-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/jewsslavesandt heslavetrade.htm <A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/jewsslav esandtheslavetrade.htm">Books & Reading: Chapter One</A> ----- Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade Setting the Record Straight By Eli Faber New York University. 366 pp. $27.95 --[2]-- Like their counterparts in Holland in earlier decades, England's Jews clearly preferred other investment vehicles to the Royal African Company, for slightly more than two-thirds of those who invested in the Bank (49 of the 73) did not own Royal African Company stock. Refusing to commit all their investments to the Royal African Company, the remaining 24, or about one-third, split their capital between the two corporations. In all, therefore, fewer than 10 percent of England's Jewish investors chose to entrust their capital exclusively to the Royal African Company. Of the 79 investors known to have purchased shares in either the Company or the Bank, or in both, only 6, or 7.5 percent, invested solely in the Royal African Company. The remainder, 73 individuals, or 92.4 percent, either invested nothing in the Royal African Company or lodged only part of their capital with it. Still other investment opportunities absorbed more of their capital during the 1690s. Six Jews subscribed to the Tontine in 1693, the first long-term loan floated by the British government. At least two others, and possibly a third, invested in the East India Company between July 1691 and April 19, 1695, emulating the fourteen who had done so in earlier years. In truth, the Royal African Company was a losing enterprise, which may (apart from moral considerations) account for the judiciousness the majority of London's Jewish investors exhibited by either dispersing their capital among more than one investment possibility or by avoiding the Company altogether. War, low prices for the sugar that it carried from the West Indies to Europe, and, above all, illegal slave trading by interlopers, the term for private merchants who persistently violated the Company's monopoly between 1672 and 1698, undermined its ability to earn a profit. According to K. G. Davies, historian of the Royal African Company, it was unable to do so even during the years of its unmodified monopoly, the quarter-century between 1672 and 1698. As Davies wrote, the 1690s, the decade in which Jewish investors first acquired stock in it, were "years of unmitigated disaster for the company." Investment by London's Jews in the Royal African Company began, in fact, after the Company had attained its peak in the slave trade. While cautioning that data for the number of slaves it brought to the western hemisphere cannot be regarded as definitive, Davies calculated on a tentative basis that the Company delivered 90,768 slaves to the West Indies between 1673 and 1711. Sixty-five percent of those deliveries occurred before Alvaro Da Costa purchased his stock in 1691, for the Company conveyed 59,091 slaves to the West Indies in the eighteen years between 1673 and 1690. Deliveries fell by 54.3 percent during the subsequent seventeen years (1691-1707) to 26,975, which represented only 29.7 percent of all the Company's slave deliveries through 1711. In sum, Jewish investors appear to have invested capital in the Royal African Company as it relinquished its position in the English slave trade to the private traders who emerged as the dominant force. Between 1698 and 1708, for example, such merchants are reputed to have delivered 76,062 slaves to Britain's colonies in the Caribbean and North America, in contrast to the Company's 18,943. According to one contemporary account, the private traders delivered 35,718 slaves to Jamaica alone between 1698 and June 14, 1708, far in excess of the 6,854 delivered by the Royal African Company. Not surprisingly, the number of Jews who invested in the Company declined as its prospects deteriorated, falling from 29 in 1699, to 16 (and possibly 2 more) in early 1708, still hovering at 16 or 17 at the beginning of 1713. The Company's records for early 1708 indicate that the relative amount of stock held by Jewish investors also declined from the 1699 level, although modestly. As noted previously, they held 12.2 percent of the Company's stock in 1699, but by 1708 their share had fallen to 9.3 percent. The latter was somewhat in excess of their 6.6 percent presence among the Company's shareholders, just as their ownership of 4.4 percent of the stock fifteen years earlier in 1693 had exceeded their 3.6 percentage of the shareholders. The fact that Jewish investors owned proportionally more stock in 1693, 1699, and 1708 than their percentage as shareholders does not indicate any unusual interest on their part in the slave trade or any rush by them to own Royal African Company stock. The same occurred in connection with other contemporary