Jews and the American Slave Trade Review

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(More customer reviews)Saul S. Friedman is professor of Jewish and Middle Eastern history at Youngstown State. He is also the author of A History of the Holocaust (Parkes-Wiener Series on Jewish Studies), A History of the Middle East, Land of Dust, The Incident at Massena: The Blood Libel in America, No Haven for the Oppressed; United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938-1945, etc.
He writes in the Preface to this 1998 book, "This is not a text in American history, Jewish history, nor, for that matter, the history of slavery... Rather it is intended as a response to a series of charges which have been widely circulated in the last several years. to wit: (a) that the shipment of millions of Africans to the New World was a black Holocaust; (b) the number of victims and suffering in American death marches and ghettoes ... dwarfs anything experienced by European Jews under Hitler; (c) chief among the villans responsible for these degradations throughout the colonial world and well into the antebellum period were Jews ... (d) Jews not only masterminded the slave trade, they continue to exploit American blacks to the present day. In its simplest form, the charge is that Jews were responsible for the slave trade to and in America." This book is particularly a refutation of the Nation of Islam's The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.
Here are some quotations from the book:
"9,000 slaves is not 80,000 as suggested by the 'Secret Relationship.' Nor does the purchase of one quarter of slave imports constitute domination of the trade." (Pg. 67)
"Jews who owned FEW slaves knew the institution to be obsolete, inefficient, and morally wrong." (Pg. 144)
"Jews accepted slavery because it was the norm among their Gentile neighbors, serving as an escape valve for frustrations of poor whites, offering protective coloration for the foreign born." (Pg. 167)
"Some Jews worked to ameliorate black suffering even when there was no reciprocity. Black culture had imbibed anti-Semitism along with Christian theology in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries." (Pg. 204)
"There is no substance to claims that Jews in cities owned a disproportionate number of slaves, nothing to support the contention that Jews dominated the illegal slave trade, and nothing but slander when it comes to the charge of Jewish bankers secretly sabotaging humanitarian war efforts in the nineteenth century." (Pg. 210)
"'The Secret Relationship' offers no general condemnation of the 19,816 Methodist, 5,034 Presbyterian, 2,123 Lutheran, 2,129 Episcopalian, 2,230 Congregationalist, 2,442 Catholic, 676 German Reformed, or 664 Universalist churches in America for their failure in confronting the great moral issue of the nineteenth century, but it does fault Jews, who had about as many congregations as the Swedenborgian or Moravian Christian sects in 1860." (Pg. 215)
"During the formative years of the United States, then, when the import and sale of Africans was at its peak Jews owned less than three-one hundredths of a percent, 0.03 percent of all the slaves in America." (Pg. 217)
"Somehow the mythmakers omit mention of African participation in the slave trade. No legitimate scholar disputes the existence of slaves in African societies before the arrival of European whites." (Pg. 222)

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The Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semitic manuscripts published in years. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades. Friedman elucidates the role of American Jews toward the great nineteenth-century moral debate, the positions they took, and explains what shattered the alliance between these two vulnerable minority groups in America.--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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