In episode four of HBO’s production of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro) drawls out the story of Judah Benjamin, the “Jewish lawyer who served [Jefferson] Davis as attorney general, as secretary of war, and as secretary of state.” Bengelsdorf, a Lindbergh apologist who is himself the son of a German-born South Carolina Jewish peddler and veteran of the Confederate army, is trying his best to convince the Levin family that Jewish boys like their eldest son Sandy will be accepted as real Americans if they are willing, first, to become real Confederates. While he is careful to point out that “the cause for which the South went to war was neither legal nor moral,” Bengelsdorf isn’t just telling Benjamin’s story because it represents a high-water mark of Jewish political achievement in America. Why Bengelsdorf chooses to share Judah Benjamin’s story—and not, say, Haym Solomon’s—with the Levins has everything to do with what Benjamin did in order to prove his American bona fides.
Judah Benjamin has long been an object of ambivalent fascination for American Jews not just because he owned slaves and served a government whose central purpose was the perpetuation of slavery as an institution, but because he attained power and recognition as the direct result of doing so. For this reason, Benjamin’s legacy as an early American Jew, especially as it has been fictionalized, warrants our consideration today. The urgency with which the Jewish community of Charlotte, North Carolina, petitioned city officials last month to oversee the removal of a downtown monument that memorialized “the Confederate Kissinger” is indicative of just how much symbolic, and potentially dangerous, weight his story still carries.
Benjamin is hardly a fitting subject for admiration, and his ideas concerning race, though of his time and place, are indefensible. To be content with merely condemning him, however, is to fall short of recognizing not only how truly Jewish and American he was, but exactly what American Jews are letting go of as they dismiss the one figure from their past whose face made it onto on a piece of paper currency.