I've done some digging into the Jewish role in American slavery on and off over the past few months. Special thanks to @RedpillBot for the memes that encouraged me to do a deep dive into this. (The last bit from the Jewish Encyclopedia is a transcription from a meme from the redpill folder). Please feel free to use this info for any future memes, infodumps, etc.

Based on my own research, the "40%" statistics shared by David Duke and others are off by my calculations, but please feel free to double check my numbers, sources, etc. Here's a write-up on my findings:



Let's be generous and assume there were no black slaveowners or American indian slaveholders (though there were).

According to the Encyclopedia of World Slavery by Junius Rodriguez,

"A few Jews even became prominent slaveowning planters in the Old South … as successful as these Jewish Southerners were by Southern standards, they represent a very tiny percentage of the 20,000 Jews residing in the antebellum South who could, or would, ever aspire to own a slave. About 5,000 Jews owned one or more slaves — about 1.25 percent of all the slaveowners in the antebellum South."

According to "Jews and the Civil War" by Jonathan D. Sarna at Brandeis University, about 25000 jews lived in the south (https://www.brandeis.edu/hornstein/sarna/americanjewishcultureandscholarship/Jews%20and%20the%20Civil%20War.pdf) at the start of the Civil War. Assuming Rodriguez' numbers are from the period, this means that 20%-25% of jews in the south owned slaves.

So, 20-25% of jews in the South owned slaves. One in 4 to one in 5 jews.

According to the 1860 US census (which does not distinguish between whites and jews), these are the white populations of the southern states:

Alabama - 526271
Arkansas - 324143
Florida - 77746
Georgia - 591550
Louisiana - 357456
Mississippi - 353899
N. Carolina - 629942
S. Carolina - 291300
Tennessee - 826722
Texas - 420891
Virginia - 712089

This amounts to a total of 5112009 "whites" living in the South. (https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1880/vol-01-population/1880_v1-13.pdf) Subtract 25000 jews from that and you get 5087009. The total number of slave holders in the South in 1860 was 393,975 (https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/8.10.20.pdf). Subtract the 5000 jews from that and you have 388,975, or 7.6%.

Let's also take a more generous route with Rodriguez' numbers. Let's subtract 20000 jews instead of 25000 from the total white population yielding 5092009. Again, the total number of slave holders in the South in 1860 was 393,975. Using a ratio to determine the number of slave-holding jews to satisfy the assumption that a lower population means lower slave-owner count, we'll subtract 4000 jews (instead of Sarna's 5000) from that and you have 389,975, or, again, 7.6%. The only difference is a fraction of a percent.

To recap:
20%-25% of jews in the South owned slaves - 1 in 4 to 1 in 5
7% of whites in the South owned slaves - less than 1 in 10

This means that a slaveowner was about 3 times more likely to be jewish than to be white. Again, this is assuming all slaveowners were white or jews; there were black and American tribe slaveholders as well which would skew the white slaveowner population to even smaller proportions.

To give another bit of trivia, according to Jacob Rader Marcus, a historian and Reform rabbi, in his four-volume history of Americans jews, over 75 percent of jewish families in Charleston, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia, owned slaves, and nearly 40 percent of jewish households across the country owned slaves.

Finally, the Jewish Encyclopedia has this to say about the jews' role in New World agriculture:

"On the virgin soil of America the Jews were among the puioneers of agriculture. While Louis de Torres introduced tobacco into use for civilized manking (Kayserlingh, "Columbus," p. 95), Jews transplanted the sugar-cane from Madeira to Brazil in 1548 (according to Fishell; see M.J. Kohler, "Publ. Am. Jew. Hist. Soc." ii. 94) or in 1531 (Lindo, in G.A. Kohut's article ibid. iii. 135; compare Joseph ha-Kohen, in R. Gottheil's translation, ibid. ii. 133). During the seventeenth century the sugar industry was monopolized by the Jews, and with their expulsion from Brazil it was transplanted to the West Indies, where, in 1663, David de Marcato's invention of new sugar-mills benefited the sugar-trade in Barbados. The Jews in Georgia, chief among them Abraham de Lyon, transplanted vine and silk culture from Portugal to America ("Publ. Am. Jew. Hist. Soc." i. 10). But while de Lyon cherished great expectations in that direction, the Jews of Georgia in general found the production of indigo, rice, corn, tobacco, and cotton more profitable (ibid. p. 12). In fact, the cotton-plantations in many parts of the South were wholly in the hands of the Jews, and as a consequence slavery found its advocates among them."


@flux_the_cat
@King_Noticer
@BowsacNoodle
@maxmustermann