opportunities for investment, and therefore appears to have characterized their activity as investors. Data compiled by P. G. M. Dickson show that Jewish investors between 1707 and 1709 exhibited the same tendency when subscribing to ventures in other companies (Table 1.1). Moreover, the factor by which their proportion of shares exceeded their proportion as shareholders in those ventures was higher in every case than it was in the Royal African Company in early 1708. The tendency between 1691 and 1701 of most Jewish investors either to avoid the Royal African Company altogether or to refrain from committing all their investment capital to it continued, and characterized the strategies of new shareholders between 1702 and the end of 1712. During the course of that period, at least 86 Jewish investors acquired stock for the first time in the Company, in the Bank of England, or in both. Twenty-six, or 30.2 percent, acquired shares in the Royal African Company, a decline from the 31 between 1690 and 1701 (or 3 8.7 percent of all Jewish investors then) who did so. As in the earlier period, most Jews making investments preferred other avenues to investment in the Company. At least 72 individuals invested for the first time in the Bank of England over the course of the later period. This was 2.76 times as many as the number of those who acquired shares for the first time in the Royal African Company--a somewhat greater margin of difference between acquisitions in the two corporations than in the 1690s, when the difference was 2.35 times. Fully 83.3 percent of the new Bank investors (60 of the 72) did not purchase Royal African Company stock; and virtually none of them had owned any of it in the previous decade. As before, others refused to commit all their investments to the Royal African Company, for the remaining 12, or 16.6 percent of the 72, apportioned their capital between the two enterprises. Only 14 of the 86 individuals who invested for the first time in one or both companies, or 16.2 percent, invested exclusively in the Royal African Company. Half, however, had invested earlier in the Bank of England, and they continued to hold its stock between 1702 and 1712. Another 2 had invested in the Bank during the previous period, but whether they continued to hold its stock in the later period is not known. In all, therefore, only 5 of the individuals who invested for the first time in either company between 1701 and 1712, or 5.8 percent, can be said to have invested exclusively in the Royal African Company when the entire period between 1691 and 1712 is examined. Why those 5 did so, in view of the fact that the Company failed to pay dividends, "plumbed the depths of joint-stock finance" during the first decade of the eighteenth century, was essentially bankrupt by 1708, and four years later collapsed in "a state of moribund somnolence" is not known. And matters did not improve after 1712. The Company continued to limp along, functioning in a tubercular fashion, defaulting, for example, when it contracted to deliver slaves to the South Sea Company in the mid-1720s. As in the years between 1691 and 1701, Jewish investors from 1702 through 1712 turned not only to the Bank as an alternative to the Company but also to other investment opportunities, as indicated by the data in Table 1.1. By 1706, new investors in the East India Company included such individuals as Isaac De Valencia, Daniel De Mattos, Anthony Mendes, Moses Barrow, and Alvaro Da Fonseca. In early 1709, Jewish investors in the newly reorganized East India Company numbered at least 62, a group almost four times greater than the 16 who, less than a year before, had held Royal African Company stock. A new opportunity to earn profits in the slave trade presented itself in 1714 with the assignment of the asiento to the recently established South Sea Company. England acquired the much coveted contract in 1713 in the Treaty of Utrecht, thereby obtaining the exclusive right to deliver slaves to Spain's colonies. Early the following year the Crown assigned the asiento to the South Sea Company, bypassing the nearly bankrupt Royal African Company. Established in 1711 as a vehicle for funding the government's growing debt, the South Sea Company held a monopoly to all commerce with Spain's American colonies; its charter empowered it alone to trade in the South Seas. It was therefore logical to designate the new company as the one to implement the asiento for the next thirty years, the duration of Spain's concession to England at Utrecht. In unfortunate contrast to the Royal African Company, stock-transaction records for the South Sea Company no longer exist. There is, however, a published list of the voting shareholders, defined as those who held at least 1,000 [pounds sterling] worth of stock, on December 25, 1714, a date early enough to reflect the degree to which the investing public