Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

72 // DAVID BRION DAVIS
traditions, and prejudices—was made possible only by the near extermination of
indigenous populations and by the dehumanizing subjugation of the so-called
African race.
Notes
* An earlier version of this essay appeared in Culturefront: A Magazine of the
Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 1992), 42-45. Thanks are given to the editor of that
journal and the New York Council for the Humanities for permission to use the essay
here. Some of the same material also appeared in an essay in The New York Review of
Books, December 22, 1994, 14-16.
1. Joseph C. Miller, The Way of Death (Madison, WI, 1988).
2. For a fuller documented account of Jews and slavery, see my Slavery and Human
Progress (New York, 1984), 82-101.
3. Paul E. Lovejoy, "The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis,"
Journal of African History, Vol. 23 (1982), 473—500. But also see Joseph E. Inikori and
Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1992).
4. An asiento was a contract between an individual or company and the Spanish
crown for the transport of Africans and their sale as slaves in the New World.
5. Seymour Drescher, "The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade," in
Immigrants and Minorities, 12 (July 1993), 120.
6. As Seymour Drescher points out, wealthy Jews of Amsterdam and Hamburg
did play "significant entrepreneurial or organizational roles" in the "minuscule
Brandenburg, Swedish, and Courland slave trades," but these so-called Baltic trades
"combined did not account for as much as 0.7 percent of Europe's transatlantic slave
trade." Drescher notes one final irony: "the only major state in Europe whose people
or rulers evinced no interest whatever in getting into the Afro-Caribbean system during
the four centuries after Columbus's voyages was the kingdom of Poland, proportionally
the most "Jewish" area of Europe until its final partition in the 1790s." Of
course the irony is a new one, he adds, since "for five centuries, no one imagined
European Jewry to be dominant in the transatlantic slave trade." Drescher, "The Role
of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade," 117, 122.
7. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 101.
8. Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color
m the Old South (New York, 1984), 204.