The Peculiar Institution / Antisemitism Crossover

Did Jews control the transatlantic slave trade?

There’s a question that wasn’t asked in the recent Q&A, but comes up often enough and will serve as a good opening for this post. The question is: “Why does Darryl talk about the Jews so much?” It’s a fair question, because I do talk about them a lot, and most people who talk about Jews a lot do it for less-than-admirable reasons.

The first reason is simply that Fear & Loathing In the New Jerusalem immersed me in Jewish history for several years, much more deeply than any other topic I’ve studied. I read something like 80 whole books, countless sections and chapters from other books, and over a thousand, probably closer to two thousand papers, articles, essays, diaries, etc on topics often tangentially related to Zionism and the Israel-Palestine story. I often worked in Israel during my time with the Department of Defense, and I’ve got friends over there who are current or former Israeli service members. I’ve also got Palestinian friends, both in America and in the West Bank, and since publishing the podcast I have received countless emails and letters from people on both sides of the conflict, telling me their stories and sharing their appreciation for the series. It’s been many years since I wrapped it up, and I still get these emails. So to one extent or another, sometimes more, sometimes less, Zionism, Israel, and Jewish history have been a theme I rarely go long without recalling.

The other reason is just that Jews are the most interesting people to read about and study. They’ve been a diaspora people for 2,500 years - a literate, commercial, urban people who appear in just about every important episode in modern European history. Modernity has been defined by the shift from countryside to city, from land wealth to money wealth, from farming to urban trades, from local, tributary economies to long-distance trade networks requiring credit, insurance, and other complex financial instruments. As the European peasantry made its trek into the cities and tried to adapt to this rapidly-changing world, the Jews were already there, waiting, with skills and experience that put them way ahead of the game. That didn’t just apply to the professions, but to intellectual, social, and political movements as well. You can’t discuss the history of anarchism, socialism, communism or nationalism without talking about Jews. You’ll find them hanging around, playing more or less important roles, during the French Revolution, the 1848 revolutions, the American progressive movement, the Russian revolutions, and both world wars. They were as important as the Italians in the early history of American organized crime, they played a leading role in the Civil Rights movement and were the most important leaders of the campus radical movements in 1960s Europe and America. From Marx and Freud, to Strauss and Adorno, from Einstein to Oppenheimer to Feynman, from Bellow, Roth, and Asimov to Spielberg, Kubrick, Allen, and both the Wachowski and the Coen brothers, Jews played a decisive and disproportionate role in shaping the culture of the 20th and early 21st century. Today, of course, you can’t get through the first ten minutes of a discussion about US foreign policy without discussing Israel, neoconservatives, and the shaping of US policy in the Middle East. No matter where you look, there they are, and not just in the background, but right out front.

The unfortunate fact that these topics cannot be discussed without incurring at least a suspicion of antisemitism discourages serious people of goodwill from engaging with them, and instead yields the floor to people who are often neither serious nor of good will. The frequent result is something I’ve seen happen a hundred times. It goes something like this. A nice, normal conservative college student (there are left wing versions of this pipeline as well, but I’ll stick with what I know), is perusing the comments section of a Daily Wire article on why communism is the worst thing since New Coke, when someone with the handle Uncle_Adolf1488 pipes in, “Most of the early Bolshevik leaders were Jews. No surprise an article on (((Daily Wire))) wouldn’t mention that.” “Ridiculous,” replies our nice, normal conservative college student, “everyone knows the Soviets were Russian.” No seriously, says Uncle Adolf, you can read about it right here in this Times of Israel article. Hm. Interesting, thinks our student friend, I’ll have to ask Professor Bernstein about this in History tomorrow. Bad idea. He is dressed down in front of the class for bringing up conspiracy theories and antisemitic talking points, as his classmates pile on with dirty looks. Shaken, he goes home and jumps on Google to find out that Uncle_Adolf was right about the Bolsheviks. When our guy goes back to the Daily Wire comments section to ask Uncle_Adolf some follow-up questions, he finds that his would-be mentor has been banned and can no longer be reached. So he pokes around, and ends up in corners of the internet he should probably avoid - because those are the only places his questions are addressed, though he had to resort to non-corporate off-brand search engines to even locate them - and encounters all of Uncle_Adolf’s friends. And have they got a story for him.

