Jewish views on slavery

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Allegations that Jews dominated the slave trade in Medieval Europe, Africa, and/or the Americas were widely refuted by scholars.[1][2]

Slavery was customary during the antiquity and the Middle Ages, and legislations commonly permitted the slave trade. According to the Jewish Law, Jewish slaves had the right of emancipation on the seventh (Sabbatical) year, and all slaves had to be freed after seven Sabbatical cycles on a Jubilee year.[3][4] A slave who was taken to the Holy Land became free as soon as he touched the soil.[5]

History

In 492 Pope Gelasius permitted Jews to introduce slaves from Gaul into Italy, on the condition that they were non-Christian.[6]

Ibn Khordadhbeh in the 9th century describes two routes by which Jewish slave-dealers carried slaves from West to East and from East to West.[6] According to Abraham ibn Yakub, Byzantine Jewish merchants bought Slavs from Prague to be sold as slaves. Louis the Fair granted charters to Jews visiting his kingdom, permitting them to trade with slaves, provided the latter had not been baptized. Agobard claimed that the Jews did not abide to the agreement and kept Christians as slaves, citing the instance of a Christian refugee from Cordova who declared that his coreligionists were frequently sold, as he had been, to the Moors. Many, indeed, of the Spanish Jews owed their fortune to the trade in Slavonian slaves brought from Andalusia.[7] Similarly, the Jews of Verdun, about the year 949, purchased slaves in their neighborhood and sold them in Spain.[8]

The means by which Jews earned their livelihoods were largely determined by the restrictions placed on them by the authorities. The Christian Church repeatedly protested against the sale of Christians to Jews, the first protest occurring as early as 538. At the third council of Orleans a decree was passed that Jews must not possess Christian servants or slaves, a prohibition which was repeated over and over again at different councils—as at Orleans (541), Paris (633), Toledo (fourth council, 633), Szabolcs (1092), Ghent (1112), Narbonne (1227), Béziers (1246). After this time the need of such a prohibition seems to have disappeared. Thus, at Marseilles, in the 13th century, there were only two cases of Jewish, as against seven of Christian, slave-traders[9] It was part of St. Benedict's rule that Christian slaves were not to serve Jews.[10]

Despite the ruling, many Christians trafficked with the Jews in slaves, and the Church dignitaries of Bavaria even recognized this traffic by insisting on Jews and other merchants paying toll for slaves.[11]

Allegations and refutations

Allegations that Jews dominated the slave trade in Medieval Europe, Africa, and/or the Americas often appear in antisemitic discourse as a part of "Jewish domination" or "Jewish persecution" antisemitic canard. One of the latest examples of such accusations are made in the Nation of Islam's 1991 book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.[12] These charges were widely refuted by scholars.[1][2]

According to a review of Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight by Eli Faber and Jews and the American Slave Trade by Saul S. Friedman in The Journal of American History,

Eli Faber takes a quantitative approach to Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade in Britain's Atlantic empire, starting with the arrival of Sephardic Jews in the London resettlement of the 1650s, calculating their participation in the trading companies of the late seventeenth century, and then using a solid range of standard quantitative sources (Naval Office shipping lists, censuses, tax records, and so on) to assess the prominence in slaving and slave owning of merchants and planters identifiable as Jewish in Barbados, Jamaica, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and all other smaller English colonial ports. He follows this strategy in the Caribbean through the 1820s; his North American coverage effectively terminates in 1775. Faber acknowledges the few merchants of Jewish background locally prominent in slaving during the second half of the eighteenth century but otherwise confirms the small-to-minuscule size of colonial Jewish communities of any sort and shows them engaged in slaving and slave holding only to degrees indistinguishable from those of their English competitors.[13]

Jewish slaves

Jewish communities customarily ransomed Jewish captives according to a Judaic mitzvah regarding the redemption of captives (pidyon shvuyim).[14] Knowing this, slave traders preyed on Jews.[15] In his A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson writes:

Jews were particularly valued as captives since it was believed, usually correctly, that even if they themselves poor, a Jewish community somewhere could be persuaded to ransom them. If a Jew was taken by Turks from a Christian ship, his release was usually negotiated from Constantinople. In Venice, the Jewish Levantine and Portuguese congregations set up a special organization for redeeming Jewish captives taken by Christians from Turkish ships, Jewish merchants paid a special tax on all goods to support it, which acted as a form of insurance since they were likely victims.[16]

