Should my family apologise for slavery? - The Jewish Chronicle

A few weeks ago, I was standing next to a small wooden slave house in Monticello, the former tobacco plantation owned by Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, USA. As the tour guide told us about life on the plantation — the brutal work conditions, the whippings, the families separated at auction — I thought about my own family, and how they benefited from slavery. I felt increasingly uncomfortable about the choices made by my ancestors.
It had only been recently that I had learned that my mother’s family made money from slavery. In the 19th century, they — the Salmons and Glucksteins — had sold tobacco imported from plantations in Virginia. They were not themselves slaveholders, but like millions of others — bankers, insurance brokers, sugar dealers, shipbuilders, cotton mill workers — they were part of a broader economy that profited from slavery.
Over the past eight years, the shoe had been firmly on the other foot. I had been working in Germany to restore a lake house that the Nazis has stolen from my father’s Jewish family, who had fled Berlin in 1936. Some had found refuge in England, but others were killed during the Holocaust. I had personally received money from the German government as a token of restitution. It was not only an official admission of guilt; it was something material. This was part of the process of reconciliation. So if I was willing to identify as a victim in my father’s family, to receive reparations from the German government, then surely I had better understand not only Britain’s role in slavery, but also my family’s.
When I first started looking into this history I was embarrassed at how little I knew. Growing up, I was taught that Britain was the ‘good guy’, the great emancipator. We celebrated William Wilberforce and his associates for passing the Abolition Act. We did not learn about Britain’s role in slavery, that by 1834 Britain had transported over three million captive Africans to the Americas, a third of whom died during the dreaded Middle Passage. We were not told about the plantations where the enslaved men, women and children endured brutal conditions. Nor did we learn about the tobacco, cotton and sugar that flowed back to Britain, and the people who sold these commodities, including my family, and the wealth that flowed into the nation.

17 Quamina execution from Joshua Bryant book John Carter Brown Library 2 CMYK

The execution of Quamina, a leader of the Demarera uprising (Photo:John Carter Brown Library)

So how did my family benefit from slavery? To find the details, I visited several archives and spent time on the internet. Here’s what I found. My family started their tobacco business in 1843, when my four- times great-grandfather Samuel Glückstein arrived in London from Belgium. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he taught himself how to roll cigars and then sold them on the streets. Eventually he and his brother and brother-in-law formed the company Glückstein & Co.
The tobacco they purchased came from the USA, almost certainly from plantations worked by enslaved women and men. Through the 1850s and up to 1865, when slavery was abolished in the USA, Glückstein & Co. continued to purchase tobacco from American plantations worked by enslaved people. The business outgrew the family home and moved into a Soho workshop. It was profitable enough to hire an Irish servant and support more than twenty members of the family for more than two decades. This much is clear: Glückstein & Co. gave the family money, power and prestige. And this was based on slavery.
In 1870, the company was disbanded following a dispute between my four-times grandfather Samuel Glückstein and his partners. The family’s next company was called Salmon & Gluckstein (they had dropped the umlaut from their surname). Does the fact that this new company began operations after slavery was abolished in the USA let it off the hook? No. For as well as selling rolling tobacco, pipe tobacco and snuff from the USA, Salmon & Gluckstein also sold Cuban cigars. But, slavery was not abolished in Cuba until 1886. This means that in addition to selling tobacco worked by enslaved people in the USA, the family business also sold cigars produced on slave plantations in Cuba.

