The Jewish Run Slave Trade

by lizardking Tue Feb 02, 2016 2:41 am

The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Part I)

“In war, truth is the first casualty”—Aeschylus, Greek dramatist

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“Skip” Gates

The issue of slavery, without a doubt, has continued to play an important role in historical discussion. It is also one of those issues that has carried a lot of emotional baggage.

Yet in any historical and rational discussion, it is important to make truth our guide rather than ideology or personal bias.

Last month, Henry Louis Gates of Harvard finally came out and declared that some blacks did own slaves in the seventeenth century in America.

Gates writes that they “did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War.”[1]

Building on the work of Carter G. Woodson, Gates continues to say that in 1830, “about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free.

Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people.”[2] As we shall see in subsequent articles, this is not a recent discovery, but it took Gates years to come out and say it.

In other words, it is meaningless for popular historians such as John Hope Franklin to talk about slavery on a wide scale while denying that slavery was also “institutionalized” in some instances by blacks.

With all our modern emphasis on the historical slavery of Africans by Europeans, it never occurs to some that Africans might be just as involved in the slave trade. Moreover, historical studies show that African slavery of Europeans was much bigger in scope than previously taught.[3]

For example, between 1500 and 1800, pirates from North Africa’s Barbary Coast captured and sold more European slaves than there were African slaves being transported to the American colonies. Even after the United States abolished slavery, some Muslim countries were still in the business of buying European slaves.[4]

More importantly, the abolition of slavery was exclusively a European enterprise, spurred on by a radically Christian spirit.[5]

In fact, anti-slavery sentiment has been in existence in Christian circles since the infancy of Christianity, particularly after the decline of the Roman Empire.[6] And it was European Christians who established schools for former slaves after the abolition of slavery in America, reasoning that in the Christian scheme of things, blacks had as much redemptive purpose as they themselves did.

By contrast, many African countries did not want to end the slave trade because it brought immense monetary gain. Historian John Thornton notes that

“slavery was widespread in Atlantic Africa because slaves were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law. By contrast, in European legal systems, land was the primary form of revenue-producing property, and slavery was relatively minor.”[7]

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Whippings were a standard punishment for generations

Abolishing slavery in Africawas in a sense a declaration of war, for it would force Africa to come up with a wholly different revenue-producing property.

Since I will be addressing the European slave trade in more depth in a future article, let me just summarize the main points here, as the issue of slavery intersects with the issue of truth.

Once Europe adopted the essentially theological idea that all men are created in God’s image and saw that slavery was incompatible with that central teachings of Christianity, then slavery had to go, no matter the cost.

Although some Christians of the era did try to find proof texts to maintain the position that slavery was compatible with Scripture, their presupposed proof-texts simply could not stand up to in-depth scrutiny.

As we shall see in the summer, sola sciptura had some political and messianic ring to it, particularly during the rise of Zionism at the end of the 18th century.

In their quest to end slavery, the British went so far as to use military force in order to stop slave ships from continuing to traffic souls, even entering Brazilian waters to destroy Brazilian slave ships and threatening the Ottoman Empire with war if they did not boycott the African slave trade.

Yet, although the abolition of slavery was an exclusively Western development, spearheaded primarily by Christians—and although African nations had been deeply involved in the slave trade centuries before it reached Europe and America—somehow slavery in modern times has become an evil peculiar to Western civilization![8] This shows yet another kind of willful blindness.

In order to justify a bias against Western civilization, some historians transfer the lion’s share of the guilt for worldwide historical slavery to the very people who fought to put an end to it!

Yet their argument falls apart the moment we look with any depth at the international record of slavery. The fact is that slavery not only existed for centuries in lands such as Southeast Asia and Africa and the Middle East, but was far more prevalent in other countries than is commonly believed.[9] Slavery was even widespread among the Northwestern Coastal Indians.[10]

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The Slave Market – Gustave Rudolphe

In general, “institutionalized” slavery was practiced in virtually every continent and in every era; it is a human failing, not a Western one. Throughout history:

• Africans enslaved other Africans

• Europeans enslaved other Europeans

• Africans enslaved Europeans

• Europeans enslaved Africans[11]

• Vikings enslaved Europeans

• Mongolians enslaved Europeans

• Egyptians and Turks enslaved Greeks and Romans

• Greeks and Romans enslaved Germanic peoples

• Asians enslaved other Asians

• American Indians enslaved other Indians

• Europeans enslaved Christians[12]

• Muslims enslaved Christians[13]

• and on and on it goes.

Yet Western civilization has taken an unfortunate hit by intellectuals and popular historians of various stripes who not only focus solely on the slavery perpetuated by Western civilization, but who argue that the abolition of slavery, which makes the West unique and essential in proclaiming freedom, was motivated purely by economic interests.[14]

But the reason I found the real history of slavery to be disturbing was because it did not align with what I had sincerely believed for years. British journalist and historian Guy Walters, who has written about World War II, says,

“I have found the truth to be far more satisfying than what has been served up by junk historians in print and online. I have also found the truth to be utterly scandalous, and on numerous occasions I have felt genuine anger at what I have discovered.”[15]

To a certain extent this describes my reaction to the facts I uncovered in my over ten years of research, most particularly with respect to the slavery issue, which always carries emotional feelings.

Guy Walters

After much study and reflection on the historical record, I was faced with several choices.

I could reject what I had previously believed and embrace the truth, I could rearrange the evidence to downplay its significance.

I could even simply ignore the truth, acting as if it did not affect my perspective of history.

Since the latter two options were contrary to the spirit of honest truth-seeking I have tried to build my life around, the former choice was all that was left to me, distasteful though it may be.

Historian Christopher Behan McCullagh rightly argues that we cannot ignore historical truth because history itself “enables us to understand our social and cultural inheritance, our institutions, beliefs and artifacts, and it is vital that it be as accurate as possible.”[16]

John Adams once proclaimed,

“Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”[17]

If our wishes cannot alter the state of facts, then we would be better off allying ourselves with truth, rather than relying on imaginary evidence dressed up in academic terminology, which in the end will evaporate, leaving us nothing on which to stand.

We all know that truth is not always a pleasant thing, and on many occasions it has the potential to create conflict, since not everyone likes the truth.

But if the truth is divisive for a good cause—to help sift fact from fiction—so be it. Honest men and people of reason will ally themselves with the truth. But no matter where the truth may take a person—and although it may be offensive or politically incorrect—nothing else will make him free.

The sad part is that many in our own day deliberately love to attack the truth. If a statement does not line up with their preconceived notions or the politically correct opinions of the day, then they loudly reject it as false, accompanied in some cases by legal suits, media castigation (name-calling, after all, being one of the best ways to silence an opponent), or career-ending repercussions.

