THE JEWISH MESSENGER’S 1865 HEBREW LINCOLN ACROSTIC: WHO WROTE IT, WHEN, AND WHY WAS IT PUBLISHED?

The focus of this article is a poem that appeared in Hebrew on the pages of a leading nineteenth-century Jewish newspaper published in New York—The Jewish Messenger—following Lincoln’s assassination. The first letters of each line of the poem spelled out the name of the late president transliterated in Hebrew, hence “the Lincoln acrostic.” The article investigates who authored the acrostic, when the published text was actually written, and the historical and Jewish frames through which the acrostic constructed the deceased presi-dent. The article leverages the thematic analysis of the poem to help answer the more prosaic journalistic queries as to who authored it and when. But beyond the journalistic queries of who, when, where, and how, the article also attempts to interpret “why.” It investigates the role of Hebrew in the minds of contemporaries, both Jewish and Gentile, and the role of journalism in expressing that mind. Beyond that, it explores the relation of the people identified with the Hebrew language and the classical Hebrew texts to the deceased Lincoln and to the United States of their times.