The role some Jews played in the Atlantic slave trade, both as traders and as slave owners, has long been acknowledged by historians. But allegations in recent decades that Jews played a disproportionate role in the enslavement of African Americans — and that this fact has been covered up — have made the topic a controversial one.

Did Jews really own slaves?

Yes. Jacob Rader Marcus, a historian and Reform rabbi, wrote in his four-volume history of Americans Jews that over 75 percent of Jewish families in Charleston, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia, owned slaves, and nearly 40 percent of Jewish households across the country did. The Jewish population in these cities was quite small, however, so the total number of slaves they owned represented just a small fraction of the total slave population; Eli Faber, a historian at New York City’s John Jay College reported that in 1790, Charleston’s Jews owned a total of 93 slaves, and that “perhaps six Jewish families” lived in Savannah in 1771.

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A number of wealthy Jews were also involved in the slave trade in the Americas, some as shipowners who imported slaves and others as agents who resold them. In the United States, Isaac Da Costa of Charleston, David Franks of Philadelphia and Aaron Lopez of Newport, Rhode Island, are among the early American Jews who were prominent in the importation and sale of African slaves. In addition, some Jews were involved in the trade in various European Caribbean colonies. Alexandre Lindo, a French-born Jew who became a wealthy merchant in Jamaica in the late 18th century, was a major seller of slaves on the island.

In a 1994 article in the New York Review of Books, David Brion Davis, an emeritus professor of history at Yale University and author of an award-winning trilogy of books about slavery, noted that Jews were one of countless religious and ethnic groups around the world to participate in the slave trade:

The participants in the Atlantic slave system included Arabs, Berbers, scores of African ethnic groups, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch, Jews, Germans, Swedes, French, English, Danes, white Americans, Native Americans, and even thousands of New World blacks who had been emancipated or were descended from freed slaves but who then became slaveholding farmers or planters themselves.

Davis went on to note that in the American South in 1830 there were “120 Jews among the 45,000 slaveholders owning twenty or more slaves and only twenty Jews among the 12,000 slaveholders owning fifty or more slaves.”

 

 

75 percent of the slaves owned in the South were owned by Jewish slaveholders.” In 1860, there were about 15,000 Southern Jews and 4 million slaves. If 3 million (75 percent) were so owned, this would mean 200 slaves for every Jewish man, woman and child, or 1,000 slaves for every Jewish head of household. Jews owned only a fraction of 1 percent — thousands, not millions — of the enslaved population. HAROLD BRACKMAN San Diego, Feb. 4, 1994

Most Americans don’t realize either that the transatlantic slave trade was driven by the sugar trade. Sugar cane was a scarce medicinal plant in medieval Europe. But when white colonizers started cultivating sugar in the fertile tropics of the Americas, it rapidly became a staple — and a great source of wealth for Europe’s shipping and trading powers. This New World economy of sugar and slaves — of vast, labor-intensive plantations — began in earnest in Brazil during the 1500s, according to historians. The involvement of Jews in black slavery began there also.

* Brazil. The Portuguese were the first to colonize Brazil, and Sephardic Jews from Portugal were among these early settlers. “In its early years,” writes Seymour B. Liebman in “New World Jewry, 1493-1825,” “Brazil was built by Negro slaves (400,000 between 1570 and 1670) and the acumen, hard work and calculating perseverance of the Jews.”

Dr Tony Martin The Jewish involvement in The african Slave Trade

Some background is essential. The Sephardim — that is, the Jews of Spain and Portugal — had flourished for centuries in the Iberian peninsula. By 1497, they made up an estimated 20 percent of Portugal’s population of 1 million. But that year, the king of Portugal compelled the Jews to convert to Christianity. (Spain had similarly forced its Jews to convert or flee five years earlier.) While many Jews left Portugal, others indeed were baptized and became “New Christians.” Despite the church’s persecution, some continued to practice Judaism in secret; they came to be known as “Marranos.”

New Christians were drawn to Brazil, in part because it was far from the seat of the Inquisition, but also because the South American colony was a place where the Sephardim could apply their established expertise in trade and sugar cultivation. Soon a Sephardic community thrived in Brazil’s pivotal port city of Recife. When the Dutch — then unique in Europe for their religious tolerance — took control of Brazil in 1630, the Marranos there were able to practice Judaism openly again.

During this time in Brazil, Jews owned a small percentage of the sugar plantations but were the predominant retailers of slaves in the colony, according to Arnold Wiznitzer’s “Jews in Colonial Brazil.” The shipping of Africans to Brazil was monopolized by the Dutch West India Company, which sold them “at public auctions against cash payment,” Wiznitzer writes. “The buyers who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews.” These brokers then sold slaves to plantation owners on credit. More than 23,000 Africans were shipped to Brazil between 1636 to 1645, Wiznitzer says, a period when perhaps half of the 3,000 white civilians living there were Jews.