It does not matter if the statement is historically accurate; if it does not correspond to their ideological fashion, then it must be rejected out of hand, without rational, logical consideration.

Offense has become the catchphrase of the era, and more pains are taken to avoid offending people than are taken researching the truth. Sincere people will surely admit that at first the truth does not make them comfortable, but in the long run it makes them truly free.

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn

For me, embracing the truth about slavery turned out to be both liberating and intellectually fulfilling. It certainly was not easy at first, but embracing the truth is a path that any honest man should take.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Nobel laureate for literature in 1970, was perhaps one of the rarest minds of the twentieth century, and I highly esteem him. He was sent to the Gulag because he reported on the actions of the Red Army after they conquered certain territories.

Solzhenitsyn was tortured, stripped of human dignity, and ultimately became a committed Christian.

Later, he wrote about his experiences in his famous book The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn’s monumental study Two Hundred Years Together, which was a best-seller in Russia, has yet to be translated into English for ideological reasons.[18]

Solzhenitsyn said that the first step of a courageous man is to not deliberately take part in a lie. In other words, once our eyes are open to the truth (no matter who pronounces it), we should flee from falsehood whenever we find it because, once again, truth will free us from spiritual, intellectual, and political bondage.

Everyone who desires to be free will have to seek and find the truth with the data available to him or her—through science, history, logic, reason, and more importantly Logos.

Albert Camus

Unfortunately, those who claim to seek truth and justice often violate their own principles when truth and justice conflict with their ideology.

When Albert Camus was asked to explain why he remained silent during the French invasion of Algeria, he declared, “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother above justice.”[19]

In the next two articles, the reader is going to ask to put on his historical and thinking cap in order to examine the issues that will be raised.

Emotion, by the way, is not part of our thinking cap. While emotion can be a good virtue, if used properly, when it comes to truth, facts, and ultimate reality, emotion should take a back seat. Emotion can lead to double standards on some occasions.

For example, we have Holocaust museums in the Western world dedicated to those who have died in Nazi Germany, but we have not a single Holocaust museum dedicated to the peasants in Soviet Russia, to the Christians who were massacred during the Armenian genocide, to the Chinese who died in World War II, to the precious people who lost their lives in the Middle East, etc.

In other words, the Soviets, the Christians, the Armenian, the Chinese, the Iraqis, are just an afterthought in the Zionist scheme of things.

We also have Civil Rights museums.[20] How many museums do we have for the European people who got sold into slavery in Africa and other parts of the world?
By the way, the word slavery itself came from the Slav, and it found its place in our language precisely because the Slavic people were being sold into slavery by other Europeans for no less than six centuries.[21]

In order to be fair and honest, those issues need to be discussed rationally, historically, and with a love for the truth. And this is where we will pick up in the next two articles.

by lizardking Tue Feb 02, 2016 2:46 am

Jewish Slavery in Western Culture (Part II)

By Jonas E. Alexis on April 22, 2013

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“Live not by lies!”—Alexander Solzhenitsyn[1]

Editors Note: Dear readers, this is another fabulous article from a new VT staff writer Jonas Alexis. It is packed full of well researched and confirmed information from a variety of sources on a most complicated and misrepresented historical subject. The anchor for this piece was Hugh Thomas’ 900 page tome, The Slave Trade, 25 years in making, and 87 pages of source notes.

Preface: After writing the following essay, I asked a number of historians if they would be willing to read it and provide some comments. Many declined, but some were curious. I sent it to several individuals, but I never got a response from those who were interested in reading it.

I eventually asked one well-known courageous Jewish academic and prolific writer, who actually praised the essay and responded,

“[Jewish historian] Eli Faber told me that he was professionally destroyed by writing his book about Jewish participation in the slave system.”

This is not surprising, since Jewish historians such as Arno J. Mayer have received similar treatment. After writing Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, Mayer’s work was labeled “perverse,” and he was even accused of “engaging in a subtle form of Holocaust denial.”[2]

To all my Jewish brothers and friends out there: I wish to express that the following article is not intended to incite animosity toward you. I am on your side! …JA

_______________________________________

…by Jonas E. Alexis

Mortimer Adler

One of the greatest logicians in the last century is arguably Mortimer Adler, a prolific philosophical writer who served as chair of the board of editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and he happens to be one of this columnist’s favorite writers.[3] Adler eventually became a Christian at the end of his life. Many more could be cited here, but time constraints.

The following article was written primarily on the basis of historical account and the search for the truth.

From a geopolitical perspective, Alan Hart is right in pointing out that Zionism is the real enemy of the Jews, and I would add that it is the enemy of all mankind.

From a theological perspective, rejecting Logos has metaphysical implications, and those implications have historical and detrimental consequences.

We simply cannot afford to by-pass those consequences any longer. Now let us move on to the subject.

Despite the fact that slavery existed for millennia in every continent, popular opinion lays the blame for black slavery at the feet of Western civilization in general with little effort devoted to proving this theory with historical documentation.

Yet popular historians never care to tell us that a major factor in the continuance of the slave trade, from Roman times to the Civil War, was the involvement of Jewish businessmen. Jewish writer Chaim Bermant declared back in 1977 that

“It was the London Rothschilds who found the [20 million pounds] to compensate slave owners after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. In 1854 a [16 million pound] loan to finance the Crimean War was launched through the House of Rothschild, and in 1871 they raised [100 million pounds] to help France pay her war indemnity to Prussia.”[4]

Moreover, it is well established by the historical data that Jews played a significant role in the slave trade in the ancient Roman world,[5] and this painful chapter in human history has been acknowledged even by those who try to minimize the role Jews played in both ancient and modern slavery.[6]

Historian Jonathan Schorsch declares that many scholars try to dismiss or minimize this fact, but the evidence is quite clear. Schorsch himself maintains that the Jewish participation was at a minimal level.[7]

In the sixth century, Italy, the slave trade was quite profitable, and once again it was not without Jewish profiteers; in Spain for example, Jews more often than not garnered their wealth through the slave trade.[8]

Heinrich Graetz

Heinrich Graetz, arguably the father of modern Jewish historiography, writes that a sizeable portion of the Jews’ wealth around the 900s came from the transportation of slaves.[9] Graetz notes that even in the 700s, the Jews turned their attention to the slave trade.[10]

Historian Israel Abrahams agreed with Graetz on these accounts,[11] and historian Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht likewise concurred with these assessments.[12]

Nineteenth century historian Henry Hart Milman notes that “We have ample evidence that one great branch of commerce fell almost entirely into the hands of the Jews—the international slave-trade.”[13]

