Richard Kreitner’s Tell-[Almost]-All Book of Jewish Slave Trading

Richard Kreitner’s Tell-(Almost)-All Book of Jewish Slave-Trading

Fear No Pharaoh (2025), p. 45:

For hundreds of years, Jews in the New World participated in slavery and the slave trade. They were investors and creditors, importers and exporters, agents and auctioneers, masters and mistresses. Thousands of men, women, and children were bought on the coast of Africa and shipped in miserable, deadly conditions across the Atlantic on vessels owned by Jews, some even bearing biblical names: the King Solomon, the David, the Hannah, the Abraham and Sarah.

While most Jewish slave traders, like their non-Jewish counterparts, were based in the sugar islands of the Caribbean, many others lived in seaboard towns and cities that later became part of the United States. They were some of the most prominent members of the earliest American Jewish communities.

 

Richard Kreitner’s January 30, 2015, Forward article (formerly titled “Should Jews Have To Pay Reparations for Slavery?”) EXCERPT:

Nobody can argue that the balance of the Jewish record on the question of American slavery and the Civil War is anything but regrettable. If the career of Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin were not enough, the overwhelming complacency of the antebellum Jewish community, even in the North, provides a record sufficiently embarrassing to warrant official acknowledgement — even, perhaps, reparation.

But there were American Jews before the war who risked everything to fight the South’s “peculiar institution.” Familiar with the story of Exodus, they knew it was not actually all that peculiar….

Jews in the New World participated in slavery at least as fully and profitably as their Gentile neighbors. Jews in New Amsterdam owned slaves within a decade of their 1654 arrival, and their brethren in Newport, Rhode Island, were involved in the slave trade right up until the War of Independence, in which several slaves of the city’s Jews were forced to fight. In the South, being rich enough to own slaves and not owning any “carried it with it social and business disadvantages,” the historian Max Kohler wrote in 1897, while in the North outright abolitionism was discouraged by “business and trade policy,” which “rendered such avowals inexpedient.”

 

Richard Kreitner, quoted in the March 27, 2025, Forward article titled “Why Jews were like everyone else — only more so — during slavery and the Civil War”:

Legally under the 1790 Naturalization Act, which specified who and how immigrants could become citizens, Jews were absolutely accepted as white. In the South, they were more than accepted as white. They were eagerly welcomed as white because the white population in the South needed all the help they could get to offset very large populations of enslaved African Americans. There’s certainly lots of prejudice, but they did immediately count as white, and I believe that was mostly the case in the North as well, before the Civil War. However, it was a tenuous whiteness….

One is, to the extent that we Jews who are white do enjoy racial privilege in this country — which, though we are targeted and at the receiving end of prejudice, certainly increasingly, we have enjoyed certainly since the 1950s — you can’t have any discussion about race in this country that does not begin with slavery. Slavery and the forms of racial domination, Jim Crow, segregation, has shaped this country and the distribution of wealth and power in this country. We are partakers in that legacy….

But there’s another part of it: I’m sure you’ve seen this episode of Larry David on Finding Your Roots. I’m sure he was strolling around assuming that he was simply a post-1900 [arrival] and he finds out that he has a great-grandfather owned slaves in Mobile, Alabama and fought for the Confederacy. I’ve heard from other people who have uncovered similar stories in their family that they really knew nothing about. They’re actually quite psychologically impacted by this question of, “How can it be that we are not immune to this historical crime?” I think we have ties to it that are both direct and indirect.