To find sanctuary and profit in the new world, Jews sometimes played a prominent role in the machinery of slavery, I learned from scholar Jonathan Schorsch
One-hundred and fifty years after the U.S. Civil War, slavery's ramifications continue to torment the American psyche. Nearly six in 10 Americans think race relations are bad, and four in 10 feel they are getting worse, according to a recent New York Times poll.
In June, a white supremacist murdered nine parishioners at Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. And in July, yet another
African-American, Sandra Bland, wound up dead under suspicious circumstances
after being arrested by a white police in Waller County, Texas.
American
Jews would like to think they have only an incidental share in their country's sullied
legacy of slavery and racism. But both white supremacists and black chauvinists
insist Jews were central to the equation.
Jonathan
Schorsch has devoted much of his academic career to understanding the
relationship between Jews and blacks in the New World. Schorsch, the son of
former Jewish Theological Seminary chancellor Ismar Schorsch, was drawn to the
subject in the early 1990s, after learning of the accusations from Black
nationalists, such as Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, that Jews
were responsible not only for the slave trade but for having embedded the very
idea of racism into Scripture.
Yet
Schorsch was no less exasperated with the knee-jerk Jewish reaction to Farrakhan.
Jewish leaders in the 1980s and 1990s turned the discussion to the vanguard
role the community played in the civil rights movement.
Jonathan Schorsch
The
history, it turned out, was far from black and white.
SLAVERY WAS
ubiquitous in the New World starting in the 1500s until well into the
mid-1800s. Schorsch set out to establish the facts— painful as they might be in
contemporary eyes— about Jewish-Black relations in the age of slavery.
In 2004, he
wrote Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World which concluded that
Jewish attitudes toward blacks, between the 1600s and 1800s, were on the whole
not much different from the European colonial norm.
In 2009, he
came out with Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians
and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century . The book, aimed at an academic
audience, examined the extent to which the Catholic Church in the 1600s
distrusted and discriminated against both Jewish and African converts to
Christianity.
His latest
essay on Jews in the Caribbean appears in a just-released collection of http://www.walburgpers.nl/winkel/algemeen/joden essays— for now
available only in Dutch— published in conjunction with the Jewish Historical
Museum of Amsterdam's current exhibit on Jewish life in the Caribbean.
IN JUNE, I
heard Schorsch speak at the historic Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam about how
Jews in the Dutch Caribbean reconciled halacha and slavery. Many in the
audience were non-Jewish descendants of former slaves.
Jews from
Spain and Portugal— but also from Ashkenazi lands— began to live openly in
Amsterdam starting in the early 1600s after the Netherlands became Protestant.
Schorsch explained that slavery in Europe during the 1600s was mostly of the
domestic variety. Slaves in Jewish households were often incorporated into the
family. Males were circumcised. Women went to the mikve. Otherwise, they
couldn't work in the home preparing kosher food or serving wine.
Meantime,
Jews arrived in the Caribbean in the 1600s settling in Suriname, Curaçao, northeast
Brazil, and New Amsterdam – all Dutch colonies dominated until 1730 by the quasi-governmental
Dutch West India Company. The Dutch were happy to have white Jewish slave
owners settler in the Caribbean.
But the
slavery of the New World was a far cry from the domestic variety that had offered
a prospect of assimilation back in Europe. Caribbean slavery was
plantation-based aimed at stoking colonial economies – at a dreadful cost to
African lives and dignity.
The Jewish
communities of the Caribbean enjoyed sweeping religious and economic freedom
not generally available in the Old World. And Jews followed the prevailing
Christian and Muslim mores in their treatment of slaves – not Jewish law. The
massive plantation system blocked opportunities for assimilation into the
master's household previously available.
Schorsch
came to conclude that the Jewish minority was no less involved in benefiting
from the institution of slavery than the larger Christian society. In the 17th
and 18th century, Jews owned perhaps 40,000 slaves in the Dutch Caribbean most
of whom were not given the option of conversion and assimilation into the
Jewish community.
I caught up
with Schorsch after he returned to his academic base at Potsdam University in
Germany.
What
would halacha have demanded of Jewish slave owners?
That slaves
be allowed to rest on Shabbat. Halacha on other matters was not monolithic. The
most stringent, but until the 16th century the most widespread halachic
understanding was that male slaves would be circumcised at purchase or within
the first year, and that female slaves be immersed in the mikve. It was also forbidden
to approach a slave sexually.
How
learned were the Dutch Jews who reached the Caribbean in the 1600s of Jewish
tradition?
Scholars
continue to debate the Jewishness of the Converso or New Christian population. The
consensus has it that the Portuguese Conversos were far more loyal to and
fervent regarding maintaining Jewish beliefs and practices than the Spanish
Conversos.
I think the
best way to understand the Jewishness of Conversos is to see the population as
being divided into four types: (1) those secretly loyal to Judaism – Marranos;
(2) sincere converts to Catholicism and those who for pragmatic reasons dropped
interest in Judaism; (3) those practicing a syncretic religion combining
Judaism and Christianity; (4) those disgusted by religious coercion and
violence; skeptics, free-thinkers.
Because
Judaism was forbidden in Iberian territories, a prohibition enforced by the
Inquisitions, secrecy and dissembling epitomize this whole phenomenon, making
it simply impossible to quantify the size of each of these four types.
So even
Conversos loyal to Judaism tended to know little about actual living
Judaism.
With
some exceptions they had no input from contemporary Jews or Jewish texts. Hence
the increasingly tenuous connection between crypto-Judaism and real Judaism.