Historian James. A. Huie declared exactly the same thing.[14] That pattern continued even during first crusade, when the slave trade became an occupation for some Jews.[15] Solomon Grayzel tells us that in the Middle Ages,

“Jews were among the most important slave-dealers” to bring slaves from other places and sell them “to Christian and Mohammedan masters.”[16]

Even during the Ottoman Empire, Jews “took an active part” in the slave trade, owning Muslim slaves.[17]

Historians Albert S. Lindemann and Murray Friedman write that a small number of Jews were involved in the slave trade in the modern world,[18] but other historians such as Jacob Rader Marcus and Marc Lee Raphael declare that the number of Jews who were involved in the slave trade in the modern world were more than significant.[19]

Raphael goes so far as to say that “in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.”[20]

In a similar vein, Jewish historian Arnold Wiznitzer declares that by the middle of the seventeenth century in Brazil Jews “dominated the slave trade.”[21] They dominated the trade because Jews were always in the minority, and Jewish slave traders were “entirely out of proportion to their numbers.”[22] There were indeed a number of professing Christians who were trying to justify human slavery on a number of Biblical texts.

More importantly, those professing Christians were more often or not crypto-Jews or conversos who still wanted to build their heaven on earth through the slave trade and other venues. Celebrated historian John H. Elliott of Oxford declared:

Haitian Slavery

“New Christians, many of them covert Jews, had not only settled in Brazil but were also the dominant element among the Portuguese merchants who controlled the transatlantic slave trade, and they seized the opportunity offered by the union of the crowns to establish themselves in the Spanish American ports of Vera Cruz, Cartagena and Buenos Aires.
From here they infiltrated the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, where they became a significant presence, particularly in Lima…
“There were obvious scope for profitable commercial activity in the silver-rich viceroyalties, and for at least sixty years after 1580 they made an important contribution to Spanish American economic life, some of them simply as small traders, shopkeepers and artisans, but others as wealthy merchants.”[23]

“New Christians” were also involved in covert vices, such as “buying public offices, which they made use of so arrogantly that the Old Christians would not put up with it,” as one converso Diego de Valera put it.[24]

In 1492, Jews were expelled from Spain. Because of their covert activity, most particularly with respect to rapacious usury, they were given the choice of converting to Christianity or facing deportation. Many Jews, in order to remain in the land, became the “New Christians.”[25] A “New Christian” is simply a person who was “secretly professing the Jewish faith and not a sincere Christian.”[26]

There were however exceptions to this. Other “New Christians” seemed to have made a genuine move from Judaism to Christianity. People like Bartolome de las Casas appeared to have been sincere.[27]

He eventually wrote a brilliant piece of work defending the Indians.[28] Some “New Christians” followed their tradition covertly, and some did not. This was a complex issue.[29]

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Slaveryspan

There is enough evidence to show that there were enough “New Christians” who simply wanted to follow their old tradition. Historian Edward Kritzler writes that these people were also called “Esparandos, Hopeful Ones, who expected that the Messiah would soon come and that He, like them, would appear in the guise of a Christian and so forgive their apostasy.”[30]

More importantly, “As long as they pretended to be Christians and delivered the goods, no one questioned their religiosity too closely.”[31]

Many of those “New Christians” and the Sephardic Jews “found attractive opportunities in the trade and the cultivation of sugar. Their international network connections and strategic position in core areas of the sugar market in the commerce of Northern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula gave Sephardic Jews and New Christians an edge over their competitors.”[32]

Historian Dean Philip Bell declares that “They were engaged in all aspects of colonial trade.”[33] Schorsch writes that “slavery owning by elite Conversos in Spain and Portugal should not be underestimated, though of course these owners had obtained the privilege as Christians.”[34]

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The chains of historical truths are never broken

Crypto-Jews and New Christians existed in colonial Peru, Chile, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, etc. In 1636 in Recife, Brazil, Jews were making inroads in professions such as the sugar industry, tax farming, the slave trade, among other things.[35]

The estimation is that “by 1645 half of the 1,500 Europeans living in Dutch Brazil were Jews.”[36]

In order to be successful in the trade, many began smuggling illegally. Historian Adam Sutcliffe commented that “the early modern Sephardim were exemplary non-patriots, sustaining international commerce as well as their own complex cultural networks and identities, precisely because they remained aloof from theological divisions and political rivalries.”[37]

Many historians make no distinction between those “New Christians” and genuine ones, and blended them together as if they were the same.[38] But historians at least agree that there were indeed distinctions between those two.[39]

Yet in a book edited by Israeli historian Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, the blame for slave trade is largely laid at the feet of Christians! Ben-Sasson did not hesitate to write that the pagan Slavs were captured by Christians and sold to Jews who eventually “transported them to Islamic lands.”[40]

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Even the derivation of the word ‘slave’, from the early Slavic slaves, with beautiful women bringing the highest prices is unknown today.

Ignoring all the historical evidence that anti-slavery attitudes and movements have existed throughout Christian Europe, as we shall see in the next two articles, Ben-Sasson tells us that “the servitude of Christians to other Christians constituted the warp and woof of feudal Christian society.”[41]

Picking and choosing historical instances that best support his ideological hermeneutics, Ben-Sasson did not feel it necessary to tell us of the largely disproportionate number of Jews who were involved in the slave trade at all.

Eli Faber, who believes that the number of Jews who participated in the slave trade was small, writes that some Jews—primarily the “New Christians”—actually practiced Judaism secretly and professed to be Christians outwardly.[42] This of course intensified the spirit of anti-Jewish behaviors, and again they were hated for such activities.

Elliott declares that “they were disliked and distrusted in the Spanish territories, where opinion hardened against them in the 1620s and 1630s.” They were eventually viewed as traitors and usurpers and were eventually persecuted even in places such as Mexico, “where thirteen of them were burnt at the stake, and twenty-nine abjured.”[43]

Historian Cecil Roth, who writes page after page in The History of Marranos that Jews were persecuted but doesn’t give an explanation why, declares that from 1690 until 1722, Jews were known to be “the greatest slave-holders” in Surinam.[44] Raphael makes similar assertions.[45] Just one decade after they set their feet in Curacao, they “owned 80 percent” of the plantations there.[46]

Keep also in mind that the Jewish population has never exceeded five percent of any society they lived in. Because of this, many Jewish communities increased in wealth, from of the seventeenth century up to the eighteenth century, in the Dutch West Indies, in Brazil, in Portugues, in Barbados, etc.[47]

Bartolome de Las Casas

Moreover, slave trading Jews such as Isaac Da Costa of Charleston, David Franks of Philadelphia, Aaron Lopez of Newport, became increasingly wealthy.[48]

And by 1889, with the increasing number of “traders, brokers, bookkeepers, clerks, collectors, petty merchants, retailers, wholesalers,” Raphael tells us that “two-thirds of all the Jewish families in the United States had at least one servant!

