Protagonist
2008-02-03 15:24:22 UTC
Jewish Slave Ship Owners
For decades, the White people of America have been subjected to a continual
barrage from Blacks and others that Europeans are somehow "responsible" for
the African slave trade and that we need to "atone" for our "guilt." There
are a number of flaws with the idea that we are somehow "responsible" for
the African slave trade.
First, few White people even owned slaves--slavery was a rich man's pursuit,
and slavery did not exist amongst the middle and working classes of White
people.
Second, even if every European in America had an ancestor who owned slaves
(which is an extremely unlikely proposition), it makes little sense to blame
the children for the supposed sins of their fathers.
Third, Blacks sold their own kind into slavery, do blacks are every bit as
much to blame for slavery as are Whites.
Fourth, European Whites did not bring the slaves to America. On the
contrary, it was the Asiatic Jews who brought them here.
Below is a listing of the Jewish slave ships and the Jewish owners of them.
Name of ship
Abigail
Crown
Nassau
Four Sisters
Anne & Eliza
Prudent Betty
Hester
Elizabeth
Antigua
Betsy
Polly
White Horse
Expedition
Charlotte
Jewish Slave Ship Owners
Caracoa Aaron Lopez, Moses Levy, Jacob Franks
Issac Levy and Nathan Simpson
Moses Levy
Moses Levy
Justus Bosch and John Abrams
Henry Cruger and Jacob Phoenix
Mordecai and David Gomez
Mordecai and David Gomez
Nathan Marston and Abram Lyell
Wm. De Woolf
James De Woolf
Jan de Sweevts
John and Jacob Roosevelt
Moses and Sam Levy and Jacob Franks
Moses and Sam Levy Jews
Source: Elizabeth Donnan, 4 Volumes, 'Documents Illustrative of the History
of the Slave Trade to America' Washington, D.C. 1930, 1935 Carnegie
Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Pa.
In addition,
Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael
Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael is the Nathan and Sophia Gumenick Professor of Judaic
Studies, Professor of Religion, and Chair, Department of Religion, The
College of William and Mary, and a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College,
Oxford University. He has been the editor of the quarterly journal, American
Jewish History, for 19 years, and a visiting professor at Brown University,
the University of Pittsburgh, HUC-JIR, UCLA, and Case Western Reserve
University. He came to The College of William and Mary in 1989 after 20
years at Ohio State University. He is the author of many books on Jews and
Judaism in America, and his most recent publication (with his wife Linda
Schermer Raphael) is When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short
Stories (Rutgers University Press, 1999). He is now writing Judaism in
America for the Contemporary American Series of Columbia University Press.
Visit him at the website of his synagoge, Bet Aviv, in Columbia, Maryland.
The following passages are from Dr. Raphael's book Jews and Judaism in the
United States a Documentary History (New York: Behrman House, Inc., Pub,
1983), pp. 14, 23-25.
"Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed,
the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an
imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew
purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if
they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as
well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth
century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact,
in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or
Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.
"This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the
eighteenth century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought
slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses,
which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in
Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of
Philadelphia in the 1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's
and early 1770's dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent."
Dr. Raphael discusses the central role of the Jews in the New World commerce
and the African slave trade (pp. 23-25):
SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
JEWISH INTER ISLAND TRADE: CURACAO, 1656
During the sixteenth century, exiled from their Spanish homeland and
hard-pressed to escape the clutches of the Inquisition, Spanish and
Portuguese Jews fled to the Netherlands; the Dutch enthusiastically welcomed
these talented, skilled businessmen. While thriving in Amsterdam-where they
became the hub of a unique urban Jewish universe and attained status that
anticipated Jewish emancipation in the West by over a century-they began in
the 1500's and 1600's to establish themselves in the Dutch and English
colonies in the New World. These included Curacao, Surinam, Recife, and New
Amsterdam (Dutch) as well as Barbados, Jamaica, Newport, and Savannah
(English). In these European outposts the Jews, with their years of
mercantile experience and networks of friends and family providing market
reports of great use, played a significant role in the merchant capitalism,
commercial revolution, and territorial expansion that developed the New
World and established the colonial economies. The Jewish-Caribbean nexus
provided Jews with the opportunity to claim a disproportionate influence in
seventeenth and eighteenth century New World commerce, and enabled West
Indian Jewry-far outnumbering its coreligionists further north-to enjoy a
centrality which North American Jewry would not achieve for a long time to
come.
