Reviews of New Books
Jacob Reb
By Robert Cheeks
The Jewish Confederates
By Robert N. Rosen
University of South Carolina Press,
517 pages, $39.95
The Jewish Confederates—Charleston, South Carolina attorney Robert Rosen’s timely, well-sourced, and accurate record of Southern Jewry’s participation in the War Between the States—will break against the walls of academia like the shot from a brace of well-placed Parrot rifles.
Among other things, the author shatters one of the more egregious myths of history: “That the ‘Wandering Jew’ was citizen of no country, that they were cowards and they were disloyal.”
Rosen notes that there was no state- or church-sponsored anti-Semitism in the antebellum South. Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms and wars of Europe found “Palestine” in such remote places as South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. They were welcomed as neighbors, afforded the rights and privileges of freemen, and allowed to practice their religion. Rosen points out that the first Jewish senators were elected from the South even though fewer than 25,000 Jews lived in Dixie. And while anti-Semitism “was a fact of life in the nineteenth century,” it was a prejudice that many Southerners did not embrace.
By contrast, Rosen documents virulent anti-Semitism in Massachusetts, where “the first known Jew in Boston was ‘warned out’ in the 1640s.” When the war broke out in 1861, the Boston Evening Transcript blamed the Jews for secession.
Rosen writes that those Jews who established themselves in the South had “nowhere else in America...experienced such fullness of opportunity or achieved comparable political and social acceptance.” Not only did Jews whose families had settled in the South in the eighteenth century flock to the Confederate banner, but recently arrived immigrants did so as well. And while many Jews, along with their neighbors, opposed secession, most shared the patriotism that was the trademark of Southern resistance.
Rosen shares the Lincolnite belief that the “Civil War was brought about by the dispute over slavery.” He acknowledges, though, that “Some Jewish Confederates, like many of their Gentile comrades, fought for what they termed their ‘liberty’ and freedom, which included the right to own slaves.” Rosen doesn’t spend enough time on the causes of the war; it would have been interesting to know what the leading Jewish citizens of the South had to say about tariffs, states rights, federalism, and Lincoln’s efforts at consolidating national power.
The author gives us an overview of two of the leading figures in Southern Jewry: David Levy Yulee and Confederate Secretary of State Judah Philip Benjamin. He is especially good on Secretary Benjamin’s covert activities. Rosen profiles several Jewish soldiers who distinguished themselves on the field of battle and rose in rank, unimpeded by religious bias. In many cases Jewish bodies littered the fields of honor, their blood flowing alongside that of the Gentile soldiers under their command.
From primary sources, Rosen sketches the lives of Jewish Confederates in combat, the suffering of their families on the homefront, and the lengths many went to to maintain their “Jewishness.” Commanders from Robert E. Lee to Thomas Waul had praise for their service.
In 1866, in an effort to raise funds for a monument to the Jewish Confederate dead, the Hebrew Ladies Memorial Association of Richmond distributed this poignant appeal: “In time to come, when our grief shall have become, in a measure, silenced, and when the malicious tongue of slander, ever so ready to assail Israel, shall be raised against us, then, with feeling of mournful pride, will we point to this monument and say: ‘There is our reply.’”
Robert Rosen’s emendation to the American Jewish record is must reading not only for his co-religionists but for those who study the Civil War. In revealing the patriotism of Southern Jewry, Rosen has dealt a blow against bigotry.
Ohioan Robert Cheeks writes for Muzzleloader, Muzzle Blasts, and various Civil War publications.
I LEFT MY HEART IN YERBA BUENA
By Clark Stooksbury
This Land Is Your Land: The Geographic Evolution of the United States
By Seymour Schwartz, Foreword by Barber Conable, Jr.
Abrams, 304 pages, $75
My home town of Knoxville is named for Henry M. Knox, who also gave his name to Fort Knox, Kentucky. Local historian Jack Neely describes him as a “plump, blandly competent Boston general in the American Revolution, then a Secretary of War who presided over no wars, a man who never came within a day’s ride of Tennessee.” My home state of Tennessee is named after the river, which was in turn named for an Indian town called Tinnasi. This odd combination of place names is not unusual in the American landscape, as Seymour Schwartz illustrates in This Land Is Your Land.
