The Invisible History of the Human Race (19 page)

Did the slave trade give rise to a culture of mistrust that was passed down from the slave era even to individuals who live in the same places today? There are good reasons to believe that it might have. For those who witnessed the ways an innocent bystander might be swept up by or somehow betrayed into the slave trade, it would have made more sense to distrust people, as a general rule. People who automatically distrusted others were probably more likely to do well, or at least to not be enslaved. Wariness would also have been a smart strategy to teach the next generation.

There’s another way this terrible correlation could be interpreted: Perhaps the slave trade made people not less trusting but less trustworthy. Perhaps people weren’t trusted in countries like Benin because they didn’t deserve to be trusted. After all, chiefs turned on their own people, and families sent some of their own literally down the river. Was a culture of betrayal passed down as well as a culture of distrust? This could partially be the case. Nunn’s analysis reveals that ethnic groups and local governments in the regions that were most affected by the slave trade in the past are also least trusted today. People whose ancestors were more affected by the slave trade were more likely to report that they did not approve of their local councilors, who were corrupt and did not listen to constituents. As Nunn explained, it’s quite likely that this is an accurate assessment of the local councils in these areas. Nevertheless, when they controlled for this effect, there was still a significant amount of
distrust
in countries most affected by the slave trade—regardless of whether the object of
trust was truly worthy.

When Nunn and Wantchekon published their study, Wantchekon spoke about it on a television show in Benin, and it struck a very deep chord. Many locals wrote to him, and it seemed that everyone had something to say about it. One old friend phoned and put the call on speakerphone so that Wantchekon could hear his entire family excitedly affirming and arguing about the idea of trust. It was as if a fever had broken. Everyone acknowledged that a deep distrust still shadowed their lives, and they also agreed that being so suspicious made no sense. They
should
trust one another more.

Still, even years after his study was published and after he had lived in the United States for a long time, Wantchekon rang his sister in Benin to tell her that an old friend was visiting him. She warned, “You know, you should be careful. Watch out for him!” Wantchekon thought,
I’ve known this guy for forty years! He hasn’t killed me in forty years!
Trust remains a major topic in
public meetings in Benin. Indeed, Wantchekon has now started a university in the country. “The best contribution that I can make to Africa and to Benin in particular is by training the next leaders and the next academics through a strong graduate program in economics,” he said. “In September we are going to start, everything is on track.”

Nunn and Wantchekon’s assertion that mistrust and silence could be passed down for more than a century was shocking. We don’t normally think of ideas and attitudes persisting for so long. Could they be passed down over even longer periods of time?

 • • • 

In 1348 in a castle on Lake Geneva, a Jewish man named Agimet was tortured “in the presence of a great many trustworthy persons.” Eventually he broke and confessed to having caused the Black Death by poisoning the local wells. In the previous year the plague had swept into Europe via the Silk Road. In village after village in Europe, people awoke to find themselves feverish, the skin of their fingers and toes turning black, and their lymph nodes swelling grotesquely until they split open and bled. Victims bled internally as well, urinating blood and coughing it up, until they died in great pain.

The plague, which was highly contagious and destroyed entire families and villages, is believed to have killed as many as fifty million people in Europe (60 percent of the population) and seventy-five million worldwide. At the time, no one understood what the dread affliction was or where it came from. Some believed it must be a punishment from God, a consequence of the movement of the planets, or a malady created by humans. Many people blamed it on the Jews, the largest minority in Europe at the time, or on people with disabilities, and in some rare cases even on the nobility. Primarily, though, the Jews were held accountable, and after Agimet’s torture, terrible pogroms (violent riots that target a specific ethnic group) took place all over Europe for more than a decade.

Out of 320 towns that had a Jewish community in the territory that later became Germany, 232 carried out pogroms, destroying homes, inflicting torture, and expelling or killing Jewish inhabitants. In many areas entire communities were disbanded, and fleeing Jews were set upon by peasant mobs. Seventy-nine towns remained peaceful. The Jews even had defenders among the Christians. Pope Clement VI declared that well poisoning was a crime “without plausibility.” Medical faculties in many towns also asserted that the stories about well poisoning were false. But reason had little effect on the panic. As the plague took hold in Basel, Switzerland, and more Christians died from the infection than Jews, on January 9, 1349, some six hundred Jews were forced into a specially constructed wooden building on an island in the Rhine, where they were burned alive.

After three years the worst of the plague was over, but the fear and the hatred it engendered persisted. In one of the most remarkable
studies of the transmission of ideas over time, the economists Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth found evidence that animosity endured generation after generation, for as long as six hundred years.

Voigtländer and Voth compared the treatment of Jewish people in towns after the Black Death with their treatment in the same towns in the 1920s. Following World War I, anti-Semitism was on the rise in Germany. Many Germans blamed Jews for the war, and once again villagers turned on their own neighbors, carrying out pogroms. The researchers identified the towns that exhibited the most virulent anti-Semitism in pre–World War II Germany, and they found a remarkable correlation with the Black Death pogroms. Of the twenty pogroms that took place in the 1920s, Voigtländer and Voth found that nineteen were carried out in towns that had also attacked their Jewish communities in the fourteenth century. If you were a Jew in 1920s Germany and you lived in a town where no medieval pogroms took place, your chance of being attacked by your fellow townsfolk was 1.1 percent. But if you were Jewish and you lived in a town where a medieval pogrom had occurred, the chance that you would be attacked rose to 8.2 percent.

