The Jewish Role in the Slave Trade
by Jeff Davis
The “official” history of slavery seems to deviate little from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” or the latest propaganda film from Steven Spielberg. People are left to assume that White Christians were involved in the most evil part of slavery, the shipping of slaves. The truth is that Christian nations were repelled at the cruelty associated with the importation of slaves and that was the first part of slavery outlawed by Christian nations. The one people who controlled and profited the most from shipping Blacks as if they were cattle, packing as many as possible onto slave ships were the Jews.
Now, of all people, a Jewish feminist historian named Natalie Zemon Davis has written a book on a subject which has up until now been strictly off limits to historians and scholars–Jews and their role in the slave trade and in slave ownership. Davis uses as her starting point the life and times of one Jewish physician who also made big bucks (or in his case, big guilders) in the slave trade during the 18th century, David Isaac Cohen Nassy, a resident and merchant prince of the Dutch colony in Surinam in South America, where tens of thousands of black African slaves lived and toiled in the sugar cane fields and the steaming, fever and snake-infested jungles under conditions that made a plantation in Virginia or domestic service in Massachusetts look like paradise. (more…)