Jews and the Black Holocaust

Jewish Slavery Industries: Black Slavery

Related:
[Jewish Slavery Industries: White Slavery]


What are the Issues?

Blacks and Jews have been involved in a re-evaluation of their current and historical relationship. Events of the past several months have raised both tensions and the level of rhetoric coming from all sides. The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews is a historical accounting of the part of the relationship that has been ignored by both Blacks and Jews. Most people are not even aware of the extensive record of encounters between the two groups prior to the 20th century. The Honorable Louis Farrakhan referred to this well-documented history in 1984 and was immediately labeled an "anti-Semite." Merely questioning the belief that Jews were co-sufferers in the Black slave experience draws angry rebukes from Jews of all stripes. The book in question presents indisputable historical data from census records, wills, Jewish historians and scholars, rabbinical sermons, port records, court records, runaway slave notices, slave sale advertisements, etc., which forces all sides to grapple with the long-held mythology that Black people always found a friend in the Jews.

Some Jews and their dutiful negros have hired the services of Dr. Harold Brackman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in an effort to preserve the comfortable mythology which has obscured the actual historical record. But unbeknownst to them, Dr. Brackman's 1977 unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, entitled The Ebb and Flow of Conflict, goes far beyond The Secret Relationship in its claims of Jewish conspiracy in the Biblical origin of White supremacy. He clearly states that Jewish Talmudic scholars invented the Hamitic Myth which, through the story of Noah, everlastingly assigned to the African the role of slave and divinely cursed servant of White people. According to Dr. Tony Martin's book, The Jewish Onslaught, the Jewish invention of the Hamitic Myth "provided the moral pretext upon which the entire trade grew and flourished."

"There is no denying," said Brackman of the story of Noah, "that the Babylonian Talmud was the first source to read a Negrophobic content into the episode..." Brackman pointed out further that two third century Jewish "Sages" provided homosexual embellishments for the Biblical story as well.

This "curse" was the absolute basis for the Europeans' choice of dark-skinned Africans for chattel slavery. Many denominations of Christianity, Islam and Judaism believe it and teach it to this very moment! Southern plantation owners attacked the Abolitionists with it; its teaching was the foundation of the slaves' permitted religion; Black inferiority is based on it; the Ku Klux Klan relies on it; even the Mormons officially taught it until 1978. When the Jews invented it and promoted it to the world they sentenced the Black Race to a holocaust the likes of which no people have ever suffered. "Hate teaching" will forever be defined by this wicked belief system brought to us in the Jewish Holy Talmud via Harold Brackman.

The critics curiously use a Harvard English teacher, Henry Louis Gates, to offer historical clarity. Gates exhibits no evidence that he even read the book in his oft-quoted NY Times opinion. His willingness to make asinine historical claims with the glaring absence of support from reputable Black or Jewish historians proves Adam Clayton Powell's axiom: "Harvard has ruined more negroes than bad whiskey."

Overwhelming Evidence

The history that the old "Black-Jewish Coalition" clumsily avoids is the entire three century history of Jewish presence in South America and the Caribbean. But other highly acclaimed Jewish scholars have not been so blind:

• Lee M. Friedman, a one-time president of the American Jewish Historical Society, wrote that in Brazil, where most of the Africans actually went, "the bulk of the slave trade was in the hands of Jewish settlers."
• Marcus Arkin wrote that the Jews of Surinam used "many thousands" of Black slaves.
• Herbert I. Bloom wrote that "the slave trade was one of the most important Jewish activities here (in Surinam) as elsewhere in the colonies." He even published a 1707 list of Jewish buyers by name with the number of Black humans they purchased.
• Cecil Roth, writer of 30 books and hundreds of articles on Jewish history, wrote that the slave revolts in parts of South America "were largely directed against [Jews] as being the greatest slave-holders of the region."
• "I gather," wrote Jewish scholar Wilfred Samuels, "that the Jews [of Barbados] made a good deal of their money by purchasing and hiring out negroes..."
• According to the Jewish historians, all Barbadian Jews owned slaves - even the rabbi had "the enjoyment of his own two negro attendants."
• In Curaçao which was a major slave trading depot, Isaac and Susan Emmanuel report that "the shipping business was mainly a Jewish enterprise."
• Says yet another Jewish writer of the Jews of Curaçao, "Almost every Jew bought from one to nine slaves for his personal use or for eventual resale."
• Seymour B. Liebman in his New World Jewry, made it clear that "[t]he ships were not only owned by Jews, but were manned by Jewish crews and sailed under the command of Jewish captains."
• Moshe Kahan stated bluntly that in 1653-1658, " Jewish-Marrano merchants were in control of the Spanish and Portuguese trade, were almost in control of the Levantine trade...were interested in the Dutch East and West Indian companies, were heavily involved in shipping; and, most important, had at their disposal large amounts of capital."
• In Brazil, where most of our kidnapped ancestors were sent, Jewish scholar Arnold Wiznitzer is most explicit about Jewish involvement:

"Besides their important position in the sugar industry and in tax farming, they dominated the slave trade. From 1636 to 1645 a total of 23,163 Negro slaves arrived from Africa and were sold for 6,714,423 florins. The West India Company, which monopolized imports of slaves from Africa, sold slaves at public auctions against cash payment. It happened that cash was mostly in the hands of Jews. The buyers who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews, and because of this lack of competitors they could buy slaves at low prices. On the other hand, there also was no competition in the selling of the slaves to the plantation owners and other buyers, and most of them purchased on credit payable at the next harvest in sugar. Profits up to 300 percent of the purchase value were often realized with high interest rates....If it happened that the date of such an auction fell on a Jewish holiday the auction had to be postponed. This occurred on Friday, October 21, 1644."

Given the concise statements in the Jewish historical record, of which the "Black/Jewish Coalition" is totally ignorant, how can it be taken seriously in the present debate? (For even more evidence see the Facts and Quotes Section)

Jews and Slavery in the Old South

The Jewish critics prefer to focus on the history of slavery in America while ignoring our kidnapped African family in other parts of the Western Hemisphere. This attempt to focus the debate is designed to limit our historical inquiry and to suggest that we Blacks are to care only about our Black family within America's political boundaries. This view also conveniently limits the consideration of evidence of direct Jewish involvement as whip-wielders in the slave trade which is so abundant in the southern part of the Western Hemisphere. By the time of the Jewish migration into what is now the United States, Jews were less involved in the direct trade but remained significant beneficiaries by their involvement in the plantation economy.

Jews in the South were of the merchant class, according to a Jewish historian, having developed "a separate and distinctive accommodation to the plantation economy." The Southern planters depended upon these merchants to move their produce to market as well as for a source of supplies and financing. Jews had become commission merchants, brokers, auctioneers, cotton wholesalers, slave clothing dealers, and peddlers, keeping the slave economy oiled with money, markets and supplies.

It is no mystery why the Jews were absent from representation in the ranks of the Abolitionists. The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in their report of 1853 expressed their frustration at the lack of Jews:

"The Jews of the United States have never taken any steps whatever with regard to the slavery question. As citizens, they deem it their policy to have every one choose which ever side he may deem best to promote his own interests and the welfare of his country. They have no organization of an ecclesiastical body to represent their general views; no General Assembly, or its equivalent. The American Jews have two newspapers, but they do not interfere in any discussion which is not material to their religion. It cannot be said that the Jews have formed any denominational opinion on the subject of American slavery....The objects of so much mean prejudice and unrighteous oppression as the Jews have been for ages, surely they, it would seem, more than any other denomination, ought to be the enemies of caste, and friends of universal freedom."

One study by Ira Rosenwaike published by the American Jewish Historical Society has shown that 75% of the Jews of the South owned Black slaves while 36% of the White population owned slaves.

