Slave-owning Jewish Confederate woman documents wartime Passover in newly published diary

Like this year, Passover in 1864 took place in April. In the penultimate year of the American Civil War, a Jewish Confederate citizen named Emma Mordecai spent the holiday with her cousins in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. It’s one of the opening memories in the diary she started in the spring of 1864 and continued into the following year.

“By all I was most kindly greeted,” she wrote in her diary, “and I was gratified at the unvarying regret expressed at our family having left Richmond, and at the kind invitations I received from various friends to pass days or nights with them whenever I could.”

The 51-year-old Mordecai had previously lived in Richmond but left the capital to seek refuge from the advancing Union army at her sister-in-law’s nearby farmhouse. Still, Mordecai was committed to returning to the war-torn city’s Jewish community for the holidays, including that Passover.

It was a colder-than-usual spring, making it vital to light fires at the farmhouse and for much of her Passover stay in Richmond. There were other concerns: Her nephew George, after some time away from the Confederate army, had rejoined its ranks with his two brothers.

Mordecai’s wartime diary in its entirety is now available to the general public in print for the first time, thanks to the poignant efforts of two scholars, Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper, both of Rowan University in New Jersey.

“The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai” was released this past autumn by New York University Press.

Ashton, who conceived the project and had been editing the diary and working on an introduction, died in January 2022. Klapper, not wishing to see her friend and colleague’s work lapse, stepped in to complete the edits and introduction.

“It’s always exciting to see a new book out in the world,” Klapper told The Times of Israel. “I’m grateful for finishing the book. It’s a fitting final scholarly legacy for [Ashton].”

The diary spans a period from May 1864 to May 1865, with a final entry from over 20 years later, in 1886. As Klapper explained, it reveals a complex individual. A devout member of a minority group representing less than one percent of the Confederate population, Mordecai retained her Judaism even as other family members converted to Christianity or intermarried. She knew her Bible, penned a Sunday school textbook for synagogues, observed Shabbat and, as noted earlier, ventured back to Richmond for holidays: Passover, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

She was well-read in general, able to translate French literature, and loved nature. Yet she was also a slaveholder who espoused racist views of Blacks and lamented the triumph of emancipation. A defender of the Confederacy, she applauded its increasingly rare military victories. In later life, she made financial donations to Confederate monuments and memorials.

“This makes her a good example of how messy history is,” Klapper said. “She embodied a lot of contradictions. It’s the reason why the book is important. [It shows] the full range of American Jewish experiences in the US.” More generally, she added, “history is full of messy, contradictory people — just like the present day is.”

Mordecai, who lived into her 90s and never married, gifted her diary to a great-niece. Until now, it had been only accessible through her family archive at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina. Ashton, a professor emeritus of philosophy and world religions at Rowan, wished to make it more broadly available.

Diaries by Northerners and Southerners alike are a thriving area of Civil War studies. Ardent Confederate Mary Boykin Chesnut documented life under the Union guns at Charleston, South Carolina, while Northerner George Templeton Strong made acerbic observations from New York City and Union soldier Elisha Hunt Rhodes contributed observations from the battlefield as he rose up the ranks — with all three journal-keepers immortalized in the Ken Burns documentary “The Civil War.” (Cue the series’ famed fiddle melody.) Mordecai’s yearlong-plus effort can be viewed through multiple lenses.

“Civil War, history of slavery, women in the Civil War, in this case,” said Klapper, who is a professor of women’s history and director of women’s and gender studies at Rowan. “Trying to understand how someone could support Confederate nationalism — those are the reasons why this diary is important. It’s one of the very few diaries published by a Jewish woman during the Civil War — very few.”

Emma was the 12th of Jacob’s 13 children from two wives. The Mordecai family — they pronounced their surname mor-de-key — did not consist of recent immigrants. While their forebears hailed from Germany and England, the family had lived in the US for several generations, representing some of the 250,000-strong American Jewish population at the time, before the immigrant waves later in the 19th century. Of that quarter-million, only 25,000 were in the South.

