For at least half a century, claims have circulated, contrary to all evidence, that Jews played an outsized role in the Atlantic slave trade. The real history of American Jews and slavery is far subtler and more interesting than this ugly portrait, and is the subject of Richard Kreitner’s new book Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery. In his review, Allan Arkush notes that there were indeed “many prominent American Jews who were slave traders, slave owners, or ideological defenders of slavery,” but Kreitner strives “not to skewer them but to understand and display them, warts and all, alongside other contemporary Jews whose aims and actions were far nobler.”

The latter category included some rabbis and some very prominent abolitionists:

Born in Poland, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, Ernestine Rose ran away from home when she was fifteen after eluding a bad shidduch and made her way first to Berlin and then to London before coming to America, reading and arguing all the way. By the time she arrived, she held to “a form of socialism propagated by the utopian industrialist Robert Owen.” . . . Nearly forgotten today, Rose, Kreitner writes, “was likely the best-known woman orator of the time.”

In contrast to Ernestine Rose, August Bondi’s abolitionism does seem to have flowed from his commitments as a Jew. . . . In 1855, when he was twenty-two, he moved to Kansas and participated for a time in John Brown’s “ragtag frontier army” in the fight against slavery (though he did not participate in its most brutal escapade at Harper’s Ferry). In 1861, reminded by his mother “that ‘as a Jehudi’ he was obligated ‘to defend the institutions which gave equal rights to all beliefs,’” he joined the Union Army.

Such opponents of slavery, writes Arkush, “had to be bold,” especially because “the abolitionist community was deeply Christian and unhospitable to Jews.”

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.