Geography is a natural corollary to the study of history. Schwartz quotes the statement of Jamestown’s John Smith, “As Geography without History seemeth as carkasse without motion, so History without Geography wandereth as vagrant without certaine habitation.” And so Schwartz’s geographical narrative follows American history from Columbus to the entrance of Alaska and Hawaii into our union. Each state is discussed in order of its incorporation into the nation.
During his first expedition, Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Caribbean Sea he named San Salvador. Though there is disagreement among scholars, the location is now believed by many to be an island in the Bahamas. As the Spaniards and their Italian captains got an early start exploring the Western hemisphere, they attached their names to many parts of it. Several who sailed with Columbus eventually settled on an island they named Puerto Rico. Columbus never made it to the major land mass of North America, but in 1513 Puerto Rico’s Governor, Ponce de Leon, explored the peninsula that is now the southeasternmost portion of the United States. He named it Florida after the term for Easter, Pasqua Florida.
The naming of the North and South American continents suggests the often accidental nature of terms of place. The grand prize went to Amerigo Vespucci, the explorer whose real talent was public relations, since he built on Columbus’s discoveries. (He also may have inflated his role in the expeditions in which he participated.) Schwartz reports that the German geographer-cartographer Martin Waldseemüller misassigned the name “America,” and only to the South American continent at first. After Europe, Africa, and Asia, wrote Waldseemüller, a fourth continent “has been discovered by Americus Vespucius…and I do not see why anyone should rightly forbid naming it Amerige—land of Americus, as it were, after its discoverer Americus, a man of acute genius—or America, since both Europe and Asia have received their names from women.” Six years later, Waldseemüller acknowledged the primacy of Columbus’s discoveries over those of Amerigo Vespucci and dropped the name “America” from his maps and writings. But as is often the case in publishing, a retraction is rarely noticed.
That was not the last time a mistake played a role in naming a place. Consider Casper, Wyoming, which was named to honor Caspar W. Collins, who was killed in battle with Indians in 1865. A typographical error which got the hero’s name wrong stuck, and supplanted the correct spelling.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was involved in a spelling controversy that lasted for nearly a century. The early Scots-Irish settlers named the western Pennsylvania city for a British official from the French and Indian Wars, using their own suffix for indicating a hamlet. Later-arriving German immigrants dropped the “h.” The h-less spelling was officially adopted in 1816, but never took hold among the people. In 1890, something called the Board of Geographic Names stipulated “Pittsburg.” Again it failed to take. In 1911, the U.S. Department on Geographic Names returned the “h” to Pittsburgh and the controversy subsided.
Sometimes a city was fortunately renamed. Imagine an NFL matchup between the Terminus Falcons and the Yerba Buena 49ers. Atlanta started as Terminus because it was the end of a railroad line. San Francisco was originally named for a mint that grew in the area. It later took its name from San Francisco Bay, which was so called by early missionaries in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi.
The states, cities, towns, rivers, and lakes of America got their names from a riotous array of sources. Although British settlers dominated, the French, Spanish, Germans, and Dutch all left their mark in place names. Many of the best monikers came from Indians. There is no better source for a place name than people who have occupied the region for centuries.
This list-filled oversized book isn’t always compelling reading, but Seymour Schwartz sheds light on many tidbits of interesting Americana. For where would we be if we didn’t have Mississippi, Sante Fe, Vermont, and Muskogee to keep us oriented?
Clark Stooksbury writes from Knoxville, Tennesee.
THE RISE AND FALL OF MUSIC KINGS
By Martin Morse Wooster
The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power
By Norman Lebrecht, 1990
A substantial portion of the cost of a ticket to a classical music concert goes to pay the orchestra’s music director or guest conductor. Top conductors are compensated lavishly. But in this highly entertaining book, British music critic Norman Lebrecht suggests few of them earn it.
Lebrecht is a fine writer who gives his readers humorous anecdotes and catty details about the lives of great conductors. For those of us who only know Arturo Toscanini or Eugene Ormandy as names on record labels, the insights are highly illuminating.