“You ever read 200 Years Together, by Solzhenitsyn?”

“No, never heard of it. I’ve heard of Solzhenitsyn from Jordan Peterson though.”

“Of course you haven’t. Solzhenitsyn wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, his speeches and even his minor unimportant works are available in 80 languages, but somehow an English translation of just that one book has never been published. Weird, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, it’s your lucky day, because I happen to have right here a PDF of a translation a few of Our Guys did.”

“Our Guys?”

“I’ll tell you later. Read the book. And it’s not just the communists, either. You’ll see.”

So off he goes down that rabbit hole, and, sure enough, most of what they’re telling him checks out. They’re telling him half the story, but he doesn’t know that, all he knows is that Uncle_Adolf and his friends are the only ones answering questions that his professors, Google, and Daily Wire (which he, too, has been banned from by now) apparently don’t want him to ask. Instead of coming back home from school on Thanksgiving with long hair and a yin-yang tattoo, he comes back with a shaved head and a tattoo his mom thinks are two innocent lightning bolts (though dad knows better). At Thanksgiving dinner, instead of haranguing his family about their support for Trump, he’s letting them have it about the International Jew, about America’s Zionist Occupied Government, and “turn off that sportsball crap so I can show you this ten-part documentary called Europa: The Last Battle. No, it’s not on (((Amazon))) mom, and you won’t find it on (((Netflix))) either.” Grandpa was a flight mechanic in World War 2 and doesn’t like this kind of talk one bit, and mom is afraid that her boy has fallen under the spell of Kanye West, who, she vaguely remembers from an episode of The View, got in trouble for something like this. It’s the same story at Christmas, and by summer break they’re actually relieved to hear he’ll be staying in his college town rather than coming home. It’s become awkward to bring him anywhere because he can’t go five minutes without bringing up the JQ, even in mixed company. He becomes obsessed, and finds a way to bring any discussion to his topic of choice.

“Sweetie, let’s just go church,” says mom.

“OK, but have you read John 8:44?”

“Forget church, let’s watch some TV.”

“Have you ever looked into who owns the media corporations?”

“Sigh… read any good books lately?”

“They own the publishing companies, too, but yes, I have… you ever heard of Kevin MacDonald?”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“…”

His inability, or refusal, to adapt to the sensibilities of others isolates him from people he knows, but that’s OK, because he’s got new friends now. The Jew becomes the one-size-fits-all explanation, not only for everything wrong in the world, but once they’re far enough down the rabbit hole to slog through E. Michael Jones’s 1,100-page books, for everything wrong in the history of the world. I’m telling you, I’ve seen it happen a hundred times, and to smart, well-put-together people, too. Eventually, almost all of them reach a point where they realize that all they’ve done is trade one simplistic angels-and-demons myth for another, that history is messier and more complicated than they thought, and anyway, even if it’s all true, obsession is always off-putting, unattractive, and ultimately self-destructive. The hope is that they haven’t said or done anything they can’t take back. I really despise right-wing influencers who encourage their mostly-young and impressionable audiences to do things that could haunt them for the rest of their lives. Google my name and within the first few results you will find pages dedicated to calling me a racistfascistantisemite. Years ago, when I was applying to lease a house owned by an older Jewish couple, they did a search and that’s what they found. Fortunately, the next thing they did (credit to them) was look up my podcast, and listen to Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem, which they loved, and which convinced them the accusations were bullshit. Not every landlord (or employer, or girlfriend’s parents, etc) would have bothered to listen to the podcast, though. Anyway, most people don’t have a 26-hour long podcast that makes their views clearer than any accusation could, and those people can run into actual, long-term, real-life trouble. I personally know several guys who are normal, non-hateful people who treat everyone they meet with respect, who are near-unemployable because they ended up on the SPLC’s Hatewatch website for appearing on an edgy right-wing podcast that, on other episodes, crossed over into thoughtcrime. In an age when everything is recorded, and the world is vindictive and unforgiving of youthful behavior that can be coded as “far-right,” I just can’t abide people who use their platform to encourage others to tattoo the scarlet letter to their foreheads.

