I BOOKS

From pottery to
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paintings to
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ilona and gallery
— it's all that
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nothing you'd
expect.

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tt_ CIRS
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,.SUNSET ST Ft1P' Highway

■

and gallery

LOEHMANN'S OF HUNTERS SQUARE MALL
14 MILE & ORCHARD LK. RD. • FARMINGTON HILLS
855-4488
Mon., Tues., Sat. 10-5:30;
Wed., Thurs., Fri. 10-9; Sun. 12-5

29536 Northwestern
Southfield, Michigan

10 -5:45
0
HOURS: M Sat 10 - 510

1

4: •

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40"

OWNER OF

48 •

a

H A I

S I G

••

*

IS PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE OPENING
OF HIS SECOND SALON

NOW TWO EXCEPTIONAL_ FULL SERVICE SALONS TO SERVE YOU
„

4,"

HAIR

DESIGN

26117 NORTHWESTERN HWY
SOUTHFIELD
4 i*
357-4771' BS':

22

FRIDAY, JULY 22, 1988

14 MILE & FARMINGTON RD.
SIMSBURY PLAZA
FARMINGTON HILLS
851-5559
PRIVATE PARKING
EAST ENTRANCE OF SALON

Judah R Benjamin
Supported The South

JOSEPH COHEN

Special to The Jewish News

li Evans has a lot of
curiosity. Not enough
to kill a cat, but
enough to bag a big one. The
cat he's bagged had about
nine lives, all of them filled
with enigmas. For the past
nine years, Evans, the chron-
icler of southern Jewish life
in "The Provincials," has
been in pursuit of the most
elusive southern Jew in
American history, Judah P.
Benjamin, known as "the
brains of the confederacy." His
superbly written biography
"Judah P. Benjamin: The
Jewish Confederate" has not
only just appeared, but it has
quickly gone into three
printings.
Up to now, Benjamin has
always been something of an
embarrassment to the Amer-
ican Jewish community. One
of the first Jews ever to be ad-
mitted to Yale University, he
left under a cloud of suspi-
cion. Moving to New Orleans,
he did not avoid, but did not
seek, any contact with its
Jews. He married a Roman-
Catholic daughter of the
Creole aristocracy, and kept
the marriage intact despite
abuse and humiliation from a
wife who chose to live apart
from him, engaging in what
was apparently an extensive
string of scandalous adulter-
ies. No nice Jewish girl for
him!. No Yiddishkeit.
He built Belle Chasse, a
showplace in its plantation
setting, where he kept many
slaves. A Jew with slaves can
hardly be countenanced in
any era. It was no wonder he
has been an embarrassment.
What did he feel, what did he
think? What was in his pri-
vate heart?
The absence of answers to
these questions has led to the
creation of an enigmatic
legend fueled by, speculation.
There were other questions
left unanswered because Ben-
jamin meticulously destroyed
his personal papers. Self-
assured, confident, brilliant,
possessed of a positive image
of himself, one no lacking in
ego, what, we wonder, did he
have to hide? What was he
running from?
Finding the answers was
the task Evans set for him-
self. It was complicated. The
public record was easily come
by as all of Benjamin's.
speeches as a, United States
senator are extant, as are
some of the reminiscences of
those who knew him. No

doubt the best account sur-
vives in a long letter written
by Varina Howell Davis, Jef-
ferson Davis' wife, a remark-
able woman who was devoted
to Benjamin. But even the
constant stream of letters he
wrote to his inconstant wife
living in Paris has disap-
peared. To make matters
worse, the documents ac-
cumulated by Benjamin's first
biographer, the Tulane histo-
rian Pierce Butler, went up in
flames when Butler's country
home burned. Like Butler,
whose biography of Benjamin
was published in 1907, Robert
D. Meade, Benjamin's second
biographer in 1943, was not
Jewish, and neither of these
historians made any effort to
understand Benjamin as a
Jew.
Now, for the first time, a
sensitive, perceptive Jewish
writer, with a style that is ar-

Self assured,
confident. What
did he have to
hide? What was he
running from?

ticulate, engaging and charm-
ing, with a command of his-
tory and a knowledge of pub-
lic life, has produced what is
already regarded as a defini-
tive life story. It answers
many of the questions and
resolves most of the enigmas
— some will probably always
be there. Benjamin, "the dark
prince" as Stephen Vincent
Benet called him in "John
Brown's Body," emerges as a
Jew after all, not a traditional
one, but certainly one in
whom the American Jewish
community can take pride.
He was reared in an en-
lightened Jewish home. His
father was one of the original
founders of American Reform
Judaism, and when young
Benjamin went off to Yale, he
took his prayer book with
him. His treatment of his
slaves was humane, and he
was among the first to urge
their emancipation, to the ex-
tent that he enlarged upon
his full cup of enemies in the
South when he already had
plenty in the North.
As for his leaving no per-
sonal records, Evans convin-
cingly explains that Ben-
jamin, as astute as he was,
clearly understood that he
would be made into history's
scapegoat by the South for its
loss of the war, and by the
North as a renegade South-
erner. It was widely believed