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.”