"What happened to them?" Topic

Hello everyone,
You told me about blacks, Indians, other ethnic groups involved militarily in the ACW.

And the Jews in all that?

There were indeed Jews in the U.S.A., weren't they concerned?

I suppose that when they were not practicing, they enlisted en masse in volunteer regiments and then underwent conscription like non-Jews?

But practicing Jews?

What happened to them?

By "practicing" do you mean Orthodox, he EEE ya?

By 1860, the initial Sephardic Jewish population had been swamped by a recent wave of Ashkenazi, hard to sort out from the other Germans. I remember a colleague in graduate school speaking of a "spike" of field-grade Jewish officers in Missouri Union regiments, which puzzled him until he worked out that they were realschule graduates--commonly holding staff positions in German regiments raised in St Louis. (St Louis was very heavily German in this period.)

On the other side, Judah P. Benjamin, of Sephardic descent and the son of immigrants, held various Confederate cabinet positions. Generally speaking, there was not a Jewish position on the ACW or separate Jewish regiments--just Jewish citizens going to war along with Christian neighbors.

Do be careful with meaning, though. Itinerant peddlers were called "Jews" regardless of individual race or religion. Grant got into a serious fuss when he banned Jews from Army camps c. 1863. Various regiments with strong Jewish elements protested, and he was left explaining that he didn't mean them: he meant the people selling shoddy, overpriced goods to soldiers, but he didn't know another word for such people.

Do be careful about the meaning of the word as sources use it.

Jewish soldiers:

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PDF link

Nicely done, 79th!

@robert piepenbrink
I would not have believed either that before the introduction of conscription, Jews who were Ashkenazi rather than Sephardic or Mizrahi did not prefer, like Christians, to serve with their coreligionists, because with conscription, no one, whatever their origin or religion, had a choice.

@79thPA
Thanks for the links.