Jews and the American Slave Trade (review)

Book Reviews 175 Dershowitz' tribute to the accomplishments ofElie Wiesel and C. Ozick's Afterword that he is our generation's Teacher of Memory is short in content but long in significance. What can be true of storytellers is equally true of tales inspired by them. In the writings of Elie Wiesel, the ethics of memory and morality live. Wiesel speaks to the imagination, to the feelings, to the passions, to exalted senses and to deprived ones. His humane voice is heard in this Festschrift. For this, we are grateful. Zev Garber Judaic Studies Los Angeles Valley College Jews and the American Slave Trade, by Saul S. Friedman. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998. 326 pp. $34.95. Saul Friedman's volume is a response to The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, published in 1991 by the Nation ofIslam. It addresses in detail the efforts of The Secret Relationship to demonstrate that Jews were prominent as slave traders and slave holders throughout the Atlantic world, and particularly in the U.S. To a large degree, Friedman's study is aimed at a general audience, yet its argument relies heavily on its summary of current scholarship and on its critique of the scholarly pretensions of The Secret Relationship. It addresses both the historical issue of slavery and the contemporary issue ofblack-Jewish relationships, especially in large American cities. Friedman has been generous in his citations of scholars in the field, including this reviewer's work on the history of slavery and on the issue of how we should respond today to the history of slavery. Friedman has succeeded, in my opinion, in refuting the strongest forms of the assertions of Jewish dominance of the institutions of slavery. Instead, his analysis emphasizes the range ofJewish involvement in slavery and slave trade, and argues that it fit on a continuum that overlapped the level of involvement of white Christians, and also of Africans and even African-Americans. The historical issue ofJews in slavery goes beyond the debate in the U.S. The slave trade to the region that became the United States was just over five percent ofthe total Atlantic slave trade. So the question ofthe overall place ofJews in the slave trade will be resolved more outside the frontiers of the U.S. than within. On the other hand, the slave population in the U.S. became the largest and remained enslaved longer than all others except those in Cuba, Brazil, and Africa itself, so in that sense the U.S. is an appropriate focus for this debate. In Friedman's book, the geographic scope ofthe argument is at once the U.S. and a wider world extending to all the shores of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Eight of the seventeen chapters focus on colonies and states of the United States. Yet six 176 SHOFAR Summer 2000 Vol. 18, NO.4 chapters of the book address other times and places: the ancient world, Jews and slavery, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, the Dutch and their colonies, and the colonies of the French and English. In scrutinizing and challenging the claims of The Secret Relationship, Friedman must address (as did the authors he is contesting) the problemofidentification: who was Jewish in ancestry and in religious practice? The historical record does not neatly identify who was Jewish and who was not, and there is the question ofwhether persons who professed the Christian religion could be seen as Jews. The authors of The Secret Relationship tended to add persons on the periphery into the category of Jews, thereby increasing their estimate of Jewish involvement in slavery. Seymour Drescher, in a recent study, emphasizes that New Christians among the Portuguese, if they had been determined to celebrate the Jewish religion openly, could have migrated to the Netherlands or Dutch colonies. The question of who is a Jew will not be resolved for this debate until it is resolved in other venues as well. Overall, I think Friedman has presented the facts as they are best known. To focus on Jews as the cause and the beneficiaries of slave trade is demonstrably a fallacious effort. Friedman's presentation is appropriate in its...