References

  1. ^ a b Reviewed Work: Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight by Eli Faber by Paul Finkelman. Journal of Law and Religion, Vol. 17, No. 1/2 (2002), pp. 125-128
  2. ^ a b Refutations of charges of Jewish prominence in slave trade:
    • "Nor were Jews prominent in the slave trade." - Marvin Perry, Frederick M. Schweitzer: Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. ISBN 0312165617. p.245
    • "In no period did Jews play a leading role as financiers, shipowners, or factors in the transatlantic or Caribbean slave trades. They possessed far fewer slaves than non-Jews in every British territory in North America and the Caribbean. Even when Jews in a handful of places owned slaves in proportions slightly above their representation among a town's families, such cases do not come close to corroborating the assertions of The Secret Relationship." - Wim Klooster (University of Southern Maine): Review of Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight. By Eli Faber. Reappraisals in Jewish Social and Intellectual History. William and Mary Quarterly Review of Books. Volume LVII, Number 1. by Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 2000
    • "Medieval Christians greatly exaggerated the supposed Jewish control over trade and finance and also became obsessed with alleged Jewish plots to enslave, convert, or sell non-Jews... Most European Jews lived in poor communities on the margins of Christian society; they continued to suffer most of the legal disabilities associated with slavery. ... Whatever Jewish refugees from Brazil may have contributed to the northwestward expansion of sugar and slaves, it is clear that Jews had no major or continuing impact on the history of New World slavery." - Professor David Brion Davis of Yale University in Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), p.89 (cited in Shofar FTP Archive File: orgs/american/wiesenthal.center//web/historical-facts)
    • "The Jews of Newport seem not to have pursued the [slave trading] business consistently ... [When] we compare the number of vessels employed in the traffic by all merchants with the number sent to the African coast by Jewish traders ... we can see that the Jewish participation was minimal. It may be safely assumed that over a period of years American Jewish businessmen were accountable for considerably less than two percent of the slave imports into the West Indies" - Professor Jacob R. Marcus of Hebrew Union College in The Colonial American Jew (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1970), Vol. 2, pp. 702-703 (cited in Shofar FTP Archive File: orgs/american/wiesenthal.center//web/historical-facts)
    • "None of the major slavetraders was Jewish, nor did Jews constitute a large proportion in any particular community. ... probably all of the Jewish slavetraders in all of the Southern cities and towns combined did not buy and sell as many slaves as did the firm of Franklin and Armfield, the largest Negro traders in the South." - Rabbi Bertram W. Korn, Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789-1865, in The Jewish Experience in America, ed. Abraham J. Karp (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1969), Vol. 3, pp. 197-198 (cited in Shofar FTP Archive File: orgs/american/wiesenthal.center//web/historical-facts)
    • "[There were] Jewish owners of plantations, but altogether they constituted only a tiny proportion of the Southerners whose habits, opinions, and status were to become decisive for the entire section, and eventually for the entire country. ... [Only one Jew] tried his hand as a plantation overseer even if only for a brief time." - Rabbi Bertram W. Korn, Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789-1865, in The Jewish Experience in America, ed. Abraham J. Karp (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1969), Vol. 3, p. 180. (cited in Shofar FTP Archive File: orgs/american/wiesenthal.center//web/historical-facts)
  3. ^ Mishpatim: Jewish Tradition and Slavery By Rabbi Jeffrey Schein, citing Parashat Mishpatim, Exodus 21:1 - 24:18
  4. ^ Mishnah: The Oral Law by Harry Gersh. Behrman House, Inc. 1984. ISBN 0874413907 p.49
  5. ^ "Responsa of Geonim," section 12, cited in Slave Trade, Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906 ed.
  6. ^ a b Slave Trade. Jewish Encyclopedia
  7. ^ Grätz, "Gesch." vii.
  8. ^ Aronius, "Regesten," No. 127
  9. ^ "R. E. J." xvi.
  10. ^ Aronius, "Regesten," No. 114
  11. ^ ib. No. 122
  12. ^ Anti-Semitism. Farrakhan In His Own Words. On Jewish Involvement in the Slave Trade and Nation of Islam. Jew-Hatred as History. ADL December 31, 2001
  13. ^ Book Review of Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight by Eli Faber and Jews and the American Slave Trade by Saul S. Friedman The Journal of American History Vol 86. No. 3 December 1999
  14. ^ Ransoming Captive Jews. An important commandment calls for the redemption of Jewish prisoners, but how far should this mitzvah be taken? by Rabbi David Golinkin
  15. ^ Jewish involvement in the slave trade. From a post to Kulanu's listserv by Anne Herschman December 2001
  16. ^ Paul Johnson: A History of the Jews. 1987. p.240

Further reading

  • Eli Faber: Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight. New York: New York University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8147-2638-0
  • Saul S. Friedman: Jews and the American Slave Trade. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998. ISBN 1-56000-337-5
  • Roth, Norman: Medieval Jewish Civilzation
  • Tertullianus, Qunitus Codex Agobardinus

External links

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

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