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When John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln in 1865, Davis and Benjamin were suspected of having plotted the event and, as the martyred Lincoln was compared to Christ in the Northern press, Benjamin was pilloried as Judas Iscariot. When the South was defeated, fearing that he could never receive a fair trial if charged with Lincoln’s murder, Benjamin fled to England, where he lived out his life as a barrister, publishing a classic legal text on the sale of personal property. Evans speculates that, had Benjamin been captured by Union troops, the United States might have had its own Dreyfus Trial.

A solitary man, estranged from his wife, Benjamin died alone in England. His daughter arranged to have him buried in the Catholic Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Until 1938, when the Paris chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy provided an inscription with his American name, his simple tombstone was engraved with the name "Philippe Benjamin."

While Judah Benjamin preferred such obscurity, his prominence as a Jew assured that he would come under harsh scrutiny during and after his life. For example, on the floor of the Senate Ben Wade of Ohio charged Benjamin, a defender of slavery, with being an "Israelite in Egyptian clothing." With characteristic eloquence, Benjamin replied, "It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate Deity, amidst the thundering and lightnings of Mt. Sinai, the ancestors of my opponent were herding swine in the forests of Great Britain."