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A few years ago, San Francisco writer Jason K. Friedman and his husband decided to buy a second home in Friedman’s hometown of Savannah, Georgia.
The real estate listing for the flat they bought advertised the 1875 building as the Solomon Cohen House, which piqued Friedman’s interest sufficiently to begin researching the Cohen family.
Born in 1802, Solomon Cohen was the grandson of a Sephardic rabbi who had made his way from London to South Carolina in 1749. Solomon moved to Savannah and became a lawyer, businessman, civic leader and, in 1865, the first Jew in Georgia to be elected to Congress. His wife, Miriam, had been raised in Philadelphia by her aunt Rebecca Gratz, one of the most important American Jews of the 19th century due to her philanthropic leadership and for pioneering the model of Sunday school education.
Solomon and Miriam’s son, Gratz, was the first Jewish student to enroll at the University of Virginia. But he died at the age of 20 from a bullet wound received while serving as an aide-de-camp for a Confederate general just weeks before the South surrendered in the Civil War.
Friedman’s new nonfiction book, “Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War,” focuses on Gratz’s life but works on many levels. It is a tragic family drama, a record of Jewish socioeconomic mobility in the antebellum South and a portrait of a young man whose life would otherwise be largely forgotten or subsumed in the pat valorization of the war dead.
The book also reflects on living in the shadow of history, particularly as Friedman attempts to come to terms with slavery in a way he wasn’t forced to do in the “blindered” education of his Southern boyhood.
I recently spoke on Zoom with Friedman, who divides his time between San Francisco and Savannah. Our conversation has been lightly edited.
J.: Can you talk about your own personal history with Savannah?
Jason K. Friedman: I grew up in Savannah and fled for college — it’s an old story. It’s not because it was an antisemitic place. There have been Jews there since 1734, and it’s a pretty good place for Jews. But it’s a small town, so I got out of there and didn’t really look back over the years.
And you were drawn back to the city in middle age?
I feel like I changed some, but I think the city changed as well. It was a port city and always at least believed itself to be rather cosmopolitan. But it actually did become a much more open, interesting and equitable kind of place, like a little big city. I think that the power, in terms of city government, shifted from the dominant white machine, and it just became a different and more interesting place for me. And my parents were getting older, and I wanted to have a place that was near them where I could relate to them as an adult.
Solomon Cohen was not only a slaveholder but a vocal defender of the institution of slavery. In the book you note your surprise that Jews owned slaves.
I didn’t know that Jews owned slaves, nor did most Jews I talk about this book with. So why didn’t we know that? It must be the fact that our liberation story is so central to the Jewish religion. That’s certainly the reason that I was surprised. But Solomon Cohen would have thought of “How could Jews own slaves?” as a naive question. And I saw that there was institutional support for slavery all over the place — primarily from Christian churches, but also from some Jewish pulpits.
I found a pamphlet by a very prominent New York rabbi, Morris Raphall, on the Biblical view of slavery that just sort of laid it out there, saying, “Have you never read the Bible? There are explicit rules for how to treat your slaves.” And he felt the solution is just to follow the laws in the Bible for treating your slaves in a way that he believed humanized them. And of course there were also rabbis who thought that it was ridiculous for Jews to support slavery in that day and age, and that, of course, Jews should oppose slavery.
But ultimately I learned that white people who could afford slaves owned slaves, and that doing so for certain ethnic groups who might not have been considered white off the bat — such as Italians, Irish, Greeks and Jews — was often a way of trying to assimilate. It was sort of a way into the dominant culture by acting like your neighbors, and that included owning slaves. Jews owned slaves proportionately to their wealth, just the way non-Jews did. It shouldn’t have been so surprising, but it was.
Can you tell me at what point you started to take a special interest in Gratz Cohen, and what it was about him that initially stood out to you?
Well, the house was billed as the Solomon Cohen House, so in a way it was just doing my due diligence to figure out who Solomon Cohen was. He was a very important figure, but he wasn’t to me an especially sympathetic one. I knew that his son Gratz’s journal was in the Georgia Historical Society just a few minutes’ walk from our new flat, and so I went and I read the diary.
In the few places that he’s written about, Gratz is just sort of considered a Confederate war hero, but when I was actually reading his journal, in which he confides his deepest feelings, I felt a real connection to him. He was unlike his by-the-book businessman father. He was much more sensitive, and he was a poet and intellectual. He went away to get schooled and kind of become himself. He was also very attracted to other men, and he idealized male-male relationships.
And I guess the weirdest part of this whole story was how attached he felt to his enslaved valet, Louis, and how he rhapsodized on their relationship. He felt extremely close to him and talked about him with various pet names and in passionate terms, so that when I started to read these diary entries and poems, I thought, “Wow, this is different, and I want to know more.”
Can you discuss Gratz’s experience as the first Jewish student at the University of Virginia?
I came at this story as a story of difference, and so I was on the trail of antisemitism. But the more I dug into the story, I saw that Gratz was actually more alike than different. I mean, these were the sons of the South’s top families, and he was an elite in the way they were, and he seemed to be comfortable there.
However, I also found letters and diary entries where I could feel his loneliness there. He’s not the type of person to say, “Oh, I’ve been a victim of antisemitism” — he would never have talked like that. But there were entries when he’s writing on a Sunday when everybody else is at church, and there was a kind of a melancholy to it. And it gave him a space to think and write about being a Jew.
Going away to school for him, and also for me, was a way of discovering yourself or creating a self, and I think that he actually became in touch with his Jewishness up there in a very interesting way.