Ask the Jewish critics to name one (just one) prominent Colonial American Jew who did not own slaves. He will have the same difficulty as the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith had in their 1976 pamphlet entitled, American Jews: Their Story. The ADL lists 13 pioneers of the American Jewish community - 10 of whom have been definitively linked to the slave trade. Some Jewish scholars of today, such as Jacob Rader Marcus, chart the wealth and prestige of their ancestors by the number of Black slaves they possessed. The point that the "Coalition" eludes is the utter failure of Judaism to control this oppressive impulse on the part of these Jews. As Rabbi Bertram Korn, the foremost scholar of nineteenth century Jewish history, has written: "It would seem to be realistic to conclude that any Jew who could afford to own slaves and had need for their services would do so....Jews participated in every aspect and process of the exploitation of the defenseless blacks."

When Rabbi David Einhorn of Civil War era Baltimore, a true Jewish friend of Black people stood up for the humanity of the Black Man using the holy principles of Judaism from the Torah, his words were brilliant:

"America of the future will not rest on slave chains or belittling its adopted citizens. It will also give up its disinterestedness in the fate of other peoples of the world....[T]he next battles will leave a real blood bath, but slavery will be drowned in that bath."

Alas, his own congregation physically expelled him from his position as rabbi and ultimately from the city. They opted, as most Jews did, to accept the "Judaism" of the most prominent rabbi of the time Morris J. Raphall:

"[I]t remains a fact which cannot be gainsaid that in his own native home, and generally throughout the world, the unfortunate negro is indeed the meanest of slaves. Much had been said respecting the inferiority of his intellectual powers, and that no man of his race has ever inscribed his name on the Parthenon of human excellence, either mental or moral."

The historical record is formidable and well-represented in The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One. Within 334 pages there are 1,275 footnotes containing multiple references for the reader to examine. The irrefutable record of Jewish historical compliance with Black oppression is no longer a "secret." The debate has surely changed.

The Washington Post has confirmed the accuracy of The Secret Relationship while exposing the ignorance of its media critics. University of Chicago African Studies professor and Jew Ralph A. Austen has written in Tikkun Magazine that the "substantive content...seems fairly accurate." Furthermore he says, "The authors of The Secret Relationship underestimate the structural importance of the Jews in the early stages of the New World slave trade." The Jewish Community, negro followers, Harold Brackman and Henry Louis Gates might do well to investigate that amazing assertion of this Jewish historian.

Jewish Racism

But what of the continuing Jewish racism that elicits no Jewish response at all. No letters warning of some ominous trend. The African United Front of Los Angeles raised many of these issues in a recent Final Call article:

·Michael Levin of City College of New York, Vincent Sarvich of the University of California at Berkeley and Richard Hernstein at Harvard are among the most prominent Jewish scientists and scholars who maintain that Black people are intellectually deficient. Hernstein's book Bell Curve harkens back to some plantation philosophy claiming that Blacks are intellectually inferior to Whites. Other Jews, including Howard B. Abikoff of the Long Island Jewish Medical Center, Rachel Klein of the Long Island Medical Center and Columbia University, and Gail Wasserman, in the Department of Child Psychiatry at Columbia, are engaged in research which has the potential to link genetics to violence in inner city Black and Latino children. Where is the outrage, Coalition? Where are the calls for repudiation?

·Journalists like Jeff Greenfield, Norman Podhoretz, Roger Rosenblatt and other Jews have besmirched the Black image in news shows or on the printed page. Jewish producers in Hollywood like Norman Lear, Mort Lochman and Ed Weinberger continually produce degrading television sitcoms, like Sugar Hill, produced by Armyan Berstein, Tom Rosenberg and Mark Abraham. These portrayals can only be compared to Julius Streicher's degradation of Jews in Der Stürmer in Nazi Germany.

·The San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Times and numerous other newspapers have documented the fact that for decades the ADL ran a private nationwide spy network - "a systematic, long-term, professionally organized political espionage operation complete with informers, infiltrators, money laundering, code names, wiretapping and secret meetings." Newspapers have revealed that among the 950 organizations and 10,000 individuals that the ADL prepared files on were many Black groups, including the NAACP!

There are many issues of varying degrees of significance that must also be raised to clear the air:

For thirty years Israel has maintained strong economic, military, nuclear, scientific, academic, energy, tourist, cultural, sports, transportation, agricultural and intelligence ties with South Africa - and thereby prolonged Black oppression there. Jews were the only group in this country who arrogantly threatened to protest the visit of revered African National Congress Chairman and now President Nelson Mandela to the United States in 1990. They have labeled Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu "anti-Semites" while the 110,000 Jewish South Africans are, in fact, the richest single community in the world.

The late Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan asserted that the quality of American military forces had deteriorated because they were composed of Blacks "who have low intelligence and low education." He urged America to ensure that "fresh blood and better brains go to their forces." He is a hero in Israel.

Jewish talk show host Howard Stern was quoted in the November 1st issue of Time magazine as stating that, "they didn't beat this idiot (Rodney King) enough." In March, he played Ku Klux Klan songs on his broadcast and used the term "nigger" 55 times in 10 minutes. He offered the term "porch monkey" and "yard ape" as labels for Blacks.

Furthermore, during the week of March 7, 1994, Jewish comedian Jackie Mason was quoted by news broadcasts as having said: "The susceptibility to violence happens to be more among Blacks than whites - a hundred times more."

In 1991, Judge Joyce A. Karlin sentenced Korean merchant Soon Ja Du to five years of probation, 400 hours of community service and a fine of five hundred dollars for killing Black teenager Latasha Harlins. Judge Stanley M. Weisberg transferred the Rodney King case to Simi Valley and thereby virtually assured an unfair trial for the Black victim. Superior Court Judge Roosevelt I. Dorn, a Black jurist who had been hand-picked to hear the case of three men charged with beating Reginald Denny during the early hours of the L.A. Civil unrest, was removed from the case by District Attorney Ira Reiner. Karlin, Weisberg and Reiner are all Jews. Jewish leaders did not repudiate them for their "racism" or "unfairness;" there were no newspaper advertisements taken out to condemn them, nor were their names dragged before congress to be censured.

If the Jewish Community has a longstanding interest in providing accurate information about history, culture and traditions of the Jewish community, as some have claimed, maybe they should commence with one or more of the above.

Black educators need not fear cheap smear campaigns by long-time racists. Our history is our responsibility, and we have no right to compromise with truth or the instruction of our children. What they teach Jewish children is their business.

This article was found athttp://www.blacksandjews.com/Jews_and_Slavery.html which was freely available on the Internet on January 29, 2006 and is included in this archive for research, educational, and personal use by those requesting such materials in advance in accordance with the fair use provisions of Title 171 of the copyright act. More recent updates may be available at the owner's site.

Jewish Slave Ship Owners

For decades, the White people of America have been subjected to a continual barrage from Blacks and others that Europeans are somehow "responsible" for the African slave trade and that we need to "atone" for our "guilt." There are a number of flaws with the idea that we are somehow "responsible" for the African slave trade.

First, few White people even owned slaves--slavery was a rich man's pursuit, and slavery did not exist amongst the middle and working classes of White people.

Second, even if every European in America had an ancestor who owned slaves (which is an extremely unlikely proposition), it makes little sense to blame the children for the supposed sins of their fathers.

Third, Blacks sold their own kind into slavery, do blacks are every bit as much to blame for slavery as are Whites.

Fourth, European Whites did not bring the slaves to America. On the contrary, it was the Asiatic Jews who brought them here.

Below is a listing of the Jewish slave ships and the Jewish owners of them.

