Book Review

Jews and the American Slave Trade. By Saul S. Friedman. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998. xiv, 326 pp. $34.95, isbn 1-56000-337-5.)

These two very different studies again confirm what every historian of the Atlantic slave trade already knows: the utter irresponsibility—at a minimum—of the Nation of Islam's assertions in The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (1991) that Jewish merchants dominated the slave trade and that Jews owned slaves in numbers significantly greater than did Christians. What is the pity is that such malicious allegations should inspire refutation at the level of thoroughness in these books, and that academically styled studies such as these should have so little prospect of reaching enthusiasts of such tracts as The Secret Relationship.

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The principal scholarly interest of these books, under such unscholarly circumstances, lies in how they support the obvious. 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. Notes and tables longer than the text demonstrate Faber's extremely thorough use of the considerable specialized literature on Jews in the British Empire as well as in the quantitative sources on slavery and the slave trade.

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