The Unusual Relationship Between Abraham Lincoln and the Jews

It was Good Friday—April 14, 1865—when John Wilkes Booth made his way into the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre, forcibly propped the door shut behind him, and shot a bullet into the head of Abraham Lincoln. For many mourners, the timing had unusual significance. The Civil War, in which some 750,000 Americans had lost their lives, was coming to an end. Just weeks earlier, citing the nation’s trauma in his Second Inaugural address, Lincoln had suggested that this “mighty scourge of war” was a form of divine retribution visited on “both North and South” for the offense of slavery. He ended with words of consolation and exhortation:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds. . . .

Lincoln’s own suffering, as evident as the nation’s, was inscribed in his countenance. Of his two life-masks, one had been cast as he was beginning his campaign for the presidency in 1860, and the other in February 1865, some two months before the end of the war. In the intervening years, his face had become emaciated, his eyes were gouged into his skull, and his skin was creased by age and sadness. “This war is eating my life out,” Lincoln once told a friend. “I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see the end.”