Jewish Slave Ship Owners

Name of ship	Owners	Ethnicity
Abigail Crown Nassau Four Sisters Anne & Eliza Prudent Betty Hester Elizabeth Antigua Betsy Polly White Horse Expedition Charlotte Caracoa	Aaron Lopez, Moses Levy, Jacob Franks Issac Levy and Nathan Simpson Moses Levy Moses Levy Justus Bosch and John Abrams Henry Cruger and Jacob Phoenix Mordecai and David Gomez Mordecai and David Gomez Nathan Marston and Abram Lyell Wm. De Woolf James De Woolf Jan de Sweevts John and Jacob Roosevelt Moses and Sam Levy and Jacob Franks Moses and Sam Levy	Jews Jews Jew Jew Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jew Jew Jew Jews Jews Jews

Source: Elizabeth Donnan, 4 Volumes, 'Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America' Washington, D.C. 1930, 1935 Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Pa.

In addition,

Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael

Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael is the Nathan and Sophia Gumenick Professor of Judaic Studies, Professor of Religion, and Chair, Department of Religion, The College of William and Mary, and a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University. He has been the editor of the quarterly journal, American Jewish History, for 19 years, and a visiting professor at Brown University, the University of Pittsburgh, HUC-JIR, UCLA, and Case Western Reserve University. He came to The College of William and Mary in 1989 after 20 years at Ohio State University. He is the author of many books on Jews and Judaism in America, and his most recent publication (with his wife Linda Schermer Raphael) is When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories (Rutgers University Press, 1999). He is now writing Judaism in America for the Contemporary American Series of Columbia University Press. Visit him at the website of his synagoge, Bet Aviv, in Columbia, Maryland.

The following passages are from Dr. Raphael's book Jews and Judaism in the United States a Documentary History (New York: Behrman House, Inc., Pub, 1983), pp. 14, 23-25.

"Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.

"This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's and early 1770's dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent."

Dr. Raphael discusses the central role of the Jews in the New World commerce and the African slave trade (pp. 23-25):

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
JEWISH INTER ISLAND TRADE: CURACAO, 1656

During the sixteenth century, exiled from their Spanish homeland and hard-pressed to escape the clutches of the Inquisition, Spanish and Portuguese Jews fled to the Netherlands; the Dutch enthusiastically welcomed these talented, skilled businessmen. While thriving in Amsterdam-where they became the hub of a unique urban Jewish universe and attained status that anticipated Jewish emancipation in the West by over a century-they began in the 1500's and 1600's to establish themselves in the Dutch and English colonies in the New World. These included Curacao, Surinam, Recife, and New Amsterdam (Dutch) as well as Barbados, Jamaica, Newport, and Savannah (English). In these European outposts the Jews, with their years of mercantile experience and networks of friends and family providing market reports of great use, played a significant role in the merchant capitalism, commercial revolution, and territorial expansion that developed the New World and established the colonial economies. The Jewish-Caribbean nexus provided Jews with the opportunity to claim a disproportionate influence in seventeenth and eighteenth century New World commerce, and enabled West Indian Jewry-far outnumbering its coreligionists further north-to enjoy a centrality which North American Jewry would not achieve for a long time to come.

Groups of Jews began to arrive in Surinam in the middle of the seventeenth century, after the Portuguese regained control of northern Brazil. By 1694, twenty-seven years after the British had surrendered Surinam to the Dutch, there were about 100 Jewish families and fifty single Jews there, or about 570 persons. They possessed more than forty estates and 9,000 slaves, contributed 25,905 pounds of sugar as a gift for the building of a hospital, and carried on an active trade with Newport and other colonial ports. By 1730, Jews owned 115 plantations and were a large part of a sugar export business which sent out 21,680,000 pounds of sugar to European and New World markets in 1730 alone.

Slave trading was a major feature of Jewish economic life in Surinam which as a major stopping-off point in the triangular trade. Both North American and Caribbean Jews played a key role in this commerce: records of a slave sale in 1707 reveal that the ten largest Jewish purchasers (10,400 guilders) spent more than 25 percent of the total funds (38,605 guilders) exchanged.

Jewish economic life in the Dutch West Indies, as in the North American colonies, consisted primarily of mercantile communities, with large inequities in the distribution of wealth. Most Jews were shopkeepers, middlemen, or petty merchants who received encouragement and support from Dutch authorities. In Curacao, for example, Jewish communal life began after the Portuguese victory in 1654. In 1656 the community founded a congregation, and in the early 1670's brought its first rabbi to the island. Curacao, with its large natural harbor, was the stepping-stone to the other Caribbean islands and thus ideally suited geographically for commerce. The Jews were the recipients of favorable charters containing generous economic privileges granted by the Dutch West Indies Company in Amsterdam. The economic life of the Jewish community of Curacao revolved around ownership of sugar plantations and marketing of sugar, the importing of manufactured goods, and a heavy involvement in the slave trade, within a decade of their arrival, Jews owned 80 percent of the Curacao plantations. The strength of the Jewish trade lay in connections in Western Europe as well as ownership of the ships used in commerce. While Jews carried on an active trade with French and English colonies in the Caribbean, their principal market was the Spanish Main (today Venezuela and Colombia).

Extant tax lists give us a glimpse of their dominance. Of the eighteen wealthiest Jews in the 1702 and 1707 tax lists, nine either owned a ship or had at least a share in a vessel. By 1721 a letter to the Amsterdam Jewish community claimed that "nearly all the navigation...was in the hands of the Jews."' Yet another indication of the economic success of Curacao's Jews is the fact that in 1707 the island's 377 residents were assessed by the Governor and his Council a total of 4,002 pesos; 104 Jews, or 27.6 percent of the taxpayers, contributed 1,380 pesos, or 34.5 percent of the entire amount assessed.

In the British West Indies, two 1680 tax lists survive, both from Barbados; they, too, provide useful information about Jewish economic life. In Bridgetown itself, out of a total of 404 households, 54 households or 300 persons were Jewish, 240 of them living in "ye Towne of S. Michael ye Bridge Town." Contrary to most impressions, "many, indeed, most of them, were very poor." There were only a few planters, and most Jews were not naturalized or endenizened (and thus could not import goods or pursue debtors in court). But for merchants holding letters of endenization, opportunities were not lacking. Barbados sugar-and its by-products rum and molasses-were in great demand, and in addition to playing a role in its export, Jewish merchants were active in the import trade. Forty-five Jewish households were taxed in Barbados in 1680, and more than half of them contributed only 11.7 percent of the total sum raised. While the richest five gave almost half the Jewish total, they were but 11.1 percent of the taxable population. The tax list of 1679-80 shows a similar picture; of fifty-one householders, nineteen (37.2 percent) gave less than one-tenth of the total, while the four richest merchants gave almost one-third of the total.

An interesting record of inter island trade involving a Jewish merchant and the islands of Barbados and Curacao comes from correspondence of 1656. It reminds us that sometimes the commercial trips were not well planned and that Jewish captains-who frequently acted as commercial agents as well-would decide where to sell their cargo, at what price, and what goods to bring back on the return trip

Quotes and Facts About Blacks and Jews

When assessing the relationship between Blacks and Jews, one need not resort to vicious name-calling or opprobrious epithets. One need only to present the facts. World Jewry apologizes to no one when they cite historical precedent as a guide for their future relationships with any people. The historical record is clearer than the muddled pronouncements of a reactionary and controlled media. None of the critics of The Secret Relationship have been able to re-write the history showing a history of "friendship" between Blacks and Jews. They are forced to succumb to the tragic reality that nearly every one of their colonial fathers had a Hitler-like hate of Black people and participated in the robbing of their humanity. Those who have felt that there was some "special" relationship which carried with it a "special" right to criticize and control Black leadership can no longer make such a claim.

