https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18058/jews-history-usa
“Benjamin’s is a quintessentially American story, one in which all Americans, and especially American Jews, should take pride.”
Writer Diane Cole, who reviewed James Traub’s new book about Judah Benjamin for the Wall Street Journal… argues that possessing slaves does not “jibe” with her understanding of Jewish tradition. Cole, however, fails to mention that possessing slaves also does not “jibe” with anyone’s understanding of Christian tradition.
You can certainly condemn someone for owning slaves, but to single out Jews while disregarding the centuries of non-Jews who owned slaves is unfortunately antisemitic.
In the ancient world, virtually everyone owned slaves: Romans, Greeks, Persians, and yes, Jews. Slavery was as common to the ancient world as people waking up and going to work is today. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had slaves; they were nonetheless, in other respects, great men. We may not like it, we may find it morally repugnant, but it is fact, and it was a part of those societies and has continued for thousands of years, into the modern era.
The Torah planted the seeds in Jewish tradition that would ultimately engender the call for all people to be free.
The Jewish historical narrative in America has, for the most part, been written and shaped by the great wave of Jewish immigrants that arrived in our nation around the turn of the 20th Century. That this wave has had a huge impact on American life and culture is undeniable. But it is not the entire history of Jews in America—far from it. Jews arrived on the heels of the earliest American settlers, primarily making their homes in Charleston, South Carolina, which was a religiously tolerant city, welcoming various Protestant sects, Catholics, and Jews alike. Today that seems common enough, but it certainly wasn’t in the 1600’s, especially in the Massachusetts Bay Colony where even many Protestants were not welcome, much less Catholics and Jews.
The Jews that settled in the South were primarily Sephardic, with roots going back to Spain and the Mediterranean area. They assimilated and became part of Southern society; some became landowners or became prosperous enough even to own slaves. We can indict those Jews for this sin as we can indict anyone and everyone who also owned slaves, but it was part of American society at that time.
