanian government introduced a series of harsh anti-Jewish restrictions, and even tacitly encouraged mob attacks on Jews. The Board of Deputies of British Jews and France's Alliance Israélite Universelle promptly sent delegations to Bucharest. Yet, for all the prestige and influence of these distinguished European Jews, they failed to halt the violence. Simon Wolf and his colleagues thereupon devised a new approach. It was for Washington to convey a “signal” to the Romanians by appointing a Jew as official United States consul in Bucharest, Here it was that the “Mordecai M. Noah factor” again came into operation. An ambitious San Francisco Jewish lawyer, Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, got wind of the consulship proposal and immediately pounced on it. Notwithstanding his Sephardic background, Peixotto earlier had spotted his main chance through the German-Jewish brotherhood of B'nai B'rith. By 1863 he had risen to the Order's presidency. Now, in 1870, a thirty-six-year-old father of six, Peixotto exploited his B'nai B'rith connections to campaign for the Romanian post. The brothers Joseph and Jesse Seligman were among his sponsors, and even agreed to cover Peixotto's $6,000 salary. Simon Wolf, in turn, regarded Peixotto's Jewish “eminence” as precisely the instrument for making a strong case in Bucharest. Wolf pressed the issue with Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, and prevailed.
Peixotto carried with him to Romania a personal letter from President Grant that was all but a road map. “The United States,” stated the document, “knowing no distinction of her citizens on account of religion or nativity, naturally believes in a civilization the world over which will secure the same universal views.” Reaching Bucharest in February 1871, Peixotto was escorted through the streets in ceremony for his official presentation to Prince Charles. Jewish onlookers exulted. Romanians gaped. Duly impressed by this evidence of Jewish Finanzmacht , the prince then expressed to Peixotto his good will toward the United States and toward “our Romanian Jews.” Subsequently, Peixotto worked his diplomatic leverage to the hilt, interceding precisely in behalf of “our Romanian Jews.” Incidents of anti-Jewish physical assault (if not of legal restrictions) declined sharply during his five-year tenure in Bucharest.
By then, too, the United States government had become increasingly sentient to its moral leverage on the international scene. No denigration of American religious equality henceforth would be tolerated at the hands of a foreign government. Thus, the question of an American Jew's Hoffähigkeit— acceptability at a royal court—became a diplomatic issue in 1884. In that year President Grover Cleveland appointed Anthony M. Keiley of Virginia as minister to Habsburg Austria. Keiley promptly sailed off to Europe, and was still on the high seas when word reached Washington from Vienna that the appointment was unacceptable. Mrs. Keiley was Jewish. Reacting with indignation, Secretary of State Thomas Bayard protested: “It is not within the power of the President nor of Congress ... to inquire into or decide upon the religious belief of any official, and the proposition to allow this to be done by any foreign Government is ... inadmissible.”
Prolonged discussions between the two governments failed to resolve the impasse. With Vienna firm on the unacceptability of individuals of “proximate Semitic descent,” the Keileys had no recourse but to return to the United States. But neither was President Cleveland prepared to budge. He declined to accredit a new minister to the Habsburg court. In his annual message to Congress, the president made much of his decision to leave American affairs in Vienna in the hands of a charge d'affaires—indefinitely, if necessary. But it was not necessary. Although the Keileys themselves declined ever to return to Vienna, in 1888, after extensive and embarrassing Austrian press debate, a much-chastened Habsburg government announced that Baron and Baroness Albert von Rothschild henceforth were to be regarded as hoffähig , the first Jews to be admitted to the royal court. Like Switzerland twenty years earlier, the Dual Monarchy was susceptible to pressures exerted by a distant republic, whose own liberal conscience in turn was repeatedly prodded by the Jewish community.