page_title: Judah P. Benjamin
section_title: Appraisal
hierarchical_section_title: Judah P. Benjamin / Appraisal
caption_attribution_description: Placard related to Judah P. Benjamin at Gamble Plantation Mansion, Ellenton, FL, United States.
context_page_description: Judah Philip Benjamin, QC was a lawyer and politician who was a United States Senator from Louisiana, a Cabinet officer of the Confederate States and, after his escape to the United Kingdom at the end of the American Civil War, an English barrister. Benjamin was the first Jew to hold a Cabinet position in North America, and the first to be elected to the United States Senate who had not renounced his faith. He successively held the Cabinet positions of Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State of the Confederate States of America.
  Benjamin was born to Sephardic Jewish parents from London, who had moved to St. Croix in the Danish West Indies when it was occupied by Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. Seeking greater opportunities, his family immigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Charleston, South Carolina. Judah Benjamin attended Yale College but left without graduating. He moved to New Orleans, where he read law and passed the bar.
  Benjamin rose rapidly both at the bar and in politics.
context_section_description: Benjamin was the first U.S. senator to profess the Jewish faith.  In 1845, David Yulee, born David Levy, the first cousin of Judah Benjamin’s father, had been sworn in for Florida, but he renounced Judaism and eventually formally converted to Christianity. As an adult, Benjamin married a non-Jew, was not a member of a synagogue, and took no part in communal affairs.  He rarely spoke of his Jewish background publicly, but was not ashamed of it. Some of the stories told of Benjamin that touch on this subject come from Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who referred to an address Benjamin delivered in a San Francisco synagogue on Yom Kippur in 1860, though whether this occurred is open to question as Wise was not there and it was not reported in the city's Jewish newspaper. One quote from Senate debate that remains "part of the Benjamin legend", according to Evans, followed an allusion to Moses as a freer of slaves by a Northern senator, hinting that Benjamin was an "Israelite in Egyptian clothing". Benjamin is supposed to have replied,  "It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate hand of deity, amidst the thunderings and lightnings of Mount Sinai, the ancestors of my opponent were herding swine in the forests of Great Britain." However, this anecdote is likely apocryphal as the same exchange between British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (a converted Jew) and Daniel O'Connell took place in the House of Commons in 1835. Butler, p. 434.}}
  Edgar M. Kahn, in his journal article on the 1860 California sojourn, wrote, "Benjamin's life is an example of a man's determination to overcome almost insurmountable barriers by industry, perseverance, and intelligent use of a remarkable brain." This brilliance was recognized by contemporaries; Salomon de Rothschild, in 1861, deemed Benjamin "the greatest mind" in North America. Nevertheless, according to Meade, "he was given to quixotic enthusiasms and was sometimes too cocksure of his knowledge."  Ginsburg said of Benjamin, "he rose to the top of the legal profession twice in one lifetime, on two continents, beginning his first ascent as a raw youth and his second as a fugitive minister of a vanquished power." Davis, after Benjamin's death, deemed him the most able member of his Cabinet, and said that the lawyer's postwar career had fully vindicated his confidence in him.
  According to Brook, "in every age, a heroic sage struggles to rescue Benjamin from obscurity—and invariably fails." Benjamin left no memoir and destroyed his personal papers, by which "the task of future researchers and historians was made exceedingly difficult and laborious".  After his death, Benjamin was rarely written about, in contrast to Davis and other Confederate leaders.  Part of this was due to Benjamin depriving his potential biographers of source material, but even Davis, in his two-volume war memoir, mentions him only twice. Evans suggests that as Davis wrote the books in part to defend and memorialize his place in history, it would not have been characteristic of him to give much credit to Benjamin. Davis, in the midst of postwar business struggles, may have resented Benjamin's success as a barrister, or may have feared that allegations of involvement in Lincoln's assassination would again be made against the two men. Brook concurs that Benjamin's postwar success, that began as Davis lay in prison and other Confederates struggled for survival, may have soured Southerners towards the former secretary, but that anti-Semitism was also likely a factor. "For the guardians of Confederate memory after Reconstruction, Benjamin became a kind of pet Jew, generally ignored, but then trotted out at opportune moments to defend the segregated South against charges of bigotry."
  Those writing on Jewish history were reluctant to glorify a slaveowner, and reacted to Benjamin's story with "embarrassed dismay". This was especially so in the two generations following 1865, when the question of the Civil War remained an active issue in American politics. It was not until th
caption: Memorial plaque to Benjamin, Gamble Plantation Historic State Park, Ellenton, Florida
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