“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong”: Solomon Schechter’s 1909 Lecture on Abraham Lincoln and Today’s Accusations of a “Blood Libel”
“Every great movement is liable to suffer not less by the arrogance of the few than by the ignorance of the many” Solomon Schechter
[This post is free. Please consider subscribing to support this work, Hodesh Tov - Shaul]
Introduction:
On this President’s Day which is also the eve of the beginning of the Hebrew month of Adar, where the Jews are saved and yet vengeance is praised, many of us received a petition via social media by a group of Jewish individuals who will remain nameless, making the claim that the mere accusation of Gaza as genocide constitutes a “blood libel.” A blood libel? How to make sense of this? Given this moment, I thought it appropriate to re-visit a lecture given by Solomon Schecter in 1909 on the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.
Solomon Schechter on Abraham Lincoln
On February 11, 1909, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, Solomon Schechter (1847-1915), who arrived at the Jewish Theological Seminary a few years prior (1902) gave a lecture there on Lincoln. This was not as strange as it sounds, as many rabbis in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century gave sermons on Lincoln. It was a kind of cottage industry among liberal rabbis looking to find their place in post-Civil War America, viewing Lincoln as a kind of Mosaic redeemer of Blacks from slavery.
Schechter was a relative newcomer to America, most proximately from England, but before that from Romania. And yet he mentions in his lecture that he read about Lincoln in his youth in Eastern Europe as news from the Civil War reached the cities and small towns there.
The myth of Lincoln had already blossomed in America by the first decade of the new century and Schechter chose to focus on a few elements of that myth, but more forcefully, on an aspect of his biblical stature. I think Lincoln was more Abrahamic than Mosaic. Omri Boehm notes, “Moses expresses that universalist ethics are based on the authority of one deity. Abraham’s point is that universal ethics can only stand above the deity” (Boehm, Radical Universalism, 61). As Lincoln evolved, certainly as Schechter understood him, for Lincoln ending slavery was not just about emancipation but about upholding universals and acknowledging national sin. For Schechter, Lincoln was an amalgam of a Hillel-like rural villager who, self-educated, rose to become a wise sage, and a quasi-mystic, whose success was in part his misalignment with the world he lived in and role he found himself. Commenting on a note by the Confederacy historian Alexander H. Stephens who claimed Lincoln, “rose to the sublimity of a religious mysticism (not for Stephens a positive assessment) Schecter writes,
“It will, therefore, not be amiss if we devote this hour to this trait of religious mysticism in his character touching also on one or two other traits which by their seeming contrast, served either as a corrective or as an emphasis of this mystical trait.”
In his new book, A Radical Universalism, philosopher Omri Boehm spends a good deal of time parsing the affinity and disaffinity between liberalism and universalism through the two categories of Unionism and Abolitionism around the Civil War. There were two basic approaches the North took in the Civil War. Unionism was a position that the war was justified to save the Union. Unionists were opposed to slavery, but the real impetus for war was not the evils of slavery as much as salvaging a fracturing nation (“A nation divided shall not stand” Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, 1858). Alternatively, the Abolitionists justified the war as a war against injustice and the evils of slavery, a universal they believed was being subverted. That is, as W.E.B DuBois has it, for Abolitionists slavery was more of a moral sin and less of a political wedge. If slavery persisted, the country lost its “right” to exist. The American experiment, in all its aspirational heft, would be a dismal failure.
