(Newspaper). New York Daily Tribune.

(AMERICAN JUDAICA)

Tuesday, January 15

New York

1861

On p. 5: "Slavery and the Hebrew Scriptures / Reply to the Rabbi Raphall" by M. Heilprin, New York, Jan. 11, 1861.

first jewish reply to pro-slavery rabbi raphall. Michael Heilprin, a Polish-Jewish Intellectual, had taken an active part in the 1848 Hungarian Revolution and served on the editorial staff of Appleton's New American Cyclopedia. He expressed outrage at Raphall's reading of the Bible, subjecting the Rabbi's Biblical exegesis to a thoroughgoing deconstruction. Essentially, Heilprin believed that the Torah's concession to slavery was an example of the Rabbinic maxim, "Dibrah Torah keneged yetzer hara" ("The Torah was addressing the evil inclination"). See B.W. Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War (1951) pp.18-19.