had some measure of confidence in the new company. Ominously, its first directors had no experience in commerce with the West Indies or Spanish America. On the other hand, its recurring difficulties with the Spanish government, war between the two nations, scandal, and its inability to earn a profit in the asiento trade all lay in the future. The South Sea Company had a total of 2,039 voting shareholder groups on Christmas Day in 1714. Nearly all were individuals; only a very small number were either partnerships, in the main comprised of two or three people, or corporate entities like the Master and Wardens of Trinity House or the "Governour and Company for making hollow Sword-blades." The religious identity of two shareholders is unknown. Of the remaining 2,037 shareholder groups, 34, or 1.6 percent, were made up of Jewish shareholders. Thirty-three of these owned their shares as individuals, while the remaining Jewish shareholder group was a partnership consisting of three men, two of whom also owned shares on an individual basis. The 34 Jewish individuals who were willing to invest in the South Sea Company at the end of 1714 in amounts large enough to qualify as voting stockholders were double the 16 or 17 who owned stock in the Royal African Company at the beginning of 1713, indicative of greater confidence in the new company than in the bankrupt older one. Yet they were fewer than the approximately 49 who, five years before, had held shares in the Bank of England and the 62 with investments in the East India Company. The prospects of the South Sea Company, predicated in part on the transport of slaves to Spain's colonies, evidently did not inspire as much confidence as the other two great corporations did. On the other hand, Jews who chose to invest in the new enterprise were more likely to take greater risks than their non-Jewish counterparts. Five of the 34 Jewish stockholding groups, or 14.7 percent, each possessed four votes, indicating that each owned at least 10,000 [pounds sterling] worth of stock. Of the 2,003 non-Jewish stockholding groups, 132, or 6.5 percent, did. Six of the Jewish investors, or 17.6 percent of the Jewish shareholding groups, each qualified for three votes, indicating holdings ranging from 5,000 [pounds sterling] to 9,999 [pounds sterling]. The corresponding figure for non-Jewish shareholders was 237, or 11.8 percent. With holdings between 3,000 [pounds sterling] and 4,999 [pounds sterling], 5 Jewish shareholding groups, or 14.7 percent, could each cast two votes. Non-Jewish shareholding groups with two votes totaled 296, or 14.7 percent of all non-Jewish shareholding groups, precisely the same percentage as the Jewish investors in this category. Finally, 18 of the Jewish investors, or 52.9 percent of the Jewish shareholding groups, could each cast one vote, for they owned at least 1,000 [pounds sterling] in stock but not more than 2,999 [pounds sterling], while the non-Jewish investors who qualified for one vote apiece were 1,338 in number, or 66.7 percent of the non-Jewish shareholding groups. If Jewish investors comprised a small segment of the stockholders of the Royal African Company and of the voting members of the South Sea Company, all available evidence leads to the conclusion that they had as little or perhaps even less interest in establishing direct commercial ties with Africa. This pattern was apparent by 1700, when thirty-nine merchants with interests in the African trade who petitioned the House of Lords included only one Jewish individual, Abraham Mendes. It persisted through the course of the eighteenth century. England's Jewish spokesmen took credit in 1689, as described previously, for exporting woolen goods, importing gold, silver, and other foreign products, and for capturing the diamond market in India. They traded during the late seventeenth century with Spain, Portugal, and their American colonies, and with Holland, Italy, Flanders, the German States, France, the Canaries, the Azores, Jamaica, Barbados, and India. Whether they also had at least some commercial ties with Africa cannot be determined definitively, for interlopers, Jewish or otherwise, who violated the Royal African Company's trade monopoly with Africa obviously did so in secrecy. On the other hand, none of the interlopers involved in the slave trade whose identities are known was Jewish. In 1698, the identities of the private traders became a matter of public record. Acknowledging the porousness of the Royal African Company's monopoly, Parliament that year authorized private merchants to trade with Africa upon payment to the Company of 10 percent of the value of all goods they exported to Africa, and 10 percent on goods imported from specified regions. Gold, silver, and slaves were exempted, no matter where they were procured in Africa. No fee had to be paid for these three commodities, thereby ending the