Rebuttal of Boteach's South-Bashing - Letter by Lewis Regenstein

Lewis Regenstein

Lewis Regenstein, a Native Atlantan, is a writer and author. He can be reached at Regenstein@mindspring.com.

Rebuttal of Boteach's South-Bashing - Letter by Lewis Regenstein

Editor's Note: The text of the letter below was sent via email by Lewis Regenstein to Rabbi Boteach back in August 2005 when Boteach's article (text below) first appeared. Boteach did not extend the courtesy of a reply to Mr. Regenstein.
The falsehoods, bigotry and ignorance in Boteach's commentary are so shocking and outrageous, we considered not repeating them here below. Example: Boteach compares Robert E. Lee to Al Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda terrorist. But Truth trumps our comfort zones and it is necessary that our readers understand the depth of bigotry and ignorance directed toward the South. We can't decide if Boteach's commentary is willful deception or shocking ignorance of American history. In any event, Mr. Regenstein's command of the facts and his considerable patience are admirable. He presumes Rabbi Boteach to be ignorant until proven a willful liar.

Dear Rabbi Boteach,

Your vicious and ignorant article, comparing the Confederacy with terrorists and calling it "a truly evil cause", shows that you know little about the Civil War, its causes and participants.

It is especially offensive to the multitude of Southern Jews who served their country with great honor, sacrificing much, sometimes their lives, and all they owned, defending their people and cities that were under attack by the North.

Moreover, to describe war criminals like Grant and Sherman as "great men" shows that you must be completely ignorant of the fact that they were notorious anti-Semites. Indeed, prejudice against Our People was blatant in the North, while Jews in the South were largely accepted and treated as other citizens. Indeed, General Robert E. Lee went out of his way to accomodate his Jewish soldiers so they could observe their holy days.

All this is described in detail in Robert Rosen's "The Jewish Confederates" and Mel Young's "Last Order of the Lost Cause," as well as many other histories of the era.

Moreover, that "great man" Grant and his family owned slaves throughout the War and did not free them until it had ended.

Some 3,500 to 5,000 Jews fought honorably and loyally for the Confederacy, including its Secretary of War and later State, Judah Benjamin. My then 16 year old great grandfather (Andrew Jackson Moses) served, as did his four brothers, their uncle, his three sons, and some two dozen other members of my Mother's extended family (The Moses’ of South Carolina and Georgia). More than half a dozen of them fell in battle, largely teenagers, including the first and last Confederate Jews to die in battle (Albert Moses Luria and Joshua Lazarus Moses).

We know first hand, from their letters, diaries, and memoirs, that they and their comrades-in-arms were not fighting for slavery, but rather to defend themselves, their families, homes, and country from an often brutal invading army that was trying to kill them, burn their homes and cities, and destroy everything they had.

Towards the end of the War, a unit of Sherman's army, which had just burned nearby Columbia, South Carolina, headed towards my family's hometown of Sumter, presumably to do the same to it. My great grandfather rode out to fight Potter's Raiders, along with some other teenagers, old men, and the wounded and invalids from the local hospital, a mission as hopeless as it was valiant. And with their families and homes and their own lives in mortal danger, defending slavery was the last thing on their minds.

The Union army was hardly known as a human rights organization. It was a top Union General, Ulysses S. Grant, who on 17 December, 1862 issued the infamous General Order # 11 expelling all Jews "as a class" from his area of operations, including parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. Union commanders also forbade Jews from riding on trains (November, 1862), and wrongly blamed them for whatever economic troubles the North encountered.

It was this same Union Army (led by many of the same Civil War generals, including Sherman, Grant, Sheridan, and Custer)) that engaged in virtual genocide against the Native Americans in what we euphemistically call "the Indian Wars," often massacring harmless, defenseless old men, women, and children in their villages.

Other war crimes specifically committed by Grant include:

Ordering the destruction of an entire agricultural area to deny food to the South (the Shenandoah Valley, 5 August, 1864);

Leading the mass murder of the Plains Indians to make land available for the western railroads (the eradication of the Plains Indians, 1865-66);

Overseeing the complete destruction of defenseless Southern cities, and conducting such warfare against unarmed women and children (e.g., the razing of Meridien, and other cities in Mississippi, spring, 1863).

Contrast these atrocities (and many others too numerous to list) with the gentlemanly policies and behavior of the Confederate forces. My ancestor Major Raphael Moses, who was General James Longstreet’s chief commissary officer and is credited with carrying out the Last Order of the Confederate Government, was forbidden by General Robert E. Lee from even entering private homes in their raids into the North, such as the famous incursion into Pennsylvania. Moses was forced to obtain his supplies from businesses and farms, and he always paid for what he requisitioned, albeit in Confederate tender.