The following is a guide for informed analysis. (See also "Open Letter to Cornel West" by the African United Front for a litany of issues raised by Blacks about Jewish behavior. See also Professor Tony Martin'sBroadsides.)

From The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews...

About "Civil Rights"

Martin Luther King, Jr.

"A special and unique relationship to Jews"

When we were working in Chicago, we had numerous rent strikes on the West Side, and it was unfortunately true that, in most instances, the persons we had to conduct these strikes against were Jewish landlords. There was a time when the West Side of Chicago was a Jewish ghetto, and when the Jewish community started moving out into other areas, they still owned the property there, and all of the problems of the landlord came into being.

We were living in a slum apartment owned by a Jew and a number of others, and we had to have a rent strike. We were paying $94 for four run-down, shabby rooms, and we would go out on our open housing marches on Gage Park and other places and we discovered that whites with five sanitary, nice, new rooms, apartments with five rooms, were paying only $78 a month. We were paying 20 percent tax.

The Negro ends up paying a color tax, and this has happened in instances where Negroes actually confronted Jews as the landlord or the storekeeper. The irrational statements that have been made are the result of these confrontations.

Clayborne Carson, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998), p. 309.

Black Slavery

Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael
"Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.
"This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's and early 1770's dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent."

Read more of Rabbi Raphael's statement

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Ira Rosenwaike
"In Charleston, Richmond and Savannah the large majority (over three-fourths) of the Jewish households contained one or more slaves; in Baltimore, only one out of three households were slaveholding; in New York, one out of eighteen....Among the slaveholding households the median number of slaves owned ranged from five in Savannah to one in New York." "The Jewish Population in 1820," in Abraham J. Karp, ed., The Jewish Experience in America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (Waltham, Massachusetts, 1969, 3 volumes), volume 2, pp. 2, 17, 19.

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Cecil Roth
"The Jews of the Joden Savanne [Surinam] were also foremost in the suppression of the successive negro revolts, from 1690 to 1722: these as a matter of fact were largely directed against them, as being the greatest slave-holders of the region." History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932), p. 292.

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Jacob Rader Marcus
"All through the eighteenth century, into the early nineteenth, Jews in the North were to own black servants; in the South, the few plantations owned by Jews were tilled with slave labor. In 1820, over 75 percent of all Jewish families in Charleston, Richmond, and Savannah owned slaves, employed as domestic servants; almost 40 percent of all Jewish householders in the United States owned one slave or more. There were no protests against slavery as such by Jews in the South, where they were always outnumbered at least 100 to 1....But very few Jews anywhere in the United States protested against chattel slavery on moral grounds." United States Jewry, 1776-1985 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), p. 586.

Marcus describes the mockery of the Indian by Hyam Myer's "Wild West Show" in his book, The Colonial American Jew:

"[Myer sought] formal permission to exhibit some Mohawks in Europe. Myers sailed with the Indians before the proper certificate was forthcoming from the Indian Commissioner, and had already begun to parade them in Holland and in the taverns of London when the Lords of Trade urged Lieutenant-Governor Cadwallader Colden in New York to have Johnson put an end to the undertaking. From all indications Myers made no money on his grand European tour, for he ended up owing the Indians money - or refusing to pay them. Then, as now, there was "no business like show business!"

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Isaac Mayer Wise, the leader of the American Reform Jews, wrote of the California Indians:

"...though not total savages, [they] are very primitive and ignorant....[They do] nothing besides loafing and begging....They catch trout in the river, and then sell them to buy ammunition, shoot rabbits, birds, eat various roots and wild plants, also snakes, frogs, dogs, cats, and rats, and say, 'Me work no.' In conversation with several of them I found that they have no particular home and are heathens."

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Julius Kahn, San Francisco Jew
In turn-of-the-century San Francisco the 12-term Congressman Julius Kahn was a Jew who was affiliated with Temple Emanu El. "The oath to the Japanese," he said, "would be but a hollow mockery, an empty formality signifying nothing. We do not want that kind of citizenship, and we do not intend to have it, if we can prevent it." He spoke vehemently against Japanese immigration and naturalization even as Jews pushed mightily for Eastern European immigration. The early 1900 saw passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts which were enthusiastically supported by Kahn and his constituents. He was such an advocate that the Acts were called the Kahn Exclusion Acts.

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The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Report of 1853
"The Jews of the United States have never taken any steps whatever with regard to the slavery question. As citizens, they deem it their policy to have every one choose which ever side he may deem best to promote his own interests and the welfare of his country. They have no organization of an ecclesiastical body to represent their general views; no General Assembly, or its equivalent. The American Jews have two newspapers, but they do not interfere in any discussion which is not material to their religion. It cannot be said that the Jews have formed any denominational opinion on the subject of American slavery....The objects of so much mean prejudice and unrighteous oppression as the Jews have been for ages, surely they, it would seem, more than any other denomination, ought to be the enemies of caste, and friends of universal freedom."

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Rabbi Bertram W. Korn
"It would seem to be realistic to conclude that any Jew who could afford to own slaves and had need for their services would do so....Jews participated in every aspect and process of the exploitation of the defenseless blacks."
"Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789-1865," in Abraham J. Karp, The Jewish Experience in America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (Waltham, Massachusetts, 1969), pp. 184, 189. [Dr. Korn is a rabbi, historian; A.B., Cincinnati, 1939; Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ordination M.H.L. 1949; Sr. rabbi, Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1949-; Chaplain, USNR, 1944-; Visiting professor, American Jewish History, Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, 1962-; Honorary Overseer Gratz College of Pennsylvania; visiting professor, American Jewish History, Dropsie University of Pennsylvania; 1970-; Recipient Merit Award, American Association for State & Local History, 1969.]

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Louis Epstein, author of Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism:
"The female slave was a sex tool beneath the level of moral considerations. She was an economic good, useful, in addition to her menial labor, for breeding more slaves. To attain that purpose, the master mated her promiscuously according to his breeding plans. The master himself and his sons and other members of his household took turns with her for the increase of the family wealth, as well as for satisfaction of their extra-marital sex desires. Guests and neighbors too were invited to that luxury."

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Seymour B. Liebman
"They came with ships carrying African blacks to be sold as slaves. The traffic in slaves was a royal monopoly, and the Jews were often appointed as agents for the Crown in their sale....[They] were the largest ship chandlers in the entire Caribbean region, where the shipping business was mainly a Jewish enterprise....The ships were not only owned by Jews, but were manned by Jewish crews and sailed under the command of Jewish captains."

New World Jewry 1493-1825: Requiem for the Forgotten (KTAV, New York, 1982), pp. 170, 183. [Liebman is an attorney; LL.B., St. Lawrence University, 1929; M.A. (Latin American history), Mexico City College, 1963; Florida chapter American Jewish Historical Society, 1956-58; Friends of Hebrew University, 1958-59; American Historical Society Contributor to scholarly journals on Jewish history.

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Herbert I. Bloom
"The Christian inhabitants [of Brazil] were envious because the Jews owned some of the best plantations in the river valley of Pernambuco and were among the leading slave-holders and slave traders in the colony."1
"Slave trade [sic] was one of the most important Jewish activities here [in Surinam] as elsewhere in the colonies."2

1. , "A Study of Brazilian Jewish History 1623-1654, Based Chiefly Upon the Findings of the Late Samuel Oppenheim," Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, vol. 33 (1934), p. 63.
2. The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Port Washington, New York/London: Kennikat Press, 1937), p. 159.

[Bloom is a rabbi; B.A., Columbia University, 1923, Ph.D., 1937; M.H.L., Jewish Institute of Religion, 1928, D.D., 1955; rabbi, Temple Albert, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1928-31. President Kingston Ministerial Association, 1945-46, and 1959-60; B'nai B'rith; Zionist Organization of America; vice-president, National Prison Chaplain Board, since 1962; Social Action Committee of Central Conference of American Rabbis, since 1947; Author: The Jews of Dutch Brazil, 1936; The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam, 1937.]