Jews had clearly achieved a comfortable position in American society.”[49]

It was for a similar reason that historian William Thomas Walsh declared that Jews “had profited hugely on the sale of fellow-beings as slaves, and practiced usury as a matter of course, and flagrantly.”[50]

As such, “they would force Christian servants to be circumcised…and urged their debtors, sometimes, to abjure Christ.Again, Moses had condemned blasphemers to death.

Yet it was a custom of many Jews to blaspheme the Prophet for whom Moses had warned them to prepare.”[51]

Blacklisted by Popular Historians

Lindemann wrote that the fact that a number of Jews were in involved in the slave trade is even ignored by prominent Jewish historians such as Oscar Handlin, “while mentioning by name the ‘great Jewish merchants,’ who made fortunes in the slave trade.”[52]

Jewish historian Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht noted the same thing, that “The Jew as beneficiary of slavery is rarely mentioned by Jewish historians.”[53]

Influential Jewish historian Simon M. Dubnow wrote a two-volume work on the history of the Jewish people, and Jewish participation in the slave trade is not even mentioned, although he talks about slavery frequently.[54]

Herbert S. Klein, also avoids any mention of this issue in his study The Atlantic Slave Trade.

Instead, Klein declares, “While the arguments against the slave trade may have had a moral origin, they were also based on the interests of European workers and capitalists and not on any concern with the African slaves themselves. The institution and its trade might be unacceptable, but at least in the English campaign it was not fought in the name of equality for blacks.”[55]

Yet in the very next page, Klein cites “90,000 English-speaking Quakers” who began to revolt against the slave trade in the 1770s. A decade later, other Christian groups such as the Methodists and Protestants joined in the fight.[56]

Other historians of various stripes also tend to dismiss the issue altogether or discussed it briefly as if it is unimportant and unnecessary.

David Brion Davis

David Brion Davis, one of the leading authorities on the history of slavery in the Western World, does not even address this particular issue in his widely read study The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture,[57] and only made passing references to Jewish law in the Old Testament and other things in his study The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution.[58]

This is not uncommon for Davis to dismiss evidence and to pursue ideological purposes.[59] Other noted historians such as Ira Berlin, Kenneth Morgan, Stephanie E. Smallwood, do not mention this at all.[60] This has been a consistent pattern among many other historians.[61]

Historian Patrick Manning of the University of Pittsburgh concludes his book Slavery and African Life by saying, “For the case of African slaves, in turn, one may argue that the response to their sacrifice is to honor their memory and thereby ensure that no such sacrifice will be made again.”[62]

The sad part is that throughout the entire book Manning never discusses the Jewish participation in the slave trades. Manning has an entire chapter entitled “The End of Slavery,” but he never mentions the influence of Christianity in abolishing the slave trade.

Eugene D. Genovese, a widely read scholar of slavery in the South, also avoids mentioning either fact.[63] Historian Bernard Bailyn slightly makes reference to a “close-woven network of enterprising Sephardic Jews with connections throughout the Atlantic world” in the eighteenth century in South America which constituted the “inner core” Atlantic trade.[64]

Historian Thomas Benjamin for example mentions that Surinam attracted, among other groups, a number of English Jews in the 1600s, stating that

“The formation of Brazil in the early and mid-sixteenth century depended upon the partnerships of Portuguese men and native women. The first Portuguese colonizers, for the most part, were outcasts and castaways, degredados, shipwrecked sailors, crypto-Jews and other textiles”; that “Jews became some of the sugar planting elite in Permambuco,” Brazil, but that “the majority of colonists were seeking opportunity and wealth…”[65]

But Benjamin never discussed the Jewish connection to the slave trade. We see similar methodology in the writing of Barbara L. Solow.[66]

Some historians perhaps dismiss this body of scholarship ignorantly,[67] others do not. To those who have intentionally ignored it demonstrate both cowardice and misapplication of actual historical tragedies which should never be repeated.

Hugh Thomas

In his study of the Atlantic slave trade, historian Hugh Thomas for example only cites two Jews “known to me” as slave traders in the Anglo-Saxon traffic.[68]

Thomas is not a bad historian. But here he is willingly ignorant, for one cannot escape names such as Aaron Lopez, Jacob R. Rivera, Isaac Elizer, Samuel Moses, Simon the Jew, Nathan Simon, Franks, Pacheco, Gomez, Levy, The Davis family of Petersburg and Richmond, Manuel Jacob Monsanto of New Orleans, Solomon Cohen of Atlanta, B. Mordecai of Charleston, J. F. Moses of Lumpkin, Georgia, Abraham Smith, among others, all of whom “made their living from the Trade.”[69]

Jewish historian Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht for example talked about “a disproportionately large number of Jews” as “slave owners” and “a disproportionately large number of Jewish merchants sold slaves as they would any other goods. Several of these merchants were prominent in their communities: an acting rabbi, the president of a congregation.”[70]

Jacob R. Rivera was the fourth leading slave owner in New Port, Rhode Island; Lopez was the wealthiest and “the most prominent slave trader in the city that dominated the business in British North America.”[71]

James A. Rawley, who does not discuss the Jewish slave trade extensively in The Transatlantic Slave Trade, declares that Lopez in particular “stood in the forefront of Newport slave merchants.”[72]

Historian Willima Pencat notes that Lopez was not the only Newport Jews to invest in the slave trade; Isaac and Moses Elizer, Naphtali Hart Jr., Moses Levy, had their own slave ships.
Pencat however believed that Newport Jews were considered to be a small part of the trade and declared that “The canard that the slave trade was primarily Jewish is a lie fostered by the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam.”[73]

The issue of ideology supplanting historical truth among historians is clearly illustrated in a 1978 University of Chicago lecture given by the noted historian John Hope Franklin about Jewish communities in the nineteenth century, focusing on the southern part of the United States.

One of the questions addressed to Franklin at the end of his lecture revolved around Jewish participation in the slave trade. Franklin declared that he did not know much about the issue and therefore could not comment.