Wait just one minute, someone will surely object. Isn’t the fact that saying the wrong thing on this issue might “haunt them for the rest of their lives” evidence of something going on? Answer: yes, of course there’s something going on. Organized Jewish power is a real thing. What other minority group has an organization like the “Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations” which brings together hundreds of very powerful Jewish groups - like the ADL, AIPAC, B’nai B’rith, and countless others of which you’ve never heard - twice a year to make sure that everyone is on the same page, reading from the same script, that their efforts and spending don’t overlap, and that the watchdogs are attacking the right enemies? The Jewish community, at least at the top, is more organized than any other ethnic group, and they know how to mobilize to accomplish collective goals and punish common enemies. Other ethnic minorities try to do versions of the same thing; the Jews just happen to be very good at it. But that’s not the same as the all-encompassing conspiracy theory Uncle_Adolf is selling you, and, more importantly, it has nothing to do with the regular Jewish accountant who lives down the hall in your apartment building. If you’re mistreating him over something you read on the internet about Weimar Berlin or Jeffrey Epstein, then you are the bad guy. And if you can’t stop yourself from bringing up the Jews in conversation with strangers at a friend’s birthday party, then you are a classless boor. As I said, I’ve got friends who hold some beliefs that would peel the paint off your walls, and it’s fine, because they treat people with respect and know how to behave in public.

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Anyway, I mentioned that one of the symptoms of this disorder is that people who first get red-pilled on the JQ often come to see everything through that lens. I have a friend who is dead certain that Israel killed FDR¹, JFK, RFK, and - wait for it - that they did 9/11. He’s got his reasons, and believe me he’ll tell you all about them if you show any sign of being interested. My question for him had to do with a simple matter of probability. Even if I can follow each of the individual arguments, isn't it just unlikely that one country was behind all of those things? I’m not saying I put it past Israel to have done any of those things, given what I know for certain about other things they’ve done - the Lavon Affair and Sharon’s car-bombing campaign in southern Lebanon come immediately to mind - but are there no other bad guys in the world? How is Israel hogging all the most high-profile atrocities for itself?

Well, one of the other atrocities people like my friend attributes to the nefarious Jews is the transatlantic slave trade, and he’s not alone in that belief. Back in ‘94 or so, the Nation of Islam published a book called The Secret History Between Blacks and Jews that made the same allegation. Ever since, it’s become a trope among antisemites: more than once, when I’ve posted links to this series on Twitter, a few people drop into the comments to rhetorically ask, “Who owned the slave ships?” or something like that. If the question were returned to them in earnest, the answer, if they were being honest, would be that they don’t know, but they read a tweet or 4Chan post that said it was the Jews. I know they haven’t read the relevant books, because no one could read the relevant books and conclude that Jews were primarily, or, at the height of the trade, even disproportionately responsible for the slave trade. Sorry to those of my readers - and I know I have a few - who really want it to be true, but it’s just not. Still, the truth is more complicated than a blanket denial, so let’s get into it.

The best place to begin the story is 1492, the fateful year when the Spanish completed the Reconquista, sent Columbus on his first trip across the Atlantic… and expelled all the Jews from their country. During the centuries when the Muslims ruled Spain and Portugal, the Jewish community flourished, and enjoyed a privileged position relative to the subject Christian population. According to both Muslim and Catholic sources, as well as later Jewish historians like Heinrich Graetz, the Jews of Visigothic Spain provided valuable assistance to the Muslim invasion. Some contemporary and later sources alleged that Visigothic Jews were involved from the beginning, while others say that the Jews merely went over to the Muslim side once the invasion began, but the question remains unsettled. Suffice for our purposes here to say that the Christians of Spain believed the Jews had been in league with the invaders from the very start, and the Muslims were apparently grateful for whatever support was provided. When the Muslims conquered the city of Cordoba, the Moors left it under the control of their Jewish allies. Granada, Malaga, Seville, and Toledo were also left under Jewish administrators, and their defense was assigned to a mixed army of Muslims and Jews. Jews and Christians had been in conflict in Iberia for some time, and many Jews reveled in the turning of tables, often taking advantage of the opportunity to lord over and exact revenge on the Christians (though the Muslims eventually put the brakes on this behavior due to the disorder it caused). Jews continued to serve as middlemen between the Muslim rulers and Christian subjects, administering cities, collecting taxes, overseeing serfs, and enforcing edicts. Jewish merchants also dominated trade in the kingdom. Jews from all over the world flocked to Moorish Spain to take part, and the few centuries after the conquest have come down as a Jewish Golden Age. Soon, however, the Christian remnant began the long war to take back Iberia, and as they gradually won back control of the peninsula, most Iberian Jews retreated with the Muslims.

