Torture of Black Slaves on Jewish Sugar Plantations
Jewish scholars now admit the significance of the Jewish role in the origin, development and maintenance of in the sugar colonies, particularly in Surinam. From a book review by Dr. Laura Leibman of Reed College we read that:
“…[D]uring the 1660s Suriname was quickly becoming one of the wealthiest and most influential colonies in the Americas. It would also become home to one of the largest, richest, and most vibrant early Jewish American communities. By 1730, Jews owned nearly 30% of the country’s plantations, and at its peak the colony had as many as 1500 Jewish residents, or about one half of the white population. During the 1790s, there were five times more Jews in Suriname than in all of North America; even as late as 1830, more Jews lived in Suriname than in New York. The main port of Paramaribo housed three congregations: Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and an Afro-Jewish “brotherhood.” The community left an immense written and archeological record….
Recent scholarship on the colony has begun to shift the way we understand the origins of American Jewish history. Rather than playing a peripheral role in colonial affairs, Suriname’s Jews were central to the construction of early American notions of race, gender, and sexuality….As the [author of Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname p (2010)] points out, “To study the history of the Jews in Suriname is to study the history of slavery…”
The Black-Jewish relationship in the sugar colonies was based on Black slavery maintained by Jewish force. In Dr. Aviva Ben-Ur‘s 2020 book Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825 she writes,
“The liberty Jews enjoyed…was inextricably intertwined with violent coercion….African slaves were routinely tortured on the village’s roadsides or along the fence enclosing the synagogue square.”
We learn from B’nai B’rith leader Simon Wolf of the Jewish militia in Surinam which was formed to suppress slave revolts; and in which they cut off the hands of captives to award to each other as trophies.
Historian Rabbi Dr. Jacob Rader Marcus actually posed the Jewish slave masters as victims (!) when he wrote that
“The chief problem the whites faced vis-a-vis the Negroes…was the threat of servile revolts. By the 1780’s Surinam was a country whose 3,356 whites floated in a vast sea of nearly 50,000 Negroes. The whites felt they were being persecuted by their own slaves! The result was a vicious circle of white insecurity, inducing Negrophobic repression and inhuman cruelty, to which the blacks reacted by murdering their white oppressors and escaping into the jungle.
The tortures were horrifying and described by English explorer Captain John Gabriel Stedman who assisted the colonists in their wars with the escaped slaves (known as Maroons) and wrote a narrative of his experiences in 1796. Stedman described tortures that included whipping, mutilation, hanging, and quartering, drowning, living amputations, starving to death, breaking out of the teeth, stinging to death by mosquitoes and other insects, as well as burning alive at the stake. These sadistic tortures were performed seemingly for the sheer pleasure of the Caucasian master. According to one account, “slitting up their noses, and cutting off their ears, from private pique, these are accounted mere sport.” When one master died, “the principal part of his slaves were beheaded and buried along with him.” There was one report of a Jewish woman who murdered a Black woman “by running a red-hot poker through her.”
The Black slaves often chose suicide and at times would throw back their heads and swallow their tongue, choking them to instant death in the presence of their masters. The practice had become so prevalent that the slave masters sought to prevent it by “holding a firebrand to the victim’s mouth.” This method being prevented,
Finally, Captain Stedman concluded that “by such inhuman usage this unhappy race of men are sometimes driven to such a height of desperation, that to finish their days, and be relieved from worse than Egyptian bondage, some even have leaped into the caldrons of boiling sugar, thus at once depriving the tyrant of his crop and of his servant.”
Learn more about the Jewish community in Surinam in this interview with Dr. Aviva Ben-Ur, author of Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825:
For more on this topic see the Nation of Islam book series The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews. Download the free guide by clicking here.
To purchase the series click here.
