The past decade has witnessed a remarkable expansion in the historiography of slavery, with scholars dismantling the long-held assumption that the institution was primarily the preserve of white European men. Justin Marozzi’s Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World (2025) has illuminated the vast networks of enslavement that stretched across the Muslim world for centuries. Stephanie Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (2019) demolished the comfortable fiction that white women were passive bystanders to Southern slavery, demonstrating instead their active, often brutal, investment in the system. Sean Stilwell’s Slavery and Slaving in African History (2014) has similarly complicated narratives that sanitize indigenous slavery in Africa. Together, these works reflect a growing scholarly consensus: slavery was so deeply woven into the fabric of human civilization across time and geography that almost all communities were touched by it, either as victims, participants, or both.
Jews were no exception. Yet whenever Jewish involvement in slavery enters public discourse, it generates a particular kind of heat. The reason is not hard to identify. Antisemitic propagandists, most notoriously the Nation of Islam’s 1991 publication The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, have weaponized partial and distorted evidence to portray Jews as the singular architects of the Atlantic slave trade, a claim that serious historians have comprehensively refuted. The understandable impulse to counter such libels has, however, sometimes produced an overcorrection, with scholars and popular writers minimizing or sidestepping Jewish participation in slavery altogether. The explosion of new scholarship on slavery’s universality now makes a more honest accounting both possible and necessary. Jews participated in slavery across multiple epochs and geographies. They did not monopolize it, did not invent it, and were in many settings minor players within systems overwhelmingly dominated by others. But they were participants, and that participation deserves a clear-eyed examination.
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