When the Reconquista was completed, it was a given that the Moors, if they were not enslaved or killed, would be expelled back into North Africa. But what to do with the Jews? Could they be trusted not to assist a Moorish reinvasion? After all, under Christian rule their privileges had been replaced by legal disabilities, and their status in society definitively revised downward. The Spanish decided that, no, they could not be trusted, and ordered that all Jews must either convert to Christianity or leave the country. Those who converted - variously called conversos, Marranos, or “New Christians,” - were often the wealthiest Jews, those who would have had much to lose by leaving. Freed from all legal restraint and enjoying the full privileges of Christian subjects, the conversos flourished, Historian of the conversos, Yirmiyahu Yovel, wrote:

Conversos rushed into Christian society and infiltrated most of its interstices. After one or two generations, they were in the councils of Castile and Aragon, exercising the functions of royal counselors and administrators, commanding the army and navy, and occupying all ecclesiastical offices from parish priest to bishop and cardinal. Those who wanted to keep a secret Jewish aspect of their identity would sometimes seek refuge in Catholic monasteries. The conversos were priests and soldiers, politicians and professors, judges and theologians, writers, poets and legal advisers - and of course, as in the past, doctors, accountants, and high-flying merchants. Some allied themselves by marriage to the greatest families of the Spanish nobility… Their ascent and penetration of society were of astonishing magnitude and speed.

The rapid success of these New Christians generated resentment among many Old Christians. The conversos remained almost strictly endogamous (married within the group), and maintained social and business relations mostly with other ethnic Jewish converts. It is hard to imagine it being any other way. After all, those were their friends, family members, and business contacts, and those relations didn’t evaporate simply because they’d converted to Christianity. They worked and spent time with the people they knew, and the people they knew happened to be other conversos. Nevertheless, their apparent clannishness gave their enemies the rationale they needed to claim that these New Christians had never really converted at all. They had been given all the rights and privileges of true Christians, but continued to engage in nepotism and give preferential treatment to their co-ethnics. Indeed, conversos spawned a sort of secret society, with code words and clandestine meetings. That, said their accusers, was why the conversos had ascended the ladder so quickly. Some conversos did truly convert, of course, but others only pretended, and continued to practice Judaism in secret. Still others really did “convert” in order to maintain their position and get out from under the stifling authority of the rabbis, but became irreligious businessmen rather than committed Christian believers.

After several rounds of anti-converso community violence in the mid-to-late 15th-century, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile established the Spanish Inquisition, which convened its first proceedings in Seville in 1480. The Inquisition had no jurisdiction over Jews, and was commissioned solely to identify and correct false Christians. How do you go about investigating the heart and mind to suss out real from false believers? Well, it’s very difficult, and the Inquisition earned its infamous reputation. This was an era where torture was taken for granted not only as punishment for convicted criminals, but as a valid tool of interrogation before guilt had been established. Inverting reality, most jurists at the time believed that a person’s testimony could only truly be trusted if it had been extracted by torture. Were there false converts in Spain? Sure. But many innocent ex-Jewish converts were condemned, often for opportunistic reasons, and not always by Old Christians. On more than one occasion, conversos were denounced to the Inquisition by Jewish accusers who were contemptuous and envious of them. And what of the unconverted Jews of Spain? Their situation became increasingly tenuous as the Reconquista approached its conclusion, and accusations piled up that they were responsible for luring New Christians away from the True Faith. This was the explicit rationale for the 1492 expulsion edict: “You well know that in our dominion, there are certain bad Christians that Judaised and committed apostasy against our Holy Catholic faith, much of it the cause of communications between Jews and Christians.” They had first tried to separate Jews in isolated villages and neighborhoods, but, they said, the Jews continued “trying by whatever manner to subvert our Holy Catholic faith and trying to draw faithful Christians away from their beliefs.” After 1492, conversos were allowed to stay in Spain, and they continued to prosper both individually and as a community, but they remained under a permanent cloud of suspicion, never knowing when a business competitor or political rival might denounce them to the Inquisition.

