With the publication
of the first volume of
The Secret Relationship
Between Blacks and Jews in 1991 came the revelation that before the time of
Christopher Columbus and through the European expansion into the western
hemisphere, Jews were active participants in the epic racial crimes
committed by the “New World’s” European invaders. An abundance of Jewish
scholarly writings provided extensive evidence directly contradicting the
popular notion that Jews had ever been the friends or allies of the
suffering and oppressed Black man and woman.
•Christopher
Columbus—whose trans-Atlantic exploits initiated the brutal genocide of the
Red man and forecasted the African Holocaust—was financed by wealthy Spanish
Jews and is claimed by some scholars to be a Jew himself.
•Jewish merchants
owned, insured, and financed slave ships and outfitted them with chains and
shackles for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They were auctioneers,
commission merchants, brokers, and wholesalers, keeping the slave economy
oiled with money, markets, and supplies.
•Nine out of ten
Africans were shipped to Brazil. Jewish scholar Dr. Arnold Wiznitzer
described the early Jewish presence:
Besides their
important position in the sugar industry and in tax farming,
they dominated the slave trade....The buyers
who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews, and because of this
lack of competitors they could buy slaves at low prices.
•Dr. Marcus Arkin
wrote that the Jews of Surinam used “many thousands” of Black slaves, and
Rabbi Herbert I. Bloom added that the “slave trade was one of the most
important Jewish activities...” In 1694, Jews owned 9,000 Africans. They
protested vehemently when the Gentile authorities decreed that the slaves
should have a day off.
•The prominent
Jewish historian Dr. Cecil Roth wrote that the slave revolts in parts of
South America “were largely directed against [Jews], as being
the greatest slave-holders of the region.”
•In South America,
Jews set up militias with the sole purpose of fighting the Black Maroons,
the escaped Africans who were fighting to free their enslaved brethren. The
first Hebrew poem written in the “New World” was a bitter attack on the
Maroon leader. The Jewish militias murdered these Maroons and cut off their
hands to award as trophies.
•The Jews of
Barbados, wrote one Jewish scholar, “made a good deal of their money by
purchasing and hiring out negroes...” Another wrote that
all Barbadian Jews—including the rabbi—owned
Black slaves.
•Jews warehoused so
many African slaves in Barbados that authorities moved to limit the number
of captives they could possess.
•Jews became the
major traders in “refuse slaves”—Africans who were weak and sick from the
Middle Passage voyage. Jewish traders “fattened them up” and sold them at a
profit.
•Sugar drove and
expanded the slave trade, and, say Jewish scholars, Jews “acquired large
sugarcane plantations and became the leading entrepreneurs in the sugar
trade.”
•Jewish scholars
Isaac and Susan Emmanuel reported that in Curacao, which was a major
slave-trading depot, “the shipping business was mainly a Jewish enterprise.”
•When the earliest
settlers in New York decided to participate in slavery, they contacted “the
jobbers and the Jews,” who were the recognized international dealers. The
largest shipments of Africans arriving in New York in the first half of the
18th century were commissioned by Jewish merchants.
•European
encroachment created lethal conflict with the indigenous communities, and
Jewish traders often supplied the Europeans with weapons and critical
supplies. Once the Red man was removed, it was often the Jewish traders who
acquired the valuable land. One actually held title to the entire Grand
Canyon.
•Jews owned slave
pens where they warehoused Africans and sold them wholesale. They smuggled
slaves to places where slavery was illegal, rented them when they did not
want to buy, and bred African women for sexual purposes. Jews ran jails and
imprisoned and punished Black slaves; they served as constables, sheriffs,
detectives, and bounty hunters in the slavocracy and participated in the
dehumanization of Black Africans.
•Itinerant Jewish
peddlers traveling the countryside were known to search for and capture
runaway slaves and bring them in for the bounty.
•The founders of
Richmond, Virginia’s Jewish community were all
slaveholders.
•When slavery was
outlawed in the colony of Georgia, Jews left; they would return only when
slavery was reinstated.
•In Newport, Rhode
Island—the center of the rum and slave trade—every Jewish family owned Black
slaves. What’s more, their synagogue was built by Black slaves “of some
skill.” Of the 22 Newport distilleries serving the triangular slave trade,
all 22 were owned by Jews.
•American
rabbis owned and rented slaves. The leading
abolitionist organization bitterly complained that Jews “have never taken
any steps whatever” against slavery.
•Profiteering slave
smugglers and pirates like the Jewish Lafitte brothers of New Orleans
continued the international slave trade for years after its legal end in
1807.
•More than 3,000
Jewish soldiers fought for the slaveholders in
the Civil War, and a Jewish owner of a 140-slave plantation, Judah P.
Benjamin, was secretary of state for the Confederacy. His picture is
engraved on Confederate currency.
•Jews advertised
openly for the return of their “runaways”; and when their Black chattel grew
elderly and infirm and were unable to work they “freed” them, forcing them
to fend for themselves in their old age.
•Jews bequeathed
Black human beings from one Jewish generation to another, and they sold
Black children and babies away from their parents. One Jew stipulated in his
will that the sale of his slaves should be used for his son’s Yale tuition.
•Jews helped to
suppress slave uprisings and in 1831, Jews were involved in hunting down the
great Nat Turner and his freedom fighters.
•The first Jew
elected to the U.S. Senate, Florida’s David Yulee, was one of the most
strident haters of Indians and defenders of slavery in American history.
•Dr. Brackman wrote,
“Jews were about twice as likely to be slave owners as the average white
Southerner.” Rabbi and historian Dr. Bertram W. Korn, the acknowledged
expert on 19th-century American Jewry, wrote:
It would seem to be
realistic to conclude that any Jew who could afford to own slaves and had
need for their services would do so....Jews participated in every aspect and
process of the exploitation of the defenseless blacks.
And though some of
these open acts of racial persecution might be attributed to individual Jews
acting on their own, nearly all the offenders were members of larger Jewish
communities and enjoyed a prominent and honored place among their
coreligionists. The profits from these slavery-based enterprises helped
finance Jewish community development, built synagogues, homes, schools,
businesses, and institutions, and in many untold ways enriched their lives,
congregations, and communities.
The distressing
reality is that one can go on and on without much difficulty in enumerating
the extensive involvement of Jews in the Black Holocaust—even if one is
limited to only that evidence published by Jewish sources. Actually, one is
hard-pressed to name a single prominent American Jew in the slavery era who
did not own slaves or profit from Black African
slavery.
Jews also took an
active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the
Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an
imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for
each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company.
Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao
in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados
and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role
in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French
(Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants
frequently dominated [emphasis ours].
This was no less
true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century
Jews participated in the “triangular trade” that brought slaves from Africa
to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was
taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da
Costa of Charleston in the 1750’s, David Franks of Philadelphia in the
1760’s, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760’s and early 1770’s
dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent.
Given the historical record of the early Black–Jewish relationship, the attitudes and behaviors of American Jews in the post-slavery era should not be hard to predict.