The Slave Trade and the Jews | by David Brion Davis | The New York Review of Books

The Slave Trade and the Jews | by David Brion Davis | The New York Review of Books: Jews 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.