Overview

Lays to rest the controversial myth of Jewish involvement in the slave trade In the wake of the civil rights movement, a great divide opened up between African American and Jewish communities. What was historically a harmonious and supportive relationship suffered from a powerful and oft-repeated legend, that Jews controlled and masterminded the slave trade and owned slaves on a large scale, well in excess of their own proportion in the population. In this groundbreaking book, likely to stand as the definitive word on the subject, Eli Faber cuts through this cloud of mystification to recapture an important chapter in both Jewish and African diasporic history. Focusing on the British empire, Faber assesses the extent to which Jews participated in the institution of slavery through investment in slave trading companies, ownership of slave ships, commercial activity as merchants who sold slaves upon their arrival from Africa, and direct ownership of slaves. His unprecedented original research utilizes shipping and tax records, stock-transfer ledgers, censuses, slave registers, and synagogue records. These materials reveal, once and for all, the minimal nature of Jews' involvement in the subjugation of Africans in the Americas. A crucial corrective, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade lays to rest one of the most contested historical controversies of our time.

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9780814726389

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Reviews

"""Stunning."" --Publishers Weekly ""A well-researched study that neither allocates blame nor exonerates the participants in the peculiar institution, but puts to rest a pernicious anti-Semitic libel of recent coinage."" --Kirkus Reviews ""For anyone in search of ammunition to refute farfetched claims about Jewish culpability for the enslavement of Africans in America, this is the place to look."" --Peter Kolchin, Los Angeles Times ""Exhaustive... A scholarly, careful work."" --The Washington Post Book World (front page)"

Despite the polemical subtitle, a scholarly and meticulously researched account of Jewish participation in the slave trade in the British colonies of the Caribbean and in the US. In 1991, the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam published an inflammatory document entitled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which charged that Jews had financed and dominated the slave trade in the American colonies and early US. According to Faber (History/John Jay College, City University of New York), this study's conclusions have been widely accepted as fact, despite grave defects in historical methodology, with deleterious consequences for historical scholarship and race relations. Here limiting his study to slavery in the British Atlantic colonies in the 17th through the 19th centuries, the author uses primary source material, including shipping and tax records and other commercial documents, to refute the anti-Semitic theme of The Secret Relationship. Faber concludes that Jewish involvement in the Atlantic slave trade was exceedingly limited: by successively examining the small, (initially predominantly Sephardic) Jewish communities of Barbados, Nevis, and Jamaica, and mainland colonies like Newport and New York City, Faber persuasively demonstrates that Jewish participation in the slave trade in each area consisted of tiny percentages of slave sales and ownership, from the earliest years of settlement through the abolition of the slave trade in the 19th century. A well-researched study that neither allocates blame nor exonerates the participants in the peculiar institution, but puts to rest a pernicious anti-Semitic libel of recent coinage. (Kirkus Reviews)

<p> The only way to set the record straight is to do what those making the claim [of Jewish domination of the slave trade and widespread slave ownership] have failed to do, namely sift through the entire body of evidence, with a view to determining the scale and nature of the Jewish contribution. This is precisely what Faber does. -Howard Temperley, Times Literary Supplement

<p> For anyone in search of ammunition to refute farfetched claims about Jewish culpability for the enslavement of Africans in America, this is the place to look.

Stunning. --Publishers Weekly A well-researched study that neither allocates blame nor exonerates the participants in the peculiar institution, but puts to rest a pernicious anti-Semitic libel of recent coinage. --Kirkus Reviews For anyone in search of ammunition to refute farfetched claims about Jewish culpability for the enslavement of Africans in America, this is the place to look. --Peter Kolchin, Los Angeles Times Exhaustive... A scholarly, careful work. --The Washington Post Book World (front page)

Author Information

The late Eli Faber was Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, and author of A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654-1828, the first volume in the five-volume The Jewish People in America.

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