19 Monument to Demerara Uprising CMYK

Monument to the Demerara Uprising

After yet another late-night deep dive on the internet, I find an additional connection between my family and slavery. In 1902, Salmon & Gluckstein was sold to Imperial Tobacco for £400,000. In today’s money that is equivalent to around £40 million. At the time, 70 per cent of Imperial Tobacco was owned by the tobacco company W. D. & H. O. Wills, whose name adorns various buildings in Bristol, buildings the University of Bristol is currently contemplating renaming because of the company’s connection with slave plantations. In other words, my family made a fortune by selling its tobacco business to a family that made at least part of its money from slavery.
My family knew exactly what they were doing. In the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s, slavery was one of the most talked about topics in Britain. As good business people, my ancestors knew precisely where their tobacco came from and how it was cultivated. They could have pursued another trade or profession. They chose not to. For decades, and like so many others in Britain, they benefited from slavery. They benefited from other people’s suffering. For this, I am very sorry.
To learn more about how other people might have dealt with their difficult family legacies, I spoke with a descendant of a Nazi war criminal. To be clear, I don’t believe there is an equivalence between what enslaved people suffered at the hands of Britain and what Jews endured in Nazi Germany. These are two separate historical tragedies, and to draw out similarities and differences, or worst of all to judge which crime is the greater, would be a mistake. But I sense that there may be some lessons to be learned.
Over the last few years, I have frequently visited Germany. And when people find out that my Jewish grandparents were forced to flee the country in the 1930s, there is often a moment as they digest this information, a pause, followed by an expression of sorrow and then an apology. This has always felt appropriate. Never mawkish or cloying or self-aggrandising. I’ve appreciated the sentiment of solidarity. I would have felt anxious if they had failed to acknowledge the crimes of the past; I would have felt unseen.
I reached out to German author and journalist Alexandra Senfft. She told me that her grandfather was Hanns Ludin, the Nazi who ran Slovakia and oversaw the deportation of more than 70,000 Jews to the death camps. When she learned about this history, she says she felt ‘a sense of deep sadness, of mourning and of anger’. But her family was extremely resistant to discussing her grandfather’s Nazi past.
Over time, she realised that if she did not talk about it, she felt like an accomplice. An accomplice to the original crimes? I asked. “No,” she said, “an accomplice to the silence. To the cover-up. I’m not responsible for what my grandfather did, but I am responsible for facing up to it. For finding the courage to look at the frightening issues.”
But why discuss this in public, I asked; why not keep it within the family? “It’s crucial to go public to break the silence, to encourage others to speak up and thus to change society,” she said. Then added, “This is a political act, not a personal act.”

White Debt

So what about the rest of my family? What about our legacy of slavery? What, if anything, should we do about it? I wrote an email summarizing my research and sent it out to my extended family. I quickly received responses. The vast majority were glad to hear from me. The information was new to them. They were saddened by the history. They wanted to learn more.
But a few, no more than a handful, were not happy. One said “I can’t see why I should pay for what my great-great-grandfather did.” Another told me, “There are many families who made money from slavery, why pick on our family?”A third, said “We should focus instead on the problems of today like poverty or climate change.” A fourth said that I needed to be very careful. Over the years, some people have focused on Jewish slave ownership as a way to fuel antisemitism. I do some research and quickly find that the subject of Jewish links with slavery have been extensively studied and that historians have found no evidence that Jews were more responsible for slavery than anyone else.
These conversations were difficult. Uncomfortable. The majority of my relatives said that it was vital that the family’s legacy of slavery be acknowledged but that this was not enough. We needed to do something concrete. After all, some of us had received reparations from the German government.
In the end, more than 30 family members agreed to make a financial contribution. These funds were used to support a Black British student to study a PhD at a UK academic institution. The debt that we owe can never be fully repaid. Our contribution, is modest, but it is a start.
Ninety minutes into the “slavery tour” at Monticello, we gathered under an old oak tree with sunset’s pinks and purples streaking through the sky. The tour guide was now fielding questions. “Was Jefferson a good slave-owner?”asked a man from Washington DC. “After all, he wrote the inspiring lines “All men are created equal” in America’s Declaration of Independence.”
The guide took a deep breath. “Is it possible to be a good slave-owner?”, she asked rhetorically, “isn’t that an oxymoron?”
And yet, she said, it’s crucial we don’t get caught up in feelings of guilt and shame.
What’s important, is that we ask ourselves, what can we do today to make a difference? How can we as individuals and as a community move the needle forward? I couldn’t agree more.