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Arnold Wiznitzer
"The West India Company, which monopolized imports of slaves from Africa, sold slaves at public auctions against cash payment. It happened that cash was mostly in the hands of Jews. The buyers who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews, and because of this lack of competitors they could buy slaves at low prices. On the other hand, there also was no competition in the selling of the slaves to the plantation owners and other buyers, and most of them purchased on credit payable at the next harvest in sugar. Profits up to 300 percent of the purchase value were often realized with high interest rates....If it happened that the date of such an auction fell on a Jewish holiday the auction had to be postponed. This occurred on Friday, October 21, 1644."

Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 72-3; [Note: Wiznitzer, Arnold Aharon, educator; Born in Austria, December 20, 1899; Ph.D., University of Vienna, 1920; Doctor of Hebrew Literature, Jewish Theological Seminary of America; Emeritus research professor, University of Judaism, Los Angeles; Contributor to historical journals in the United States and Brazil including the Journal of Jewish Social Studies and the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Former president, Brazilian-Jewish Institute of Historical Research.]

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Rabbi Morris Raphall

"[I]t remains a fact which cannot be gainsaid that in his own native home, and generally throughout the world, the unfortunate negro is indeed the meanest of slaves. Much had been said respecting the inferiority of his intellectual powers, and that no man of his race has ever inscribed his name on the Parthenon of human excellence, either mental or moral."

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Jews in the South

W.E.B. DuBois, future NAACP leader

"The Jew is the heir of the slave-baron in Dougherty [Georgia]; and as we ride westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land of Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for moneygetting, born in the swift days of Reconstruction­'improvement' companies, wine companies, mills and factories; nearly all failed, and the Jew fell heir."

The Souls of Black Folk (1903) note: When DuBois tried to republish the book in 1953, he succumbed to pressure to replace the word "Jew" with "foreigner."

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Jewish Racism

Moses Maimonides

The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion refers to Moses Maimonides as "the symbol of the pure and orthodox faith." His Guide to the Perplexed is considered the greatest work of Jewish religious philosophy, but his view of Blacks was Hitlerian:

"[T]he Negroes found in the remote South, and those who resemble them from among them that are with us in these climes. The status of those is like that of irrational animals. To my mind they do not have the rank of men, but have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher than the rank of apes. For they have the external shape and lineaments of a man and a faculty of discernment that is superior to that of the apes."

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Philadelphia Jewish weekly The Jewish Record of January 23, 1863:

"We know not how to speak in the same breath of the Negro and the Israelite. The very names have startlingly opposite sounds ­ one representing all that is debased and inferior in the hopeless barbarity and heathenism of six thousand years the other, the days when Jehovah conferred on our fathers the glorious equality which led the Eternal to converse with them, and allow them to enjoy the communion of angels. Thus the abandoned fanatics insult the choice of God himself, in endeavoring to reverse the inferiority which he stamped on the African, to make him the compeer, even in bondage, of His chosen people.

"There is no parallel between such races. Humanity from pole to pole would scout such a comparison. The Hebrew was originally free and the charter of his liberty was inspired by his Creator. The Negro was never free and his bondage in Africa was simply duplicated in a milder form when he was imported here....The judicious in all the earth agree that to proclaim the African equal to the surrounding races, would be a farce which would lead the civilized conservatism of the world to denounce the outrage."

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A Rabbi, 1956
"What our friends in the North do not fully appreciate is the fact that there is no difference between most of the Jews and their Christian neighbors in their attitudes toward the Negro. This is not a by-product of antisemitism, but an honest conviction. For these Jews desegregation presents not merely a school problem, but also a problem of the mixing of races."

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Major Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785-1851)

He was considered the most distinguished Jewish layman in his time. He was such a prolific proponent of slavery, that the first Black American periodical, The Freedom's Journal, was launched in response to Noah's racist propaganda. He actually defended slavery by calling it liberty:

"There is liberty under the name of slavery. A field negro has his cottage, his wife, and children, his easy task, his little patch of corn and potatoes, his garden and fruit, which are his revenue and property. The house servant has handsome clothing, his luxurious meals, his admitted privacy, a kind master, and an indulgent and frequently fond mistress."

He argued that "the bonds of society must be kept as they now are" and that "To emancipate the slaves would be to jeopardize the safety of the whole country." The Freedom's Journal called Noah the Black man's "bitterest enemy" and William Lloyd Garrison, the leading White abolitionist, called him the "lineal descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross."

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Jews and Hollywood

Anti-Defamation League Charter
"For a number of years a tendency has manifested itself in American life toward the caricaturing and defaming of Jews on the stage, in moving pictures. The effect of this on the unthinking public has been to create an untrue and injurious impression of an entire people and to expose the Jew to undeserved contempt, and ridicule. The caricatures center around some idiosyncrasy of the few which, by the thoughtless public, is often taken as a pivotal characteristic of the entire people..."

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Neal Gabler
Author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews invented Hollywood

"What is amazing is the extent to which they succeeded in promulgating this fiction throughout the world. By making a "shadow" America, one which idealized every old glorifying bromide about the country, the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas-so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination. . . . Ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the movies the Jews made."

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Lester D. Friedman
Author of Hollywood's Image of the Jew
"Today, most people associate the blackface tradition with minstrel shows, and more particularly with Al Jolson. In actuality, many Jewish performers gained early and continued success using it. Sophie Tucker was billed as the 'World Renowned Coon Shouter' or more euphemistically as the 'Manipulator of Coon Melodies.' Eddie Cantor played Salome in drag and blackface, while George Burns often toured with an even more comically stylized blackface than Jolson's. Later George Jessel often joined Eddie Cantor on stage in various blackface routines...Indeed, it is too easy to ignore the derogatory aspects of such activities, the unconscious racism accepted and nourished by such cruel parodies, by citing historical contexts. The undisguised elements of ridicule in such blackface portrayals by Jews mimicking the outlandish stereotypes of blacks now looks suspiciously like one group's desperate need to assert its own superiority by mimicking another. Such a motivation while perhaps unconscious is nonetheless hard to ignore."

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Rob Reiner, Film Director, on Hollywood in 1992:

"It's all run by Jews, even Disney. That's funny, because Walt Disney was a terrible reactionary. If he found out that Jeffrey Katzenberg were running his company, he'd be spinning in his grave. That's a wonderful bit of poetic justice."

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The REAL Anti-Defamation League

B'nai B'rith Magazine, May, 1925, vol. 39 :

Darktown
Rastus: Whuffo' yo' 'jeculate yoself to me in dat onery manner?
Cicero: Whoffo'? Nigguh, who do yo' calkerate yo' is?
Rastus: Yo' nigguh! mah family am quality folks an' ahm a pusson of rank.
Cicero: Huh! ah'll have yo' triflin', Rastus, to know that ah'm ranker than you is.

"Jokes" like these appeared regularly in the B'nai B'rith Magazine even as the ADL fought this kind of defamation of Jews. In photo is ADL current "leader" Abraham "Bull" Foxman.

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Andrew Goodman

"...it is true that the white man (and by this I mean Christian civilization in general) has proved himself to be the most depraved devil imaginable in his attitudes towards the Negro race....The source and cause of this need for reaction can be attributed to white contempt and neglect. The historical contempt that the white race held for the Negroes has created a group of rootless degraded people. The current neglect of the problem can only irritate this deplorable state of affairs. The Black Muslims should constitute a warning to our society, a warning that must be heeded if we are to preserve the society. The road to freedom must be uphill, even if it is arduous and frustrating. A people must have dignity and identity. If they can't do it peacefully, they will do it defensively."

