With So Few Jews in the South at the Time, It Is Astonishing that One Should Appear at the Very Center of Southern History

I first became curious about Judah P. Benjamin fifteen years ago when I began my research for The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South. I was intrigued with the ways n which Jews and Southerners were alike--stepchildren of an anguished history--and yet how different. Whereas the Jewish search for a homeland contrasted with the Southerner's commitment to place, Southern defenders of the Confederacy often used Old Testament analogies in referring to themselves as “the chosen people” destined to survive and triumph against overwhelming odds. Benjamin fascinated me then because of the extraordinary role he played in Southern history and the ways in which Jews and non-Jews reacted to him. He was the prototype of the contradictions in the Jewish Southerner, and the stranger in the Confederate story, the Jew at the eye of the storm that was the Civil War. Objectively, with so few Jews in the South at the time, it is astonishing that one should appear at the very center of Southern history. Benjamin himself avoided his Jewishness throughout his public career, though his enemies in the Southern press and in the halls of the Confederate Congress never let the South forget it.

--Eli N. Evans, prologue to Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate (New York: Press Press, 1988), xi-xii.