The Jews Who Defended Slavery, and Those Who Risked Everything to Fight against It

For at least half a century, claims have circulated, contrary to all evidence, that Jews played an outsized role in the Atlantic slave trade. The real history of American Jews and slavery is far subtler and more interesting than this ugly portrait, and is the subject of Richard Kreitner’s new book Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery. In his review, Allan Arkush notes that there were indeed “many prominent American Jews who were slave traders, slave owners, or ideological defenders of slavery,” but Kreitner strives “not to skewer them but to understand and display them, warts and all, alongside other contemporary Jews whose aims and actions were far nobler.”