Many southern Jews came to accept, if not embrace, slavery—though the spiritual dissonance of this position, even at that time, was lost on no one. During one barbed congressional debate over slavery in the 1850s, an abolitionist senator inveighed against “Israelites with Egyptian principles”—a dart aimed at his slavery-defending colleague Judah Benjamin, the Jewish Democrat from Louisiana who would go on to serve in the cabinet of Confederate president Jefferson Davis during the Civil War.[22]
