Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Jews in the Slave Tirade \\ 71
sobering and depressing part of this message, it should be stressed that even with
regard to the Dutch Sephardi sugar trade, we are dealing with a few hundred families.
And after the brief Dutch sugar boom had ended, Britain emerged as the
world's greatest sugar importer and slave-trading nation. In Barbados, to be sure,
there were fifty-four Jewish households in 1680. But these were not great slave
traders or planters; they were mostly the managers of retail shops and moneylending
firms who owned fewer slaves per household (three) than the non-Jewish
residents of Bridgetown.
To keep matters in perspective, we should note that in the American South, in
1830, there were only 23 Jews among the 59,000 slaveholders owning twenty or
more slaves and only four Jews among the 11,000 slaveholders owning fifty or
more slaves. Even if each member of his Jewish slaveholding elite had owned
3,704—a ridiculous figure anywhere in the world—the total number would only
equal the 100,000 slaves owned by black and colored planters in St. Domingue
in 1789, on the eve of the Haitian Revolution. In actuality, the free people of color
in the Caribbean greatly surpassed the much smaller number of Jews in slave
ownership. Even in Charleston, South Carolina the percentage of free African
Americans who owned slaves increased from one-half to three-quarters as one
moved up the socioeconomic scale as indicated by the ownership of real estate. 8
While the thousands of black slave owners in the antebellum South included large
numbers of freed people who had simply purchased family members or relatives,
there were also colored planters, especially in Louisiana, who owned more than
fifty or even one hundred slaves. The allure of profits and power transcended all
distinctions of race, ethnicity, and religion.
No one should defend or apologize for the Jews who bought and sold slaves,
or who forced slaves to cut cane on the estates of Joden Savanne. Yet Jews as a
group were much less responsible for the crimes of the slave trade than were
Catholics or Protestants—or Muslims, some of whom actually initiated the
process of shipping black African slaves to distant markets—even if one adopts
the absurd and dangerous though often seductive belief in collective guilt over
centuries for members of religious, ethnic, or racial groups. In fact, by that criterion
no group would be more culpable than the descendants of African ethnic
groups who captured and enslaved other Africans in order to sell them to
European traders in exchange for textiles, metal ware, guns, liquor, and other
desired commodities. It is a disturbing thought, nonetheless, that many Sephardi
Jews, including those who established the first synagogue in Curacao and the first
Jewish settlements in North America, found the path to their own liberation and
affluence by participating in a system of commerce that subjected another people
to contempt, dishonor, coerced labor, and degradation. It has even been said that
the more enlightened rulers of eighteenth-century Europe were much swayed
by the early achievements of enfranchised Jews in Dutch Brazil, the Caribbean,
and North America. This is one aspect of the dismal truth that the New World—
conceived as a land of limitless opportunity, breaking the crust of old restraints,