Emma Mordecai was a unique woman for her times. An educator and outspoken supporter of the Confederacy, Mordecai – who lived of her life in Richmond from 1812 to 1906 — was Jewish when Jews made up less than 1 percent of the Old South’s population. She also never married in a culture in which women were given few opportunities other than matrimony.
And in her diary, Mordecai prayed for the Confederacy’s survival and wrote movingly about hospital visits, food shortages, Jewish rituals, the local social scene, the sounds of nearby battles, and how emancipation impacted her household and family.
Dr. Melissa R. Klapper, a professor of history and director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, has co-written “The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai.”
Dr. Klapper, a Baltimore native who attended the Bais Yaakov School for Girls, is a 1995 graduate of Goucher College and earned her doctorate in history from Rutgers University. She lives in Merion Township, Pennsylvania.
Published by NYU Press, “The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai” comes out in late October.
Jmore: How did ‘The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai’ originate?
Dr. Klapper: My late colleague, Dianne Ashton, professor emerita of philosophy and world religions at Rowan University, began writing a book about Emma Mordecai’s Civil War diary nearly a decade ago.
When she passed away in 2022, I was concerned that the book would never see the light of day. So with her husband’s blessing, I completed and revised the book and saw it through to publication.
Who exactly was Emma Mordecai? Was she typical of Jewish women in the South at that time?
Emma Mordecai was the 12th of 13 children in a large antebellum American Jewish family that lived in several places in the South. The Jewish population in the South was quite small at the time, so they were unusual in that way. But there was a significant community in Richmond that many family members ended up involved in, including Emma.
Like most other white Southern families, the Mordecais typically hired and then bought slaves as soon as they could afford to do so, and they all shared the racial prejudices of the slaveholding society around them. Emma was somewhat unusual in that she never married, though there were other Jewish women at the time who never found Jewish spouses as well.
Why did she remain an observant Jew and refuse to convert like other members of her family?
A number of Emma’s siblings either converted to Christianity or married non-Jewish spouses. Emma sincerely believed in the beauty and righteousness of Judaism and rebuffed her own family members’ attempts to convert her. She started a Sunday school for Jewish children in Richmond and wrote (anonymously) a textbook used by Jewish educators in many places.
What was her daily life like?
Emma’s daily life changed when she left her home in Richmond in April 1864 and moved to her non-Jewish sister-in-law Rosina Young Mordecai’s farm a few miles away from Richmond.
She was no longer the one running her household, and no longer living with two of her older half-siblings. But she still spent a great deal of time reading, sewing, taking walks, visiting neighbors and writing in her diary. On most Friday nights and Saturday mornings, she stayed in her room and read from her prayerbook and Bible. She returned to Richmond each time there was a Jewish holiday to spend it with her relatives.
Her relationship with her enslaved people?
Emma did not take any of her personal slaves with her to the farm. They were already hired out in Richmond. Their salaries were paid to her as their owner, and she then provided them with money for food, shelter and clothing, as was typical.
Emma and Rosina together supervised the enslaved people on the farm, whom they both referred to as ‘servants.’ While neither of them was violent and both claimed to see their enslaved people in familial terms, Emma had sold enslaved people in the past when she was displeased by their behavior, and she was often suspicious of Rosina’s slaves’ activities. She was a true believer in the racist system of slavery and the supposed benefits of that system for everyone involved.
Was she a racist, by contemporary standards?
While historians do not like to apply contemporary standards to the past per se, there is no doubt that Emma was racist. She believed African Americans were inferior to white people and that slavery was a positive good. There were plenty of Americans in the mid-19th century who did not hold these racist beliefs, so this was a choice she made.
Would you characterize American Jewry at that time as being more pro-Union or pro-Confederacy?
Most, though not all, American Jews sided with the part of the country where they lived. They genuinely believed in either the Union or Confederate cause, and some of them also feared the antisemitism that might follow if they did not toe the line. So most Southern Jews sided with the Confederacy, as did Emma and all her siblings except one, who was a West Point graduate and career military officer. He resigned his commission rather than fight against his colleagues and relatives on both sides of the war.
Did a sizable number of American Jews own slaves?
The majority of white Americans never owned slaves, but some American Jews were among those white Americans who did, both in the North, where slavery was present until well into the 1800s, and the South, where slavery shaped antebellum society.
It is a thoroughly debunked and antisemitic lie that American Jews were disproportionately involved in the slave trade or disproportionately owned slaves. But most Southern Jews who could afford to own enslaved people did so, including within important Southern Jewish communities like New Orleans, Charleston and Richmond.
Why write about someone who owned enslaved people and supported the Confederacy?
It is important to tell Emma’s story to demonstrate how complicated history is. The point is not to lionize her or excuse her choices in any way but to use her story as a window into how American Jewish history developed during the antebellum and Civil War, and to remind contemporary readers that American Jews have a long history in the USA that includes both positive and negative aspects of it.
What happened to Emma Mordecai during the war? And after the war?
Emma spent the last year of the war in relative security at her sister-in-law’s farm near Richmond, but they were close enough to battles to hear the gunfire and the farm was frequently raided by soldiers from both the Confederate and the Union armies. Three of her nephews were serving in the Confederate army, which left the household dominated by women, and she had relatives all over the South that she was anxious to hear about — not all survived.
Emma was shocked when the enslaved people on Rosina’s farm left within weeks of the end of the war and had to start doing work she had never done before. She was distraught by the devastation in Richmond. In the long term, after the war, Emma took up the most common kind of work for an educated woman and became a teacher.
Are there many surviving diaries from Jewish women in the antebellum South?
There are a few others. Clara Solomon, an adolescent girl in New Orleans, kept a diary during the early part of the Civil War that described the Union occupation of the city.
Another example, Phoebe Pember Yates Levy, was a resident of Richmond who kept a diary about her work as a nurse in charge of one of the largest military hospitals there.
Historians have known about Emma Mordecai’s diary, but this is the first time it has been published.
Did her views about slavery ever evolve?
Emma’s diary ended with the end of the Civil War, but she seems to have been interested in the ‘Lost Cause,’ the racist mythmaking that followed the Civil War, and nostalgically looked back on slavery as a good thing.
What do you hope readers gain from reading this book?
‘The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai’ shows us how messy history is. Emma Mordecai was both a staunch defender of Judaism and a fervent Confederate nationalist who believed in white supremacy. She was a complicated figure, and reading about her life brings to life the contradictions and messiness of all historical figures.
What does ‘The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai’ tell us about the current times we live in?
‘The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai’ reminds us how easy it can be to just go along with the majority opinion or social expectation, instead of developing an individual moral compass.
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