Many
Conversos who fled to lands where one could be a Jew openly did so not out of a
desire to be Jewish but merely to flee the terror of the Inquisition.
Raised as
Catholics, these “New Jews,” in historian Yosef Kaplan’s phrasing, were mostly
ignorant of rabbinic law and many even saw it rather negatively, as did the
Church.
Jews
appear to have played a comparatively minor role in importing African slaves to
the New World. Right?
As
slavery became industrialized by the Portuguese and Spanish in the late 15th
century, some Converso or New Christian merchants played a prominent role as
slave traders. This lasted perhaps into the 17th century.
One
question remains the religious loyalties of these men, but we should not
preclude the likelihood that some were Marranos, i.e., loyal Jews.
In terms of
open Jews, the number of slave traders, even part-time, known to scholars from
the four-century history of the Atlantic slave trade probably does not exceed
30. This is an astonishingly low number and the reason for the paucity of
Jewish slave traders continues to be unclear.
Did ethics
keep Jews out of this business? Lack of
connections? The most well-known (or
notorious) might be Aaron Lopez of Newport, Rhode Island.
Jews in
various colonies often played a role, sometimes a prominent one, in buying up
slaves at slave markets in the Americas and selling them in the interior of the
colonies to planters.
Were
there differences in how Jews related to the slave economy among Caribbean
colonies controlled by the Netherlands versus those dominated by France or
Britain?
French
colonies did not generally tolerate a Jewish presence, but where they did, as
in Saint Domingue (later Haiti), some Jews entered the planter elite, just as
in Suriname, a Dutch colony, and Barbados and Jamaica, English colonies.
But in all
of the colonies, Jewish merchants benefitted from slave labor, as did almost
any family that wasn’t poor and could afford one or two slaves to help with the
arduous and endless work necessary for running their domestic economy.
Were
there Jews who protested the slave system?
Beginning
in the 18th century, some European Jewish influenced by the enlightenment became
critics of slavery. Some Jews became active in the abolitionist movement of the
19th century, which really thrived only in the English colonial orbit, but they
represented a small minority of the Jewish population and their radical stance
often went unappreciated by the larger community, to put it mildly.
Turning to domestic slaves. How did the Caribbean Jewish
community relate to these Jews of color?
Those few
slaves who were converted, either according to Halacha or by taking on
Jewishness through sexual/romantic relations with Jewish masters were usually
initially welcomed in the small, vulnerable communities around the Atlantic. They
were treated as full Jews, as was the standard way in the so-called Old World
before the rise of industrial slavery.
They
married within the community, the men were given honors in synagogue. But
quickly in each community a backlash ensued. In Amsterdam, Suriname and Curaçao
the governing elites instituted legislation against non-whites, for example
banning non-whites from burial in the regular part of the cemeteries, banning
their circumcision, immersion or conversion, removing the option of calling the
men to the Torah or studying in the yeshiva at Amsterdam, prohibiting non-white
women from sitting in the front rows of the women’s section in synagogue.
While
Halacha is hardly always “progressive,” we see how under the Atlantic slave
system race came to take precedence over Halacha in many Atlantic-world Jewish
communities.
If
Jews were not prominent players in the trans-Atlantic slave trade or
instrumental in financing for the slave trade why have Jews been persistently
singled out by Black militants for opprobrium?
I think
the animosity stems from two factors. The first is the turn of early
20th-century American Black activists and radicals from their elders’
Christianity. "White” Christianity now faced harsh critique from them and
so did Judaism, the source of Christianity and a partner in the alleged
Judeo-Christian civilization that American thinkers loved to parade around.
The second
factor is later 20th-century socio-economic tensions. In the Civil Rights era
many Blacks negatively compared their own situation to that of Jews. They came
to see Jews as succeeding because they could pass as white and surmised, not
without reason, that some of that success was gained at their expense.
There
could not have been a slave trade without Africans in Africa prepared to sell
other Africans to European and Muslim buyers. Yet you seem to feel that this is
besides the point.
African
slavery prior to the era of European conquest and colonization— taking losing
warriors in inter-tribal conflicts or raiding rival villages for slaves— was
mostly domestic, an equal-opportunity matter, and lacked the intense racism that
European enslavement of Africans developed and required. This is not to excuse
such slavery.
Once
Europeans arrived in Africa, however, they took slaves in increasingly high
numbers in order to provide labor for their profit-making agricultural colonies
and intentionally instigated inter-tribal wars in order to obtain more slaves.
The slaves
themselves were now treated miserably, like non-humans, and since almost every
slave came from Black Africa – an entire, vicious system of exclusion, ostracization,
and dehumanization was erected.
And
what about the Muslim/Arab slave trade?
Often
inquiries into these topics have as much to do with current ideological drives
than with some supposedly neutral facts. People want to know whom to blame,
whom to absolve. So, frequently such questions are rhetorical as much as purely
informational.
If Africans
participated in slavery then whites aren’t so terrible, some whites might say. If
most of the slave trade and economy was run by white Christians, the Jews who
were involved were just doing what everyone else was doing.
I find this
a highly unsatisfying, even a suspect way of avoiding responsibility.
Nonetheless, can you assess the role of Arabs in the transport of African
slaves to the new world.
I have
never heard of Arabs involved in transferring slaves to the Americas. They were rather busy with their own
extensive slave system, which differed significantly in some respects from
Atlantic-world slavery.
--------
Elliot
Jager is a Jerusalem-based journalist. His book Pater: My Father, My
Judaism, My Childlessness will be published by The Toby Press in October.
