Dit is een verkorte versie van ‘The Slave Trade and the Jews’, dat verscheen in The New York Review of Books van 22 december 1994. Vertaling: Tinke Davids Pestepidemieen, het kapitalisme, de communistische revolutie: het is allemaal al sinds jaar en dag de schuld van de joden. Aan dat rijtje is...
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Traders in the Atlantic slave system included Arabs, Africans, Italians, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Jews, Germans, Swedes, French, English, White Americans, Indians, and even thousands of blacks in the New World who had been freed and became slave-owning farmers or planters themselves. The responsibility, then, rests with peoples of all kinds who shared in the enormous profits made by the first multinational mass-market production system—the production of sugar, tobacco, coffee, dyes, spices, cotton, and so on.
It is both remarkable and disturbing that before the end of the eighteenth century this Atlantic slave system hardly aroused serious protest. The major world religions have long sanctioned slavery; popes blessed the first Portuguese slave traders and Islamic jihads justified the enslavement of countless sub-Saharan infidels for centuries. In Barbados, the Church of England owned hundreds of slaves in the eighteenth century, and many devout Quakers were actively involved in the slave trade as late as the 1850s.
The small number of Jews in the Atlantic community accepted the enslavement of blacks as naturally as the Catholics, Muslims, Lutherans, Huguenots, Calvinists, and Anglicans.
For four centuries, the African slave trade was an integral part of European expansion and colonization of the New World.
And by the way there's still slavery. Kids in China make our clothes.