Jewish historian Ralph A. Austen, who had attended, commented later:

John Hope Franklin

“John Hope Franklin and I were both aware that Sephardic Jews in the New World had been heavily involved in the African slave trade.
Why did two professional historians in a university setting hesitate to provide our colleagues with such an important piece of information?
I cannot answer for Franklin but I, as a Jew sitting in a Jewish institution that was entertaining an African-American guest, felt that pointing out the role of Jews in the history of Black slavery would, in this context, have constituted something of a betrayal.
“I did not want to undermine the sense of solidarity between the two communities which had been reinforced by Franklin’s very presence, as well as through his references to our confrontation with white Gentile Southern bigots.
Franklin and I were condoning a benign historical myth: that the shared liberal agenda of twentieth-century Blacks and Jews has a pedigree going back through the entire remembered past.”[74]

While Franklin consciously hides the truth, he irrationally blames Christianity for the slave trade:

“It was a strange religion, this Christianity, which taught equality and brotherhood and at the same time introduced on a large scale the practice of tearing people from their homes and transporting them to a distant land to become slaves.”[75]

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In his widely read textbook From Slavery to Freedom, Franklin ignores the true role Christians played in abolishing slavery and makes vague references to some Christians who opposed it.

He is not the only one to do so. While laying the blame of the Atlantic slave trade on European Christians in general and Protestantism in particular, historian Carla Gardina Pestana does not even find it relevant to discuss the preponderance of Jews who were in the slave trade.[76]

On one level, it is perhaps understandable why those historians dismiss the subject of Jewish participation in the slave trade, for the connotations to anti-Semitism are strong, thanks to a work the radical black group Nation of Islam published a few years ago. In the book, entitled The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, they charged Jews with having a major hand in slavery.

To avoid being classed as an ally of this radical group, many historians quickly down-played any Jewish involvement. David Brion Davis implied that it was simply an accident that a small number of Jews happened to participate in the slave trade.[77]

Ralph Austen stated that although serious students of history knew that Jews had indeed played a major part in the slave trade, scholars like himself did not want the truth to be known outside of scholarly literature.[78]

Austen writes, “the anti-Semitic character of The Secret Relationship emerges not from its substantive content—which seems fairly accurate—or even the aurora of conspiracy conveyed by its title.”[79] What bothers Austen is that the book portrays Jews as a “uniquely greedy and untrustworthy population.”[80]

Django Unchained vs. Historical Truth

Django

Thus far, we have seen that the issue of slavery is not as black and white as many Hollywood movies have tried to portray for years.

More recently, Django Unchained has delivered the message to multiplied millions of viewers that slavery can only be placed at the feet of ignorant European Christians—with the Bible on one hand and a whip on the other.

Jamie Foxx told the L.A. Times before the movie hit theaters worldwide:

“This actually gives us an opportunity to entertain and to educate people that are wondering what slavery is about. Young kids, black and white, but especially black kids, they don’t know about slavery today. So before the movie comes out, I hope we can talk about what happened in this country. I think we are grown enough to do it now.”[81]

Yes, we need to talk about this historically. But you cannot educate young kids when you are hiding the actual truth from them. What Foxx implicitly ends up saying is that we only have to learn about slavery through Hollywood propaganda.

We need to close all the historical accounts and watch Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained to be enlightened. Foxx could have had the answer to his dilemma if he simply crack-opens any serious book on the masters of the slave trade in the nineteenth century.

In the end, what Foxx calls “education” is in reality a form of manipulation. He and the Hollywood industry are brainwashing young kids and implanting deep-seated hatred in the culture toward Europeans, the very people who largely gave their lives for the abolition of slavery.

This is simply not fair and every decent individual–Jews, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, theists, etc.–must resent this madness. We all need to get in this fight against this evil which continues to rise and which seems to have no end.

by lizardking Tue Feb 02, 2016 2:52 am

Jewish Slavery in Western Culture (Part III)

“We need to read about the past in order to understand the present. People without a grasp of history are like a person without a memory. Many of the current beliefs in our society are properly grasped only when we see how they have emerged. A knowledge of history will help us to understand better both ourselves and those with whom we might disagree.” — Historian Tony Lane [1]

…by Jonas E. Alexis

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Tony-lane-e1368367623617

Historian Tony Lane

Eli Faber declares that “When compared with their non-Jewish contemporaries, [the Jews’] involvement [in the slave trade] was one that had little impact.”[2]Here Faber was in denial.

At the same time, he goes on the following pages to argue that to deny the Jewish participation in the slave trade is not a historically reliable position, for there were too many examples of that.[3] Yet even admitting this small dose of truth cost Faber his academic career.

Saul S. Friedman certainly could not deny that many Jews were involved in the slave trade, but he writes, “Any trace of Jewish ancestry is sufficient for an individual to be identified as a Jew and an oppressor. It is a familiar and illegitimate practice of anti-Semites.”[4]

What Friedman fails to explain is that Jews were involved in the business for centuries, and that this could hardly be an accident. Friedman simply cannot be a serious scholar and should not be taken seriously here.

Friedman insinuates that the Talmud actually discourages slavery and quotes Salo Baron to the effect that “A whole system of law was evolved to eliminate every conceivable abuse [of slavery] and, finally, to abolish the entire institution.”[5]To abolish the entire institution?

With all due respect to Friedman, this is complete nonsense. Why was it that, as we shall see in a moment, rabbinic Judaism resisted the abolition of slavery even in the nineteenth century? And why is it that Friedman does not tell us the particular passages of the Talmud which lays out this abolition plan?

Moreover, why doesn’t Friedman tell us other passages of the Talmud which exegetically declares that Christ, Balaam, and Titus are burning in hell in excrement?[6]

Friedman is simply a joke, and his attempt to refute Werner Sombart’s Jews and Modern Capitalism is reprehensible. He writes that “The Rothschilds hardly represented the Jews of their own age…”[7] (We will come back to the Rothschilds in the summer.)

Jews who were involved in the slave trade were largely from the South of the United States, most specifically from Charleston (formerly Charles Town). Jewish historian Howard M. Sachar writes,

“A major producer of rice and indigo, a gateway to the West Indian trade, the town by the late eighteenth century encompassed a mixed community of two hundred Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, the second largest Jewish community in North America. Most were small tradesmen, but among them also appeared plantation owners, slave dealers, and importer-exporters.”[8]
Therefore, “Given this history, it is perhaps not surprising that in the United States, Jews in the South were typically reluctant participants in the civil rights movement…Though there were some exceptions, the vast majority of Southern Jews did not involve themselves in the civil rights movement even after the struggle intensified in the 1950s and 1960s.”[9]

Howard M. Sachar

The question, then, is this: Why was there a cadre of Jews in the civil rights movement during the 1960s? Were they really trying to help the blacks? We shall return to this point in the summer.

