Suntzu wrote:A western ship, many times own by a Jew...
"Much of the historical evidence regarding alleged Jewish or New Christian involvement in the slave system was biased by deliberate Spanish efforts to blame Jewish refugees for fostering Dutch commercial expansion at the expense of Spain. Given this long history of conspiratorial fantasy and collective scapegoating,
a selective search for Jewish slave traders becomes inherently anti-Semitic unless one keeps in view the larger context and the very marginal place of Jews in the history of the overall system. It is easy enough to point to a few Jewish slave traders in Amsterdam, Bordeaux, or Newport, Rhode Island. But far from suggesting that Jews constituted a major force behind the exploitation of Africa, closer investigation shows that these were highly exceptional merchants, far outnumbered by thousands of Catholics and Protestants who flocked to share in the great bonanza.
To keep matters in perspective, we should note that in the American South, in 1830, there were only 120 Jews among the 45,000 slaveholders owning twenty or more slaves and only twenty Jews among the 12,000 slaveholders owning fifty or more slaves. Even if each member of this Jewish slaveholding elite had owned 714 slaves—a ridiculously high figure in the American South—the total number would only equal the 100,000 slaves owned by Black and colored planters in St. Domingue in 1789, on the eve of the Haitian Revolution."
-- David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and author of a trilogy on slavery, the first part of which won the Pulitzer in 1967 and the second of which won the National Book Award in 1976.
"All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia" Orwell
E l/r -10 : L/A -7.64