Groups of Jews began to arrive in Surinam in the middle of the seventeenth
century, after the Portuguese regained control of northern Brazil. By 1694,
twenty-seven years after the British had surrendered Surinam to the Dutch,
there were about 100 Jewish families and fifty single Jews there, or about
570 persons. They possessed more than forty estates and 9,000 slaves,
contributed 25,905 pounds of sugar as a gift for the building of a hospital,
and carried on an active trade with Newport and other colonial ports. By
1730, Jews owned 115 plantations and were a large part of a sugar export
business which sent out 21,680,000 pounds of sugar to European and New World
markets in 1730 alone.
Slave trading was a major feature of Jewish economic life in Surinam which
as a major stopping-off point in the triangular trade. Both North American
and Caribbean Jews played a key role in this commerce: records of a slave
sale in 1707 reveal that the ten largest Jewish purchasers (10,400 guilders)
spent more than 25 percent of the total funds (38,605 guilders) exchanged.
Jewish economic life in the Dutch West Indies, as in the North American
colonies, consisted primarily of mercantile communities, with large
inequities in the distribution of wealth. Most Jews were shopkeepers,
middlemen, or petty merchants who received encouragement and support from
Dutch authorities. In Curacao, for example, Jewish communal life began after
the Portuguese victory in 1654. In 1656 the community founded a
congregation, and in the early 1670's brought its first rabbi to the island.
Curacao, with its large natural harbor, was the stepping-stone to the other
Caribbean islands and thus ideally suited geographically for commerce. The
Jews were the recipients of favorable charters containing generous economic
privileges granted by the Dutch West Indies Company in Amsterdam. The
economic life of the Jewish community of Curacao revolved around ownership
of sugar plantations and marketing of sugar, the importing of manufactured
goods, and a heavy involvement in the slave trade, within a decade of their
arrival, Jews owned 80 percent of the Curacao plantations. The strength of
the Jewish trade lay in connections in Western Europe as well as ownership
of the ships used in commerce. While Jews carried on an active trade with
French and English colonies in the Caribbean, their principal market was the
Spanish Main (today Venezuela and Colombia).
Extant tax lists give us a glimpse of their dominance. Of the eighteen
wealthiest Jews in the 1702 and 1707 tax lists, nine either owned a ship or
had at least a share in a vessel. By 1721 a letter to the Amsterdam Jewish
community claimed that "nearly all the navigation...was in the hands of the
Jews."' Yet another indication of the economic success of Curacao's Jews is
the fact that in 1707 the island's 377 residents were assessed by the
Governor and his Council a total of 4,002 pesos; 104 Jews, or 27.6 percent
of the taxpayers, contributed 1,380 pesos, or 34.5 percent of the entire
amount assessed.
In the British West Indies, two 1680 tax lists survive, both from Barbados;
they, too, provide useful information about Jewish economic life. In
Bridgetown itself, out of a total of 404 households, 54 households or 300
persons were Jewish, 240 of them living in "ye Towne of S. Michael ye Bridge
Town." Contrary to most impressions, "many, indeed, most of them, were very
poor." There were only a few planters, and most Jews were not naturalized or
endenizened (and thus could not import goods or pursue debtors in court).
But for merchants holding letters of endenization, opportunities were not
lacking. Barbados sugar-and its by-products rum and molasses-were in great
demand, and in addition to playing a role in its export, Jewish merchants
were active in the import trade. Forty-five Jewish households were taxed in
Barbados in 1680, and more than half of them contributed only 11.7 percent
of the total sum raised. While the richest five gave almost half the Jewish
total, they were but 11.1 percent of the taxable population. The tax list of
1679-80 shows a similar picture; of fifty-one householders, nineteen (37.2
percent) gave less than one-tenth of the total, while the four richest
merchants gave almost one-third of the total.
An interesting record of inter island trade involving a Jewish merchant and
the islands of Barbados and Curacao comes from correspondence of 1656. It
reminds us that sometimes the commercial trips were not well planned and
that Jewish captains-who frequently acted as commercial agents as well-would
decide where to sell their cargo, at what price, and what goods to bring
back on the return trip
http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-genocide-black-holocaust-slave-ships.html
For decades, the White people of America have been subjected to a continual
barrage from Blacks and others that Europeans are somehow "responsible" for
the African slave trade and that we need to "atone" for our "guilt." There
are a number of flaws with the idea that we are somehow "responsible" for
the African slave trade.