Jews like Isaiah who had thirty-five slaves and Moses and Judah P. Benjamin who had one hundred forty “were ready during the Civil War to defend it to the death.”[10]

As a result, there was “No ‘special relationship’ between blacks and Jews, no universalist ethic, led Jews, North or South, to challenge this violation of human rights.”[11]

It is with pain that Jewish historian Solomon Grayzel writes:

“Some Jewish residents in the South refrained from slave-holding, and others, like Judah Touro, took care to free their slaves. But the majority of southern Jews had become so much a part of the prevailing social and economic system that there was little distinction between them and their Christian neighbors.”[12]

As examples, Grayzel mentions Senator David Yulee of Florida who had a plantation and defended the slave system, and Rabbi Morris J. Raphall of New York, who wrote sermons arguing that “slavery was an institution blessed by God.”[13]According to Raphall, not only was this institution blessed by God, but its abolition is tantamount to blasphemy.[14]

Isaac M. Wise

Rabbi Isaac M. Wise also attacked the abolition movement, which he saw as a purely Christian enterprise:

“Who in the world could act worse, more extravagant and reckless in this crisis than Protestant priests did?…The Protestant priests threw the firebrand of abolitionism into the very heart of this country…You know who made the Jefferson Davis and the rebellion? The priests did, and their whinners and howlers in the press.”[15]

During the Civil War era, “Jews who would not advocate equal right for blacks demanded equal treatment before the law for themselves. Protestants who wanted equal rights for slaves would deny them to Jews.”[16]

Grayzel writes that “The majority of Jews and the majority of rabbis were unmistakably opposed to human slavery.”[17] Grayzel mentions Rabbi David Einhorn, Michael Heilprin, and Sabato Morais as examples.[18]

It is true that some rabbis and Jews opposed slavery, but to say that the vast majority of them did oppose it, as we shall see, is an exaggeration.

Sachar, while acknowledging that some Jews actually opposed slavery, noted that “militant abolitionism was not characteristic of the Jewish majority.”[19]

When rabbi Einhorn for example preached sermons against slavery, “a secessionist mob eventually destroyed his congregational newspaper and forced him to leave town.”[20]

At the same time, rabbi Isaac M. Wise would use words such as “fanatics,” “demagogues,” “radicals,” and even “red Republicans and atheists” to describe the abolitionists. Likewise, rabbi Morris Raphall of New York would use the Old Testament to rationalize slavery.[21]

Therefore, it would hardly be a surprise to notice that Jews from the South—most specifically in South Carolina, which one historian declares to be “the home to the largest Jewish community in the United States at one time”—contributed next to nothing to the abolition of slavery.[22]

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Slaveryspan-e1368368448972

Sachar writes that there is not a single record “of any Southern rabbi expressing criticism of slavery. Several of them also owned slaves.”[23]

In the process of time, however, numerous Jews ended up freeing their slaves out of good will. Isaiah Isaacs for example ended up freeing his slaves in 1806.[24]

At the same time, many other Jews were cruel to their slaves. For example, “In 1798, Polly, a mulatto, was tried for taking two dollars’ worth of white sugar from Benjamin Solomon’s home. She received five lashes and her left hand was branded.”[25]

In 1800, Joseph Darmstadt likewise gave his slave David Clayton 39 lashes for stealing 50 shillings’ worth of beeswax.[26]

After emancipation, Southern Jews like Solomon Cohen saw that slavery was indeed somewhat profitable. Friedman tells us that Cohen, though he “lost a son fighting for the Confederacy…never yielded on the slavery issue.”

Cohen wrote, “I believe that the institution [slavery] was refining and civilizing to the whites, giving them an elevation of sentiment and ease and dignity of manners only attainable in societies under the restraining influence of a privileged class and, at the same time, the only human institution that could elevate the Negro from barbarism and develop the small amount of intellect with which he is endowed.”[27]

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Brazilslavery

Death rates for slaves outside of America were very high, as in Brazil. Raising slave children was not considered a worthwhile investment.

Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who was of “of generally liberal sentiment and active in Reform Judaism,” actively and “energetically defended Black slavery.”

Having called Blacks “savages” and “beasts of burden,” Wise, who perhaps realized that blacks would eventually be free if the North prevailed, was a staunch opponent of Abraham Lincoln. Wise referred to Lincoln as an “imbecile.”[28] Many Northern Jews, however, supported Lincoln.[29]

The issue of slavery was completely different in the South. Sachar tells us that “even Jews who did not own slaves saw little to criticize in the ‘peculiar institution.’ Isaac Harby, a Charleston journalist and playwright (a pioneer advocate of reform in Jewish synagogue practices), lashed out against ‘the abolitionist society and its secret branches.’

Jacob N. Cardozo, editor and political economist, insisted that ‘slavery brought not only great wealth to the South, but to the slaves a greater share of its enojoyment than in many regions where the relation between employer and employee was based on wages.’”[30] Edwin De Leon likewise wrote prolifically defending slavery.[31]

Sachar writes that “The South’s four million black slaves were the Jews’ lightening rod. Indeed, possibly a quarter of the region’s fifteen or twenty thousand Jews were themselves slave owners. Some Jews even were professional slave dealers.”[32]

Harriet Beecher Stowe, quoting a letter from Gamaliel Bailey that made reference to the Davis family of Petersburg, Virginia, noted that some blacks were being treated like cattle. She wrote:

“The Davises…are the great slave-traders. They are Jews [who] came to that place many years ago as poor peddlers…These men are always in the market, giving the highest price for slaves. During the summer and fall they buy them up at low prices, trim, shave, wash them, fatten them so that they may look sleek, and sell them to great profit.”[33]

Albert S. Lindemann

Apart from the issues slavery brought up, there was an underlying prejudice against blacks throughout the South, a prejudice the Jewish population embraced. For example, in 1896 The Jewish South had an editorial which read in part that

“Twenty-five years of education resulted in making the colored women more immoral and the men more trifling…”[34]

Lindemann notes that “There are even examples of Jewish participation in the Ku Klux Klan,”[35]such as one of leading Jewish financiers Bernard Baruch.[36]

In 1906, “a Jewish member of the Carnegie Library Board in Atlanta, Georgia, voted with the majority to reject a petition to admit Blacks to the library. These were not isolated incidents.”[37]

For many Jews like Jacob N. Cardozo, this prejudice was religiously based, and the Talmud was commonly relied upon to defend slavery. Therefore, “there was not a single abolitionist among the Jews of the South.”[38]

Jacob Rader Marcus writes that “Jews in the South knew full well that there was a slave problem, but like the people about them, they did nothing to come to grips with this evil.”[39]
For example, “Rachel Mordecai Lazarus was fully aware of the evils of slavery, but, after a fashion, defended this institution in her correspondence with Maria Edgeworth. Rachel contended that the black under chattel slavery was no worse off than the European who suffered under wage slavery.”[40]

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Kaplan-Collection-Benjamin2-e1368369300621-272x320

Judah P. Benjamin – Secretary of the Treasury, CSA

When Rabbi David Einhorn criticized slavery as an evil institution, he had to flee to Philadelphia with his family in order to escape mob violence.[41] The Jewish voice in defense of slavery certainly was too strong.

