Commodification and Comparison

I’m also studying the Holocaust in a Religious Studies class, and I was struck by the similarities between how slaves (during the slave trade) and European Jews (during the Holocaust) were treated. Don’t get me wrong – the slave trade and the Holocaust took place in two very different historical time periods and under very different circumstances. Reading Smallwood’s paper on the idea of “commodified freedom” made me contemplate the commodification of the Jews during the Holocaust. Prior to the outright extermination activities, the Nazis forced many Jews to wear a yellow star of David on their outer clothing, a symbol of their Jewish heritage. Similarly, Africans in the slave trade were easily identifiable by their different skin color, their language, and their customs. During the years of the Holocaust, Jews who entered into concentration camps (in particular, the labor camps) were tattooed with a series of letters and numbers by which to be identified during their time in the camp. Slaves were priced, bought, and branded, existing (similar to the Jews) only as numbers in a system. Just as the Jews were separated between who should die and who could serve Nazi Germany’s greater good, slaves were processed, divided, and categorized by who could best serve a master. People were broken down into who should work and live, and who should work and die. It is interesting to see the “process” behind the dehumanization of the slaves and the Jews, as well as how one could go about rationalizing such barbarity with religion or logic.

A question arose while reading the Smallwood paper: did white slaveholders, particularly those in the South, truly believe slaves were lesser men in the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural sense, or was that reasoning just an excuse to profit from the free labor of someone else? How could one human being rationalize the horrible, degrading treatment of other human beings?

In lecture, we discussed the question of which came first, slavery or race? The idea of race might have been a modern one with regard to slaves, but Hitler also utilized the issue of “race” when describing the number of Jews who lived within German jurisdiction. Over time, Hitler legally restricted the civil rights of the Jews until they had none – for few reasons other than the fact that he believed they were a lesser race of people who did not deserve to live. Just as the Jews were attacked and persecuted for little reasoning other than the fact that they were Jewish, so African-Americans were limited politically, socially, and economically by the prejudices of the Jim Crow legal system.