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Sherman Labovitz

Most Blacks seem more concerned with separatism as a means toward goals of group identity, group pride, and local control, and as an intervening stage leading to the self-respect, autonomy, and power believed to be prerequisite before meaningful integrtion within a truly pluralistic society can occur.

In theory, these concepts are part of a philosophical comitment with which few Jews could quarrel. In fact, a persuasive argument might be presented to demonstrate how even a similar tactical approach to Jewish survival has been succesfully applied and has reulted in the current positive position and status of the American Jewish community. However, Black attempts to operationalize these concepts have raised sharply the question of the degree to which Jews here and now remain committed to that philosophical stance.

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Jews in the Black Ghetto
Long before Minister Farrakhan made any reference to this phenomenon Jack Nusan Porter, a Jewish sociologist was very clear about it in his article entitled "Mr. Goldberg and John Henry: The Relationship Between Afro-Americans and American Jews":

"The common stereotype of Jews owning the businesses in Black ghettos is based on solid evidence, not fantasy. Jews in the East and Midwest own a disproportionate number of businesses in Black areas. [Two Jewish researchers have shown] that some 40 percent of the stores are owned by Jews. [Another] study of 458 merchants in 15 cities (14 of the largest plus Gary, Indiana but not including Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, or any other Southern city) had the following religious breakdown of retail merchants: 37.9% were Jewish; 36.0% were Protestant; and 22.9% were Catholic... The breakdown by religion, when race is considered, increases the number: 51.3% of the white merchants are Jewish; 18.7% are Protestant; and 27.0% are Catholic."

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Elie Weisel, Hate Teacher

"There is a time to love and a time to hate; whoever does not hate when he should does not deserve to love when he should, does not deserve to love when he is able. Perhaps, had we learned to hate more during the years of ordeal, fate itself would have taken fright. The Germans did their best to teach us, but we were poor pupils in the discipline of hate....Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate - healthy, virile hate - for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead."

Legends of Our Time (1968), pp.177-78:

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Compare and contrast with...

Jew Adolf Hitler
Hitler HATED Black people. His comments are included for the reader to compare to the many Jewish notables discussed here. Here is a sampling of Adolf Hitler's beliefs about the Black African:

"It does not dawn upon this depraved bourgeois world that here one has actually to do with a sin against all reason; that it is a criminal absurdity to train a born half-ape until one believes a lawyer has been made of him, while millions of members of the highest culture race have to remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the eternal Creator to let hundreds and hundreds of thousands of His most talented beings degenerate in the proletarian swamp of today, while Hottentots and Zulu Kafirs are trained for intellectual vocations. For it is training, exactly as that of the poodle, and not a scientific 'education'."

"In the most critical hour of our people, in the moment when we, practically abandoned by all the world, made defenseless by our own fault, have to watch France setting out to occupy new territories, while African negroes rape our women and children,..."

"The black disgrace works havoc on the Rhine. Women, girls and children pay for the bestial negroes' lust with their death. An uninterrupted stream of poison and disease flows into the blood of our people. Moroccan syphilis drives thousands of victims towards a cruel death..."

"All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died off through blood poisoning."

"...and one seeks compensation by success with Hottentots and Zulu Kafirs, with the blessing of the Church. While our European peoples, the Lord be praised and thanked, fall into a state of physical and moral leprosy, the pious missionary wanders to Central Africa and establishes negro missions, till there our 'higher culture' will have turned healthy, though primitive and inferior, human children into a foul breed of bastards."

"What we see before us of human culture today, the results of art, science, and techniques, is almost exclusively the creative produce of the Aryan....Without this possibility of utilizing inferior men, the Aryan would never have been able to take the first steps towards his later culture; exactly as, without the help of various suitable animals which he knew how to tame, he would never have arrived at a technology which now allows him to do without these very animals. The words 'Der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit getan, er kann gehen' (The Moor has done his duty, he may go) has [sic] unfortunately too deep a meaning."

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Robert A. Rockaway, is a senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University.

"After the first World War, Jewish Gangsters became major figures in the American underworld and played prominent roles in the creation and extension of organized crime in the United States. During Prohibition fifty percent of the leading bootleggers were Jews, and Jewish criminals financed and directed much of the nations narcotics traffic. Jews also dominated illicit activities in a number of America's largest cities, including Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York, and Philadelphia."

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Malcolm X

Let me say just a word about the Jew and the black man. The Jew is always anxious to advise the black man. But he never advises him how to solve the problem the way the Jews solved their problem. The Jew never went sitting in and crawling in and sliding in and freedom riding, like he teaches and helps Negroes to do. The Jews stood up, and stood together, and they used their ultimate power, the economic weapon. That's exactly what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is trying to teach black men to do.The Jews pooled their money and bought hotels that barred them. They bought Atlantic City and Miami Beach and anything else they wanted. Who owns Hollywood? Who runs the garment industry, the largest industry in New York City? But the Jew that's advising the Negro joins the NAACP, CORE, the Urban League, and others. With money donations, the Jew gains control, then he sends the black man doing all this wading in, boring in, even burying in-everything but buying in. Never shows him how to set up factories and hotels. Never advises him how to own what he wants. No, when there's something worth owning, the Jew's got it.

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Prof. Selwyn Cudjoe:

"The position then is very clear, Zionism is racist, it is colonial and perforce expansionist...it constitutes an intolerable and repulsive ideological position that is detrimental to peace in the world. It must be equated with South African apartheid."

- Wellesley College Prof. Selwyn Cudjoe in the Trinidad Guardian, 1975, as quoted in the Trinidad Guardian, May 22, 2000, p.13. Cudjoe was the "responsible" negro-on-duty representing the Jews at Wellesley College in their attack on Prof. Tony Martin. His shameless angling for Jewish rewards is now exposed.

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Jesus Christ

Joh:8:31: Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed;

Joh:8:32: And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Joh:8:33: They answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?

Joh:8:34: Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.

Joh:8:35: And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever.

Joh:8:36: If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.

Joh:8:37: I know that ye are Abraham's seed; but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you.

Joh:8:38: I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father.

Joh:8:39: They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus saith unto them, If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham.

Joh:8:40: But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham.

Joh:8:41: Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.

Joh:8:42: Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.

Joh:8:43: Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word.

Joh:8:44: Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

Joh:8:45: And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.

Joh:8:46: Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?

Joh:8:47: He that is of God heareth God's words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.

Joh:8:48: Then answered the Jews, and said unto him, Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?

Joh:8:49: Jesus answered, I have not a devil; but I honour my Father, and ye do dishonour me.

Joh:8:50: And I seek not mine own glory: there is one that seeketh and judgeth.

Joh:8:51: Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.

Joh:8:52: Then said the Jews unto him, Now we know that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets; and thou sayest, If a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death.

Joh:8:53: Art thou greater than our father Abraham, which is dead? and the prophets are dead: whom makest thou thyself?

Joh:8:54: Jesus answered, If I honour myself, my honour is nothing: it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that he is your God:

Joh:8:55: Yet ye have not known him; but I know him: and if I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying.

Joh:8:56: Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.

Joh:8:57: Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?

Joh:8:58: Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.

Joh:8:59: Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by.

This article was found athttp://www.blacksandjews.com/wash.post.html which was freely available on the Internet on January 29, 2006 and is included in this archive for research, educational, and personal use by those requesting such materials in advance in accordance with the fair use provisions of Title 17 Section 107 of the copyright act. More recent updates may be available at the owner's site.

This article appeared in the Washington Post, October 17, 1993. It generated so much controversy that the Washington Post ombudsman had to respond to it two weeks later (posted below). Despite their expiatory wording, both articles confirm the Nation of Islam position on Jews and the slave trade.