Company's monopoly rights to them. This new arrangement, to remain in force until July 1712, gave a new name, ten-percent men, to merchants who until then had been dubbed interlopers. Time would prove that the Ten Percent Act of 1698 was actua lly the first step in the termination of the Royal African Company's monopoly rights. When the act lapsed as scheduled in 1712, Parliament chose to throw open all commerce with Africa to free trade rather than continue the arrangement or reestablish the Company's monopoly. Henceforth, English merchants who wished to trade with Africa were entirely at liberty to do so; they were no longer required to pay anything to the Royal African Company. The identities of the merchants who traded with Africa under the terms of the Ten Percent Act are known from the records of their payments to the Royal African Company. In all but one case, the forty-one largest private traders with Africa between 1702 and July 1712 were conclusively not Jewish. The remaining one, Joseph Martin, had a name that could have been either English, French Huguenot, or Jewish. Martin was probably the prominent East India merchant of that name who served as English consul in Moscow between 1702 and 1705, as a director of the South Sea Company between 1711 and 1715, and as a member of Parliament between 1710 and 1715. On the other hand, the London Jewish community included a Jose [sic] Nunes Martinez, who married in the Sephardic synagogue in 1712. Payments by private merchants other than the top forty-one to the Royal African Company under the Ten Percent Act demonstrate that Jewish merchants played a minuscule part in trade with Africa from 1698 to mid-1712. Of the many hundreds of cargoes imported from there into England, only six belonged to Jewish merchants, including one credited in 1701 to Abraham Mendes, signatory to the petition presented to the House of Lords during the preceding year by individuals involved in commerce with Africa. Export cargoes totaled only four, again out of many hundreds, with the largest of the four belonging to Abraham Mendes in 1712. The value of the exports by Jewish merchants totaled 2,573-7-0 [pounds sterling] (Table 1.2). With the value of all sworn exports by private merchants to Africa between 1702 and July 1712 amounting to 295,144 [pounds sterling], the Jewish merchants' component amounted to less than 1 percent (eight-tenths of 1 percent). By contrast, Jewish merchants were far more active in the commerce conducted by the East India Company. Unlike their near invisibility in the ten-percent accounts of the Royal African Company, the records of the East India Company document a greater Jewish presence in the commercial affairs of that company. The paucity of exports sent to Africa by Jewish merchants under the terms of the Ten Percent Act suggests, in turn, that in the early eighteenth century England's Jewish community played hardly any part in the slave trade. Africa's rulers and merchants were paid in European and Asian goods for the people they brought to the coasts for sale as slaves. The negligible presence of London's Jewish merchants among the ten-percent men implies that they conducted little business exchanging European merchandise for slaves, with the exception of Abraham Mendes, who, as will be seen, is known to have participated in the slave trade between 1715 and 1719. With the advent of unrestricted trade between England and Africa in 1712, Jewish merchants did not shift over to commerce with the African continent. No Jewish names appeared on the list of 48 "Merchants of London Tradeing [sic] to the Coast of Africa," who responded in 1726 to questions put to them by the Board of Trade about the advantages arising from free trade with Africa and the condition of the English trading posts there. By contrast, Jewish merchants appeared as signatories on petitions regarding trade with Jamaica. In 1722, a protest signed by 51 merchants against prevailing practices in Jamaica's courts included at least 7 Jews. When 92 "Traders to Jamaica and others" submitted a petition to the Crown in the mid-1730s against discriminatory taxation imposed by Jamaica's legislature on the colony's Jewish inhabitants, at least 41 London Jews, along with at least 49 non-Jews, were among the signers. Similarly, a 1723 petition submitted by 56 London merchants who traded with Portugal included 13 Jews, while another one nine years later, again from businessmen in the Portugal trade, contained 10 Jewish signatures among a total of 25. At midcentury, Jewish merchants still did not figure in the African trade. In 1753, the anonymous author of a pamphlet published in connection with the bitter public debate that erupted when Parliament considered a bill to naturalize foreign-born Jews listed the contributions made by Jews to English commerce, but he included neither the general trade with Africa nor the