A Jewish, racist daughter of the Confederacy

“The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai” provides a unique eyewitness account of the chaotic final year of the war between the Union and the Confederacy, written by a Jew with allegiance to the Southern cause. This recently published book has a heartwarming backstory involving three Jewish women: two professors at a university in New Jersey and the Confederate diarist from Virginia.

Dianne Ashton (1949-2022) was a professor of philosophy and world religions at Rowan University in Glassboro who specialized in historical topics dealing with Judaism and women. For more than 10 years, while teaching and dealing with complications of muscular dystrophy, Dr. Ashton also worked on a scholarly biography of Emma Mordecai (pronounced Mord-e-key), including a complete transcript of her diary, one of the few surviving journals written by a Confederate Jewish woman during the Civil War.

Emma’s entries provide an intimate look at domestic life in the Old South from the perspective of an unmarried woman who was an observant practicing Jew and whose life reflected the social and political values of the Confederacy.  She discusses family relationships, wartime struggles, and the fall of Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, which had been her home for several decades.

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As far back as the early 2000s, Dr. Ashton wrote about Emma Mordecai (1812-1906), who came from a prominent family that had been in America since the  18th century. Jews made up less than one percent of the population of the antebellum South, and most of those Jews had emigrated from Europe in the 1800s.  Ms. Mordecai, her parents, and her 12 siblings all were born in the United States.

Dr. Ashton was intrigued by Emma’s independent spirit, as a single woman who, unlike some of her relatives, resisted conversion to Christianity. Attending services at Richmond’s Beth Shalome, the first synagogue in Virginia and the sixth oldest Jewish congregation in America, Ms. Mordecai was an active and vital congregant; she founded its Sunday school and also wrote an early textbook to bolster Jewish childhood education.

In April of 1864, when she was 51 years old, Emma Mordecai moved from her Jewish home in Richmond to Rosewood, a nearby farm that belonged to her Christian sister-in-law, Rosina Young Mordecai. That’s when she began her diary. Professor Ashton had surmised that Emma used the diary as a private Jewish space, facing “the challenge of finding a way to maintain her Jewish religious life while living under her Christian sister-in-law’s roof.”

At Rosewood, she wrote only in her bedroom, where she was “reminding myself of my peculiar duties as an Inheritor of law given to us by Him” and where she could read her prayer book and the week’s Torah portion. Emma remained in close contact with Jewish relatives and friends, especially for such holiday observances as Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot.

Like other Southern white women of means, Emma did own slaves, referring to them as “servants.” Dr. Ashton wrote: “Emma believed the slave system to be humane.” Nonetheless, she had full control over the lives of enslaved people, hiring them out and even selling a “disagreeable piece of property.”

Soon after arriving at Rosewood, which was a short train ride from Richmond, she visited with her Jewish cousins in the city to celebrate Passover, the festival that recalls “the day on which you went forth from Egypt, from the house of bondage, and how God freed you with a mighty hand.”  Emma observed the holiday commemorating freedom from oppression, yet she supported a hierarchical system that preserved Southern slavery,

Ms. Mordecai admired the Confederate army, calling its soldiers “pure, high minded noble men,” donated food and supplies to the war effort, and volunteered at a local hospital to help care for the wounded men in gray. When Richmond fell in 1865, Emma wrote: “I had given up all hope…. I felt terrified as to what the consequences might be…. I felt utterly miserable.”  Once General Lee surrendered, she wrote: “This was agony piled on agony….

“We felt that all was in the hands of God . . . we must submit ourselves to Him — that in thus doing we were not humbled before our foes but before God.”

“I trust in God’s mercy to preserve us from tyrannical oppression in the future,” she prayed.

Emma’s diary, written in beautiful, legible penmanship, is an important primacy source document by a Jewish woman who remained loyal to the Confederacy.  She watched Richmond become a “heap of ruins … the  eye is offended by all it sees.” After the war, when her slaves were finally emancipated and left, Emma mused: “They will now begin to find out how easy their life as slaves has been, & to feel the slavery of their freedom.”

Sadly, in early 2022, Dr. Ashton died, leaving behind years of research and a draft manuscript for her proposed book. She was 72. Melissa Klapper, who earned a Ph.D. in American women’s history from Rutgers and has been teaching at Rowan since 2001, was one of Dr. Ashton’s friends and knew about her research on the Mordecai diary.

“I couldn’t stand the idea that all her work on this would disappear,” Dr. Klapper said in a phone interview. Dr. Klapper has published several books dealing with issues related to American Jewish women’s history. Even though she hadn’t read anything directly related to Dr. Ashton’s work-in-progress, Dr. Klapper was motivated to bring her colleague’s vision to reality.

Academia can be competitive and rather cutthroat, yet it also nurtures gracious collegial generosity. At a memorial ceremony several months after Dr. Ashton’s death, Dr. Klapper approached Richard Drucker, Dianne’s widower, and “broached the subject to take this project on to see it to its completion,” Mr. Drucker said.

“Out of the blue, Melissa decided that it was something that needed to be done. Because of her relationship with Dianne, she had the inclination to do this.”

Like Dr. Ashton, Dr. Klapper recognized the historical importance of the Mordecai diary as a rare firsthand account of the Civil War seen from a Jewish perspective.  “A diary as a document brings a personal voice to life,” she said.

“The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai” is the latest addition to the Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History published by New York University Press. Dr. Ashton’s scholarship has now been realized, and a mitzvah lies behind its pages.

Emma Mordecai is, indeed, a compelling figure of 19th-century American Jewish history.  She was both a staunch defender of Judaism and an ardent Confederate nationalist. Her uncensored words reveal expressions of racism and an allegiance to the Lost Cause that are uncomfortable to read.  Nevertheless, “It is the historian’s job to air dirty laundry,” Dr. Klapper said.

“People are messy. History is very complicated.”