Moses always endured in good humor the harsh verbal abuse he received from the local women, who, he noted, always insisted on receiving in the end the exact amount owed.

Moses and his Confederate colleagues never engaged in the type of warfare waged by the Union forces, especially that of General William T. Sherman on his infamous "March to the Sea" through Georgia and the Carolinas, in which his troops routinely burned, looted, and destroyed libraries, courthouses, churches, homes, and cities full of defenseless civilians, including my hometown of Atlanta.

It was not the South but rather the other side that engaged in genocide and other war crimes. While our ancestors may have lost the War, they never lost their honor, or engaged in anything that could justify the vilification that has been directed at them by you.

We honor our ancestors because they showed amazing courage and valor, enduring incredible hardships against overwhelming and often hopeless odds, in fighting for their homeland. You apparently are unaware of any of this history, but perhaps this letter will help educate you a bit.

By the way, your article is being widely circulated on Southern Heritage websites, and I assure you that it is being quite effective in offending large numbers of people whose ancestors fought for the South. Perhaps next time you do such an article on a political rather than religious topic, you could leave off the title of "Rabbi", since your views certainly do not represent those of Our People.

Thank you for taking the time to consider these facts.

Sincerely yours,

Lewis Regenstein
Atlanta, GA
regenstein@mindspring.com

Lewis Regenstein, a Native Atlantan, is a writer and author. He can be reached at Regenstein@mindspring.com.

The Sin of Confederate Hero Worship

Why do Americans stand for Southerners idolizing the Confederacy, despite the evils of slavery and treason at its heart?

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Beliefnet Commentator

This week, I took my family to Virginia in pursuit of one of my favorite summertime activities, visiting Civil War battlefields. We traveled to the four great battlefields around Fredericksburg, where more than 100,000 soldiers died in the course of the war. I also fulfilled my lifelong dream of visiting Appomattox Courthouse where on April 9, 1865, Lee famously surrendered to Grant, in effect ending the war.

What consistently baffles me in making these visits is the romanticization of the Confederacy that continues 140 years after the war's end. Wherever you go in the South, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, James Longstreet, and the other Confederate leaders are venerated as heroes. In the course of my travels, I have driven on Robert E. Lee Drive and Jefferson Davis Highway. I've seen myriad monuments to Stonewall Jackson, and I've seen the Confederate flag flying from cars and homes.

As an American who loves his country, I am appalled by the persistence of Confederate hero worship in the South 140 years after the Civil War's end. After all, the South fought for a truly evil cause. While there were other factors that led to the Civil War, no serious, objective historian would deny that the principal cause of the war was the institution of slavery, and that the South fought to preserve its "peculiar institution."

At the outset of the war, there were seven slave states in the Confederacy vs. eight slave states in the Union. ---GHC Editor

Whether or not the soldiers of the Confederacy personally believed in slavery, they still fought to preserve the hideous, reprehensible practice of buying and selling human beings--each and every one created in the image of G-d--like animals. Babies were torn away from their mothers' breasts; men, women, and children were whipped like beasts. This was the essential, defining institution that the Confederacy struggled to keep.

Robert E. Lee was opposed to slavery. But his personal feelings about the institution are utterly immaterial. The only relevant point was that he used his military genius to fight a war that would have kept men, women, and children in chains. What on earth could make a man like that a hero? What could make a man like Jefferson Davis a hero in the eyes of the good people of the modern South, and what message are those who lionize this man sending to their children? That it is good to rebel against the United States?

The message is: "The South was Right." Lee felt higher loyalty to his home state than to the Union from which his state lawfully withdrew. Virginia had no intention to secede until Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South; Virginia's secession was over the immoral threat of force, not slavery (same goes for the other border states TN, NC, AR).

Last summer, when I visited Richmond, the Confederate capital, with my children, I was astonished to see the enormous statues of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and the other confederate luminaries that line Monument Avenue, which the Virginia tourism literature calls "one of America's most beautiful boulevards." This, in the heart of a city that is about 60 percent African-American. If I were they, would I abide this display of veneration for the Confederacy's leaders? Were the statues erected with any thought to the feelings of the city's black residents?

And aside from the slavery question, were these men not traitors to their country? The Confederate rebellion cost the United States 580,000 lives. It began when the South rejected the election of Abraham Lincoln, a president who they believed would abolish slavery but whom we Americans today regard as the greatest president ever to lead this country.

Speak for yourself, Rabbi. Many Southerners do NOT consider Lincoln "great" in any sense; he was a tyrant, a war criminal and lying politician. All your outrageous lies are offensive, but they don't change the truth.