slave trade in his discussion. If ever an occasion presented itself for England's Jews and friendly supporters to argue that the nation benefited from Jewish participation in the slave trade, this was it, for the controversy that swirled around the so-called Jew Bill required every possible argument to defend the reputation of England's Jews and their position in English society. Had it been possible to do so, the writer would no doubt have cited such trade by Jews as conducive to the "national advantage," the terminology he employed when describing their significance in the Spanish trade. The author of the pamphlet in question, whose title page assured readers that "the Utility of the Jews in Trade [would be] ... fully considered and proved," claimed that Jewish merchants handled 5 percent of the nation's trade, citing their activities as bullion importers, silk and cotton middlemen, insurance brokers for foreign shipping, and discounters of foreign bills of exchange. As for geographic regions, the writer specified that England's Jewish merchants traded with the East Indies, Jamaica, and Spain's American colonies. Owing to their disinterest in commerce with Africa, Jewish merchants did not join the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, established by Parliament in 1749 to assume the responsibilities of the Royal African Company for British forts and trading posts there. Outpaced by free traders, displaced by the South Sea Company as the supplier of slaves to Spain's colonies, the Royal African Company had limped along as best it could after 1712. By 1730, the debilitated corporation required an annual subsidy to run the forts and trading facilities it operated in Africa, ironically for the benefit of the free traders who had always been its bane. Parliament allocated 10,000 [pounds sterling] annually beginning in 1730, but by 1746 the Company's debts were so high, its credit so low, and the forts in such a state of deterioration that other arrangements had to be made. The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa was the result. Under the terms of its charter, nine directors were to administer the new company, three from each of the English ports that traded with Africa. It was not to issue stock; membership required payment of a mere 40 shillings rather than the purchase of shares. Under these terms, 480 merchants residing in the three English cities that traded with Africa joined its ranks by June 1758. London members numbered 146, while Bristol accounted for 245 and Liverpool for 89. None of the 480 was Jewish. Almost thirty years later, in 1787, the number of Londoners who belonged to the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa had skyrocketed to 1,086, among whom were eleven Jewish individuals, or 1 percent of the total. Several of the eleven may have been the owners of vessels whose ships were listed in Lloyd's shipping registers for 1776 and 1790, although none gave Africa as the destinations of their vessels. Whether the eleven were actually involved in commerce with the African continent is not at all clear, for, as a pamphleteer who identified himself as "an African Merchant" wrote in the early 1770s, the Company's membership lists had long been padded with the names of hundreds of Londoners who had nothing whatsoever to do with the Africa trade. In 1771, 1,425 Londoners were members of the Company, and yet, he asserted, everyone knew that at most only fifty traded with the African continent. Since the Company's inception approximately twenty years before, no more than a hundred had ever been engaged in African commerce, yet hundreds of new members had enrolled in 1768 and 1770. The same occurred in 1771, when 274 individuals paid their 40 shillings and became members, but not even ten of them traded with Africa. The newcomers included barbers, cheesemongers, weavers, and shoemakers, and many were underage clerks who were enrolled as members without their knowledge. The reason for all this? To influence the election of company officers, although letters sent by the candidates in 1771 to approximately two hundred of the members went undelivered because they were not to be found at the addresses where they allegedly resided. Uninvolved in the general trade with Africa, marginal at best to it at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants in England did not participate in the slave trade, with only a few known exceptions. One, Andrew Lopez, is known to have been involved in the slave trade to Mexico in the late seventeenth century. Furthermore, he contracted in the late 1690s with Portugal's Royal Guinea Company, the holder of the asiento at that juncture, to deliver slaves to Spain's colonies. In fulfillment of his obligation, Lopez engaged two London Jewish shipowners to convey slaves from Africa across the Atlantic. But Jews who momentarily entered the slave trade