- This topic has 15 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 5 days ago by .
-
Posts
-
Here is something interesting: the slave capital of the world is nowhere in Africa; it’s Brazil.
why? because although slavery is illegal there and although the current government in Brazil is leftist, the Brazilian local culture (communal level) is that slavery is acceptable!
this may surprise some folks that there is a people in the world that think that there is nothing wrong with slavery but it is so.
and even harder to believe is that much of the local infrastructure and railway transport are freely used to support the illegal (?) slave business.
The last country to formally outlaw chattel slavery was Dahomey which did it in 1994. Nevertheless, it still is practiced there. Slavery tales many forms, forced labor, human trafficking, etc. but actual chattel slavery, that is where the slave is the physical property of the owner, was and is lastly in Dahomey.
There are 3 types of slavery – to non-Jew, to Jew, and to oneself. The last on eis the hardest of all.
As previously pointed out, on a tangential and related issue, Abraham Lincoln unconstitutionality seized the property of American slaveowners without compensation. America owes descendants of slaveowners compensation.
Joey, they were not American slave owners. Lincoln freed and confiscated the property of an enemy nation. No repayment required, anymore that the U.S. had to repay property confiscated from Germany or Japan after WWII. Note that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation only affected the slaves in the rebel states. Slaves held in those states that did not rebel, (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware) were not freed until the passage of the 13th Amendment.
Redleg,
Slavery in Maryland did not end with the 13th Amendment. Near the end of 1864 (yes, Maryland was exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation) Lincoln forced the Maryland legislator to change the State constitution from Slave to Free, which (in a clearly rigged process) they did.
Slavery in Maryland officially ended on November 1st, 1864 with the adoption of the new state constitution.Given that it was illegal to secede from the United States, and therefore the secession was never legally valid, the people in the South were Americans.
I think ujm claimed that he is a descendent of Hashmonayim (well, he claimed a lot of more outrageous things!), so we know where to find a slave if we need one!
Ujm,
The legality of secession had not been decided.
The personal opinion of Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Roger B. Taney was that secession was legal and better for the country to split in two than to have a civil warOn January 4th 1861, in Baltimore, MD at the Orthodox Shul the Ruv, Rabbi Illowy (some of his Psaks are still in effect) gave this speech. This piece is where he lays out very eloquently how the Southern cause is the righteous cause.
I’m not sure which part of his speech doesn’t justify Jews believing slavery is ok?“But who, for example, can blame our brethren of the South for their being inclined to secede from a society, under whose government those ends cannot be attained, and whose union is kept together, not by the good sense and good feelings of the great masses of the people, but by an ill-regulated balance of power and heavy iron ties of violence and arbitrary force? Who can blame our brethren of the South for seceding from a society whose government can not, or will not, protect the property rights and privileges of a great portion of the Union against the encroachments of a majority misguided by some influential, ambitious aspirants and selfish politicians who, under the color of religion and the disguise of philanthropy, have thrown the country into a general state of confusion, and millions into want and poverty? If these magnanimous philanthropists do not pretend to be more philanthropic than Moses was, let me ask them, “Why did not Moses, who, as it is to be seen from his code, was not in favor of slavery, command the judges in Israel to interfere with the institutions of those nations who lived under their jurisdiction, and make their slaves free, or to take forcibly away a slave from a master as soon as he treads the free soil of their country? Why did he not, when he made a law that no Israelite can become a slave, also prohibit the buying and selling of slaves from and to other nations? Where was ever a greater philanthropist than Abraham, and why did he not set free the slaves which the king of Egypt made him a present of?”
Why did Ezra not command the Babylonian exiles who, when returning to their old country, had in their suit seven thousand three hundred and thirty-seven slaves, to set their slaves free and send them away, as well as he commanded them to send away the strange wives which they had brought along? It is an historical fact, that even the Therepentae and Essenes, two Jewish sects, who with a kind of religious frenzy, placed their whole felicity in the contemplation of the divine nature, detaching themselves from all secular affairs, entrusted to their slaves the management of their property.
