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History is messy. We try to grant the people in our own present-day lives the space to be complicated, but we sometimes forget that people in the past were complicated, too. They were no more one dimensional in their own time than any of us are now. As a longtime historian of American Jewish women, this insight is nothing new to me, but I had to keep on reminding myself of it as I worked on The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai, co-authored with the late Dianne Ashton, who initiated the project. Let me tell you a few stories to explain.

The first story is about Dianne, a pioneering feminist Jewish studies scholar. Dianne and Ellen Umansky’s pathbreaking collection (1992; revised 2009) brought together Jewish women’s voices in a way that revolutionized the study of gender and religion. All of Dianne’s work highlighted the lived experiences of women and religion, particularly in her books (1997) and Hanukkah in America: A History (2013). She also mentored a host of young feminist scholars. She was an early activist in the Women’s Caucus (now the Gender Justice Caucus) of the Association of Jewish Studies at a time when women’s studies was just starting to have an impact on the field. For nearly ten years before Dianne’s untimely death in January 2022, she worked on a project about Emma Mordecai (1812-1906).

That leads me to the next story. Emma Mordecai was one of the youngest of thirteen siblings in an antebellum American Jewish family. Her father, Jacob, moved to the South as a young man and moved around the region with his first wife, Judith, and his second, Rebecca, who was Emma’s mother. In North Carolina, the family ran the Warrenton Female Academy, a renowned school for Southern girls, but Emma primarily grew up on a farm outside Richmond, Virginia. She lived in Richmond for most of her adult life. The Mordecais scattered all over the South, and as they did, a significant number of them either married Christian spouses or converted to Christianity themselves. Not Emma, though. She remained fiercely devoted to Judaism, arguing with evangelizing siblings about her faith, establishing a Sunday School for the Jewish children of Richmond, and writing a textbook for Jewish education. Emma was a fascinating example of the argument Dianne had made in her earlier work, which explored the critical importance of women in maintaining Judaism in the antebellum era. Emma was a stalwart defender of her faith.

The story is not so simple, though. Emma, like the vast majority of her siblings who survived into the Civil War era, was a Southerner through and through. She was also a fervent supporter of the Confederacy. Jacob Mordecai and almost all of his children became slave owners as soon as they could afford to do so, whether they lived on farms of various sizes or in urban areas like Richmond. A huge amount of the family correspondence has been preserved, and it is very clear that all the Southern Mordecais shared the deep racial prejudices of their day.  This was likely motivated by a desire to shore up their own white privilege at a time when Jews were often seen as racially ambiguous. Once the war broke out, Emma became as fiercely devoted to Confederate nationalism as she was to Judaism. She began to keep a diary in April 1864 when she left Richmond for the comparative safety of her (non-Jewish) sister-in-law’s farm a few miles away. It is very clear that she believed in the inferiority of African Americans and considered slavery a benevolent and mutually beneficial system. Time and time again, the old canards that Jews dominated the slave trade or owned enslaved people in disproportionate numbers have been disproven.  But that doesn’t mean there were no Jewish slaveowners, and Emma was one of them.

There’s another story here. Dianne was a consummate professional and experienced scholar, but I do think that after spending ten years conducting research and writing about her, Dianne perhaps foregrounded Emma’s strong attachments to Judaism at the expense of more fully reckoning with the less admirable elements of her life. She passed away before she could come to terms with this issue. Achieving perspective on the people they study so deeply and for so long is not an uncommon challenge for historians. When I received Dianne’s husband’s blessing to complete the book in her name, this issue was something I had to contend with. How to revise Dianne’s unfinished work in a way that honored the themes she chose to emphasize while also delving deeper into Emma’s racism and devotion to the Confederacy, both of which are on full display in the diary? Without this further reckoning, it seemed unlikely that the book would ever see the light of day, so I became part of the story myself in revising Dianne’s manuscript into a more balanced account. 

There are layers upon layers of stories in The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai, and all of them reflect the complexities of women’s lives past, present, and future.  We don’t have to give a pass to slaveowners and racists, but we do have to try to understand them within their historical times and places. Maybe doing so will encourage us to appreciate our own messy, vibrant, contradictory, lives. After all, what kinds of stories will the women of the future tell about us 150 years from now?