Jews and the American Slave Trade [Paperback]

Saul S. Friedman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 4, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0765806606 | ISBN-13: 978-0765806604

The Nation of Islam’s Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semetic manuscripts published in years. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades. Friedman elucidates the role of American Jews toward the great nineteenth-century moral debate, the positions they took, and explains what shattered the alliance between these two vulnerable minority groups in America.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Saul Friedman’s book is a trenchant, courageous, and scholarly refutation of that lethal mix of old-fashioned Jew-hatred and modern Holocaust envy which expresses itself in the allegation that Jews controlled the slave trade to and in America.”

– Edward Alexander, professor of English, Universeity of Washington, Seattle

“The best antidote for myths and falsification of history is the truth. Prof. Friedman has provided just such an antidote to the calumnies of recent years about the role of Jews in the Atlantic slave trade. It is a scientific work that reveals the bad as well as the good. There is no doubt that this is the best survey of Jewish involvement in the slave trade to the Americas. It ends with a masterful analysis of the antipathy that has developed between Jews and African-Americans in the contemporary United States.”

– Howard L. Adelson, professor of medieval history, City University of New York

“Jews and the American Slave Trade is a much needed response to an explosive issue that has been plagued with false charges and pseudo-scholarship. In a calm, logical and precise academic fashion, Dr. Friedman amply proves that Jews did not dominate the slave trade to and in America and, in fact, played a minuscule role even when part of the larger European, West Indian, North American, and South American slave societies. From ancient slavery to colonial mass transport, through each involved European nation to each American colony, Dr. Friedman’s careful analysis is thoroughly documented and interestingly crafted. Jews and the American Slave Trade should be read by students, teachers, and the public at large.”

– Dr. David A. Rausch, professor of history, Ashland University

About the Author

Saul S. Friedman is a professor of Jewish and Middle Eastern history at Youngstown State. He has written five award-winning documentaries and many articles and books on Jewish history, including: Holocaust Literature, The Oberammergau Passion Play, Terein Diary of Gonda Redlich, and Without Future: The Plight of Syrian Jewry.

Product Details

• Paperback: 326 pages
• Publisher: Transaction Publishers (January 4, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765806606
• ISBN-13: 978-0765806604
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,316,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A POWERFUL REFUTATION OF THE NATION OF ISLAM'S CHARGES, May 6, 2011

By 

Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Jews and the American Slave Trade (Paperback)

Saul S. Friedman is professor of Jewish and Middle Eastern history at Youngstown State. He is also the author of A History of the Holocaust (Parkes-Wiener Series on Jewish Studies), A History of the Middle East, Land of Dust, The Incident at Massena: The Blood Libel in America, No Haven for the Oppressed; United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938-1945, etc.

He writes in the Preface to this 1998 book, "This is not a text in American history, Jewish history, nor, for that matter, the history of slavery... Rather it is intended as a response to a series of charges which have been widely circulated in the last several years. to wit: (a) that the shipment of millions of Africans to the New World was a black Holocaust; (b) the number of victims and suffering in American death marches and ghettoes ... dwarfs anything experienced by European Jews under Hitler; (c) chief among the villans responsible for these degradations throughout the colonial world and well into the antebellum period were Jews ... (d) Jews not only masterminded the slave trade, they continue to exploit American blacks to the present day. In its simplest form, the charge is that Jews were responsible for the slave trade to and in America." This book is particularly a refutation of the Nation of Islam's The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.

Here are some quotations from the book:

"9,000 slaves is not 80,000 as suggested by the 'Secret Relationship.' Nor does the purchase of one quarter of slave imports constitute domination of the trade." (Pg. 67)
"Jews who owned FEW slaves knew the institution to be obsolete, inefficient, and morally wrong." (Pg. 144)
"Jews accepted slavery because it was the norm among their Gentile neighbors, serving as an escape valve for frustrations of poor whites, offering protective coloration for the foreign born." (Pg. 167)
"Some Jews worked to ameliorate black suffering even when there was no reciprocity. Black culture had imbibed anti-Semitism along with Christian theology in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries." (Pg. 204)
"There is no substance to claims that Jews in cities owned a disproportionate number of slaves, nothing to support the contention that Jews dominated the illegal slave trade, and nothing but slander when it comes to the charge of Jewish bankers secretly sabotaging humanitarian war efforts in the nineteenth century." (Pg. 210)
"'The Secret Relationship' offers no general condemnation of the 19,816 Methodist, 5,034 Presbyterian, 2,123 Lutheran, 2,129 Episcopalian, 2,230 Congregationalist, 2,442 Catholic, 676 German Reformed, or 664 Universalist churches in America for their failure in confronting the great moral issue of the nineteenth century, but it does fault Jews, who had about as many congregations as the Swedenborgian or Moravian Christian sects in 1860." (Pg. 215)
"During the formative years of the United States, then, when the import and sale of Africans was at its peak Jews owned less than three-one hundredths of a percent, 0.03 percent of all the slaves in America." (Pg. 217)
"Somehow the mythmakers omit mention of African participation in the slave trade. No legitimate scholar disputes the existence of slaves in African societies before the arrival of European whites." (Pg. 222)

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A one-of its kind treatment and rebuttal., July 1, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Jews and the American Slave Trade (Hardcover)

An exhaustive and thoroughly researched account of Jewish involvement in the slave trade, Friedman's work stands out as an important rebuttal to antisemites who claim Jewish predominance in and domination of the transatlantic slave trade. ND