All these are irrefutable proofs that we have no right to exercise violence against the institutions of other states or countries, even if religious feelings and philanthropic sentiments bid us to disapprove of them.”Kuvult:
SCOTUS absolutely determined that the secession was invalid and void.
See Texas v. White (1869)
Ujm,
Yes, in 1869!!!
This was in the early 1860’s before the SCOTUS ruling.
Like I said, “The legality of secession (when states were actively seceding) had not been decided.”One of the most damaging sermons ever for the Orthodox world. Rabbi Morris Raphall made a similar sermon in New York. Within 20 years, 80% of the Jews in America were Reform.
The 13th Amendment retroactively resolved any and all questions regarding the freedom of the formerly enslaved people. The slaveowners in the District of Columbia all received compensation. And the Emancipation Proclamation was a ” fit and necessary war measure for suppressing [the] rebellion”. It exempted the counties in Virginia and Louisiana that were held by the Union Army, and the entire state of Tennessee, so it actually freed nobody at the time.
Maryland’s new 1864 Constitution was approved by voters. It was a close election, decided by the mail in votes of soldiers in the Union Army.
A lot of people in the North were quite happy to see the South go….until the South started the war by attacking Fort Sumter.
Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia ended slavery on their own. No compensation to slaveowners. Kentucky and Delaware maintained slavery until December 18, 1865, when the ratification of the 13th Amendment was announced. After that, the only slavery that remained was in Indian Territory. The US forced the five Indian nations into treaties that abolished slavery the next year.
CJ Roberts pointed out in his recent decision on birthright citizenship that Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford was totally wrong; that Taney did not understand the law: Birthright citizenship was part of Common Law and that all the 14th Amendment really did was to enshrine it in the Constitution. It is one of the four times that an incorrect SC decision was overturned by a Constitutional Amendment and those are the only times that a SC decision has been reversed through that process. New York allowed Black people to vote after Dred Scott even though the SC had declared them to be non-citizens. Taney died in 1864 and his death was unlamented. Interestingly, though, Taney believed slavery to be evil and had himself freed the enslaved people he inherited.
Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. Spain did not abolish slavery in Puerto Rico until 1873 and in Cuba not until 1886.
Ethiopia did not abolish slavery until 1943. The Italian Fascists had abolished it when the conquered the country in 1935. (It may be the only decent thing Mussolini ever did.) But Haile Selassie had brought it back in 1941 when the Brits put him back on the throne. The Brits informed Haile Selassie that if he didn’t abolish slavery he would go the way of Reza Shah and Rashid Ali.
Fascinating conversation.
There were historic forms of slavery that rational modern thinkers could still accept given the realpolitik of the times.
For example, a person captured in war would have lost their life, and by accepting mercy they also accepted a lifetime of slavery. There were no Geneva Conventions at the time, and this was something that was pretty much universally understood and accepted.
Now that there are laws of war, this justification no longer holds much water.
The rationalization of the African slave trade contrasted with the Enlightenment movement was a huge factor in the beginning of the end of slavery.
Modern,
Are you seriously claiming these pro-slavery opinions from Orthodox Rabbanim is what pushed American Jews to Reform? First being honest plenty of Jews believed as these Rabbis did.
Second, Jews were becoming Reform long before the issue of slavery.
The first real Ruv in America, Rav Avraham Yosef Rice, (who served in the same Shul in Baltimore as Rabbi Illowy) wrote to his Rebbe in Europe in the 1840’s,
“And one more thing I wish to disclose to you my revered master and teacher . . . and my soul weepeth in the dark on account of it, namely, that the character of religious life in this land is on the lowest level; most of the people are eating non-Kosher food, are violating the Shabbat in public . . . and there are thousands who have been assimilated among the non-Jewish population, and have married non-Jewish women. Under these circumstances, my mind is perplexed and I wonder whether a Jew may live in a land such as this.”
This is what Jewish America like so I’m not sure how these Rabbis take on slavery changed anything?
In 1849 Rabbi Rice resigned because he saw he was fighting a losing battle against Reformers.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.