There has been much written on whether Lincoln was more of a Unionist or Abolitionist, he certainly began as the former as he was not initially opposed to slavery per se, although he came to that in time. Schechter does not address this question exactly, but for him the stature of Lincoln was, as I read him, more of an Abrahamic figure (according to Boehm) than a Mosaic one. That is, by becoming an Abolitionist, Lincoln recognized that immoral laws are not laws that should be followed, even if they destroy the nation. Schechter wrote as follows:
“With the consciousness of the Union, or the body-politics, there developed in Lincoln also the consciousness of the national sin, and the need for confession which indeed is another manifestation of religious mysticism…Sin was also a reality with Lincoln, weighing heavily on his conscience, not to be countenanced on any aesthetic considerations or argued away by any philosophic or sociological formula. There it was, and it cried for atonement….[Lincoln wrote] “We have grown in numbers wealth and power; but we have forgotten God….We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. Intoxicated by unbroken success we have become…too proud to pray to the God that made us…It behooves us then…to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.” (“Abraham Lincoln”155)
As Schechter notes, he was speaking to the North, not the South. Again, Schechter quotes Lincoln, “If God wills the removal of the great wrong, and wills also that we of the North, as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere justice and goodness of God.”
What seems to have struck Schechter so strongly about Lincoln was that as a political figure he recognized the universal, that he also viewed as divine, and simultaneously the precarity of what he was about to undertake – to put an entire nation at risk for a universal principle that threatened to undermine the very right of the nation’s existence. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” Lincoln famously said. Survival means nothing when it transgresses the basic moral fiber of human existence.
Lincoln once said,
“I am not concerned about that, for we know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and the nation should be on the Lord’s side.”
To which Schechter commented:
“This is the great danger of every mission of this nature, that man is very often liable to confuse his own cause with that of God.”
The greatness of Lincoln according to Schechter was his willingness to sacrifice everything for a universal truth – slavery is evil, and no polity deserves to survive or even exist if it does so under those pretenses. While Schechter initially models Lincoln after Hillel from his humble beginnings, he could have also followed with his most famous saying to the aspiring convert, which expresses another form of the universal: “Do not do unto others what you would not want them to do to you.” Thereon lies the entire Torah.
The Collapse of the Jewish Conscience.
We are more than a century past Schechter’s remarks on Lincoln. We Jews stand at a moment both different and yet also eerily like the moment Lincoln faced when his nation was on the verge of collapse. Lincoln saw slave rebellions in the South, Nat Turner’s in 1831 followed by others in the US and the Caribbean Islands, Jamaica etc. Sometime in the 1790s Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to a friend telling him slavery would eventually end because the slaves will eventually revolt. By the 1830s that had come to pass.
And yet, in this moment, our moment, in this breach when universals press up against expedience, and calls for fidelity, and pride, result in egregious accusations, many of us read a letter accusing anyone, Jew or gentile, who accuses Israel of “genocide” guilty of a “blood libel.” In that petition one can hear the conscience of a people crumbling. See the petition here.
One can certainly disagree as to whether “genocide” applies in the destruction of Gaza. But let’s face it, this is not the issue. Genocide is a legal category of war with specific criteria about which experts, and non-experts, can disagree. But that is not what this petition is about. This petition raises the stakes considerably, perniciously. This petition weaponizes the blood libel, a horrific moment in Jewish history that killed thousands of Jews with no recourse to defend themselves.
What is a blood libel? A blood libel is an utterly false accusation by those in power over those who are powerless that justifies slaughtering the powerless. The claim that Jews were using Christian blood to bake matzah for Passover is the classic case. The baselessness of the claim is foisted on the power dynamics of accuser and accused. The claim that to accuse, and thus to victimize, a sovereign nation with immense military might that has killed close to 100,000 people, including tens of thousands of children, of genocide as a “blood libel,” is not only erroneous, not even cynical, it is simply craven.
But what is happening is much darker than that; it is about the utter lack of a nation, of a people, to even consider the reality of what Lincoln called “a national sin.” To consider that the very stature of a nation is founded on its willingness to consider a universal as the foundation of its existence. For Lincoln, that was slavery. For Israel, occupation. Not the same thing, and yet not categorially different, either. Both extend back to Kant’s claim of the universal evil of domination of one people over another.
