Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Jews in the Slave Trade \\ 67
Fortunately for the white planters, merchants, consumers, and other beneficiaries
of this lethal system, West Africa offered a cheap and seemingly unlimited
supply of slave labor. Long before the Portuguese African voyages of the fifteenth
century, Arab merchants had perfected the trans-Saharan slave trade and had
delivered hundreds of thousands of black slaves to regions extending from the
Persian Gulf (via a seaborne trade from East Africa) to Sicily, Morocco, and Spain.
Sharply divided by tribal disputes and rivalries, Africans never looked upon one
another as a homogeneous "race"; accustomed to a variety of forms of servitude,
many tribes or kingdoms developed highly sophisticated methods for recruiting
captives and bartering slaves for coveted commodities which Arabs or the
Portuguese could bring from distant lands. The political power and commercial
networks of the Sokoto caliphate, the Asante, and the Yoruba states, to name only
three examples, were wholly inconsistent with the popular picture of "primitive"
people overawed and dominated by European military might.
Though first monopolized by the Portuguese, the Atlantic slave trade attracted
ships from the Netherlands, France, Britain, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, and the
English mainland colonies. Even the northern German ports sought to cash in on
this lucrative traffic. How did Jews fit into this picture? To keep matters in perspective,
one should keep in mind that in 1290 England expelled its entire Jewish
population; only a scattering of migrants began to return in the later half of the
seventeenth century. In France a series of expulsions and massacres in the fourteenth
century virtually demolished the medieval Jewish communities. In Spain,
beginning in the mid-fourteenth century, a much larger Jewish population was
subjected to periodic massacres, forced conversion, mob attacks, and final expulsion
in 1492. Many of the refugees fled to Muslim lands; the estimated 100,000
Jews who escaped into Portugal were compelled to accept Christianity. By the
1570s, which marked the beginning of Brazil's sugar boom based on African slave
labor, Judaism as a religion had been virtually wiped out in England, France, the
Germanics, Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, and most of Italy; the great mass
of Jewish survivors had emigrated to Poland, Lithuania, and Ottoman lands in the
Balkans and Turkey. No professing Jews were allowed to contaminate the Spanish
or Portuguese colonies of the New World. These sustained anti-Semitic crusades
clearly reduced the opportunity Jews might have had for participating in the
Atlantic slave system and certainly precluded any Jewish "initiation," "domination,"
or "control" of the slave trade. Yet the continuing persecution and exclusion,
especially of the "New Christians" or Marranos, did lead to a desperate
search for new commercial opportunities in the rebellious Spanish province of the
Netherlands (the Dutch struggle for independence continued from 1568 to
1648).
One of the most convincing estimates of the total volume of the Atlantic slave
trade, by Paul E. Lovejoy, comes to 11,698,000 slaves exported from Africa
between 1450 and 1900. 3 For the first century most of the slaves were destined
for the Iberian Peninsula, Madeira, Sao Tome, and other sugar-producing islands