2020-

2020-07-24 c
Buy Low - Sell High

Jews Selling Blacks in Philadelphia

If DeSean steps out of the Eagles locker room and into the city, there is much to discover about the anti-Black pioneers of Philadelphia’s Jewish community. More than three generations before the Liberty Bell was rung in the state house steeple, Jews were already wealthy and powerful in the “City of Brotherly Love.”

For instance, Jonas Phillips was a founder of Philadelphia’s original synagogue, Mikveh Israel. In February of 1792, he placed an advertisement in the city newspaper to hunt and return his freedom-seeking “Negro Woman Slave” who “took nothing with her but the clothes she had on.”

In another public notice he was selling “A young handy NEGRO MAN, about nineteen years of age”—a human being he sold as a regular in-stock item, along with fish hooks, silks, ginger, linens, and other dry goods.

So common was slave trading among the Philadelphia Jews that two Jewish historians concluded: “The Jews who could afford them had both servants and slaves. The Quakers were the only people who as a religious denomination opposed the institution of slavery.” In fact, a large influx of Jews into the city occurred after the decline of the Jewish community of Barbados, but those settlers were not fleeing any anti-Jewish oppression. They left Barbados because of the emancipation of the slaves there! No more free Black labor and the Jews bounced, according to Peter Wiernik, “most of them going to Philadelphia.” (read more)

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