First, few White people even owned slaves--slavery was a rich man's pursuit,
and slavery did not exist amongst the middle and working classes of White
people.
Second, even if every European in America had an ancestor who owned slaves
(which is an extremely unlikely proposition), it makes little sense to blame
the children for the supposed sins of their fathers.
Third, Blacks sold their own kind into slavery, do blacks are every bit as
much to blame for slavery as are Whites.
Fourth, European Whites did not bring the slaves to America. On the
contrary, it was the Asiatic Jews who brought them here.
Below is a listing of the Jewish slave ships and the Jewish owners of them.
Name of ship
Abigail
Crown
Nassau
Four Sisters
Anne & Eliza
Prudent Betty
Hester
Elizabeth
Antigua
Betsy
Polly
White Horse
Expedition
Charlotte
Jewish Slave Ship Owners
Caracoa Aaron Lopez, Moses Levy, Jacob Franks
Issac Levy and Nathan Simpson
Moses Levy
Moses Levy
Justus Bosch and John Abrams
Henry Cruger and Jacob Phoenix
Mordecai and David Gomez
Mordecai and David Gomez
Nathan Marston and Abram Lyell
Wm. De Woolf
James De Woolf
Jan de Sweevts
John and Jacob Roosevelt
Moses and Sam Levy and Jacob Franks
Moses and Sam Levy Jews
Source: Elizabeth Donnan, 4 Volumes, 'Documents Illustrative of the History
of the Slave Trade to America' Washington, D.C. 1930, 1935 Carnegie
Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Pa.
In addition,
Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael
Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael is the Nathan and Sophia Gumenick Professor of Judaic
Studies, Professor of Religion, and Chair, Department of Religion, The
College of William and Mary, and a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College,
Oxford University. He has been the editor of the quarterly journal, American
Jewish History, for 19 years, and a visiting professor at Brown University,
the University of Pittsburgh, HUC-JIR, UCLA, and Case Western Reserve
University. He came to The College of William and Mary in 1989 after 20
years at Ohio State University. He is the author of many books on Jews and
Judaism in America, and his most recent publication (with his wife Linda
Schermer Raphael) is When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short
Stories (Rutgers University Press, 1999). He is now writing Judaism in
America for the Contemporary American Series of Columbia University Press.
Visit him at the website of his synagoge, Bet Aviv, in Columbia, Maryland.
The following passages are from Dr. Raphael's book Jews and Judaism in the
United States a Documentary History (New York: Behrman House, Inc., Pub,
1983), pp. 14, 23-25.
"Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed,
the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an
imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew
purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if
they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as
well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth
century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact,
in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or
Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.
"This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the
eighteenth century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought
slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses,
which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in
Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of
Philadelphia in the 1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's
and early 1770's dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent."
Dr. Raphael discusses the central role of the Jews in the New World commerce
and the African slave trade (pp. 23-25):
SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
JEWISH INTER ISLAND TRADE: CURACAO, 1656
During the sixteenth century, exiled from their Spanish homeland and
hard-pressed to escape the clutches of the Inquisition, Spanish and
Portuguese Jews fled to the Netherlands; the Dutch enthusiastically welcomed
these talented, skilled businessmen. While thriving in Amsterdam-where they
became the hub of a unique urban Jewish universe and attained status that
anticipated Jewish emancipation in the West by over a century-they began in
the 1500's and 1600's to establish themselves in the Dutch and English
colonies in the New World. These included Curacao, Surinam, Recife, and New
Amsterdam (Dutch) as well as Barbados, Jamaica, Newport, and Savannah
(English). In these European outposts the Jews, with their years of
mercantile experience and networks of friends and family providing market
reports of great use, played a significant role in the merchant capitalism,
commercial revolution, and territorial expansion that developed the New
World and established the colonial economies. The Jewish-Caribbean nexus
provided Jews with the opportunity to claim a disproportionate influence in
seventeenth and eighteenth century New World commerce, and enabled West
Indian Jewry-far outnumbering its coreligionists further north-to enjoy a
centrality which North American Jewry would not achieve for a long time to
come.