Justifications of occupation abound as did justifications for slavery. But Schechter knew that Lincoln, at least the Lincoln venerated by Schechter, had no interest in justifications, some of which he may have voiced earlier in his career when he was still a Unionist. As an Abolitionist, universals succumb to no justifications, evil cannot be justified. We have no official record of what Lincoln thought of Turner’s 1831 rebellion, although I assume, like most white Americans, he opposed it. John Brown, the white abolitionist who staged the first abolitionist attack in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in 1859 was initially thought to be crazed, and later hanged. Later he was venerated as a hero. The evils of domination sometimes take time to be recognized.
I submit that we Jews stand on the precipice of an utter collapse of moral conscience, of an abandonment of a prophetic wisdom tradition, of a collapse into the dark and amoral abyss of power and its endless justifications. In truth, this petition is meaningless, it has no teeth, it will convince no one not already convinced and is merely a blunt weapon that only serves to mollify and appease an anxiety of guilt. But it is telling in its depravity.
I return to Lincoln once more. “A national sin.” “We have forgotten God.” “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”
Schechter saw the greatness in such a man. Let collective blindness not overtake us in this precarious moment.
Thanks to Carla Sulzbach
.
Sadly, we know who some of the signatories of that petition are, and they are highly influential and respected Jewish leaders, both religious and secular. It's unconscionable that they are using their influence to peddle such dishonest and dehumanizing crap. Shame on them.
Yet, just as in his day, Schechter’s words & ideals were often far removed from the world’s realities. He was speaking at a time when many good people in the western world were decrying the injustice and horrors of slavery worldwide.
Many of the loudest voices came from within Europe - where, although slavery had been abolished across the continent, the “barbaric” & “cruel” Arab slave trade around Zanzibar, Eastern Africa, & the Arabian Gulf had become the primary target of many humanitarian societies and “civilization & progress” associations determined to get rid of the scourge of humans owning other humans.
This looked and felt very good to the Christian world - to promote an end to such human cruelty & bondage. And yet, in Africa, Asia, & the Americas, slavery - in the form of forced labor - and concentration camps were springing up and thousands were dying in their captivity:
In the Belgian Congo, 10 million people had died owing to the brutal treatment of Congolese civilians by Belgian & other nationalities working for the Congo Free State of King Leopold II. The whole country had become a slave labor camp and many whites were still involved in an unofficial slave trade. When Leopold II died he bequeathed his private colony to the Belgian nation.
In what is today called Namibia, German South West Africa under the rule (ultimately) of Kaiser Wilhelm II, not only concentration camps, but a death camp & the world’s first extermination order had only recently marked the genocide of the Herero & Nama peoples - something openly called for by many.
In South Africa the British had placed Boer civilians in a concentration camp (called that) in order to separate the people from the rebels, cutting off the supply lines to the latter in an attempt to break their morale; meanwhile, the notorious pass system was underway for blacks living at the mercy of their heavily armed white masters.
In Australia the Aboriginals had been experiencing massacres, economic slavery (forced labor) and severe discrimination for over 200 years and continued to do so into the 1930s and beyond. Many were put in concentration camps. The indigenous people of Tasmania had been wiped off the face of the earth much like the Taine people in the Caribbean.
In North America, concentration camps known as reservations had swallowed up the remaining indigenous peoples of the land. A population that had reached approximately 100,000,000 in 1500 (the US & Canada) had declined to approximately 250,000 by 1900. War, hardship, superior military capabilities on the part of the white settlers, disease, & hunger carried off most of those not murdered in a 400 year long genocide.
In other words, while the nice white Christian (& Jewish) citizens of Europe & North America were singing & speaking about progress, civilization, the ills of slavery & such, their nations were involved in sadistic brutality against indigenous peoples through colonialism, settler colonialism, & economic warfare across the globe.
If we look closely at what our illustrious countries are still up to, we will find equally horrific circumstances strangling & killing those who would prefer not to be the victims of our liberal world order.