through the doorway of the asiento proved to be a detriment. When the contract with the Portuguese company expired in 1701, the Spanish refused to renew it, in part because of the presence of Jewish merchants in its activities. In view of this, the assertion by one Isaac Pereira in 1703 on behalf of the small Jewish community at Jamaica that "the Jews before the present war by their industry and interest had procured the Assiento of Negroes to be established at Jamaica" is inexplicable. At least one of London's Jewish merchants and quite possibly a second participated in the slave trade between 1715 and 1719. In 1715, Abraham Mendes received authorization from the South Sea Company to transport slaves to Jamaica and from there to the Spanish mainland on his ship, the King Solomon. The vessel subsequently carried 289 slaves from Jamaica to Porto Bello and, while it still clearly belonged to Mendes, 295 slaves on July 1, 1719 to Jamaica. Mendes, it will be recalled, had signed the African traders' petition to the House of Lords in 1700 and had functioned in the commerce between England and Africa during the ten-percent era. In the second case, Isaac Fernandez Nunes, one of the larger investors in the South Sea Company at the end of 1714, petitioned the Company in 1715 on behalf of the owners of the May Flower, a slave ship that had been seized by the Spanish in the West Indies with 200 slaves on board. Whether or not Nunes himself had a share in the vessel is, however, not known. Two Jewish merchants who resided in London are known to have participated in the slave trade during the 1720s and 1730s. The number of slaves traceable to their efforts indicates, however, a negligible impact on the slave trade, one that was far below the capacity of the London slave fleet in 1726. One, Rodrigo Pacheco, had resided in New York as early as 1711, where in partnership with two non-Jewish and one other Jewish merchant he imported a slave from Curacao in 1716. Returning to London in the late 1720s or early 1730s, Pacheco was involved between 1727 and 1739 in the transport of 25 slaves to New York from various locations in the western hemisphere, 21 of them in partnership with non-Jewish investors. The second of the two, Isaac Levy, imported 117 slaves from Africa to New York in 1721 in partnership with three other merchants, two of whom were not Jewish. His remaining partner, Nathan Simson, was a Jewish merchant who at the time resided in New York. Simson returned to London by the summer of 1722, where he died in 1726. In the interim, he is not known to have participated again in the slave trade. One additional Jewish individual in England, Gabriel Lopez Pinheiro, is known to have had a form of contact with the slave trade during the 1720s. An officer of the London Sephardic community, Pinheiro was a refugee from Portugal in 1706 who, using various aliases, traded primarily with his homeland after he fled to England, but also as far afield as Vienna, to which he exported diamonds. Pinheiro became involved in 1726 in a transaction involving the sale of 51 slaves as attorney for the Marquis Govia, a Portuguese aristocrat. The owner of the island of St. Antonio off the coast of West Africa, the Marquis leased it to several Englishmen for a period of twenty-seven years, and subsequently permitted them to acquire 100 slaves on the island at a cost of 10 [pounds sterling] per person, payable in London. The lessees refused to pay, arguing that, inasmuch as only half the slaves had been delivered, the contract had not been fulfilled. Because the Marquis had meanwhile left London, the lessees found themselves dealing with his attorney. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, when London's West Indian houses functioned as bankers to merchants and planters in the colonies, one of London's Jewish firms is known to have provided financial backing in the slave trade. In keeping with the dependence of colonial slave factors, or retailers, on London's West Indian houses, the company of Lindo, Aguilar & Dias provided credit for two shipments of slaves sold in Jamaica in 1789 by Alexandre [sic] Lindo, a leading Jewish slave factor there. Lindo, Aguilar & Dias, later known as Aguilar, Dias & Son, provided "Guarantees" for Lindo, Lake & Co., a partnership in Jamaica that between 1796 and 1802 marketed slaves arriving from Africa. By extending such "Guarantees," the London house provided credit to the firm in Jamaica for slave cargoes. Aguilar, Dias & Son of London also provided support to Alexandre Lindo after he moved to England in the mid-1790s, where, along with his enterprises in sugar, coffee, cotton, and insurance, he lent funds to firms and individuals who participated in the slave trade. With the eclipse of the Royal African Company, private traders in London, Bristol, and Liverpool consolidated their hold on the slave trade, with London playing