(UNDATED) Two hundred years after his birth on Feb. 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln remains our most admired president. Yet, before his election in 1860 to the White House, Lincoln had served only two years as a Congressman from Illinois, and in 1858, he was defeated in his bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate.

In short, it was not a resume that inspired confidence as the Civil War began, or the stuff that legends are made of.

Yet Lincoln surprised his critics, and since his tragic death in 1865, more volumes have been written about him than any other American. .

Generally overlooked in the many books about Lincoln are his encounters with the U.S. Jewish community of his time. Each interaction had lasting impact upon our nation.

When the Civil War began, the U.S. population was about 28 million, including about 150,000 Jews. Unlike some of his predecessors, Lincoln established warm personal friendships with a number of Jews long before he became president.

One of his closest friends was Abraham Jonas, a prominent Illinois attorney and one of the first people to urge Lincoln to run for president. Indeed, the two men maintained an extensive private correspondence for years.

Lincoln’s relationship with Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati, the founder of the Reform Jewish movement in the United States, proved important during an anti-Jewish incident during the war.

On Dec. 17, 1862, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant issued the infamous General Order No. 11 calling for the expulsion of “Jews, as a class” within 24 hours from all areas in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky controlled by Union forces.

The directive was particularly harsh:” … Post commanders will see that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters.”

The 25,000 Jews who lived in the Confederate states, plus those in Kentucky, were suspected of being spies or financial contributors to the southern cause.

Many Jewish families were physically expelled from their homes, and an angry Cesar Kaskel of Paducah, Ky., sent a telegram to Lincoln seeking a meeting to protest “this inhuman order … the grossest violation of our Constitution and our rights as citizens … which will place us … as outlaws before the whole world.” Rabbi Wise also joined the protest.

Just 17 days after the order was issued, Kaskel met with Lincoln in the White House. The president said: “And so the Children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan.” Kaskel replied, “Yes, and that is why we have come to Father Abraham, to ask his protection.”

Lincoln responded: “And this protection they shall have at once.” The president then ordered that General Order 11 immediately be revoked.

Sadly, 80 years later, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Order 9066 expelled more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes at the start of World War II, and that directive was never revoked. It was not until 2005 that the U.S. government officially apologized for that unjust action.

Grant never mentioned Order No. 11 in his best-selling memoirs, and in 1907, his son said the expulsion decree “was a matter long past and best not referred to.” During Grant’s presidential campaigns, he received many Jewish votes; in 1876, he participated in the dedication of Adas Israel, a Jewish congregation in Washington, DC.

Like other Americans, Jews joined both the Union and Confederate armies. During the Civil War, Lincoln opened the military chaplaincy to rabbis for the first time. Until then, chaplains had always been Christian clergymen.

Lincoln was one of the few presidents who never joined a church or affiliated with a religious community. In 1864, the National Reform Association sought Lincoln’s backing for an amendment to the Constitution amendment that would designate the U.S. as a “Christian nation.” Lincoln refused to support it.

Gary P. Zola, the executive director of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, has an upcoming book on Lincoln and the Jews. Zola believes Lincoln “has served as an iconic patron of the American ideals that Jews value most highly: freedom of religion, civil justice, liberty for all, and moral courage … Lincoln’s memory has functioned like a cultural crucible wherein American ideals and Jewish heritage continuously interact.”

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

KRE/DEA END RUDIN