Another of the so-called ‘jewish inventions’ listed by Marnie Winston-Macauley at ‘Aish’ is the claim that jews were responsible for the creation of the ‘American Transcontinental Railroad’ by which she actually means the Central Pacific Railroad.
The basis for this claim is her assertion that one of principal architects – Theodore Judah – was in fact jewish. (1)
The problem of course is that Theodore Judah was not jewish in the slightest, but rather the son of an Anglican minister and his wife from Connecticut and Massachusetts respectively who both came from purely European racial stock. (2)
One suspects that Winston-Macauley – if she’s not simply being dishonest – is here mistaking Theodore Judah for Judah P. Benjamin, the famous jewish Attorney General of the Confederate States of America who was active around the same time as Judah.
However, it is worth finishing off this short piece by noting the sheer scale of what Theodore Judah achieved in engineering terms, which has long been known (3) but it is worth quoting J. David Rogers and Charles Spinks’ summary of it from a 2019 academic symposium on Judah and his legacy so the reader can see him as the European engineering genius that he truly was:
‘In purely engineering retrospect, Judah’s achievements would seem nothing short of providential, especially in comparison to modern route surveying efforts. With a minimal survey crew utilizing crude instruments and only draft animals for transportation, Judah was able to lay out a remarkably accurate alignment across the most difficult natural obstacles undertaken up until that time (1861).’ (4)
References
(1) https://aish.com/91795029/%60
(2) Sebastian Visscher Talcott, 1994, [1883], ‘Genealogical Notes of New York and New England Families’, 1st Edition, Clearfield: Baltimore, p. 561, n. 79
(3) John Galloway, 1941, ‘Theodore Dehone Judah – Railroad Pioneer’, Civil Engineering, Vol. 11, Nos. 10-11, pp. 586-588 & 648-651 (available here: http://cprr.org/Museum/Galloway_Judah_ASCE/index.html)
(4) https://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/american&military_history/THEODORE%20JUDAH%20AND%20THE%20BLAZING%20OF%20THE%20FIRST%20TRANSCONTINENTAL%20RAILROAd-Sierra%20Nevada-Rogers.pdf
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