Some Jews who refused to convert went to North Africa, some to Turkey, others to Italy or Holland, but by the far the largest number migrated the short distance to Portugal, which as yet had no laws aimed at coerced conversions. The Jewish population of Portugal tripled almost overnight and, for a few years, they prospered. But in 1496, a marriage alliance united the crowns of Spain and Portugal, and Portuguese King Manuel I wasted no time aligning his country’s Jewish policy with that of Spain. Actually, Manuel went much further, and the repercussions of his decision can be felt even today. The Jews who left Spain took with them their tremendous wealth, a hit that might’ve crippled the Spanish economy if the unlimited riches of the New World hadn’t started pouring in at just that moment. When it was clear that most Jews would leave Portugal rather than convert, Manuel amended his previous order: instead of being given the choice to  “convert or leave,” Jews in Portugal were simply given the ultimatum, “convert… or else.” Leaving was not an option.

The Jews who had left Spain rather than convert to Christianity were naturally a more committed and obstinate bunch than those who converted and stayed behind. Having already resisted the pressure of coerced conversion once, they were no more willing to do so now - except now they had no choice. As a result, many Jews in Portugal “converted” with their mouths, but remained Jews in their hearts, where a burning resentment against the Roman Catholic Church smoldered. Historian Nathan Wachtel writes that, “this was how, under a regime of relative tolerance (toward New Christians, not toward Jews - DC), the New Christians in Portugal learned and perfected the art of leading a double life: apparently Christian on the outside, while privately given to observing (however imperfectly) the celebrations and rites of the Jewish religion.” Who can blame them? An uncharitable judge might assign a small bit of responsibility to false New Christians of Spain, who chose to lie when they had the choice to leave unharmed, but no blame can be assigned to those whose only other choice was death. Because of King Manuel I’s irrational and draconian edict, the problem of false Christians in Portugal was far more widespread than in Spain. In 1506, a riot in Lisbon resulted in the deaths of about 2,000 New Christians, and an uncounted number must have been maimed. If any progress toward integration of the converts had been made, it was thrown into reverse by the Lisbon atrocity. It was clear that, even if the converts had wanted to assimilate to Christian society, the Christians themselves would make it all but impossible.

The king at first to mollify the New Christians by punishing some of those who’d taken part in the massacre, and allowing some to leave the country to engage in international trade. But by 1515, he’d changed his tune once again, and asked Pope Clement VII for permission to stand up an Inquisition in his country. The behavior of Inquisitors in Spain and other places had brought the institution into disfavor at the Vatican. To be genuine, said Clement, conversion must result from persuasion and positive example, not from force and fear. Citing some of the recent abuses, the Pope accused some inquisitors of acting like “thieves and mercenaries” who more resembled “ministers of Satan, and not of Christ.” Strong words, but words were not all. The Pope ordered a general pardon of all New Christians accused of Judaism, the release of all prisoners and convicts, and the restitution of their seized property. But then, sadly, Clement VII died, and his successor, Paul III, and in 1536 King Joao III received the Pope’s blessing to create the Portuguese Inquisition, which, in many ways, would make its Spanish predecessor look like a band of gentle reformers. The Portuguese variant was ruthlessly efficient, hunting down actual and suspected Judaizers not only in Portugal, but all over Europe and even in the colonies of the New World. Tens of thousands were burned alive. Maybe the worst part of this whole shitshow, from a Christian perspective, is that the violence and coercion brought sincere conversions to a full stop. Who has ever seen the light of the Cross with an agent of the Church holding a knife to his throat? Or, what sincere convert would not doubt his decision when undergoing an ordeal administered by the Church’s torturers? In fact, it was actually dangerous for Jews to convert to Christianity, since the Inquisition only had jurisdiction over those who professed the Christian faith, and had no authority over unconverted Jews. Madness.

