Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (review)

Book Reviews 177 about the structure and rhetoric ofthe exhibit. There were many points ofrhetoric and interpretation to be resolved in this complex discussion. But when it came to estimating the volume of the slave trade, the position that won the day among the black community, as among the scholars, was that the exhibit needed to present the current scholarly consensus on the facts. There were many debates to be resolved even after the facts were agreed upon, but that was a starting point. This agreement laid the basis for a moving and successful museum exhibit. I think Friedman has worked judiciously to locate the.facts, and that his book is helpful in clarifying the past and the present. The impact of the book will depend not so much on Friedman's work itself, but on how people from various points ofview use it in current discussions. Patrick Manning Department of History Northeastern University Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight, by Eli Faber. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 366 pp. $27.95. "Jewish historians have neither overlooked nor denied the fact that members of the Jewish faith participated in the institution of slavery" (p. 6), writes Eli Faber in Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade-a quantitative historical work published by New York University Press in 1998. For these historians, he notes, "there had never been anything 'secret' about the 'relationship' between blacks and Jews during the era ofslavery ..." (p.6). Faber's work has its origins in the fourth annual Sonia Kroland Coster Lecture at Hunter College in New York City in May 1994. Its ostensible purpose is to discredit the "big lie" told in The Secret Relationship Between Blacks andJews, a tract published by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam in 1991. In that tract the Nation ofIslam's researchers had argued explicitly that members of the Jewish faith financed and dominated the slave trade, owned far more slaves than any other group, and were exceedingly cruel in their treatment of their slaves. The net effect of the publication of the tract was, Faber states, to initiate a debate in which little data was cited "that measured the actual size and scope ofinvolvement by Jewish merchants and colonists" (p. 8). Thus, Faber views it as his task in this work, which contains nearly one hundred pages of tables, eighty pages of footnotes, and another twenty-five pages of bibliographic references, "to ascertain what the historical record provides by way of empirical evidence regarding the degree to which Jews and their non-Jewish contemporaries participated in slavery as investors, traders, and owners" (p. 8). For Faber, the extent of Jewish involvement in the slave trade is of intrinsic significance because "slavery underlay a large part ofthe economy ofthe Atlantic region in the early 178 SHOFAR Summer 2000 Vol. 18, No.4 modem era" and "fueled European settlement and expansion in the western hemisphere" (pp. 8-9). Faber chooses to focus on the British empire rather than other European nations because Britain transported far more blacks during the height of the slave trade in the latter part of the eighteenth century than any other nation. Nevertheless, his starting point is the seventeenth century, in which he notes that Jewish merchants of the Resettlement tended not to invest in either the Company ofRoyal Adventurers Trading into Africa, or the Royal African Company, or the South Sea Company in the early eighteenth century, or the Company ofMerchants Trading to Africa in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, in the colonies of Barbados and Jamaica, and mainland America, few Jews had a stake in slavery and the factoring enterprise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for they were not engaged in agriculture but worked as shopkeepers and merchants who supplied the planters and their slaves. Thus persons such as Alexandre Lindo in Jamaica and Jacob Rodrigues Rivera and Aaron Lopez in Rhode Island-persons who made fortunes in the business of slavery-were the exceptions and not the rule. As a whole, this book, which is loaded with quantitative data, is a taxing read. One must wonder why Faber, who states that...