When Daniel Webster argued against slavery, it was Judah P. Benjamin, a Senator from Louisiana, who defended it.[42]

For those reasons, many blacks in the South had negative perceptions of Jews, and one journalist declared in 1946 that many blacks in the South had a “grim satisfaction from the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

They contend that their local Jews have been indistinguishable from the ‘crackers’ in their attitude toward Negroes.”[43]

Anti-Jewish resistance became a serious issue during the Civil War era. Many Jews were singled out as “extortionists, counterfeiters, blockade-runners.”[44] In Richmond, Virginia, a historian by the name of J.B. Jones, who had made close Jewish friends, wrote that “illicit trade has depleted the country and placed us at the feet of Jew extortioners.”[45]

A magazine named Southern Punch noted, “Who are our opponents at the present time?…The dirty greasy Jew peddler [sic] who might be seen, with a pack on his back, a year or two since, bowing and cringing even to the Negro servants, now struts by with the air of a millionaire.”

The Richmond Examiner pronounced similar charges, saying in part that “Every auction room is packed with greasy Jews…”[46]

The Examiner retracted from their statement because they made no distinction between native Jews and immigrant Jews, but the anti-Jewish spirit was still there.

In 1862, as the Union Army was closing in, “rumors circulated that traders were passing counterfeit money. Soon the culprits were deemed to be the three resident Jewish families, as well as occasional itinerant Jewish traders. A mob of irate citizens then passed a ‘resolution’ giving the local Jews ten days’ notice of expulsion.”[47]

Many Northern Jews were singled out as well. James Gordon Bennett of the New York Tribune identified them as “speculators in gold…engaged in destroying the national credit…speculating in disasters.”[48]

As is to be expected, there were exceptions to the prevalent Jewish-black prejudice, cases where Jews acted out of charity, compassion, and genuine love for their slaves. Jacob Rader Marcus notes that “some bondsmen were emancipated during the lifetime of the master, or by testament, as a reward for loyal service, for care during illness, for friendship and devotion.”[49]

Some Negroes “were to be accorded many of the courtesies enjoyed by freedmen and freed women. Jacob I. Cohen and Isaiah Isaacs, the well-known Richmond merchants, partners for years, both manumitted slaves in their wills. Isaacs stipulated that the men and women to be freed were to receive a generous supply of clothing; Cohen left money to these servants but specified that if any of them preferred to remain in bondage, they were free to choose their own masters.”[50]

We are told that New York lawyer Sampson Simson was very sympathetic to blacks, as well as Leon Godchaux, a clothing manufacturer and sugar planter in the 1840s.[51] David Brandon “asked his family to be kind to his servant, a free black, the ‘best friend I ever had.’”[52]

Friedman recounts the case of “the Friedman brothers of Tuscombia, Georgia,” who “bought a slave named Peter Still, without telling his master that their real purpose was to liberate him.” Ernestine Louise Rose, an orator, was another individual who was in the anti-slavery camp.[53]

Marcus however notes that there were other Jews who obviously mistreated their slaves.[54]

Feuerlicht notes that “A few Jews freed their slaves in their wills; many did not. A few Jews freed their slaves before they died. One Jew killed a slave. Others brought their slaves before the law to be harshly punished for trivial offenses.”[55]

A number of Northern Jews joined the abolition organization such as the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (or the Pennsylvania Abolition Society) way back in 1774,[56] but it was after Christians such as the Quakers founded the organization as far back as 1688.[57]

George Fox

But the Quaker movement, or Society of Friends, with the spirit of anti-slavery, was largely founded around 1652 with George Fox as the leader.

The Quakers rejected the slave trade precisely because they saw it as wicked and because it largely promoted “corruption” and “anti-Christian behavior,” and because the slave trade itself was in “direct violation of the Gospel-rule.”[58]

In 1693, the Quakers wrote An Exhortation and Cautions to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping Negroes, which sought to refute the prevailing idea that blacks were by nature slaves.

The Quakers constantly maintained the Christian teaching that not only are Negroes fellow human beings, but that God had a redeeming purpose for them as well as for all humanity.

By the 1750s, one of the main activists within that movement was Anthony Benezet, who established schools for the Negroes in Philadelphia. Benezet even made the case that if Britain would not help in abolishing the slave trade, she would bring the wrath of God upon her.[59]

Other non-Quaker groups began to assimilate into that frame of thinking.[60] Isidor Busch for example was a Northern Jew who became “one of the most dynamic abolitionists in the Midwest.”

Polish-born Michael Helprin was another one.[61] Rabbis Gustav Gottheil and David Einborn committed themselves to the abolitionist ideals.[62] The Quaker movement had deteriorated in subsequent generations and by the 1950s they got involved in social engineering.(See E. Michael Jones’ The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing).

Yet even then, Sachar, as we have already said, notes that “militant abolitionism was not characteristic of the Jewish majority….Neither were they prepared to identify their religious views with the anti-slavery movement. Indeed, their spiritual leadership offered them little guidance beyond circumspection.”[63]

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Banner_2-640x152

Many of the Jews who believedstrongly in the abolition movement were not Orthodox Jews but Reform Jews. David Einhor of Baltimore talked about his belief “in one humanity, all of whose members, being of the same and early origin, possess a like nobility of birth and a claim to equal rights, equal laws, and an equal share of happiness.”[64]

Yet at the same time, Orthodox Rabbi Morris J. Raphall of B’nai Jeshurum Synagogue “was a virulent critic of both abolitionism and Reform Judaism.” For Raphall, the abolitionists were blasphemers. Yet Raphall was criticized in the same spirit by Rabby Michael Helprin.[65]

Even in ancient times, rabbis had “a low opinion of slaves” and “they did nothing to eradicate slavery…”[66] In fact, when well-known slave dealer Moses Lopez arrived to America from Portugal, he invited his brother, Duartez, to join him.

One of the first things that Duartez did as soon as he got established was to openly cling to his “ancestral faith. Duarte underwent the painful ordeal of circumcision and adopted the name Aaron. His wife, Anna, became Abigail…Aaron (Duarte) Lopeze then remarried his wife in a Jewish ceremony. Thereafter, he wasted little time in setting out as a merchant shipper.”[67]

In the end, it must be said that all wicked behaviors must be placed at the feet of sinful men. It is quite ridiculous to put a burden on our fellow Jews and declare that they should all be responsible for nineteenth-century slavery.