the predominant role during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Britain's slave fleet numbered 171 vessels in early 1726 and was capable of transporting somewhat in excess of 49,000 slaves. Liverpool, its dominant position in the slave trade still a quarter-century in the future, had the fewest: 21 vessels, with a capacity of 5,200 slaves. Bristol had 63 vessels, able to carry 16,950 slaves. London, not yet overtaken by its rivals, had the most, with 87 vessels capable of loading slightly more than 26,990 slaves. Approximately 50 merchants were the primary owners of London's 87 slave ships. Thirty-three owned 1 vessel, 11 owned 2, 2 owned 5, 1 owned 6, and 2 owned 7, while the names of the owners of 2 vessels are not known. None of these owners of London's slave fleet in 1726 was Jewish. However, lists of primary owners account for only part of the story. Although shipping in eighteenth-century England was at times owned by individual entrepreneurs, the more usual form of maritime ownership occurred through partnerships formed for a particular venture. Shares were at times divided as minutely as sixty-fourths; and the greatest shareholder usually acted as ship's husband, the term for the organizer and agent of the undertaking, who was therefore the individual usually listed as the vessel's owner. It is highly unlikely, however, that Jews figured in any consequential manner as small investors in slave ships. The important pamphlet published in 1753 describing the contributions of England's Jews to the nation's trade made no mention, as we have seen, of participation by them in either the general commerce with Africa or in the slave trade. Nor was there any trace of them in the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa until late in the century, when their presence may in fact not be indicative of trade with Africa. Then too, Jewish merchants in England are known to have purchased shares in shipping, 39 of them doing so in 85 ventures between 1693 and 1798, but overwhelmingly in voyages bound for India and other locations in the Far East. Accordingly, the 1753 pamphlet emphasized the role they played in commerce with those regions. Finally, and most tellingly, the surviving Naval Office records of slave ships that arrived at New York between 1715 and 1765, at Georgia between 1754 and 1767, and at Barbados between 1782 and 1805 identify all the investors in such ventures. The records for these colonies therefore make it possible to retrieve not only the names of the primary owners but also those of smaller shareholders; and save for several instances in New York, the minor investors as well as the primary owners were overwhelmingly non-Jewish. Ship registers compiled by Lloyd's beginning in the 1760s indicate that London's Africa fleet remained in the hands of the City's non-Jewish merchants after midcentury, lending support to James A. Rawley's assessment that, despite the "rich ethnic mix of the [London] commercial community ... native Englishmen, West Indians, and Scots seemed to preponderate in the slave trade sector. Lloyd's register for 1764, the first published, listed 74 London vessels with Africa as their destination; none of the primary owners listed therein was Jewish. The registers for 1776 and 1790 respectively listed 72 and 69 vessels, again with primary owners whose names were not Jewish. Bristol edged ahead of London during the 1730s for leadership in the slave trade, and in the early 1740s it ranked first among England's three slave-trading ports. There, 124 merchants and 74 shipowners invested in the slave trade between 1698 and 1729. From 1730 through 1745, when Bristol led its rivals in the British slave trade, 68 merchants and 72 shipowners did so. None in either period was Jewish. But then, Jews did not yet reside in Bristol. They did not settle there until the 1750s, and when they did they functioned as modest artisans and shopkeepers; apparently not a single international merchant was to be found among them. Subsequently, none appeared among the 112 merchants and 74 shipowners who invested in the slave trade between 1746 and 1769. And after one to two generations of residence in Bristol, its Jewish inhabitants (nor London Jews with funds to invest) still did not participate in the port's slaving ventures. None of the primary owners of the approximately 520 slave ships between 1770 and 1807 that belonged to Bristol was Jewish, nor were any of the lesser investors in 134 of those vessels. