Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, The Civil War and the Fight to End Slavery by Richard Kreitner

Expand

Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, The Civil War and the Fight to End Slavery by Richard Kreitner

'Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, The Civil War and the Fight to End Slavery' by Richard Kreitner

Long before rumors on the subject spread on the Internet, neo-Nazis and the Nation of Islam trafficked in lies that the slave trade was dominated by Jewish merchants. Richard Kreitner sets the record straight in Fear No Pharaoh, but his research provides little comfort for propagandists of any persuasion. Jews were involved in the slave trade and were slave owners, albeit responsible, by estimates he cites, for only “1 percent of the roughly twelve million seized from Africa and transported to the Americas.” He adds that free Blacks “in the antebellum South owned many more slaves than Jews did.”

Kreitner refuses to deny the complicity of many Jews in a practice at odds with Judaism’s defining story of the flight from Egyptian captivity and the Mosaic restrictions on the practice of slavery. As a minority with its own reasons to fear America’s white Protestant majority, most Jewish leaders hesitated to question established institutions and were wary of the frank antisemitism of many Northern abolitionists and “progressives.” In the South, tolerance, much less assimilation, “to a large extent meant assimilation into a slave society,” he writes.

However, exceptional voices were heard in the Jewish community, including Rabbi David Einhorn’s position that “equality between the races, and indeed all people, was not a radical position to be rejected out of hand. It was a fundamental principle of Judaism.” Fear No Pharaoh is an enlightening examination of a chapter in America’s past that continues to haunt the present.

Buy Fear No Pharaoh on Amazon here.

Paid link