Groups of Jews began to arrive in Surinam in the middle of the seventeenth
century, after the Portuguese regained control of northern Brazil. By 1694,
twenty-seven years after the British had surrendered Surinam to the Dutch,
there were about 100 Jewish families and fifty single Jews there, or about
570 persons. They possessed more than forty estates and 9,000 slaves,
contributed 25,905 pounds of sugar as a gift for the building of a hospital,
and carried on an active trade with Newport and other colonial ports. By
1730, Jews owned 115 plantations and were a large part of a sugar export
business which sent out 21,680,000 pounds of sugar to European and New World
markets in 1730 alone.
Slave trading was a major feature of Jewish economic life in Surinam which
as a major stopping-off point in the triangular trade. Both North American
and Caribbean Jews played a key role in this commerce: records of a slave
sale in 1707 reveal that the ten largest Jewish purchasers (10,400 guilders)
spent more than 25 percent of the total funds (38,605 guilders) exchanged.
Jewish economic life in the Dutch West Indies, as in the North American
colonies, consisted primarily of mercantile communities, with large
inequities in the distribution of wealth. Most Jews were shopkeepers,
middlemen, or petty merchants who received encouragement and support from
Dutch authorities. In Curacao, for example, Jewish communal life began after
the Portuguese victory in 1654. In 1656 the community founded a
congregation, and in the early 1670's brought its first rabbi to the island.
Curacao, with its large natural harbor, was the stepping-stone to the other
Caribbean islands and thus ideally suited geographically for commerce. The
Jews were the recipients of favorable charters containing generous economic
privileges granted by the Dutch West Indies Company in Amsterdam. The
economic life of the Jewish community of Curacao revolved around ownership
of sugar plantations and marketing of sugar, the importing of manufactured
goods, and a heavy involvement in the slave trade, within a decade of their
arrival, Jews owned 80 percent of the Curacao plantations. The strength of
the Jewish trade lay in connections in Western Europe as well as ownership
of the ships used in commerce. While Jews carried on an active trade with
French and English colonies in the Caribbean, their principal market was the
Spanish Main (today Venezuela and Colombia).
Extant tax lists give us a glimpse of their dominance. Of the eighteen
wealthiest Jews in the 1702 and 1707 tax lists, nine either owned a ship or
had at least a share in a vessel. By 1721 a letter to the Amsterdam Jewish
community claimed that "nearly all the navigation...was in the hands of the
Jews."' Yet another indication of the economic success of Curacao's Jews is
the fact that in 1707 the island's 377 residents were assessed by the
Governor and his Council a total of 4,002 pesos; 104 Jews, or 27.6 percent
of the taxpayers, contributed 1,380 pesos, or 34.5 percent of the entire
amount assessed.
In the British West Indies, two 1680 tax lists survive, both from Barbados;
they, too, provide useful information about Jewish economic life. In
Bridgetown itself, out of a total of 404 households, 54 households or 300
persons were Jewish, 240 of them living in "ye Towne of S. Michael ye Bridge
Town." Contrary to most impressions, "many, indeed, most of them, were very
poor." There were only a few planters, and most Jews were not naturalized or
endenizened (and thus could not import goods or pursue debtors in court).
But for merchants holding letters of endenization, opportunities were not
lacking. Barbados sugar-and its by-products rum and molasses-were in great
demand, and in addition to playing a role in its export, Jewish merchants
were active in the import trade. Forty-five Jewish households were taxed in
Barbados in 1680, and more than half of them contributed only 11.7 percent
of the total sum raised. While the richest five gave almost half the Jewish
total, they were but 11.1 percent of the taxable population. The tax list of
1679-80 shows a similar picture; of fifty-one householders, nineteen (37.2
percent) gave less than one-tenth of the total, while the four richest
merchants gave almost one-third of the total.
An interesting record of inter island trade involving a Jewish merchant and
the islands of Barbados and Curacao comes from correspondence of 1656. It
reminds us that sometimes the commercial trips were not well planned and
that Jewish captains-who frequently acted as commercial agents as well-would
decide where to sell their cargo, at what price, and what goods to bring
back on the return trip
http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-genocide-black-holocaust-slave-ships.html