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

Faber's book is designed to confront the hysterical, inaccurate, and anti-Semitic canards of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (1991), written by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam. Essentially The Secret Relationship charges that Jews were mainly responsible for the African slave trade. This charge is, of course, ludicrous and considered absurd by all serious scholars. Harvard's Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has condemned the book as "the bible of the new anti-Semitism." (p. 8) Nevertheless, The Secret Relationship has been widely read and believed by many African-Americans. Faber's book, as its subtitle indicates, is designed to "Set the Record Straight" on this issue.

Faber clearly accomplishes his goal, although that should not surprise us. Since there were almost no Jews involved in the African slave trade, it is not difficult to disprove the absurd claims of The Secret Relationship. Faber's book will probably not, however, affect the debate very much, at least in the short run. It is unlikely that the people who read, and believe, The Secret Relationship, are going to read Faber's careful, scholarly, and alas, somewhat ponderous book. Nevertheless, the scholars who do read Faber's book will now have the ammunition they might have previously lacked, to confront the nonsense in The Secret Relationship. Hopefully, teachers and professors will read Faber so that they can patiently and carefully reeducate students who have been misled by The Secret Relationship. But, it is unlikely that vast majority of those who have read and believed The Secret Relationship will ever encounter Faber's work.

Faber has looked at what appears to be every existing record involving slave trading ventures in the British West Indies and the mainland English colonies. He has also carefully analyzed the Jewish communities--and their relationship to slavery--in Jamaica, Barbados, Nevis, and the mainland colonies. He has counted and listed every known Jewish slaveowner and slave trader in England and British America. Faber provides 98 pages of tables and lists, with more numbers than anyone could ever want.

Faber's numbers make his point, over and over again, that Jews were minor players in the African trade. Table 4, for example, shows that between 1728 and 1806 traders brought over 45,000 slaves to Barbados. Only 128 of these slaves were transported on ships in which a Jew had a financial interest. Similarly, Faber shows that importers brought 3,986 slaves into New York City between 1715 and 1765, and only 32 were carried by Jewish owned ships, while another 345 came in on ships owned by investor groups that included Jews. The story in Jamaica was similar. Between 1719 and 1806 Jewish ship owners imported 960 slaves, but in the same period non-Jews imported over 260,000 slaves.

Jews were more involved in the inter-island and inter-colonial trade, but even here the numbers bear out the utter insignificance of Jews. No Jewish owned vessels carried slaves out of Barbados, and ships in which Jews had investments took only 291 slaves off the islands. This compares with over 5,300 slaves brought out by Christians. Jewish shippers carried over 2,700 slaves from Jamaica to other places, but non-Jews carried more than 32,400 from that island.

Faber shows, in mind-numbing detail, that Jewish merchants in the New World were less likely that their Christian counterparts to be involved in the slave trade. In England Jews were also less likely than non-Jews to invest in the Royal Africa Company, which held the British monopoly on the African slave trade.

Faber's book, with its tables, charts, lists, and numbers, tells three stories. First, we learn that Jews in the New World acted a lot like other white people. Where middle-class whites tended to own...