According to Maimonides, one of the greatest legal and philosophical minds to emerge from the ranks of medieval Spanish Jewry, though Jewish law found no fault with the imposition of rigorous labor on slaves, “piety and wisdom command us to be kind and just.” Nevertheless, there is no evidence to suggest that American Jews were any more considerate than Gentiles in their behavior toward slaves and indentured servants. Slaves were simply a commodity and were treated as such, while manumissions were exceedingly rare. The widower Benjamin Gomez appears to be one of the very few who manumitted a slave. In his will he left instructions that Katty, an octoroon or mulatto, be freed “as a reward for her fidelity.” We have no reason to believe that any of the Jews of colonial North America concerned themselves about the morality of slavery. In an age when even outstanding clergymen like Ezra Stiles and Jonathan Edwards owned slaves, the Jews, too, were troubled by no moral scruples in keeping bondsmen.

That Jews treated enslaved Negroes no differently than their Christian friends did is evident in the fact that the alleged New York Negro conspiracy of 1741 involved the slaves of Jewish as well as Gentile owners. It is evident also in contemporary newspaper advertisements, which indicate that Negro slaves and white indentured bondsmen frequently fled from their Jewish masters. What prompted these unfortunates to flee was most probably ill treatment, or their belief they were being mistreated, and their desire for freedom. Indentured servants were scarcely better off than Negro slaves, and it is worth noting that the indenture of Thomas Eskett of Charleston refers to bond servitude for a period of seven years as slavery.

Even servant girls who were not under indenture often found themselves subjected to harsh treatment, although not all the wrong was on the side of the employers. Some of the girls were coarse, unreliable, and immoral, while others were only children, and it was not uncommon for mistress and maid to come to blows. In 1665 Asser Levy went to court to compel the return of Aucke Jansen’s daughter, who had walked out on him before having served out her time. During a period of twenty months in the 1760’s the Judah Hays household hired and lost ten female servants; the girl who served the longest lasted three months before being discharged for breaking china, the cost of which was deducted from her wages.

Slavery, to be sure, posed many problems for the masters. Meyer Josephson, for example, complained in a letter to Michael Gratz that his “nigger wench” was “drunk all day, when she can get it,” and also “mean,” so that his wife was “afraid of her.” When Michael’s brother Barnard attempted to sell a domestic slave, he was informed by his agent that the slave could not be sold, since “he protested publicly that … if any one should purchase him, he would be the death of him.” The slave had to be “chained and handcuffed on account of his threats.” Colonel George Croghan knew that slaves were not always amenable to the wishes of their owners, for when he asked Joseph Simon to send a teenaged Negro girl to him at Fort Pitt, where he planned to turn her over to an Indian, he cautioned Simon, “Lett the wench be likely, but don’t left her know she is for an Indian.” A slave belonging to Simon’s son-in-law Levy Andrew Levy felt differently about the Indians; he ran away with them, obviously preferring freedom with savages to servitude with whites. Simon himself owned a slave named John who had to be shackled and thrown into the dungeon at Lancaster after he had almost killed a man. Simon then sold the slave at a cheap price in order to be rid of him.

*Extracted from: The Colonial American Jew: 1492-1776 by Jacob R. Marcus Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, Wayne State University Papers, Detroit, 1970 Volume II of III, p. 703. How Jews Treated Their Slaves