* The British and French West Indies. In 1654, the Portuguese recaptured Brazil, chasing the Dutch and the Sephardim out — an event that would affect the destiny of Jews and Africans in the New World.

While many of Brazil’s Jews headed for the freedom of the Netherlands, some Sephardic traders were “eager to remain in the West Indies,” according to a history of colonial Jewry by Jacob Rader Marcus, longtime director of the American Jewish Archives. Some “fled to French Martinique and Guadeloupe, others to Jamaica and to English Barbados, where they furthered the sugar industry and the Negro slave economy which it created,” Marcus writes.

The Jewish refugees from Brazil, as University of Kansas economic historian Richard B. Sheridan has pointed out, “were masters of sugar technology and taught the English the art of sugar making.” The sugar colonies of Barbados and Jamaica grew to become jewels of the British empire during the 1700s. An estimated 1.1 million Africans were shipped to these islands over the entire course of the slave trade.

The Jewish traders were not the main beneficiaries of this economic boom, however. One British historian notes: “Most Jews in Barbados and Jamaica in the 18th century were small men, shopkeepers . . . . The sugar trade became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the sugar-planters’ agents in London, a restricted and confined circle. {Jews} did not participate.” The role of Jewish traders was apparently limited, during the early 1700s, to the sale of “great numbers of ‘refuse’ Negroes (sickly slaves),” according to Stephen Alexander Fortune’s “Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650-1750.” These Africans, bought cheaply, were resold “at considerable profit” once healthy.

The role of Jewish merchants in the slave economy of Martinique and Guadeloupe was eventually restricted as well. Initially, “the Sephardi emigres from Brazil . . . engage{d} both in plantation agriculture and trade, exporting sugar and tobacco to Europe and importing slaves and cloth,” according to Jonathan Israel’s history, “European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550-1750.” The Catholic French, however, ordered the expulsion of all Jews from these islands in 1685, thus virtually ending their role in the trade.

* The Dutch Colonies. The Jewish and Dutch refugees from Brazil also landed in Suriname in the late 17th century, establishing it as a sugar colony. This small piece of South America, as Harvard University historian Eugene Genovese has noted, would be the one and only place where Jews constituted a substantial planter class. Genovese cited one scholar’s finding that 115 of Suriname’s 400 sugar estates in 1730 were owned by Jews.

The island of Curac ao, a pivotal Dutch distribution center off the coast of Venezuela, was the site of the largest Jewish settlement in the New World. The Sephardic community there numbered almost 2,000 by the mid-1700s, constituting about half of the white population. Curac ao’s Jews “prospered early through shipping and slave-trading,” writes David Lowenthal in “West Indian Societies.” Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, historians of Curac aoan Jewry, report that “{a}lmost every Jew bought from one to nine slaves for his personal use or for eventual resale.” Later, Curac aoan Jews became, as Stephen Fortune writes, “the predominant insurance underwriters for ships plying the Caribbean” — including slave ships.

Under the auspices of the Dutch, Sephardic Jews also had a direct hand in wholesale slaving. As Arnold Wiznitzer has pointed out, Jews in Amsterdam owned as much as 10 percent of the stock in the Dutch West India Company, the great slave-shipping enterprise that helped launch the Netherlands to international commercial prominence during the 1600s. But the French and English monopoly trading companies, which eventually dominated the shipping of Africans to New World colonies, excluded Jews from that level of the trade.

* Colonial North America. The far-flung Sephardic “trade diaspora” in the Caribbean led ultimately to the founding of Jewish communities in North America. Before the Revolutionary War, the largest settlement of Jews in the colonies — perhaps as many as 1,000 by 1760 — was in the bustling port city of Newport, R.I. Aaron Lopez, formerly a Marrano in Portugal, laid the first cornerstone of the Newport congregation’s synagogue in 1759. (The building is now a historic site, the oldest synagogue in the United States.) Lopez later became a shipper of legendary prosperity. Black slaves were among his cargoes, as his biographer, Stanley F. Chyet, has noted.

Gentiles, however, overwhelmingly controlled the slaving business in colonial America. Rhode Island’s Sephardic merchant-shippers were known mainly for their prominence in the business of selling oil from sperm whales used in candlemaking. So the real history of the participation of Jewish merchants in the slave trade is a lot more complex than Leonard Jeffries suggested with his line, “Everyone knows rich Jews helped finance the slave trade.” Jeffries is clearly misusing historical facts to serve his animus against Jews today.

 

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