Also that year, Paul Finkelman reviewed the book for the Journal of Law and Religion. Commenting on the claims by The Secret Relationship about Jewish participation in the slave trade, which he calls ludicrous, he notes that Faber indeed succeeds in "setting the record straight", as indicated by the book's very subtitle, although he notes that the book may not reach the audiences which need to hear its message the most. He notes that Faber demonstrates that Jewish merchants in the New World were less likely to be involved in slave trade than their Christian counterparts, and that overall, Jews were "virtually irrelevant to the history of slavery and the slave trade in the New World". He does, however, criticize the book for not covering in depth the case of Suriname, which he argues is a likely exception to the pattern of Jews not being involved in agriculture and therefore not owning many slaves. Like previous reviewers, he also notes that the book focuses too much on the presentation of statistics, and does too little to analyze them, in particular, not addressing the issue of whether there is a connection between Jewish culture and their relatively small involvement in the various aspects of slavery.