After the massacre of 1506, Portuguese New Christians were increasingly allowed to leave the country, spreading all over Western and Northern Europe, as well as the Mediterranean basin and the budding towns of the New World. Alienated from the Jewish community, but never fully accepted as Christians, the alienated New Christians became a community unto themselves, a high-trust business and social network that crossed borders and oceans. Many moved to the Spanish Netherlands and, as nominal Christians, eagerly embraced the Protestant Reformation, especially Calvinist variants that shifted emphasis back to the Old Testament. Others simply took off the mask and reconverted to Judaism, since they faced no legal disabilities in the Netherlands once the Dutch freed themselves from Spanish rule (with much enthusiastic support and assistance from Jews and New Christians who’d flocked to the country from unfriendly locales such as Spain, Portugal, and, after a series of pogroms in 1648, Poland and Ukraine). 

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The accusations lodged against “the Jews” regarding the slave trade, then, are really accusations against conversos, these New Christians. By the 1570s, Judaism as a religion had been largely extirpated “from England, France, the Germanies, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and most of Italy; the great mass of Jews who refused conversion had emigrated to Poland, Lithuania, and Ottoman lands in the Balkans and Turkey.”² To be sure, large numbers led a double life - Christian on the outside, Jewish on the inside - passing on their secret heritage generation after generation. In 1920, it was discovered that the Portuguese village of Belmonte was a community of conversos that had covertly maintained their old customs for over 400 years, and in 1985, under the guidance of an American rabbi, converted en masse back to Judaism. And it’s true that the New Christians’ alienation from the Christian community at large instilled in many a sense that, although they were Christian, they were also still, somehow, Jewish. In fact, the Inquisition and policies of forced conversion were major contributors to a view of Jewishness emphasizing racial, rather than purely religious, identity. I reject that distinction - a Christian is a Christian, that’s the end of it, and you’d be venturing onto very dangerous ground by taking it upon yourself to judge whose faith is genuine and whose is false, especially from a distance of centuries. For while it’s true that many New Christians were only wearing a mask, many were subjected to the tortures of the Inquisition whose descendants continued to sincerely profess the Christian faith. Even those wearing masks were still alienated from the larger Jewish community, so it is unfair and illogical to blame “the Jews” for the behavior of their ex-coreligionists.

Leaving all that aside, how involved were the New Christians with the transatlantic slave trade? Well, it depends on which period you’re talking about. During the early period when Portugal dominated the slave trade, New Christians were very prominent, but even this is misleading. Portuguese New Christians were heavily involved in long-distance trade of all kinds, importing and exporting goods from Lima to Istanbul and everywhere in between. Later, when the slave trade became more organized, there would be fleets dedicated solely to transporting slaves across the Atlantic, but by then the New Christians will have been largely displaced as the leading traffickers. Where New Christians and/or Jews predominated, their position was precarious and invariably short-lived. For example, Jewish and converso merchants controlled much of the sugar trade after the Dutch West India Company occupied an important section of northwest Brazil in the 1620s. Jewish merchants and plantation owners clustered in a part of Dutch Guyana known as “Jewish Savannah,” and employed some 5,000 slaves on 40 plantations. But in 1832, the community was destroyed by a slave uprising, and barely 20 years later the region was retaken by Portugal and the remaining Jews forced out. Jews played a leading role as brokers in some slave market towns, to the point that the market closed to accommodate the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, but in other markets they had almost no presence at all.

The Nation of Islam’s inflammatory book and subsequent antisemitic accusations invariably leave out half of the story. They will tell you about the slave markets that closed on Jewish holidays, but they don’t mention the many more that did not. They cherry pick a place and time where Jews or conversos were predominant in the slave trade, but leave out the fact that their position was short-lived and soon overthrown. The NOI’s book alarmingly informs us that, in 1774 on the island of Jamaica, Jews owned 310 slaves, but leaves out that this was merely 4% of Jamaica’s slave population.

