Not long ago an A.M.E. Christian activist and member of the American Anti-Slavery Group reported redeeming, or buying back, 6,000 persons held in slavery in Sudan. The Boston group is part of a network of organizations, Christian and otherwise, dedicated to ending slavery in Africa and throughout the world. Anti-slavery is once again a Christian cause because slavery's main perpetrators, at least in Sudan, are Arabs from the north who prey on and enslave Christians and traditional African religionists in the south. The resurgence of slavery appears to offer a clean line of demarcation between persecutors and the persecuted. But even in Sudan, where Christians are suffering mightily, the conflict has twisted historical roots and does not yield a simple answer.

The practice of buying back slaves, or, as the Sudanese government calls them, "prisoners of war," has been severely criticized by un agencies and various religious groups, who charge that buying human beings has only encouraged the further taking of slaves and fueled the growing arms trade as well. A spokesman for Christian Freedom International calls the practice of buying slaves "a debacle." Whatever the solution, no one, save for a few offending regimes, denies the continued existence of worldwide slavery or slavery-like practices, which include the sale of children, child prostitution, the female sex-trade, forced labor, and the arming of children. In Mauritania, Amnesty International reports that 90,000 blacks are held as property in relations from which they may not withdraw. Worldwide, 100 million children are exploited for their labor. More than an issue dividing two world religions, slavery is an abiding human scourge that has been perpetrated by and visited upon all the religious people of the world.

Thus the strength of David Brion Davis's new book, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery, is not merely the accuracy of its data but its witness to the terrible continuity between historic and contemporary practices of slavery. Davis, who is Sterling Professor of History at Yale, is best known for his books The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823, which won a National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize, and The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, which won a Pulitzer Prize. The present book is a collection of review essays from the past 15 years, ranging from studies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr., to Andrew Hacker's Two Nations and the first women's movements in America.

But most of all, his book is about the history of worldwide slavery and the slave trade. Davis has amassed a wealth of information not only on the details of the everyday lives of slaves but also on the vast, interlocking systems of finance, commerce, geopolitics, agriculture, religion, and philosophy in which North American slavery occupied a late but significant place. His book offers multiple testimonies to the haunting power of history over contemporary events. It helps us understand why we are—all of us—reaping the whirlwind in race and religious conflict. Davis explores the history of slavery in all its competing and coexisting incarnations—Christian, Jewish, traditional African, and Muslim—but never by simplifying the record or giving in to popular cultural stereotypes. In his book, the facts speak for themselves. When he discloses that the Muslim practice of African slavery predated that of the Christian West, he concludes, "[S]uch knowledge can be gained only by abandoning the search for historical villains, by seeking a mutual understanding of Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions, and by acknowledging the shared guilt and moral blindness that led to centuries of immeasurable suffering for African peoples."

Working like an opthalmologist, Davis painstakingly reads the world through the single brown eye of slavery. He raises the question of why the English abolished the slave trade in 1807 and the practice of slavery in the colonies in 1834. Was it due to the decline of the sugar industry in Jamaica and other economic conditions, or was it the result of the moral persuasion of Christians like William Wilberforce? Did abolitionist fervor inadvertently distract attention from hideous labor conditions in industrial Britain? Every reform movement risks being caught in a bind between vacuous generalities and the selectivity that highlights certain evils while ignoring others. Davis is no economic determinist. He recognizes the social force of religious outrage and concludes that it played a significant role not only in outlawing slavery but in sensitizing Britons to domestic oppression.

Again, he asks pointedly, which came first—slavery or racism? Did the widespread belief in the animalistic inferiority of blacks lead to slavery, or did the economic "necessity" of buying and selling African human beings produce racial stereotyping and the worldwide equation of slave=black (even though slave is derived from slav, the "barbarians" of Eastern Europe)? He shows that the bestialization of blacks long antedates the modern justification of slavery based on the so-called Curse of Ham. Even in those societies in which the "noble savage" was romanticized, sentimentality ineluctably gave way to expropriation and murder. The difference between black and white has forever been associated with the practice of slavery, which in turn helped construct and perpetuate the racial absolutes under which so many continue to suffer.

The story of slavery becomes even more complex when we factor in the Jews. After generations of discrimination and quotas but not pogroms and concentration camps, American Jews have watched the anti-Semitic barriers gradually come down. According to a 1974 study, more than half of America's intellectual élite was Jewish. By the 1980s Jews made up one quarter of Ivy League faculties and an even higher percentage of elite law and medical school faculties.

Jews were among the first to recognize a kinship between their struggles and those of blacks in America. Many acknowledged that they, like virtually every immigrant group, won acceptance by climbing over African Americans. Perhaps for these reasons—common suffering and guilt induced by success—Jewish editors, lawyers, rabbis, labor leaders, and philanthropists were among the most generous and courageous supporters of blacks in America. During the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s, Martin Luther King and his organization benefited from the counsel and support of many Jews, and King explicitly modeled the black struggle on the Jewish struggle. Like the black protest movements that preceded him, King found his inspiration for black suffering as well as black freedom in the Exodus and the Jewish experience in America. And today, advocates of reparations for blacks look to the precedent of reparations lately granted to survivors of the Holocaust. Those who oppose any plan of national restitution might well have their minds opened, if not changed, by Davis's portrait of the systemic deprivations of slavery.

On our current cultural battlefield, where historic Jewish support for blacks is routinely relegated to paternalism or self-interest, it is important to look at the evidence related to Jewish attitudes and behavior toward blacks. In view of the contested relations between African Americans and Jews and the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Western countries such as France, the historical questions are growing in significance.

It is true that some Jews bought and sold slaves, but they were vastly outnumbered by the thousands of Muslims, Protestants, and Catholics who profited from such trade. Davis, who announces his own conversion to Judaism on the very first page of the book, argues that the selective hunt for Jews in the slave trade is itself a form of anti-Semitism. And why, he asks, does the Jewishness of an eighteenth-century slave trader carry greater political weight than the Jewishness of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan while trying to register black voters in Mississippi? While there is much to understand in the current black dissatisfaction with Jews, is it really conceivable that Jewish support has represented nothing more than the self-serving manipulation of blacks? Would not Jews have achieved their ends even more quickly by adopting "the prevailing and insidious antiblack prejudices of white Anglo-Americans"?

Davis will not resort to comparative victimization; he will not attempt to quantify the suffering of Jews and African Americans. What he will say, however, is that absolutely nothing can equal the historic and cultural scale on which black people the world over have been subjected to the vilest and most abject forms of domination.

In one of the most memorable passages of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov dreams of a drunken man who beats his horse to death. Without purpose or meaning, the man clubs the defenseless beast while shouting to the approving crowd, "My property!" The cruelty of the scene does not first remind us of the horrors of any social or commercial system. It evokes a sin more original than slavery, one that cannot be isolated in a particular nation, religion, or race. Before any group can point the finger at others, it must point at itself. Davis's research shows that all the players participated in something deeper and more terrible than the conditions historians are usually willing to talk about.

With its combination of uncompromising accuracy and heartfelt compassion, Davis's book witnesses to the possibility of a saner and more balanced method of addressing the problems of history. In one of his essays he remarks that slavery foundered on "the irreducible humanness of the slave." Persons are not property. For just as all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, so all are made in the image of God.

Richard Lischer teaches at Duke Divinity School. His most recent book is Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery (Doubleday/Broadway).

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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