Though first monopolized by the Portuguese, the Atlantic slave trade attracted ships from the Netherlands, France, Britain, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, and the English mainland colonies. Even the northern German ports sought to cash in on the lucrative traffic. How did Jews fit into this picture? To keep matters in perspective, we should keep in mind that in 1290 England expelled its entire Jewish population; only a scattering of migrants began to return in the latter half of the seventeenth century. In France a series of expulsions and massacres in the fourteenth century virtually demolished the medieval Jewish communities. In Spain, beginning in the mid-fourteenth century, a much larger Jewish population was subjected to periodic massacres, forced conversion, mob attacks, and final expulsion in 1492. Most of the refugees fled to Turkey and other Muslim lands. The estimated 100,000 Jews who escaped into Portugal were soon compelled to accept Christianity. Large numbers of these “New Christians” intermixed with the “Old Christian” population and lost any Jewish identity, although the Inquisition continued to search for the signs of secret Jewish rituals that could bring arrest, torture, and death.
By the 1570s, during the beginning of Brazil’s sugar boom, which depended on African slave labor, Judaism as a religion had been virtually wiped out in England, France, the Germanies, Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, and most of Italy; the great mass of Jewish survivors had emigrated to Poland, Lithuania, and Ottoman lands in the Balkans and Turkey. No professing Jews were allowed to contaminate the Spanish or Portuguese colonies of the New World; in the 1680s they were also banned from the French West Indies and restricted in British Barbados. These sustained anti-Semitic measures clearly reduced the opportunity Jews might have had for participating in the Atlantic slave system and certainly precluded any Jewish “initiation,” “domination,” or “control” of the slave trade. Yet the continuing persecution and exclusion, especially of the “New Christians” or Marranos, did lead to a desperate search for new commercial opportunities in the New World, where there was less surveillance by the Inquisition, and in the rebellious Spanish province of the Netherlands, which struggled from 1568 to 1648 to win independence.
At this point one must emphasize that Jews, partly because of their remarkable success in a variety of hostile environments, have long been feared as the power behind otherwise inexplicable evils. For many centuries they were the only non-Christian minority in nations dedicated to the Christianization and thus the salvation of the world. Signifying an antithetical Other, individual Jews were homogenized and reified as a “race”—a race responsible for crucifying the Savior, for resisting the dissemination of God’s word, for manipulating kings and world markets, for drinking the blood of Christian children, and, in modern times, for spreading the evils of both capitalism and communistic revolution. Responsibility for the African slave trade (and even for creating and spreading AIDS) has recently been added to this long list of crimes.