According to the U.S. Census of 1830 a majority of Southern Jews owned Black Slaves. Ira Rosenwaike, a respected Jewish authority who has published Jewish population studies, has revealed that as many as 75% of the 322 Southern Jewish households held Black men, women and children as slaves. Rosenwaike is quoted on page 180 of the book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. ” In Charleston, Richmond, and Savannah,” he continues, “the overwhelming proportion (over four fifths) of the Jewish households contained one or more slaves; in New Orleans over three-fifths were slaveholders; in Baltimore, less than one-fifth.” Nationwide, “probably close to two-fifths of the Jewish families of 1820 owned slaves…”
Even more striking, in 1890 when slavery was abolished, two-thirds of all the Jewish families in the United States had at least one servant. Until the release of the Nation of Islam study, Jewish leaders had always denied that Jews owned slaves and had fed the popular belief that Jews had only arrived in the United States as poor immigrants in 1870.