[Steven L. Akins]

Originally Posted by Tom Connington

I meant to stick this in general discussion. Sorry.

In the book The Jewish People in America: A Time For Planting - The First Migration 1654-1820 by Eli Faber, it is explained how the Jews fled the Spanish and Portugal inquisitions, settled in Amsterdam and later came to in habit New Amsterdam (NYC), and other major port towns in The New World. Jews were able to create a pure Jewish network of mercantile trade. As Faber explains in the work, Jews went as far as marrying their own blood to keep their trading network Jewish.
I made a list of the big Jews.

Jews in Trade Goods
Isaac Gomez
Hayman Levy
Isaac Adolphus
Isaac DaCosta

Slave Trading Jews
Jacob Rodriguez Rivera
Isaac Elizer
Aaron Lopez
Samuel Moses

White Slave Trade (Indentured Servants)
Nathan Levy
Isaac Levy
David Franks
Moses Franks

Many of the earliest slave traders were Sephardic Jews operating out of Spanish and Portuguese ports, bringing African negroes to the colonies in the New World:

"Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.



"This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's and early 1770's dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent."

Jewish slave ship owners and the names of their ships:

Aaron Lopez, Moses Levy, Jacob Franks - Abigail

Issac Levy and Nathan Simpson - Crown

Moses Levy - Nassau

Moses Levy - Four Sisters

Justus Bosch and John Abrams - Anne & Eliza

Henry Cruger and Jacob Phoenix - Prudent Betty

Mordecai and David Gomez - Hester

Mordecai and David Gomez - Elizabeth

Nathan Marston and Abram Lyell - Antigua

Wm. De Woolf - Betsy

James De Woolf - Polly

Jan de Sweevts - White Horse

John and Jacob Roosevelt - Expedition

Moses and Sam Levy and Jacob Franks - Charlotte

Moses and Sam Levy - Caracoa

Source: Elizabeth Donnan, 4 Volumes, 'Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America' Washington, D.C. 1930, 1935 Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Pa.