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Liverpool surpassed both Bristol and London, achieving and maintaining an unassailable position of supremacy until the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807. Here too, Jews did not begin to settle until the 1750s, and when they did so they made their livings as peddlers and small shopkeepers. Weak and inconspicuous, the congregation they established around 1750 faded away soon thereafter, and they proved incapable of organizing a permanent community or erecting a synagogue until the 1780s. In 1790, only nineteen recognizably Jewish inhabitants were listed in the Liverpool directory for that year, out of a population of 54,000. In marked contrast to their marginal position, the merchants of Liverpool who participated in the slave trade were usually men of wealth and, in James A. Rawley's phrase, individuals of "high standing." As in London and Bristol, the Jews of Liverpool did not own ships in the slave trade. Peddlers and petty shopkeepers, none were on the list of 101 Liverpool merchants who belonged to the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa in 1752, nor, as noted previously, among the 89 who belonged to it in 1758. Nor were Jews to be found among the 66 primary owners of the 88 Liverpool vessels trading with Africa in 1752 that carried 24,732 slaves, or among the owners of the 80 Liverpool vessels listed by Lloyd's as trading there in 1764. Twenty-six years later, in 1790, the Liverpool slave fleet of 141 vessels was owned by forty firms, none of which was Jewish. And in 1807, the year in which Britain terminated the slave trade throughout its empire, none of Liverpool's seventy-odd companies trading to Africa was Jewish. Further verification that England's Jewish merchants did not own the ships that procured and transported approximately three million slaves from Africa to the Americas during the eighteenth century comes from the ports where the vessels delivered their human cargo. Naval Office records reporting the arrival of slave ships survive to varying degree for such colonies as Barbados and Jamaica, Nevis and Dominica, Grenada and St. Vincent, New York and Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia. Between 1710 and 1720, the information entered by the officials of the Naval Office began to include the names of the vessels' owners. In case after case, for ship after ship, ceaselessly, relentlessly, until the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, slave ves sels registered in London, Bristol, and Liverpool belonged to the non-Jewish merchants of those cities who were their primary owners and, as noted before, to the smaller investors who, where known from the Naval Office records, were in almost every case not Jewish. It is to two of the major destinations of their slave ships in the Caribbean, where Jewish communities developed, that we turn next. ©Copyright 1998 Eli Faber ===== from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/books/reviews/jewsslavesandtheslave trade1108.htm In "Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade," Eli Faber, a history professor at the City University of New York, takes on another facet of slavery, the ugly allegation that Jews played a significant role in the slave trade. The charge gained wide currency with the 1991 publication of the Nation of Islam's "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews." At the time, the book was denounced by the Council of American Historical Association; by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chair of Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department; and by many other responsible scholars. But Faber points out that while the Nation of Islam's book could be easily dismissed for not proving its case, little hard information was available on the scope of Jewish involvement. Faber's study exhaustively examines records involving slavery in the British empire, and concludes that Jewish "participation in the slave trade and in the ownership of slaves was quite small." Jews did own slave ships, did own slaves, and invested in companies that engaged in the slave trade, but not to a degree out of line with other white groups. Jewish ownership of slaves was particularly limited, since Jews tended to be merchants and shopkeepers (for which, ironically, they were criticized at the time) rather than plantation owners. This is a scholarly, careful work with detailed appendices. The sad truth is that the demagogues who most need to read this book are the least likely to do so. One hundred thirty years after emancipation, the history of slavery as told in these books holds many important lessons. For young blacks who dismiss academic success as "acting white," there is the memory of "pit schools." For liberals who casually compare workfare proposals to "slave labor," there is the reality of lives more grim than anything faced by Americans today. And for conservatives who oppose racial preferences, there is the reminder that today's racial inequality stems in some significant measure from a shameful history and that some appropriate response is required to address slavery's continuing legacy. ©Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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