Fresh view of Lincoln’s Jewish ties

At a time when America’s heroes are dwindling, filmmakers and historians are among those turning to Abraham Lincoln for inspiration. 

The relationship of our 16th president with Jews is the inspiration for a groundbreaking exhibit, “With Firmness in the Right: Lincoln and the Jews,” that debuted at the New York Historical Society earlier this year and opens this week at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill. It is based on the book “Lincoln and the Jews: A History,” by Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell.

“This is not the stories you’ve heard about Lincoln from textbooks. It opens up a whole new world of another aspect of Lincoln’s life,” said Carla Knorowski, CEO of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation.

Considering that Lincoln grew up at a time of anti-Semitism, many people may be surprised to learn that he was deeply committed to religious pluralism and had more Jewish friends and acquaintances than any president before him. In 1809, the year of Lincoln’s birth, barely 3,000 Jews lived in America. By 1865, the year of Lincoln’s assassination, that number had increased to 150,000. 

The exhibit includes a series of letters between Lincoln and Abraham Jonas, a Jewish lawyer from Quincy, Ill., who was instrumental in Lincoln’s political rise. In a friendship that spanned just more than two decades, Jonas was one of the first to support Lincoln’s candidacy for president and urged the Republican Party to woo political outsiders like the “liberal and freethinking Germans” and “Israelites.” 

In 1861, Lincoln rewarded Jonas’s contributions with the plum political appointment of Postmaster of Quincy. But perhaps the greatest testament to their friendship was Lincoln’s handwritten order in May 1864 to allow one of Jonas’s sons, Charles, then a Confederate POW, “a parole of three weeks to visit his dying father.”