Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

JEWS IN THE SLAVE TRADE
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DAVID BRION DAVIS
o blame Jews for participating in the Atlantic slave trade is a bit like blaming
Native Americans for contributing to the oil industry that now threat -
, ens the earth with atmospheric pollution and global warming. After eastern
Indian tribes were expelled westward to Oklahoma, some members of the small
Osage group profited from the immense reserves of oil discovered beneath their
barren and seemingly unproductive land. In the early twentieth century, after
tribal leaders distributed fabulous royalties to previously indigent Indians, oil riggers
were soon outnumbered by swarms of white vultures including luxury car
salesmen and fancy prostitutes. Money was so plentiful that, in addition to extravagant
spending, Indian oil profits also led to the founding of the great Gilcrease
Museum in Tulsa.
In somewhat similar fashion, a few of the Sephardi Jews and their descendants
who were expelled from Spain and Portugal found refuge in Antwerp and then
the Netherlands, where, thanks to geopolitical circumstances far beyond their
control, the trade in sugar and slaves became as tempting an enterprise as modern
oil. Like the oil and petrochemical industry, the slave system of Brazil and the
Caribbean revolutionized the world economy, attracting investments from all
quarters, creating thousands of new jobs, amassing capital, and benefiting consumers
throughout the Western world, including West Africa, with a new array
of cheap products. In addition, as Joseph C. Miller has written, this merchant capitalism
had the effect in Africa of converting human beings "into cold metal.. .the
Midas touch that rendered southern Atlantic slaving the Africans' 'way of
death.'" 1 Yet just as the mass of North American Indians remained enclosed in
reservations, far removed from the profits of drilling and refining oil, so the great
mass of Europe's Jews were confined for centuries in separate, isolated communities
well beyond the margins of the Atlantic slave system.
Although Jews and Native Americans have both suffered from centuries of
persecution, caricature, and even mass killings, one profound difference qualifies
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