As Lebrecht points out, the art of conducting is “nebulous and indeterminate…. No one has ever explained how one man with a physical flourish can elicit an exhilarating response from an orchestra while another, with precisely the same motions and timing, produces a dull, unexceptional sound.” Nonetheless, there’s a certain something that explains why we still buy decades-old discs by Fritz Reiner, Sir John Barbirolli, or Bruno Walter.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, composers tended to conduct their own compositions. But Richard Wagner’s complex scores were so difficult that conducting eventually became a specialty. The first modern conductor, Hans von Bülow (1830-94), spent 20 years of his career conducting Wagner’s operas, many from memory. Wagner rewarded his disciple by seducing—and marrying—von Bülow’s wife, Cosima (a daughter of Franz Liszt).
Von Bülow was the first of a long line of conductors who believed they had to make the lives of their musicians miserable in order to get the job done. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) insisted on being absolute dictator of the Vienna Opera at the turn of the century. He controlled every aspect of the opera, including the costume department and stage design. Mahler cut off free tickets for journalists and demanded that late arriving audience members sit in an uncomfortable stall known as “the sin bin.” He even defied Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef II. When the emperor asked him to perform a light opera by popular Hungarian composer Count Tichy, Mahler refused, claiming he was incapable of understanding such a frothy work. “A chestnut tree,” Mahler grumbled, “cannot be expected to produce oranges.”
The most important conductor after Mahler, Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957), also demanded absolute authority. Toscanini went into fits whenever anyone called him “Mr. Toscanini.” Everyone—even cab drivers—had to address him as “Maestro.” Toscanini not only thought himself equal to the great composers, he routinely rewrote compositions he didn’t like. His resistance to Italian Fascism—which led him, in 1931, to be beaten by Fascist thugs—came about not because Toscanini favored democracy, but because he disliked anyone (including Mussolini) giving him orders.
The great villain of The Maestro Myth is Herbert von Karajan (1908-89). Von Karajan was one of the world’s richest conductors; when he died, his estate was worth 500 million deutschemarks (about $300 million). Much of this came from von Karajan’s uncanny ability to advance—and profit from—new technology. In the wake of World War II, von Karajan, a Nazi Party member whose career was advanced by leading officials of the Third Reich, was swiftly rehabilitated to become a prominent conductor on classical LPs. In the 1970s, von Karajan toyed with laserdiscs. And in the late 1970s, he was one of the first to realize that LPs were about to be superseded by compact discs. Von Karajan profited substantially from investments in compact disc factories.
Von Karajan was also the first great conductor to realize jet airplanes enabled him to hold two or three posts simultaneously, tripling his pay. Like Mahler, von Karajan was the music director of the Vienna Opera. But von Karajan only conducted one-third as many performances as Mahler, because he was simultaneously the music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, the creator of the Salzburg Festival, and a frequent guest conductor in North and South America and Japan.
Since von Karajan’s day, top conductors have increasingly become non-resident frequent flyers. Typically, a conductor is with his main orchestra for 12 weeks or less, jetting vast distances to hold another music directorship elsewhere. And these stars are increasingly well-paid. “In 1910, a top conductor earned ten times as much for a concert as an average factory worker took home in a week,” Lebrecht writes. “In 1990, he was paid fifty times as much.”
Not much has changed in the ten years since Lebrecht published his book. Conductors are less likely to earn substantial income from records, since the classical recording industry has collapsed (largely because “umpty-fourth” versions of most all the great works already exist). But the leading conductors are always heading to the airport. Their community ties are weakening, and their reduced stage presence ensures that the differences between top orchestras aren’t as great as they once were.
As conducting salaries rise and rise, orchestras with shaky finances fold, reorganize, or transfer much of a conductor’s power to the concertmaster. We’ll probably have jet-setting conductors throughout the twenty-first century, Lebrecht concludes, but their excessive demands for wealth and power will diminish them “to the status of a Christmas tree—decorative, but wholly detached from the real world, where real decisions are made.”
TAE associate editor Martin Morse Wooster is a classical music enthusiast.
