Jews Involvement in The Slave Trade
According to Maxwell Whiteman, “A significant number of Jews gave their energies to the antislavery movement. ” in “Jews in the Antislavery Movement”, pp. 28, 42
Nathan Meyer Rothschild was known for his role in the British abolition of the slave trade through his partial financing of the £20 million British government compensation paid to former owners of the freed slaves.Source: Hochschild, Adam (2005) Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, Houghton Mifflin: New York, p. 347.
Many 19th century Jews, such as Adolphe Crémieux, participated in the moral outcry against slavery. In 1849, Crémieux announced the abolition of slavery throughout the French possessions.
Source : Duhaut, Noëmie (2021). “”A French Jew Emancipated the Blacks”: Discursive Strategies of French Jews in the Age of Transnational Emancipations”. French Historical Studies. 44 (4): 645–674.
In Britain, there were Jewish members of the abolition groups. Granville Sharp and Wilberforce, in his “A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” employed Jewish teachings as arguments against slavery. Rabbi G. Gottheil of Manchester, and Dr. L. Philippson of Bonn and Magdeburg, forcibly combated the view announced by Southern sympathizers that Judaism supports slavery.
Rabbi M. Mielziner’s anti-slavery work “Die Verhältnisse der Sklaverei bei den Alten Hebräern”, published in 1859, was translated and published in the United States as “Slavery Among Hebrews”.
Similarly, in Germany, Berthold Auerbach in his fictional work “Das Landhaus am Rhein” aroused public opinion against slavery and the slave trade, and Heinrich Heine also spoke against slavery.
Immigrant Jews were among abolitionist John Brown’s band of antislavery fighters in Kansas, including Theodore Wiener (from Poland); Jacob Benjamin (from Bohemia), and August Bondi (1833-1907) from Vienna.
A Jewish woman, Ernestine Rose, was called “queen of the platforms” in the 19th century because of her speeches in favor of abolition.
Her lectures were met with controversy. Her most ill-received appearance was likely in Charleston, Virginia (today West Virginia), where her lecture on the evils of slavery was met with such vehement opposition and outrage that she was forced to exercise considerable influence to even get out of the city safely.
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In 1654 Jews were expelled from Brazil, and in 1685 from Martinique and Guadalope, so who was in the slave industry after that ?!Historian Arnold Wiznitzer has pointed out, Jews in Amsterdam owned 10 percent of the stock in the Dutch West India Company, the large slave-shipping enterprise that helped launch the Netherlands to international commercial prominence during the 1600s. But the French and English monopoly trading companies, which eventually dominated the shipping of Africans to New World colonies, excluded Jews from that level of the trade.
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A 1998 book by George Mason University, entitled Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight, reads: “To the extent that they owned slaves they tended to own fewer slaves on average than their non-Jewish peers. A dozen or so participated in some aspect of the Atlantic slave trade to 1800, with only about half a dozen being serious traders, and even this group moved a very tiny fraction of the total Africans brought to America.
“‘Half-truths and History’, a Washington Post opinion article from 1993 specifies that the role played by Jews in the American slave trade was “small but significant.” and in far smaller numbers than non-Jews among the Portuguese, Dutch, English and French, than Arabs, or than Africans themselves.
British historian Stephen Alexander Fortune’ in “Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650-1750.” notes:”Most Jews in Barbados and Jamaica in the 18th century were small men, shopkeepers . . . . The sugar trade became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the sugar-planters’ agents in London, a restricted and confined circle. {Jews} did not participate.” The role of Jewish traders was apparently limited, during the early 1700s, to the sale of “great numbers of ‘refuse’ Negroes (sickly slaves),”.
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Funny how Kyrie Irving, and Kanye West never talk about how American Jews played a significant role in the founding and funding of some of the most important civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
In 1909, Henry Moscowitz joined W.E.B. DuBois and other civil rights leaders to found the NAACP. Kivie Kaplan, a vice-chairman of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism), served as the national president of the NAACP from 1966 to 1975. Arnie Aronson worked with A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins to found the Leadership Conference.
From 1910 to 1940, more than 2,000 primary and secondary schools and 20 Black colleges (including Howard, Dillard and Fisk universities) were established in whole or in part by contributions from Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald.
