| المستخلص: |
Jew’s trade role in the African continent faced several problematic issues notably the tendency to address it through mere ethnoreligious perceptions, which led, accordingly, to a wide range of contradicting and misleading conclusions regarding the Jewish presence in Africa throughout history. The paper aims to further some observations regarding the historical and geographical contexts of the Jewish role in African trade before the colonial era in order to provide a much clearer perspective on this role, instead of the well-established views of a notable segment of the Pan Africanism movement which consider the whole “Jewish” experience as a model for the African liberation thought and movements. The paper also aims to deconstruct, albeit partially, a number of the bases of the so-called African Knowledge and reconsider concepts such as Afrocentricity, double consciousness, and the African personality and their biased views of Jewish history in Africa. The paper concluded that the Jews’ trade contributions in Africa were ultimately in line with the rules and aims of the global trade, including the slave trade. More specially, this view tended to disclose the double standard approach by a notable sector of Africanist thinkers and researchers when it comes to the slave trade, paying their whole attention to the role of Arab and Muslims while ignoring completely role of their Jewish counterparts in this inhuman phenomenon, both directly or via the European entities since the sixteenth century at least. The paper also concluded that the Jews were strong supporters of European economic exploitation since its early stages and beyond the colonial eras indeed as revealed later (notably in the Portuguese colonies in Africa). This fact is contradicting clearly with the “African” view of the Jewish experience as an emancipatory model for the African peoples.
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