In 1616, the Portuguese king awarded a contract for the transportation of slaves from Africa to parts of the West Indies to converso merchant, Antonio Fernandes Elvas. Elvas already had a similar contract for Brazil, and was soon to take over his cousin’s contract for the island of Cape Verde, which, taken together, made Elvas the contratodore, with the vast majority of the transatlantic slave trade under his control. Elvas was the son of a wealthy family, and he had married an equally rich woman, Elena Rodrigues de Solis, who, like Elvas, was of Jewish descent (and whose brother was tucked away in an Inquisition dungeon). Elvas had risen to be official treasurer to King Phillip II’s daughter, and owned vast, luxurious properties in Lisbon and throughout Portugal. In the five years before Elvas took over the slave trade, only nine slave ships carrying some 1,300 slaves were chartered for the New World. In Elvas’s able hands, the five years following his takeover would see 139 ships, carrying some 200,000 slaves across the Atlantic. But already vultures were circling. Elvas was accused of cheating the king out of his share of the profits, and, though he was given the opportunity to defend himself, his answers proved unsatisfactory. Elvas, one of the richest men in Portugal, was hauled off to prison in 1621, where he would remain until his death. His brother-in-law would finally be tried and burned at the stake in 1637. The contract, and the title of contratodore, passed to another converso merchant, Manuel Rodrigues Lamego, who held it until 1631, whence it passed to another converso merchant until 1637, and yet another converso merchant until the mid-1640s. All of these contracts were short-lived, and few of them ended well, for despite the success of Portugal’s converso merchants, the Inquisition continued to burn through them (and their relatives) like wildfire. For example, Lamego seems to have survived his term of contratodore, but during his reign no fewer than three close family members were burned alive.

Not only the shipping monopolists, but many of the most prominent slave brokers in the New World, as well as financiers of plantations and slave trading voyages, were overwhelmingly conversos of Jewish descent. Conversos also controlled, at times, much of the trade in sugar and other commodities traveling to and from the New World. Indeed, Portugal’s imperial rise owes much to its converso community, though, if the Crown was at times appreciative of their contributions, the Inquisition did not share the sense of gratitude. In 1646, three converso brothers who controlled most of the slave trade into Mexico were each put through an auto-da-fé. In 1638, a mass trial and burning in Cartagena consumed the most prominent slave broker in that city, and a 1649 auto-da-fé in Mexico eliminated Simon and Sebastian Vaez, two of the wealthiest men in New Spain, and scores of others. In Lima, Peru, countless accused crypto-Jews were burned, including Manuel Batista Peres, the most important slave trade in the city, as well as the recognized leader of the Portuguese community there. Peres apparently conducted himself as a serious Christian, and refused to confess even under torture, but he and his brother were burned alive on the strength of rumors that they’d held secret meetings to discuss Jewish theology. Conversos were so dominant during this period that Portugal gained a reputation in Europe as a nation of crypto-Jews, exemplified, as historian David Brion Davis writes, “by the coarse Castilian proverb: ‘A Portuguese was born of a Jew’s fart.’ The Inquisition’s energetic pursuit of crypto-Jews tore through the lives of countless conversos, and ended up kneecapping Portugal’s economy, as well as its control over transatlantic trade.

Many of the accusations of Jewish dominance of the slave trade, whether in Nation of Islam books or groyper tweets, blithely ignore the fact that all of the “Jews” they’re talking about were converted Christians. Were many of them only wearing a Christian disguise? Sure. But many had sincerely converted, and the crowd intent on making the case for a Jewish-dominated slave trade simply brush off the distinction. But even if one ignores the difference, and calls every person of Jewish descent, including committed converts, a Jew, there is still no case to be made that “the Jews dominated the transatlantic slave trade.” For while conversos were very prominent during the period of Portuguese dominance, that period came to an end in the mid-17th century, when 95% of transatlantic slave traffic still lay in the future. The Portuguese were displaced by the Dutch for a while, and while Jews and conversos played a role in the Dutch trade, they did not predominate. Most slaves that were transported across the Atlantic made the voyage in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, when the British dominated the seas, and both Jews and conversos were reduced to bit players. Jews and conversos always played a role in the slave trade disproportionate to their numbers - that is only to be expected, since most Jews and conversos made their living by trade and finance, while, for most other peoples, the merchant class comprised a small minority of the population - but it was only during the brief period of Portuguese suzerainty that they might be said to have dominated it. And, again, those were almost all conversos, whose “guilt” of crypto-Judaism, in the vast majority of cases, cannot be adjudicated today. And, finally, it should go without saying that burning someone alive for secretly practicing a religion you forced them, under threat of death, to disavow, is bad and you should not do it.

Thanks for reading.

1. Israel didn’t exist yet when FDR died, so the accusation is leveled at the Zionist movement.

2. David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1994/12/22/the-slave-trade-and-the-jews)