A Look At...Slavery Then and Now Half-Truths and History:
The Debate Over Jews and Slavery

by David Mills

David Mills is a Washington Post reporter

A small storm has been swirling--in the media, in academia, but mostly in the frictional world of ethnocentric politics--around the involvement of Jews in the African slave trade. It has been a tempest of hot rhetoric, factual confusion and moral recrimination. It has revealed the willingness of some black pubic figures--Louis Farrakhan and Leonard Jeffries in particular--to use historical caricature as a blunt instrument in their political battles with present-day Jews. It has also revealed the historical ignorance of some well-respected critics of black antisemitism. The passions driving the debate on both sides have thwarted any calm understanding of the past.

The controversy kicked up two years ago when Jeffries, an Afrocentric faculty member at the City College of New York, made a notorious speech in Albany, N.Y., cataloging the supposed crimes of Jews against black people. One of the things he said was, "Everyone knows rich Jews helped finance the slave trade." Some commentators treated this not as demagogic simplification, but as a flat-out historical lie.

In late 1991, Farrakhan's Nation of Islam published "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews," quoting from the extensive research of Jewish historians to indict, in effect, today's Jews for everything from the ownership of South American sugar plantations three centuries ago to Jewish participation in the Confederate war effort. When a black professor at Wellesley College assigned the book to his introductory African-American history class, Jewish students protested and four national Jewish groups recommended the professor's job status be reviewed. Both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith have published rebuttals comparing "The Secret Relationship" to the most infamous works of antisemitic propaganda in the 20th century.

Some observers acknowledge that certain communities of Jews participated directly in black slavery--but in far smaller numbers than non-Jews among the Portuguese, Dutch, English and French, than Arabs, or than Africans themselves. To focus on the role of Jews, they say, is gratuitous at best, antisemitic at worst. But to a few critics, even mentioning Jews and the slave trade is hateful and bigoted. Jews were not significantly involved, they claim-contrary to the scholarly record, much of it compiled by historians who are Jewish.

"There wouldn't have been any slave trade at all," syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff told me, "if it had not been for the middlemen, the chiefs of certain African tribes, who had captured people from other tribes and enslaved them. It's important to say Africans have sold Africans. It's important to know that."

It is indeed important to understand all aspects of the history of slavery. For African-American people seeking to understand their place in the world, the history of slavery is as important as the history of the Holocaust for Jews. No element of a great tragedy is too small to be explored, particularly if it has been generally ignored.

Isn't it also important, I asked Hentoff, to know that Jews bought and sold Africans?

"If it's indeed the case, of course," Hentoff said, acknowledging that he is not a scholar on the subject. "If you can nail that down, of course it would be important to know that."

Most Americans, used to imagining slavery in terms of cotton fields and the Old South, don't realize that the transatlantic slave trade sent Africans primarily to South America and the islands of the West Indies. According to one well-regarded census, 9.6 million Africans arrived alive in the so-called "New World" from the 16th century through the 19th century. Of these, less than 5 percent, 427,000, were brought to what is now the United States. Nearly 4 million went to Brazil, the largest single devourer of African labor. There, the average life span of a slave was a few years.

Most Americans don't realize either that the transatlantic slave trade was driven by the sugar trade. Sugar cane was a scarce medicinal plant in medieval Europe. But when white colonizers started cultivating sugar in the fertile tropics of the Americas, it rapidly became a staple-and a great source of wealth for Europe's shipping and trading powers. This New World economy of sugar and slaves-of vast, labor-intensive plantations-began in earnest in Brazil during the 1500s, according to historians. The involvement of Jews in black slavery began there also.

-- Brazil. The Portuguese were the first to colonize Brazil, and Sephardic Jews from Portugal were among these early settlers. "In its early years," writes Seymour B. Liebman in "New World Jewry, 1493-1825," Brazil was built by Negro slaves (400,000 between 1570 and 1670) and the acumen, hard work and calculating perseverance of the Jews."

Some background is essential. The Sephardim-that is, the Jews of Spain and Portugal-had flourished for centuries in the Iberian peninsula. By 1497, they made up an estimated 20 percent of Portugal's population of 1 million. But that year, the king of Portugal compelled the Jews to convert to Christianity. (Spain had similarly forced its Jews to convert or flee five years earlier.) While many Jews left Portugal, others indeed were baptized and became "New Christians." Despite the church's persecution, some continued to practice Judaism in secret; they came to be known as "Marranos."

New Christians were drawn to Brazil, in part because it was far from the seat of the Inquisition, but also because the South American colony was a place where the Sephardim could apply their established expertise in trade and sugar cultivation. Soon a Sephardic community thrived in Brazil's pivotal port city of Recife. When the Dutch-then unique in Europe for their religious tolerance-took control of Brazil in 1630, the Marranos there were able to practice Judaism openly again.

During this time in Brazil, Jews owned a small percentage of the sugar plantations but were the predominant retailers of slaves in the colony, according to Arnold Wiznitzer's "Jews in Colonial Brazil." The shipping of Africans to Brazil was monopolized by the Dutch West India Company, which sold them "at public auctions against cash payment," Wiznitzer writes. "The buyers who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews." These brokers then sold slaves to plantation owners on credit. More than 23,000 Africans were shipped to Brazil between 1636 to 1645, Wiznitzer says, a period when perhaps half of the 3,000 white civilians living there were Jews.

-- The British and French West Indies. In 1654, the Portuguese recaptured Brazil, chasing the Dutch and the Sephardim out--an event that would affect the destiny of Jews and Africans in the New World.

While many of Brazil's Jews headed for the freedom of the Netherlands, some Sephardic traders were "eager to remain in the West Indies," according to a history of colonial Jewry by Jacob Rader Marcus, longtime director of the American Jewish Archives. Some "fled to French Martinique and Guadeloupe, others to Jamaica and to English Barbados, where they furthered the sugar industry and the Negro slave economy which it created," Marcus writes.

The Jewish refugees from Brazil, as University of Kansas economic historian Richard B. Sheridan has pointed out, "were masters of sugar technology and taught the English the art of sugar making." The sugar colonies of Barbados and Jamaica grew to become jewels of the British empire during the 1700s. An estimated 1.1 million Africans were shipped to these islands over the entire course of the slave trade.

The Jewish traders were not the main beneficiaries of this economic boom, however. One British historian notes: "Most Jews in Barbados and Jamaica in the 18th century were small men, shopkeepers....The sugar trade became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the sugar-planters' agents in London, a restricted and confined circle. [Jews] did not participate." The role of Jewish traders was apparently limited, during the early 1700s, to the sale of "great numbers of 'refuse' Negroes (sickly slaves)," according to Stephen Alexander Fortune's "Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650-1750." These Africans, bought cheaply, were resold "at considerable profit" once healthy.

The role of Jewish merchants in the slave economy of Martinique and Guadeloupe was eventually restricted as well. Initially, "the Sephardi emigres from Brazil...engage[d] both in plantation agriculture and trade, exporting sugar and tobacco to Europe and importing slaves and cloth," according to Jonathan Israel's history, "European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550-1750." The Catholic French, however, ordered the expulsion of all Jews from these islands in 1685, thus virtually ending their role in the trade.

-- The Dutch Colonies. The Jewish and Dutch refugees from Brazil also landed in Suriname in the late 17th century, establishing it as a sugar colony. This small piece of South America, as Harvard University historian Eugene Genovese has noted, would be the one and only place where Jews constituted a substantial planter class. Genovese cited one scholar's finding that 115 of Suriname's 400 sugar estates in 1730 were owned by Jews.

