Also, it does not seem there was large anti Jewish sentiment in the southern states, considering the life of Benjamin Judah...
Except that Benjamin and other prominent Confederate Jews were subjected to venomous anti-Semitic attacks:
"J. B. Jones was a Northern journalist [actualy he was from Maryland and spent his childhood in Kentucky and Missouri--DT] with Southern sympathies who settled in Richmond at the age of fifty-one and wrote a diary of the war. A job in the War Department gave him an inside view of the action, and his two-volume A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capitol offers invaluable observations of the day-by-day events. Jones disliked Jews. In his original (unedited) diaries he mentions the word 'Jew' in a derogatory way forty times, with special hatred for Benjamin and other Jews of prominence. His anti-Semitism gives insights into the thinking of the times.
"The atmosphere in Richmond against all Jews, even the 'exceptions,' grew worse as the impact of the war unsettled the economy. Jones wrote that A. C. Myers, the 'Jew Quartermaster General,' met the plea of soldiers for blankets with the answer, 'Let them suffer.' He called the distinguished Gustavus Myers 'the little old lawyer for Jew clients.' 'Illicit trade,' he wrote, 'has depleted the country of gold and placed us at the feet of Jew extortioners.' He reported laughter in the streets of Richmond 'when a Jew is asked what will be the price of shoes, etc., tomorrow.' Finally, he concluded, 'These Jews . . . have injured the cause more than the armies of Lincoln.'
"
Southern Punch magazine also vented its rage against the Jews to its Richmond readers: 'Who are our capitalists at the present time? . . . The dirty greasy Jew peddlar [sic], who might be seen, with a pack on his back, a year or two since, bowing and cringing even to Negro servants, now struts by with the air of a millionaire.'
"The German Jews were subjected to special scorn: They were considered foreigners, charged with avoiding conscription, and suspected of antislavery sentiments. The
Richmond Examiner hammered home this theme, to the consternation of the Jews of Richmond:
"While many of our people have been dragged from their homes and frequently from sick and needy families by the inexorable demands of conscription, thousands of Jews . . . have gone scot-free simply for the virtue of denying their allegiance to the country in which some of them were born and which many of them by the plainest acts have pretended to adopt.
"The editorial grew in vituperation as it enlarged its attack:
"They have flocked here as vultures and birds of passage. One has but to walk through the streets and stores of Richmond to get an impression of the vast number of unkempt Israelites in our marts. . . . Every auction room is packed with greasy Jews. . . Let one observe the number of wheezing Jewish matrons .. . elbowing out of their way soldiers' families and the most respectable people in the community."
Eli N. Evans,
Judah P. Benjamin - The Jewish Confederate, pp. 199-200.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Iv8qYPusXWcC&pg=PA199 https://books.google.com/books?id=Iv8qYPusXWcC&pg=PA200
Henry S. Foote (who had once been Governor and US Senator from Mississippi and was now a member of the Confederate Congress from Tennessee) "routinely referred to [Benjamin] as "Judas Iscariot Benjamin" and the "Jewish puppeteer" behind the "Davis tyranny" and more than once identified him as "the sole cause of the calamities which have befallen the country." At one point, Foote went as far as proposing that the Confederate constitution should be amended to specify that no Jews should be allowed within twelve miles if the national capital."
https://books.google.com/books?id=hHJyDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA226
Granted, Foote had a pathological hatred of Davis, and would use any weapon to discredit Davis's supporter Benjamin--but it is still significant that he evidently viewed anti-Semitism as an effective weapon for that purpose. And he may have been right: when Foote make his remark about banning Jews from within twelve miles of the Confederate capital "a wave of applause swept the house."
https://books.google.com/books?id=gks-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA167
Of course anti-Semitism existed in the North as well; August Belmont (chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and characterized by the
New York Times as "an agent for foreign Jew bankers") was a favorite villain for Republicans and we all know about General Orders #11. But as Leonard Dinnerstein noted in his history of anti-Semitism in America:
"Antisemitism also erupted in the South during the war. Antipathy to foreigners, which included Jews, was more severe in this region than in the North. Moreover, in ways that were easy to sense but more difficult to measure, observers noted that the region's intense commitment to fundamentalist Christianity encouraged greater disparagement of Jews. Larger numbers of people were wary of merchants and suspicious of their methods and acquisitions, and, since southerners suffered more atrocities and devastation than people in the North, they shared a heightened sense of frustration and despair. Jews were denounced for being insufficiently proslavery and disloyal to the Confederacy. It was commonly assumed that Jewish merchants hoarded merchandise and sold goods at extortionist prices, thereby intensifying the South's great deprivation. The diary of John Beauchamps Jones, a clerk in the Confederate War Department, reeked with antisemitic references; the citizens of Talbotton and Thomasville, Georgia, voted to expel Jews who lived in their towns; and members of the Confederate House of Representatives openly denounced Jews in their midst.
"For southerners, Judah P. Benjamin, who served successively as Attorney-General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State in the Confederate government, stood out as the archetypal perfidious Jew. Benjamin had been born Jewish but, like August Belmont, married a non-Jew, raised his daughter as a Christian, and did not affiliate with any Jewish organizations. Southern antisemites resented him and although he suffered no undue attacks while an attorney in Louisiana, or as a United States Senator representing the state from 1853 through 1861, many confederates attributed military losses and diplomatic failures to his being Jewish.. A Methodist parson in Nashville, characterized Benjamin as "a little pilfering Jew ... one of the tribe that murdered the Savior," stories circulated in the Confederate Army that he lived on "fine wines, fruits—the fat of the land,". and one person even believed that the prayers of the Confederacy would have been more efficacious without a Jew in the Cabinet."
https://books.google.com/books?id=G2DnBwAAQBAJ&pg=PT73
So instead of saying, "there couldn't have been that much anti-Semitism in the South--look at Judah Benjamin" one could just as well say "yes, look at Judah Benjamin and the hatred, often explicitly anti-Semitic, that he engendered."
I realize that these things are much more likely to happen in wartime, when "foreigners" are viewed with special suspicion and "middlemen" and "profiteers" are easy to blame for shortages. No doubt in the peacetime Confederacy, the virulence of anti-Semitism would greatly diminish. But in both the North and South, the underlying attitudes about the Jew as "other" would still remain, with dangerous implications in the event of future wars or depressions. (Such attitudes of course were not inconsistent with saying that one's friend Mr. Cohen or Mr. Levy, a Jewish merchant from Charleston, was a fine man. As Mary Chesnut remarked, "Everybody everywhere has their own Jew exceptions."
https://books.google.com/books?id=WojvfHAX4lgC&pg=PA547)