The researchers compared the cities of Aachen and Würzburg, which were similar in size before World War II. Jews had lived in Würzburg since 1100, while Aachen had had a Jewish community since 1242. There is no record of any violence against Jews in Aachen before or during the Black Death. By contrast, the citizens of Würzburg turned on their Jewish community and killed eight hundred people. Voigtländer and Voth noted the sentiments of medieval Würzburg’s notary, who wrote to his bishop, “The Jews deserved to be swallowed up in flames.” Over six hundred years later, even though both communities destroyed their Jewish synagogues, only Würzburg had pogroms.

 • • • 

Voigtländer and Voth didn’t only examine direct violence against Jews in 1920s Germany; they tracked anti-Semitism in a number of ways. One measure was the poll performance of the Nazi Party in 1928, when the Nazis did not yet have mass popularity. “In places with a history of Jew-burning,” wrote Voigtländer and Voth, “the Nazi Party received 1.5 times as many votes as in places without it.”

Letters to the editor of
Der Stürmer
, a particularly racist Nazi newspaper, also showed a link with the very distant past. The researchers determined the location of writers of this correspondence and found a strong link with towns that had carried out medieval attacks on Jews. In the 1920s residents of Würzburg wrote ten times as many anti-Semitic letters to the editor as did residents of other towns.

“Dear
Stürmer
,” wrote one schoolgirl. “Regrettably, [the students in my school] still have many Jewish fellow students. Equally regrettably, many German girls are still close friends with these Jewish girls. . . . I consider these friendships very dangerous since the Jews and their corrupting ideas destroy the souls of the girls slowly but surely.”

After 1939 more Jews were deported to camps from areas that had a history of medieval violence than from areas that did not. Even though deportation during this period was a national policy, Voigtländer and Voth argue that rules were enforced by local authority: The numbers of Jews who were deported reflected how stringently local administrators judged their citizens’ proof of ancestry. Eric Ehrenreich came to the same conclusion when he examined genealogy and ancestral proof. Even during Kristallnacht, when all across Germany the hateful treatment of Jewish people was effectively licensed by the Nazi Party, more Jewish synagogues were attacked in towns where Jews had been killed six hundred years earlier than in towns where they hadn’t.

Voigtländer and Voth are not suggesting that relationships among different cultures in Europe were always harmonious before the Black Death. In fact, pogroms took place before the 1300s. (In England, where there were no pogroms following the Black Death, that was due not to the absence of hatred so much as to the fact that the English had already expelled their Jewish population in 1290). Still, many more pogroms occurred in Europe after the Black Death hit.

The details of medieval pogroms and twentieth-century anti-Semitic attacks have been known for a long time, but until Voigtländer and Voth’s analysis, no one had tried to determine whether the two might be connected. Partly this is because no one had imagined that attitudes could endure for so long.

If the connection between hateful acts across the centuries and between trauma and distrust over generational time is real, how do the ideas and the feelings persist? How might they be passed down from one generation to the next? Can the personal qualities of a great-great-great-grandfather, like his faith in people or his suspicion of them, really influence the feelings of his descendants today?

 • • • 

I asked Voigtländer how such hatred was preserved over the course of centuries. He and Voth found that in cities that grew significantly after 1750, the long-term transmission of anti-Semitism was disrupted. Crucially, these rapidly industrializing cities expanded because many people moved in from elsewhere, not because the locals had more children. Where Jew-hatred persisted, there were relatively fewer people coming in. “Even though migration everywhere increased rapidly after 1820, most inhabitants of a typical town in our sample must have been direct descendants of those who lived there in 1350,” they wrote.

Nunn also wondered about who was passing down the distrust in Africa. There was no way to track it through time beyond the records that he and Wantchekon had already examined. There was also no literature that surveyed trust in earlier periods, no handy Afrobarometer that logged attitudes in different families and communities over time.

So Nunn and Wantchekon estimated for each individual whose trust was surveyed how many slaves were taken from his personal ethnic group and how many slaves were taken from the areas where he lived. The underlying idea was that, if you are taught values primarily by your family, you are likely to take those with you wherever you go. But if you absorb values from the people who live around you and from the legal, social, and political institutions in a particular region, then where you live may have more impact on your beliefs than what you learned from your parents. If this was the case, then when someone left his native village and moved to a place with a different predominant attitude, he might modify his existing values by virtue of being surrounded by people with different ones. Similarly, if someone moved into a region where all the civic organizations seemed to foster distrust, then even if he came from a previously trusting place, he might take up the local culture and become less trusting himself.

It seemed that both families and social institutions matter but that the former is more powerful. The data suggested that a region might develop its own culture of distrust and that it could affect people who moved into that area, even if their ancestors had not been exposed to the historical event that destroyed trust in the first place. But if someone’s ancestors had significant exposure to the slave trade, then even if he moved away from the area where he was born to an area where there was no general culture of mistrust, he was still less likely to be trusting. Indeed, Nunn and Wantchekon found evidence that the inheritance of distrust within a family was
twice as powerful
as the distrust that is passed down in a community.

This accords well with our personal intuitions about families: The people who raise us shape us, intentionally or unintentionally. The people who raise us were likewise shaped by the people who raised them, and so on. Similarly, the way we treat other people, even our offspring, is shaped by the way we were shaped. This is not to say that our peers don’t affect our attitudes, nor does it mean that the society in which we choose to live doesn’t contribute as well. Obviously, the older we get, the more we develop the ability to shape ourselves. Family history doesn’t necessarily determine who we become, but this body of work suggests that the effect of a family may be so powerful that it can be replicated down through many generations, over and over through hundreds of years. It’s no wonder that so many people choose to study the distant histories of their families to understand how they work today. If genealogists believe there isn’t enough in their daily lives or their culture that sufficiently explains who they are—either to others or to themselves—it may be because they are right.

In fact, the legacy of a family may be so powerful that it will not only last over extraordinary periods of time but extend over great distances as well.