Mordecai’s initial entry, which mentions celebrating Passover in Richmond, gives a glimpse into her Jewish life. She reunites with cousins and friends and attends synagogue services — presumably at Congregation Beth Shalome, where her late father Jacob Mordecai had served as president, and where she had established its Sunday school.

Ashton and Klapper collectively crafted an introduction that explores the complexities of Southern Jewish life — from religious beliefs to population hubs to antisemitism. Klapper, a 2013 National Jewish Book Award winner for “Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940,” had to pivot to the earlier period of the mid-to-late 19th century.

While working on the book, Klapper made time for another significant achievement — she is a three-time “Jeopardy!” winner from 2023 and returned for the Tournament of Champions last year.

Although the book’s introduction documents instances of antisemitism within the South, Emma’s life is overall a picture of coexistence within her intermarried family. Her Christian sister-in-law, Rosina Young Mordecai, welcomes Emma to stay at her farmhouse, Rosewood. Emma gets along well with her hosts — Rosina and her teenage daughter Augusta, nicknamed “Gusta.” On at least one occasion, Emma goes to church with Rosina, and her Christian brother-in-law takes her to Richmond for the High Holidays. Rosina’s sons George, John and William are all serving in the Confederate army, and Emma continually seeks news about them.

“Rosina probably comes up most often,” Klapper said. “They were close to each other.”

“What’s interesting about Rosina — and we don’t get her perspective on anything — is that she seems to have been the stereotypical sickly Victorian woman,” Klapper said. “She takes to her bed a lot. She sometimes went into Richmond to seek medical cures. Still, she ran quite the efficient household, which Emma admired.”

As for Gusta, “Emma seems to have been very close [with her]. They went on lots of walks, had discussions, sewed together.”

In May 1864, life at Rosewood was impacted by the approach of Union commander-in-chief Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Potomac. As part of a coordinated campaign to end the war, Grant’s forces clash repeatedly with Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia.

When Union cavalry Gen. Philip Sheridan defeats the Confederates at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, and his Southern counterpart Gen. J.E.B. Stuart is killed, Emma and Rosina ride out in a carriage, attempting to see the aftermath for themselves.

By this time, the contradictions in Emma’s character are evident. She shows compassion, expressing a wish to help any wounded Confederate soldiers she might encounter (later on in the diary, she makes multiple visits to military hospitals as a volunteer nurse). Yet she is also an upholder of the Southern system of slavery at Rosewood, where many enslaved people lived, including children. Emma and her sister-in-law pick strawberries with three young enslaved sisters named Lizzy, Mary and Georgianna.

“On the one hand,” Klapper said, “Emma and Rosina felt it was terrible if slave owners were violent. However, Emma had a history of selling enslaved people she had problems with in one way or another. Scholarship on slavery shows this was just another kind of violence” in which enslaved people were sold to “other places where they might encounter actual physical violence.”

Such violence breaks out at Rosewood, too. An enslaved man named Cyrus — whose children included Lizzy, Mary and Georgianna — gets into a physical dispute with Emma’s nephew George.

“There was some kind of altercation and tumult with enslaved people on the farm,” Klapper said. “One of the women [Cyrus’s wife, Sarah] said there was too much work… It ended up with everybody in the household getting involved, enslaved people and white people… It was true for the system of slavery — at any moment, violence could break out, even within so-called peaceable households.”

One year after Emma Mordecai started writing her diary, the world she knew began breaking apart. Richmond fell to the Union on April 3, 1865. Lee surrendered to Grant less than a week later, on April 9.

“I felt utterly miserable — That the earth might open and swallow us all up, was the only wish I could form,” Mordecai wrote on the morning of April 14. “Gradually we felt that all was in the hands of God, and that He had willed this in His unerring wisdom, and that we must submit ourselves to Him — that in thus doing we were not humbled before our foes but before God.”

The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai — edited by Dianne Ashton, Melissa R. Klapper

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