My aunt's boyfriend is a conspiracy theorist, so obviously I take everything he claims/shares on social media with a huge grain of salt.
He's just shared a text by some "Rabby Lody Van de Kamp" that allegedly confesses the Jews' involvement in the slave trade. The piece of text, which smells of r/forwardsfromgrandma (or perhaps r/forwardsfromhitler, heh) material, can be found here.
Is there any truth to it at all?
Thank you, lovely Historians!
Would have been better if you quoted the passage instead of linking directly to facebook
There is some truth to it, but context is everything.
Here's a release from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that discusses the whole matter with considerably more nuance: http://www.jta.org/2013/12/26/news-opinion/world/dutch-rabbi-confronts-jews-with-ancestors-complicity-in-slavery
On closer examination, the facebook post you linked is probably excerpted from the press release above.
It's worth noting several things here:
Lody van de Kamp is already considered about as left-wing as you can get and still be an Orthodox Jew. Any he's given to contrarian tendencies, to be polite about it. Make of that what you will.
The Dutch were only "highly involved" in the Atlantic slave trade relative to their meager amounts of colonies in the New World. This is largely currently understood as being an outgrowth of the Dutch role in the Trans-Atlantic cargo trade. Which isn't an excuse, hardly.
In 17th and early 18th centuries, the Netherlands allowed Jews a much larger degree of freedom to participate in economic and cultural life than pretty much any other Western European nation or kingdom. So it's not really that surprising that Dutch merchantile participation in the slave trade also had some Jewish members.
To further complicate matters, many of the early Jewish communities in the New World were Portuguese and Spanish marranos who were fleeing religious persecution in Iberia and in Iberian colonies. The Dutch Jews of the 17th century were largely sephardim who spoke Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) at home.