Were Jews “disproportionately” involved in slavery?

If by slavery one means slave-owning, the slave trade, the slave system, and the marketing of the products of slave labor, the answer is a qualified YES. That is because Jews were involved in slavery in significant numbers in various places at various times since ancient times. If one’s focus is the Americas, the United States, the European colonies, the west coast of Africa, the Caribbean the answer is YES, Jews were involved in all aspects of slavery but to varying degrees. Critics of The Secret Relationship have often chosen to address one aspect or the other in their efforts to cherry pick the combination of factors and circumstances that minimize the Jewish role. An example is Eli Faber’s book Setting the Record Straight, which deals almost exclusively with the involvement of British Jews in the slave trade. Available documentation shows that British Jews were minimally involved in the trade, though their Portuguese and Dutch brethren were ears deep in the despicable commerce. Also, the question of ownership is deceptive in the commerce of Black slaves. The owner of the local appliance store, for example, may have 100 refrigerators in his warehouse, but he can state truthfully on any census form that he only “owns” 1 refrigerator in his home. Jewish apologists have seized on this nuance to claim that Jews in Jamaica, for example, “owned” less than 1 percent of the Black slaves on the island in a given period. They deceptively ignore the role their ancestors played in wholesaling, stockpiling, and retailing Black human beings to the plantation owners in the sugar, cotton, and other trades.

The Caribbean was a major center of slave traffic and abuse (and is where Jewish traders profited mightily). Nine out of ten Africans went to Brazil, where the Jewish involvement in sugar plantations was extraordinary. See the entry for “sugar” in the Encyclopedia Judaica.

Some argue that there were “too few” Jews to have a substantial role in the slave trade. But this argument is only selectively applied. For instance, Jews were less than 2 percent of the population but are credited with having financed 70-90 percent of the civil rights movement, as well as comprising an estimated 50-60 percent of the “freedom riders.” So, here is direct evidence of tiny numbers dominating a large market. By and large, Jews brag about this dominance when referring to their “positive efforts,” as in the civil rights movement, and only use the “too few” argument when the subject is unflattering as in Jewish slave-ownership/slave-trading.

Though Jews represented a tiny percentage of the White population in the Americas, one important Jewish scholar says they “frequently dominated” the slave trade. Another example is the Gradis family of France, which probably represented .00001 percent of European slave shippers but had a 100 percent monopoly on trade to and from the infamous Goree Island—the Auschwitz of the Black Holocaust.

And just among the Jews, what was their involvement in slavery? Let us take Isaac Emmanuel’s statement: “Almost every Jew [in the Netherland Antilles] bought from one to nine slaves for his personal use or for eventual resale. Prominent among such purchasers were the cantors David Pardo in 1701 and David Lopez Fonseca in 1705, and the physician Isaacq da Costa in 1705.” Of the Jews in the major slave-trading depot of Curacoa, Emmanuel writes: “the shipping business was mainly a Jewish enterprise.”

Throughout the historical record, there appears no hint of moral indignation on the part of Jews concerning the enslavement of Black African people. Dr. Korn states, “There is no iota of evidence, no line in a letter, no stray remark which would lead us to believe that these Jews gave conscious support to the slave system out of fear of arousing anti-Jewish sentiment.” Brandeis’ Dr. Stephen Whitfield wrote that “one wonders whether they skipped the passages in the Passover Haggadah that extol freedom after the torment of Egyptian bondage.”

Ira Rosenwaike, whose Jewish population studies have been published in the major Jewish historical journals, has analyzed the 1971 population studies of Lee Soltow. Rosenwaike does not dispute Soltow’s startling findings: “Soltow estimates that 36 percent of the 625,000 families in the South in 1830 were slaveholders. Of the 322 household heads identified in the present study as [Jewish] residents of the same states at this enumeration, a considerably larger proportion—75 percent—were owners of one or more slaves.”

“In Charleston, Richmond, and Savannah,” he continues, “the overwhelming proportion (over four-fifths) of the Jewish households contained one or more slaves; in New Orleans over three-fifths were slaveholders; in Baltimore, less than one-fifth.” Nationwide, “Probably close to two-fifths of the Jewish families of 1820 owned slaves...” Rosenwaike, Bertram W. Korn, and Malcolm Stern are among the Jewish scholars who have studied American Jewish population data. All of their results confirm the pervasive involvement of Jews in Black slavery. Dr. Korn analyzes the available census data:

1. “In the 1820 manuscript census records for New Orleans, it has been possible to identify only six Jews. Each of these owned at least one slave, and the six owned twenty-three slaves altogether. By 1830, twenty-two Jews can be identified in the census returns — a very low number, since there were about sixty-six Jews in the area when the newly established congregation published its list of contributors in 1828, although some of the donors were not permanent residents. More than half of these twenty-two did not own slaves, but ten of them owned a total of seventy-five slaves. Obviously some of the newly arrived Jewish settlers could not afford to own slaves. By 1840, when sixty-two Jews can be identified in the census returns—again a very small number, since there must have been at least several hundred Jewish families in the community by that time—the newcomers had prospered to so great a degree that only seven reported that they owned no slaves. The fifty-five identifiable Jewish slave-owners of New Orleans in 1840 held a total of three hundred and forty-eight Negroes in bondage, an index to growing prosperity....Yet, according to the Mobile 1850 census, which lists seventy-two identifiable Jewish heads of family, thirty-one Jews were owners of slaves, to a total of ninety slaves. The proportion is even higher in view of the fact that we include in the figure for heads of families, nineteen young clerks and peddlers who lived in the homes of relatives, and fourteen Jewish bachelors who lived in a single boarding-house.”
   

And this, again, is only in America—not in South America or the Caribbean, where Jewish slave-trading was extraordinary. The fact that many of these were merchants who knowingly served the slave economy is also understated. The Negro History Bulletin was remarkably clear on this point:

1. The presence of the southern Jews compl[e]mented the system of slavery; their mercantilistic interest made slavery a more effective labor system. While most Jews were not to be found on plantations, their activities made the plantation a self-sufficient unit. What was not produced on the plantation was delivered by Jewish merchants. The southern Jew had as much, if not more, to gain by maintaining the system of slavery as any other White segment within the South. During the Civil War Jews defended the system which insured them acceptance and success in the South. Neither the Civil War nor Reconstruction changed the southern Jews’ perception of Blacks as an animal to be used and exploited.