Dianne Ashton, a professor of world religion and philosophy at Rowan University, died in January 2022. At the time, she was working on her final scholarly project: a 10-year study of the life of Emma Mordecai, a Confederate Jewish woman who owned slaves.
Mordecai clung to her Judaism in a time and place when there were few Jews, when many of her family members converted and when southern evangelicals were actively trying to convert Jews.
When she died, Ashton had a manuscript and a book proposal on Mordecai’s life. It was based on the Confederate woman’s diaries. But it was unfinished, according to the professor. It needed extensive editing.
That was why Melissa R. Klapper, a professor of history at Rowan, picked up her colleague and friend’s project where she left off. Klapper, an American Jewish historian who appeared on “Jeopardy!” in 2023 and won three games, finished the project and will see it through to publication with New York University Press. She did so with the blessing of Ashton’s husband, Richard Drucker.
“I was startled at how generous the offer was,” Drucker said.
“The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai” will come out in October.
Klapper talked about why she wanted to help her late friend.
Why did you feel it was important to pick up this project?
Dianne Ashton was a longtime mentor of mine, even before I went to Rowan as a professor in 2001. I met her at conferences. She was a wonderful, enthusiastic mentor to people who were going into American women’s Jewish histories.
Then we became colleagues. We read tracts of each other’s work. So, I was already aware of this project.
I knew if somebody didn’t try to finish the project in her name, it would just disappear. Her 10 years of work would disappear. I just couldn’t bear that idea.
Emma Mordecai reads like a character out of a novel. How much of your decision to pick up this project had to do with her?
I am not a Civil War historian. So, I learned all kinds of things. It was immediately clear that this was a very unusual story.
She was one of 13 children, and many of them converted to Christianity. Given how many people in her family converted, she was making big decisions about her life by staying devoted to Judaism.
I learned she was extremely well-educated. Much better educated than was typically the case in the South. Her father opened a school. It became a famous school for young ladies throughout the South.
She has a distinctive voice. She was living through difficult times. I very much appreciate her devotion to, as she describes it, the religion of her fathers. And yet she was a slave owner.
She clearly shared the terribly racist attitudes of many white people in the period. On the one hand, she’s going through hardship during the war. On the other, she’s part of this terrible system. It’s important to use someone like that to judge how nuanced and complicated history is.
Dianne Ashton used specific Jewish experiences to offer general insights into American Jewish history (in books such as “Hanukkah in America: A History” and “Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America”). In what ways is this project a contribution to that legacy?
She’s trying to understand the ordinary person’s experience.
I think a lot of people don’t realize how much pressure there often was on Jews in the Antebellum era to stop being Jews.
There were maybe 150,000 Jews in all of the United States. Most of them were not in the South.
She (Emma Mordecai) started a Sunday school for Jewish children following the model that Rebecca Gratz set in Philadelphia. She wrote a textbook for Jewish children.
She was somebody who exemplified staying devoted to Judaism, which was an active choice she was making. She made herself into a model of devoted Judaism.