The strangest Jewish legacy in the US is hiding in a warehouse

Behind an orange rolling shutter of a warehouse in New Orleans, between a vacuum cleaner, lighting equipment, and a cardboard box, lies the strangest Jewish legacy in America. It is a granite block nearly a meter and a half high and weighing about 725 kilograms, lying on a crushed wooden pallet. At its base is a rough fracture, and on its surface are hammer marks. The stone commemorates a man most Israelis have not heard of, even though at the height of his power he was the only Jew in the Confederate cabinet. This was the government established by 11 southern states after they seceded from the United States to protect the institution of slavery.

Judah Philip Benjamin was born in 1811 on the island of St. Croix to a Sephardic Jewish family. His parents emigrated to the United States when he was a toddler and settled in Charleston, South Carolina. His father struggled to make a living, and his mother supported the family by running a fruit stand near the port. At the age of 14, Benjamin was admitted to Yale University but left two years later without a degree for reasons that remain vague. He arrived in New Orleans as a penniless teenager, worked in a law firm, and studied law on his own. To make a living, he taught English to the children of Creole society. One of his students was Natalie St. Martin, daughter of a wealthy Catholic family, who later became his wife.

By age 21, he was already licensed to practice law. When he struggled to find clients early in his career, he and a partner summarized and analyzed about 6,000 court rulings from Louisiana. The book became a success and launched his career. His marriage to Natalie effectively fell apart, and she moved to Paris with their only daughter, while he remained in America and visited them occasionally. In New Orleans, he amassed a fortune, purchased a sugar plantation with a partner where 140 slaves were held, and advanced from the Louisiana legislature to the Senate in Washington. In 1852, he became the first Jewish senator who did not convert to Christianity. President Millard Fillmore offered to nominate him to the Supreme Court, but Benjamin refused.

Benjamin was a brilliant jurist, but also a staunch supporter of slavery and the right of southern states to secede from the United States. When Louisiana seceded from the Union in 1861, he gave up his Senate seat and joined the rebel government. Confederate President Jefferson Davis appointed him Attorney General, then Secretary of War, and finally Secretary of State. Benjamin became his right-hand man, and the two worked ten hours a day. As Secretary of War, Benjamin took the blame for the fall of Roanoke Island to the North, even though the decisions were made by Davis. He resigned, but Davis promoted him to Secretary of State. Benjamin tried to convince Britain and France to recognize the Confederacy and failed. Toward the end of the war, he even proposed recruiting slaves into the army in exchange for their freedom, not because he opposed slavery, but in a desperate attempt to prevent defeat.

His face was printed on a two-dollar bill — the only banknote issued in America featuring a portrait of a Jew. He did not belong to a synagogue, married a Catholic, and his daughter was raised as a Catholic, but his rivals would not let him forget his origins. A senator from Ohio called him "a son of Israel with Egyptian principles," meaning a Jew who justifies enslavement. Benjamin replied that while his ancestors were receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, his rival's ancestors were herding pigs in the forests of Britain. The nickname "the brains of the Confederacy," which sounds like a compliment today, was born partly from the antisemitic image of the Jew pulling the strings and from the attempt to blame him for the South's defeat.

In April 1865, with the fall of the Confederate capital, Benjamin fled south with Davis. In Charlotte, he was given shelter by Abraham Weil, a German-born Jewish merchant who served the Confederacy. After about a week, Benjamin continued south, posing as a Frenchman who did not speak English, hid in the swamps of Florida, and escaped through the Bahamas and Cuba to Britain. At 54, a refugee of a defeated government, he started over. Months later, he was licensed as a barrister in London, wrote a book on commercial law that became a legal classic, and reached the top of his profession for the second time in his life. In 1872, he was granted the title of "Queen's Counsel," reserved for top barristers, and he appeared before the House of Lords. He retired in 1883 and moved to Paris to be near his wife and daughter. A year later, he died there without returning to the United States and without accounting for his role in slavery and the rebellion.

It was only after his death that the Jews of the South adopted his image. In their eyes, his success proved that a Jew could be accepted into the American elite. In the South of racial segregation, the price was identification with the white establishment and support for the enslavement of Black people. The "United Daughters of the Confederacy" organization turned Benjamin into proof that the South was supposedly tolerant of Jews. In 1948, the organization's branch in Charlotte sought to place a tombstone on the site where Weil's house once stood. Harry Golden, a Jewish publisher and later an ally of Martin Luther King, convinced "Temple Israel" and "Temple Beth El" to fund it. Later, the branch received an antisemitic letter claiming that Jews were using him for propaganda; its members were convinced and tried to cancel the project under the pretext that it would disturb passengers boarding the bus at the nearby stop. Despite the controversy, the stone was placed, the names of the synagogues were carved on it, and two rabbis from them participated in the ceremony.

After the riots in Charlottesville, a national movement began to work for the removal of Confederate monuments, and the board of "Temple Beth El" voted unanimously in favor of moving Benjamin's tombstone from its location in Charlotte. But a law in North Carolina prohibited the removal of a public monument unless it was moved to an equally prominent and honorable location. In June 2020, the city of Charlotte invited artists to paint the words Black Lives Matter on the road in front of the stone. Days later, the letters BLM were spray-painted on it, and an unknown person struck it with a hammer. The city used the vandalism as a legal reason to uproot it from the sidewalk. Jewish lawyer Bart Friedlander, whose wife is a descendant of Weil, bought it from the city for one dollar. He considered placing it in his backyard, but according to him, "my wife didn't want it." A moving company transported it for free to the "Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience" in New Orleans. According to the Jewish magazine "Forward," which tracked the stone's journey this month since it was removed from the sidewalk, the monument has been lying in an outdoor warehouse of the museum since 2022. Its director, Kenneth Hoffman, still does not know whether to display it clean, with the hammer marks, or with the BLM inscription that the city erased. Less than a kilometer away, two banknotes bearing Benjamin's face are on display. The stone itself waits in the dark for a decision on whether it commemorates a Jewish achievement, complicity in slavery, or the price the Jews of the South paid to be accepted. According to Hoffman, it may stay there forever.