Let's put this in the starkest possible terms. The cause for which the Confederate leaders fought, namely slavery, was no more noble than the cause for which the terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Al Zarqawi fights for today in Baghdad.

Zarqawi fights to enslave the Muslim people, and the Confederate leaders fought to continue the enslavement of American's black sons and daughters. Zarqawi fights to deny Muslims their rights and to deny them a say in their political future, and the Confederate leaders fought so that blacks would have no rights and no future. Zarqawi fights so that women can be whipped in the streets when they are dressed immodestly, and the Confederate leaders fought so that black women could be lashed when they disobeyed the orders of their masters. In every way, the enslavement of blacks that Lee and Davis fought to perpetuate is much more severe than any kind of enslavement that contemporary Muslim governments, however brutal and despotic, would currently inflict against their people.

To be sure, I do not compare the Confederate leadership to terrorists. Davis and Lee never waged a war against civilians, and in their personal lives historians tell us they were scrupulous gentleman. Lee in particular was instrumental in getting his fellow Southerners to lay down their weapons after Appomattox rather than contuing a guerrilla struggle from the mountains of the West. But the cause for which these men fought was just as odious as that for which terrorists would lay down their lives today.

I'm not comparing you to a moron, Rabbi, I'm just saying that your words make less sense than a babbling, drooling moron.

It is high time for the United States to remove statues of Confederate leaders. And for those who say that removing such statues would be an affront to free speech, I would respond, are there any statues of Benedict Arnold in the United States? And would anyone dare erect one? And yet Arnold's treachery against the United States was child's play compared to the damage caused by Davis, Lee, and Jackson.

I'm not comparing you to the Taliban, Rabbi, I'm just saying that your proposal would make Taliban members proud. They delighted in destroying temples and monuments in Afghanistan just as you would like to do here in "the land of the free."

The great men of the Civil War were not the rebels, but those who fought to preserve the unity of this great nation rather than to tear it asunder. The great men of that terrible war were those who ultimately freed the slaves from bondage--most notably Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman--rather than those whose victory would have had fellow Americans owned as beasts of burden by their countrymen.

The idea that any southern state capitol would fly the Confederate flag offends the sensibilities and perpetuates racial division. Did we forget that it is the symbol of rebellion against the authority of the United States and stands for hatred of America?

"I love the Union and the Constitution, but I would rather leave the Union with the Constitution than remain in the Union without it." ---Jefferson Davis

I know that this is a hot-button issue, and that there are some state capitols that want to incorporate the Confederate battle flag into theirs because, they argue, the Confederacy is an integral part of their history. Indeed it is. But is the wrong history, the worst kind of history that could be perpetuated. While I would never compare the Confederacy to Nazi Germany--there are, after all, gradations of evil, and the Confederacy did not approach the inhuman slaughter by Hitler's minions--no one would accept a historical argument for incorporating the Nazi flag into modern Germany's flag. Modern Germany is rightly ashamed of its past and the symbols of that past.

In the same way our country could never remain the United States if the South had gained the upper hand, likewise we cannot be a great country if we romanticize those who fought an evil rebellion whose ultimate objective was the perpetuation of America's foremost moral sin.

The United States would still exist if the Confederacy had prevailed. What is a "great country" exactly, Rabbi? A globe-trotting, world-policing empire? OR perhaps a country that observes the rule of law and scrupulously abides by its Constitution?

Which leads me to another conundrum. Many of the Southerners who romanticize the Confederacy are religious Christians who lead lives devoted to moral excellence. How is it possible that they would make heroes of men who betrayed the Bible's essential message: that G-d is the father of all humankind, and all of us therefore are equal before Him?

There is no easy answer to this question. Some would say that the original sin of the Confederacy's Christians was to talk themselves into believing that slavery was really a benevolent institution, granting support, food, and shelter to a population who they believed could not fend for themselves. The perpetuation of that sin would be lionizing the Confederate leaders and believing that it does not offend the South's black citizens or undermine its morality. Still others would say that when G-d-fearing Christians honor the Confederate leaders today, they do so as a means of honoring the South and a lost way of life rather than focusing on slavery. It's collective amnesia. The horrors of slavery have been forgotten and only the charm of the old South has remained.

But all these answers ring hollow. For people of religion should be lionizing only those whose lives captured the divine ideals that they hold dear. And those who fought to preserve slavery, to use an understatement, simply don't make the grade.

When religious southern Christians engage in nostalgia for the Confederacy, they are making the mistake of putting Southern sentiment before religious conviction, in effect elevating an inferior part of their identity over the most central part. Regional loyalty must never come before eternal principle.

If Truth is an eternal principle, Rabbi, nothing in your commentary "makes the grade."

www.beliefnet.com/story/171/story_17164_1.html