TIL that the first Jewish US senator was a pro-slavery politician from Florida whose father immigrated from Morocco. He fought to recapture former enslaved people in the Second Seminole War and opened a slave-run sugar plantation when he came back https://forward.com/culture/462964/meet-jon-ossoffs-predecessors-from-the-south/

While it is wrong to blame Jews for the slave trade itself, early Jewish history in the US was marked by it. The Jewish center of the antebellum US was Charleston, SC, where mostly Sephardi Jews owned slaves at the same rate as their Christian neighbors https://forward.com/culture/205455/slaves-of-charleston/

Most narratives about Jews and race in the US start in the 1900s & omit the fact that before Ashekenazi immigration waves mostly Sephardi Jewish populations in the US were able to own property at a time when Black people *were property*. Assimilation into whiteness started early.

What does it do to our assumptions about Jews and race to consider that our history in the US does not start at Ellis Island, and that many of our early communities were slave holders at a time when whiteness in the US was codified through property rights over land and people