Adam Mendelsohn
Jews and Slavery in Antebellum America
Summary
During the 1840s and 1850s, approximately a quarter of all Jewish households in America’s South owned slaves. Patterns of slave ownership among Jews were similar to those of other white Southerners in that Jews were more likely to own female slaves and generally owned fewer slaves due to economic constraints.
Adam Mendelsohn
Adam Mendelsohn is a historian of Jewish life in English-speaking lands. Much of his work focuses on the adjustment of Jews to living in challenging societies, whether liberal and laissez-faire antebellum America and Victorian London or the racialized southern United States and South Africa. Adam is the author of The Rag Race (2014), an award-winning comparative history of Jews and the clothing trade in America and the British Empire. He is also coeditor of the journal American Jewish History. He directs the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town and is an associate professor in the Department of Historical Studies. The Centre, the only of its kind in South Africa, conducts research focused on Jews in South Africa, past and present.
People are able to differentiate and rationalise all sorts of things. It’s easy to do, perhaps if someone like a Moses Raphael, an eminent Rabbi, is saying that the Bible sanctioned slavery. He also said that biblical slavery was different in a variety of ways from modern day slavery. People live with all sorts of contradictions and dissonances of various kinds.
It depends on location. Some cities had much higher rates of slave ownership than in others. But overall, by the time of the Civil War, our estimate is a quarter of Jewish households owned slaves.