Tag Archives: Judah Benjamin

By one estimate, 10,000 Jews fought for the Confederacy. They’d been arriving in the South since 1700 where, a little more than a hundred years later Charleston, SC, had the largest Jewish community in North America. The city still is home to the nation’s oldest (1749) synagogue in continual use.  Many of their descendents would fight for the Confederacy, a fact touched on in PBS’s new Wednesday night series on Jewish Americans, according to the daily’s review. Among the mentioned is Judah Benjamin, a Louisiana planter, slave owner and lawyer who was the Confederacy’s secretary of state–a brilliant man who largely has been airbrushed out of American history. You can imagine why.