Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

66 // DAVID BRION DAVIS
any analogy. Even the radical environmentalists who see any participation in the
oil industry as immoral or as verging on criminality would never dream of interpreting
Indian oil profits as part of a larger Native American conspiracy. Yet partly
because of their remarkable success in a variety of hostile environments, Jews
have long been feared as the power behind otherwise inexplicable evils. For many
centuries they were the only non-Christian minority in nations dedicated to the
Christianization and thus the salvation of the world. 2
Signifying an antithetical Other, individual Jews have been homogenized and
reified as a "race"—a race responsible for crucifying the Savior, for resisting the
dissemination of God's word, for manipulating kings and world markets, and for
spreading the evils of both capitalism and communist revolution. Responsibility
for the African slave trade (and even for creating and spreading AIDS) has recently
been added to this long list of crimes. Such fantasies were long nourished by
the achievements of a very small number of Jews who, barred from landholding,
the army, and traditional crafts and professions, took advantage of their cosmopolitan
knowledge and personal connections that favored access to markets,
credit, and such highly desired commodities as diamonds, spices, wool, and sugar.
Indeed, much of the historical evidence regarding Jewish involvement in the slave
system is biased by deliberate Spanish efforts to encourage anti-Semitism in
Holland and to blame Jewish refugees for fostering Dutch commercial expansion
at the expense of Spain. Given this long history of conspiratorial fantasy and collective
scapegoating, a selective search for Jewish slave traders becomes inherently
anti-Semitic unless one keeps in view the larger context and the marginal place
of Jews in the history of the overall system. It is easy enough to point to Jewish
slave-trading firms in Amsterdam (the Belmontes), in Bordeaux (the Gradis and
Mendez), and in Newport, Rhode Island (Aaron Lopez and Jacob Rivera). But far
from suggesting that Jews constituted a major force behind the exploitation of
Africa, closer investigation shows that these merchants were the exception, far
outnumbered by thousands of Catholics and Protestants who flocked to share in
the great bonanza.
For four centuries the African slave trade was an integral and indispensable
part of European expansion and settlement of the New World. Until the 184()s
the flow of coerced African labor exceeded all the smaller streams of indentured
white servants and voluntary white immigrants willing to endure the risks of life
in the Western Hemisphere. The demand for labor was especially acute in the
tropical and semitropical zones that produced the staples and thus the wealth
most desired by Europeans. In the mid-eighteenth century the value of exports to
Britain from the British West Indies was more than ten times that of exports from
the colonies north of the Chesapeake—and thirty-one times greater if measured
in terms of value per capita. The economy of the northern colonies depended in
large measure on trade with Caribbean markets, which depended in turn on the
continuing importation of African labor to replenish a population that was never
allowed to sustain itself by natural increase.