Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade
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Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade

Setting the Record Straight

Eli Faber

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eBook - ePub

Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade

Setting the Record Straight

Eli Faber

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About This Book

In the wake of the civil rights movement, a great divide has opened up between African American and Jewish communities. What was historically a harmonious and supportive relationship has 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 utilizing shipping and tax records, stock-transfer ledgers, censuses, slave registers, and synagogue records reveals, 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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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2000
ISBN
9780814728796

CHAPTER 1

England’s Jewish Merchants and the Slave Trade

After an exile from England that had lasted almost four centuries, Europe’s Jewish inhabitants learned in the middle of the 1650s that they could once again reside in that nation. Expelled in 1290, they had been forbidden to return until Oliver Cromwell’s government quietly gave them permission to reenter the country after receiving a delegation sent by the Jewish community of Amsterdam to argue the case for readmission. Although a handful of Jews had previously entered and taken up residence in England during the 1630s, their presence was illegal until Cromwell gave the nod to Jewish settlement in 1656, thereby inaugurating what is known in Anglo-Jewish history as the Resettlement. Whether prompted by economic calculation or by the Puritan belief that the conversion of the Jews would precede the advent of the millennium, the government disregarded opposition among the merchants of the City of London and unofficially assented to the return of the Jews.1
By 1663, approximately 220 of them resided in London. Some, in flight from the Inquisition, came directly to England from Spain and Portugal. Others originated in the Canary Islands, France, and the German port of Hamburg, while still others came from Holland, a center of Jewish settlement dating only to the end of the previous century.2 Virtually all traced their origins to the Iberian Peninsula, as descendants of the thousands of Jews who had remained in Spain and Portugal after those nations had expelled their Jewish populations, Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497. Jews who decided to remain after the expulsions could do so only if they accepted Christianity. Those who stayed and converted comprised a distinct social group in the two Iberian nations called the New Christians, a category first created in Spain at the end of the previous century following a wave of massacres and forced conversions in 1391.
The New Christian label proved to be a term of opprobrium that passed from one generation to the next. Because many New Christians prospered as merchants, achieved eminence in the professions and in public office, or served as tax collectors, they frequently became targets of vilification. More terribly, many were accused of secretly adhering to Judaism and of transmitting it to their children. To root out the heresy of crypto-Judaism, the Office of the Holy Inquisition periodically unleashed fierce campaigns in both Spain and Portugal during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Arrest as a New Christian automatically meant the loss of one’s property and, frequently, torture by the Inquisition as it sought to extract confessions. Some went mad in the Holy Office’s dungeons, while hundreds were delivered after their examinations to the civil authorities for a public death by burning at the stake.3
The objects of public obloquy and of Inquisitional terror, New Christians in the 1590s began to emigrate from Spain and Portugal (combined under a single crown at that juncture) to the Netherlands, then in the midst of its eighty-year rebellion against Spanish rule. Once safe in Holland, many New Christians reverted to Judaism. A thriving Jewish community consequently established itself in Amsterdam. Before long it grew to be Europe’s largest, expanding from approximately two hundred individuals in 1609 to about two thousand at midcentury. While Holland’s rigid Calvinist clergy opposed the Jews, Amsterdam’s civil authorities were tolerant toward them. Although they were barred from retail trade and the artisan crafts, had to wait almost fifty years for the right to worship publicly in Amsterdam, and even longer to settle in many of Holland’s towns, the prevailing atmosphere in their new home proved to be one of mildness and benevolence.4
It was from the Jewish community in Holland that the Resettlement in England began. Coping at midcentury with a surge in Jewish refugees from Spain, Portugal, Brazil, the German states, and Poland, the leaders of Amsterdam’s Jewish community dispatched an emissary to London to propose to Oliver Cromwell that Jews be permitted to settle in England. The Resettlement was the result of his mission.5
As descendants of Jews who had originated on the Iberian Peninsula, the Jews of the Resettlement in England belonged largely to the Sephardic branch of Judaism, one of the two major subdivisions of the Jewish people. Members of the other branch, the Ashkenazim, originated in central and eastern Europe, and they too contributed to the Resettlement, although in much smaller numbers. Pushed by poverty and by persecution, Ashkenazim had begun to migrate westward before 1648 from Lithuania and Poland to the German states, to the lands of the Hapsburg monarchy, and to the Netherlands. The numbers on the move increased at midcentury because of war, growing oppression, and deadly Cossack assaults. Ashkenazim reached England for certain by the middle of the 1680s and at first worshiped together with the Sephardim in their congregation. By 1690, however, traditional rivalries triumphed, and the Ashkenazim separated from the Sephardim and established their own congregation. Combined, the two groups in 1695 numbered between 751 and 853, roughly 70 percent of them Sephardim and 30 percent Ashkenazim.6
Despite the community’s small size and the poverty in which many of its members lived, the Jews of the Resettlement claimed that they contributed significantly to England’s international commerce. When a proposal to impose a special tax on them surfaced in 1689, they drew up a petition for submission to Parliament in which they protested against discriminatory taxation by arguing that the English nation benefited from their mercantile activities. They “drive a considerable Trade,” the petitioners wrote, with Jewish merchants responsible for “exporting great Quantities of the Woolen manufactures of this Nation, and importing vast Quantities of Gold and Silver, and other Foreign Staple Merchandizes, which do greatly Enrich the Nation, and encrease the Revenue of the Customs. . . .” Moreover, they had eliminated the Portuguese as a factor in the diamond trade with India:
The Market for Diamonds in the East Indies was formerly at Goa (belonging to the Portugueze) and by the means and industry of the Jews the Market hath been brought to the English Factories, and by that means England has in a manner the sole management of that precious Commodity, and all Foreigners bring their Monies into this Kingdom to purchase the said Diamonds.
While underscoring their contributions to the country’s commercial life, the petitioners pointed out that not all of England’s Jews were successful merchants. If one-quarter had accumulated “Moderate Estates,” another quarter had only “very indifferent Estates.” The remainder, workers, consisted in part of “indigent poor people.” The latter did not burden the English, for, as the petitioners were careful to point out, the Jewish community provided them with support and assistance.7
At virtually the same moment that Jews received permission to resettle in England, the English government undertook to carve out a place for Britain in the slave trade as part of a policy to supplant Holland in international commerce. Openly challenging the Dutch in Africa, England established a series of forts along the coasts of West Africa during the early 1660s, and in 1663 dispatched a military force to capture the fortifications and trading posts held by the Netherlanders. Dutch counterattacks undid the initial successes of the British, in turn precipitating the second of the three Anglo-Dutch Wars the two nations fought between 1652 and 1674.8
England relied not only on military action but also on its merchants to achieve its goals. In 1660, four years after the Resettlement commenced, Britain chartered the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa. Obtaining gold was initially its primary purpose, but in 1663 the slave trade became one of the Company’s aims when the government revised its charter. It subsequently delivered slaves to Barbados and contracted to supply slaves to Spain’s colonies. By 1669, however, it was clear that the Company’s finances were in disarray, and plans to salvage it gave way to the creation of a new company. Continuing to count on private capital, the government established a successor by chartering the Royal African Company in 1672, endowing it with a monopoly to all commerce between England and the western parts of Africa, including the slave trade. Although the new company proved incapable of earning profits on a sustained basis, plunging toward bankruptcy by the early 1700s, it did succeed in penetrating the slave trade, transporting in excess of an estimated ninety thousand slaves to the Caribbean between 1673 and 1711.9
Because many of them were merchants who resided in the City of London, the country’s commercial and financial center, where they participated in international commerce, the Jews of the Resettlement might well have been regarded as likely to invest in the two slave-trading companies, although in the Iberian Peninsula, the region where many of them (or their ancestors) had originated, they had barely participated in the enslavement of Africans. As Salo Wittmayer Baron wrote of New Christians in Spain and Portugal who were accused of surreptitious adherence to Judaism,
We rarely hear of Negro slaves in the households of secret Judaizers. The inquisitorial records frequently offer the testimony of servants from the defendants’ households, but these witnesses evidently were for the most part free Spanish or Portuguese proletarians. Nor did the great Marrano international traders appear to have played an independent role in the growing slave trade. . . . Occasional references like that to the purchase of a boatload of slaves by Manuel Rodriguez Lamego (a brother of the Rouen Jewish leader) are too rare to be typical.10
Jewish law had certainly not precluded their involvement (no more than Christian theology precluded the involvement of non-Jews), nor would it have prevented their descendants who were now in England from investing in it. Biblical, Talmudic, and medieval Jewish law, the latter in the instance of Moses Maimonides, recognized slavery by prescribing regulations applicable to slaves and their owners.11 Shulhan Arukh, the definitive work of Jewish law compiled by Joseph Caro in the sixteenth century and accepted by the seventeenth century throughout the Jewish world as fully authoritative, recognized the existence of slavery and listed the rules that were to govern relations between slaves and masters.12 Furthermore, a variety of contemporary developments in which Jews in Holland and in the Americas participated in the enslavement of Africans also existed, serving as precedents for the Jews of the Resettlement.
Such precedents included New Christians from Portugal who reverted to Judaism when they settled in Holland during the 1590s. Some brought slaves to Amsterdam and tried to sell them prior to 1596, the year in which the city’s authorities decided to bar the development of a slave market. Others must have owned slaves thereafter, for the city’s Sephardic congregation made provision for the burial of servants and slaves in its cemetery in a regulation adopted in 1614. Between 1608 and 1621, a handful of ships chartered by Jewish merchants in Amsterdam transported slaves from West Africa to the Americas. And during the second half of the seventeenth century, Sephardic merchants in the Netherlands played a part in the transit of slaves to Spain’s colonies, although the scope of their involvement is unknown.13
Overseas, Jewish settlers became involved in slavery in Holland’s colonies, beginning in Brazil. Seized by the Dutch West India Company from Portugal in 1630, Brazil attracted Jewish settlers in relatively substantial numbers. By the middle of the 1640s, approximately fifteen hundred Jewish inhabitants resided in the areas of northeastern Brazil controlled by the Dutch, where they established two congregations and employed the first rabbi in the Americas. Their numbers began to decline in 1645 when the Portuguese colonists rose in rebellion, raising the specter of renewed control by Portugal and the return of the Inquisition. Nine years later, in 1654, a Portuguese expeditionary force recaptured Recife, forcing the Dutch to abandon Brazil. When the Dutch left, the remaining Jewish population, approximately 650 in number, also departed, some returning to Holland and others emigrating to the Dutch colony at New Amsterdam or to the English one at Barbados.14
While in Brazil between 1630 and 1654, a few of the Jewish settlers acquired sugar plantations and mills, and it is entirely reasonable to assume that they consequently employed slave labor. However, their contributions to the sugar industry were far more significant when it came to providing capital, exporting sugar, and advancing credit for slaves. As creditors, according to the historian of the Brazilian Jewish community, “they dominated the slave trade.” To be sure, all slave imports from Africa were in the hands of the Dutch West India Company, which under the terms of its charter held the monopoly to the slave trade. But the Company sold the slaves it transported to Br...

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