The island of Curaçao, a pivotal Dutch distribution center off the coast of Venezuela, was the site of the largest Jewish settlement in the New World. The Sephardic community there numbered almost 2,000 by the mid-1700s, constituting about half of the white population. Curaçao's Jews "prospered early through shipping and slave-trading," writes David Lowenthal in "West Indian Societies." Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, historians of Curaçaoan Jewry, report that "[a]lmost every Jew bought from one to nine slaves for his personal use or for eventual resale." Later, Curaçaoan Jews became, as Stephen Fortune writes, "the predominant insurance underwriters for ships plying the Caribbean"--including slave ships.

Under the auspices of the Dutch, Sephardic Jews also had a direct hand in wholesale slaving. As Arnold Wiznitzer has pointed out, Jews in Amsterdam owned as much as 10 percent of the stock in the Dutch West India Company, the great slave-shipping enterprise that helped launch the Netherlands to international commercial prominence during the 1600s. But the French and English monopoly trading companies, which eventually dominated the shipping of Africans to New World colonies, excluded Jews from that level of the trade.

-- Colonial North America. The far-flung Sephardic "trade diaspora" in the Caribbean led ultimately to the founding of Jewish communities in North America. Before the Revolutionary War, the largest settlement of Jews in the colonies-perhaps as many as 1,000 by 1760-was in the bustling port city of Newport, R.I. Aaron Lopez, formerly a Marrano in Portugal, laid the first cornerstone of the Newport congregation's synagogue in 1759. (The building is now a historic site, the oldest synagogue in the United States.) Lopez later became a shipper of legendary prosperity. Black slaves were among his cargoes, as his biographer, Stanley F. Chyet, has noted.

Gentiles, however, overwhelmingly controlled the slaving business in colonial America. Rhode Island's Sephardic merchant-shippers were known mainly for their prominence in the business of selling oil from sperm whales used in candlemaking.

So the real history of the participation of Jewish merchants in the slave trade is a lot more complex than Leonard Jeffries suggested with his line, "Everyone knows rich Jews helped finance the slave trade." Jeffries is clearly misusing historical facts to serve his animus against Jews today.

At the same time, a number of Jeffries' harsh critics have assumed that Jews had nothing to do with black slavery, or next to nothing. They said so publicly, and without qualification, during the Jeffries controversy.

Jonathan Yardley wrote in The Washington Post that Jeffries, on this point, had "turned history upside down." When I asked him what part Jews did have in trafficking Africans, Yardley (a self-described WASP) didn't know but said it would have been "relatively minor."

A.M. Rosenthal of the New York Times wrote that Jeffries "says in a public forum that the Jews financed the slave trade. That is not quite the equivalent of [the accusation] Christ-killer, but coming close, make no mistake." I asked Rosenthal too what actual role Jews played in black slavery. "There was none," he replied. "Except for the most peripheral way. If at all."

Jim Sleeper of the New York Daily News said he talked to four scholars before concluding, as he wrote in a critique of Jeffries for the Nation, that Jews merely had a "marginal" involvement in the slave trade.

How about in Brazil? I asked him.

"They would have had an extremely marginal, extremely minor role," Sleeper told me. Did Jews own sugar plantations? "I don't know." Sleeper finally acknowledged, "I don't know anything about Brazil."

Why are so many people ignorant of such a well-documented point of history? One reason is that popular histories of New World slavery tend to omit any mention of Sephardic Jews while cataloging the activities of many other ethnic communities. In "The Rise and Fall of Black Slavery," C. Duncan Rice mentions the "Dutch refugees" who established the sugar industry in Barbados, and the "planters of Dutch Surinam" who, "with characteristic Flemish practicality," started up a sugar colony with a full force of black slaves. But he does not mention the Portuguese Jews among these Dutch. James A. Rawley's "The Transatlantic Slave Trade" has not a single mention over the course of 452 pages of the involvement of Sephardic Jews.

The holes in the popular record have led to misunderstanding. In a 1991 article in the Jewish monthly Midstream, headlined "An Old/New Libel: Jews in the Slave Trade," historian Saul Friedman noted that "Jews are remarkably absent from major texts" on New World slavery and cited seven history books by name. For Friedman, this constitutes proof that the role of Jews was negligible. Actually, he merely demonstrates the inadequacies of such "major texts."

It is necessary to consider this vacuum of common knowledge when analyzing how some blacks are trying to make political hay out of this complex history. If the popular record weren't incomplete-that is, if everyone already knew that Sephardic merchants and planters had played a small but significant role in the New World slave trade-there would be no "secret" relationship for Leonard Jeffries and Louis Farrakhan to exploit.

---

Response by Washington Post Ombudsman,
Joann Byrd

The Washington Post, October 31, 1993, Sunday, Final Edition

The Timing Of News

When a painful, volatile issue is made worse by disinformation and misinformation, maybe it does fall to a newspaper to make sure all sides start from the same facts.

And that was the goal of "Half-Truths and History: The Debate Over Jews and Slavery," which appeared two weeks ago in Outlook. But this time at least, it's not so simple as that.

Post Style reporter David Mills said last week that he wanted his essay to report the historical facts that "many otherwise well-educated people don't know. The fact that they don't know this is distorting the current political discussion."

The current political discussion being the argument that arose after the Nation of Islam and Leonard Jeffries, a City College of New York professor, claimed in 1991 that Jews were heavily involved in the New World slave trade.

The Outlook article's starting point was that it is not true that Jews were disproportionately involved, but it's also inaccurate to say Jews had no role whatever.

The piece acted as a truth squad, checking the facts of Jeffries' claims, the Nation of Islam book "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews" and the commentators who condemned those distortions but got it wrong themselves. It cited a list of historians to show that Sephardic Jews played "a small but significant role in the New World slave trade." Many Jews and intellectuals have long acknowledged this; a lot of the rest of us didn't know much about it.

Two problems with the Outlook piece invited the criticism it has received:

There is no fresh news on this debate. If this piece had been published two years ago, its existence might have made sense to readers: The Nation of Islam book and Mr. Jeffries' comments were then in the daily news report; the author aimed to provide reliable information readers could use to evaluate what they saw elsewhere in the paper.

But the essay gave no newer news peg than the 1991 controversies. So it looked to readers like a political statement, an out-of-the-blue declaration that Jews were involved in the slave trade.

So critics may have missed the intent and the content while speculating on what motivated the writer and editors to put this in The Post. They called it divisive, antagonistic, antisemitic or, at least, suspicious.

Mr. Mills is correct when he responds: There is no "good" time to run this essay. Two years ago, amid news, The Post would have been perceived as joining the fight; "when there's no news, it looks like you're picking a fight," he notes.

(Mr. Mills did write a draft in 1991, and if it had run then, it might well have seemed designed to defend the extremists. He offered the piece again this summer when Mr. Jeffries was back in the news, being reinstated to head CCNY black studies. It took months of internal debate and editing to get the piece in the paper.)

The other objection is this: The piece gave too much regard to an isolated slice of a much larger and tangled history. In focusing on the role of Jews (and not, say, on the role of left-handers) it seemed to imply the extremists' position is both relevant and worth serious attention. (Mr. Mills responds, figuratively and accurately, that no one has publicly brought up the role of left-handed people.)

For Outlook editor Jodie Allen, there's value in setting down the reliable record: "Maybe we can get beyond this if the facts are known."

All of this asks a larger and difficult question: Was there a way to report what's true without aiding and abetting hate?

My bias says, always, that newspapers are in the information business, and what's usually needed is more reporting and more context.

Even two years late, the paper could have reported this with less risk of fueling hostilities and without readers being distracted by wondering what The Post was up to. The paper could have added the rest of the story.

Picture a companion report outlining the whole slave trade, maybe excerpts from an authoritative history (or two or three). The overview, I think, would detail how individuals of just about every religion, race and nationality were a part of this sorrowful disgrace.

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