A01=Richard Kreitner
abolition
Abraham Lincoln
antisemitism
assimilation
August Bondi
Author_Richard Kreitner
Category=NHK
Category=NHTS
Category=NHWF
Category=NHWR3
Civil War
Confederacy
David Einhorn
Emancipation Proclamation
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Ernestine Rose
Exodus
immigration
Isaac Mayer Wise
Judah P. Benjamin
Judaism
Morris Raphall
Rabbis
Reconstruction
Slavery
Southern Jews
Torah
Ulysses S. Grant
Product details
- ISBN 9781250419941
- Dimensions: 135 x 208mm
- Publication Date: 18 May 2026
- Publisher: St Martin's Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Fear No Pharaoh, the journalist and historian Richard Kreitner sets this question at the heart of the Civil War era. He tells the intertwined stories of six American Jews who helped to shape a tumultuous time, including Judah Benjamin, the secretive lawyer who became Jefferson Davis’s trusted confidante; Morris Raphall, a Swedish-born rabbi who defended slavery as biblically justified; and Raphall’s rival rabbis - Isaac Mayer Wise, who urged Jews to stay out of the slavery controversy to avoid attracting attention, and David Einhorn, whose fiery sermons condemning bondage led to a pro-slavery mob threatening his life. We also meet August Bondi, a veteran of Europe’s 1848 revolutions, who fought with John Brown in Bleeding Kansas and later in the Union Army, and the Polish émigré Ernestine Rose, a feminist, atheist, and abolitionist who championed “emancipation of all kinds.”
As he tracks these characters, Kreitner illuminates the shifting dynamics of Jewish life in America - and the debates about religion, morality, and politics that endure to this day.
Richard Kreitner is the author of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union and Booked: A Traveler's Guide to Literary Locations Around the World. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Nation, Slate, Raritan, The Baffler, and other publications. He lives in the Hudson Valley, New York.
