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Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight. By Eli Faber. New York: New York University Press, 1998. xvii + 366 pp.
Faber's book is designed to confront the hysterical, inaccurate, and anti-Semitic canards of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (199 1 ), written by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam. Essentially The Secret Relationship charges that Jews were mainly responsible for the African slave trade. This charge is, of course, ludicrous and considered absurd by all serious scholars. Harvard's Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has condemned the book as "the bible of the new anti-Semitism." (p. 8) Nevertheless, The Secret Relationship has been widely read and believed by many African-Americans. Faber's book, as its subtitle indicates, is designed to "Set the Record Straight" on this issue.
Faber clearly accomplishes his goal, although that should not surprise us. Since there were almost no Jews involved in the African slave trade, it is not difficult to disprove the absurd claims of The Secret Relationship. Faber's book will probably not, however, affect the debate very much, at least in the short run. It is unlikely that the people who read, and believe, The Secret Relationship, are going to read Faber's careful, scholarly, and alas, somewhat ponderous book. Nevertheless, the scholars who do read Faber's book will now have the ammunition they might have previously lacked, to confront the nonsense in The Secret Relationship. Hopefully, teachers and professors will read Faber so that they can patiently and carefully reeducate students who have been misled by The Secret Relationship. But, it is unlikely that vast majority of those who have read and believed The Secret Relationship will ever encounter Faber's work.
Faber has looked at what appears to be every existing record involving slave trading ventures in the British West Indies and the mainland English colonies. He has also carefully analyzed the Jewish communities - and their relationship to slavery - in Jamaica, Barbados, Nevis, and...