‘The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai’: Rowan historian completes late colleague’s book focusing on Jewish life in the South

Like history itself, Emma Mordecai’s story is fascinating, complicated…and more than a little messy.

Rowan University historian Melissa R. Klapper refused to let that story go untold.

So when Dianne Ashton, her colleague in Rowan’s College of Humanities & Social Sciences, passed away in 2022, Klapper made the highly unusual decision to continue Ashton’s book project on Mordecai.

The result—“The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai”—was published this fall by NYU Press.

"Dianne was a pioneer of feminist religious studies, particularly focusing on Jewish women. She was a major figure in the field,” says Klapper, a distinguished scholar and researcher of American Jewish women’s history.

“Dianne thought it was really important to add to the story of American Jewish women’s history in providing a scholarly analysis of Emma Mordecai’s diary. The diary is not totally unknown to scholars. It’s a major historical text.

“But no one had ever published the whole diary. It deserves to have a wider audience. There’s just not that much knowledge about the antebellum Jewish community and the Civil War.”

A staunch Confederate who owned enslaved people

Written from 1864-1865 and begun when Mordecai was 50, the diary documents her daily life as an unmarried Jewish woman living in and near the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia during the Civil War. The family “thought of themselves as the Jewish elite,” Klapper says.

Mordecai (pronounced Mor-de-KEY) was “a very vibrant, educated women who saw herself as a person in history,” according to Klapper. She also was a staunch Confederate who owned enslaved people.

“Not disproportionately, but not unsurprisingly, Jews in the South who hit a certain level of economic status typically did buy slaves. From their perspective, Emma and her sister-in-law, Rosina, thought of themselves as ‘good slave owners.’ They never used violence. They found that abhorrent. Rosina kept families intact.

“But Emma shared the racist stereotypes of African Americans just as much as many other white people of the south and the north,” Klapper continued. “For her, slavery was the best economic system. Her racism undergirded her belief in the system and it was something that she staunchly defended. At least as far as her diary and other letters show, she never questioned it for a moment.”

Connected to Judaism

Mordecai also was an ardent defender of Judaism at a time when only about 25,000 Jews lived in the South. Many in Mordecai’s own family, themselves also slave owners, converted to Christianity. But she held onto her Jewish faith throughout her lifetime, using the diary as a lifeline to remain connected to her beliefs, according to Klapper.

“Religion was fundamentally important to Emma,” says Klapper. When Mordecai moved to her Christian sister-in-law’s farm outside of Richmond for a period during the waning month of the Civil War, “the diary itself became the focus of Emma’s Judaism. She used it as her private Jewish space,” Klapper says, adding that that was a key point that Ashton underscored in her early work on the book.

Eventually becoming a teacher, Mordecai, who died at age 93 and whose family’s archives are housed in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, founded a Jewish Sunday school. She also authored books for Jewish children.

‘A mentor to me’

Her life has some similarities to Rebecca Gratz, a leading 19^th century Philadelphia philanthropist. An emeritus professor of philosophy and world religions, Ashton was the leading biographer of Gratz and was intimately involved in working to establish the Rebecca Gratz Digital Collection at Gratz College.

Ashton also was the author of a number of books, including “Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America” and “Hanukkah in America: A History.”  She was a former editor for American Jewish History, the preeminent scholarly journal in the field.

When Ashton passed away, Klapper, a history professor and director of women’s and gender studies at Rowan, was determined to see her scholarship through.

“She was a mentor to me even before we both ended up at Rowan,” says Klapper, who approached Ashton’s husband, Richard Drucker, about finishing the book. Drucker was pleased.

“Dianne loved being part of a scholarly community and a part of Rowan University,” Drucker says. “I’m very grateful to Melissa for helping to complete the project. She deserves a lot of credit.”

Ashton had left a rough book draft with a scholarly introduction and acknowledgements. During her sabbatical in 2023, Klapper finished the bulk of the writing, while also researching recent scholarship on American slavery—a topic that was not her area of expertise. NYU has published books by Ashton and Klapper and was committed to publishing the Mordecai diary as well, Klapper says.

“I knew about the book project, but Dianne and I never discussed it,” says Klapper, who adds that CHSS Dean Nawal Ammar’s support of the book was unwavering. “I tried to preserve her voice as much as possible. It helped in that we write in similar styles. We don’t use heavy academic jargon.”

Klapper is the author of “Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America: 1860-1920”; “Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925”; “Ballots, Babies and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940”; and “Ballet Class: An American History.”

She couldn’t bear, she says, the thought that Ashton’s immense work on the Mordecai diary would be left unfinished.

 “I couldn’t stand the idea of all of the work she put into it disappearing into the ether,” Klapper says. “To work on something 10 years and then have it disappear…that really bothered me.

“Finishing the book was a labor of love for me.”