At the same time, modern opponents of Christianity and Western culture at large need to take some responsibility. They simply cannot continue to blame the West for all the evils of slavery and then turn a blind eye to the breadth of the slave trade, particularly as it existed in Africa, where blacks were being sold by their own countrymen.

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Rich18n-1-web-e1368370589172

Africa’s involvement in the slave trade has virtually been swept under the rug

It is absolutely futile, historically irresponsible, and morally repugnant to use the historical data in order to incite hatred on another group of people who are just as fallible as anyone else.

From a historical perspective, if individuals are going to get angry, they have to look at the history of slavery beyond stage one. As we have already documented, Africa was selling blacks by the thousands. As the celebrated historian John Thornton consistently documents, slavery was not foreign to Africa at all.

Many places in central and West Africa were built upon the unchallenged and unchallengeable premise that human beings are to be used as cattle. As Thornton puts it,

“The slaves, many of whom occupied estates around the capital [of Mbanza Kongo], provided Kongo with both the wealth and the demographic resources to centralize. As early as 1526, documents from Kongo show that the provinces (constituent states) were in the hands of royally appointed people (mostly kinsmen), and by the mid-seventeenth century local power and election were regarded more as a curse than a blessing.”[68]

Other parts of Africa were “centralized” due to the massive amount of slaves who were constituted as major components of those regions. Places like Lagos increased in income largely because of the slave trades.[69]

This in turn expanded Lagos’ “economic, political, and military power both within the kingdom and in relation to other states in the region.”[70]

In some parts of Africa, “the use of slaves may have helped rulers develop more autocratic systems of government.”

The eastern Gold Coast for instance “had an abundance of slaves.” In another region, historian Sierra Leone notes that “the income that rulers obtained from their slaves was their only steady source of income.”[71] In general,

“slaves could be found in all parts of Atlantic Africa, performing all sorts of duties. When Europeans came to Africa and offered to buy slaves, it is hardly surprising that they were almost immediately accepted. Not only were slaves found widely in Africa, but the area had a well-developed slave trade, as evidenced by the numbers of slaves in private hands.”[72]

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Slaves-290x320

Late 1800’s African slave trading

Moreover, the slave trade was not “brought in from outside and functioning as some sort of autonomous factor in African history.

Instead, it grew out of and was rationalized by the African societies who participated in it and had complete control over it until the slaves were loaded onto European ships and transfer to Atlantic societies.”[73]

Not only was African slavery larger in scope than what is imagined—most specifically in central Africa[74]—but it was “rooted in deep-seated legal and institutional structures of African societies, and it functioned quite differently from the way it functioned in European societies.”[75]

Thornton argues that in many places, slaves in Africa was no different than European slaves in maintaining some decent social positions, and this has led many historians to declare that in some instances, slaves “were well treated, or at least better treated than European slaves.”[76]

This however cannot be said about the overarching slavery movement that was widespread in the continent.

More importantly, the international slave trade would have been almost impossible without the cooperation of the African rulers, and Africans were not taken out of Africa without consensual arrangement with the African rulers,[77] as is widely taught in popular and sensational books by Afrocentric writers such as Molefi Kete Asante of Temple University.

_________________________________

Lessons from History

George Santayana

Studying history, as we are now beginning to see, sometimes is not a pleasant enterprise. It can bring to light painful wounds and memories. Yet it is largely through a study of history that the present can make more sense.

Spanish philosopher and writer George Santayana wrote at the dawn of the twentieth century,

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it….This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.”[78]

The Zionist mob in Hollywood has tried very hard to make us forget about the past by producing movies which explicitly make the point that slavery should be placed at the feet of only Europeans.

But it must be emphasized that the root of the story will not be found in history alone, but also in the conflict between two theological systems: Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism.

That is where the issue lies, not with people. People who try to understand the historical conflict without a grasp of historical theology will generally have a skewed view of what the issue is all about.

Those who followed the theological teachings of Rabbinic Judaism routinely began to persecute Christians in the first century, and Paul lamented that those people “have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men…” (1 Thessalonians 2:13).

The evils that those men have produced over the centuries are, dare we repeat it, “contrary to all men.” And those evils are still with us today.

by lizardking Tue Feb 02, 2016 2:57 am

The Forgotten Slaves: Whites in Servitude in Early America and Industrial Britain

“When I was a boy, ‘recalled Waters McIntosh, who had been a slave in Sumter, South Carolina, ‘we used to sing, ‘Rather be a nigger than a poor White Man,’ Even in slavery we used to sing that.’ Mr. McIntosh’s remarks reveal…that the poor whites of the South ranked below blacks in social standing…slaves felt unbridled contempt for lower‑class whites…Frederick Douglas opened his famous Life and Times with an account of Talbot County, Maryland, which he said housed a ‘White population of the lowest order…

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Forgotten-slave-whites-in-servitude1-277x300

Throughout the South the slaves of many of the larger planters lived in a society of blacks and well‑to‑do Whites and were encouraged to view even respectable laboring Whites with disdain…Ella Kelly, who had been a slave in South Carolina…You know, boss, dese days dere is three kind of people. Lowest down Is a Layer of White Folks, then in de middle is a layer of colored folks, and on top is de cream, a layer of good White folks…

The Forgotten Slaves: Whites in Servitude in Early America and Industrial Britain

by Michael A. Hoffman II ©Copyright 1999. All Rights Reserved

Two years ago, Prime Minister Paul Keating of Australia refused to show “proper respect” to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II during her state visit. In response, Terry Dicks, a Conservative member of the British Parliament said, “It’s a country of ex-convicts, so we should not be surprised by the rudeness of their prime minister.”

A slur such as this would be considered unthinkable if it were uttered against any other class or race of people except the descendants of White slavery. Dicks’ remark is not only offensive, it is ignorant and false. Most of Australia’s “convicts” were shipped into servitude for such “crimes” as stealing seven yards of lace, cutting trees on an aristocrat’s estate or poaching sheep to feed a starving family.

The arrogant disregard for the holocaust visited upon the poor and working class Whites of Britain by the aristocracy continues in our time because the history of that epoch has been almost completely extirpated from our collective memory.

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Forgotten-slave2-193x300

When White servitude is acknowledged as having existed in America, it is almost always termed as temporary “indentured servitude” or part of the convict trade, which, after the Revolution of 1776, centered on Australia instead of America. The “convicts” transported to America under the 1723 Waltham Act, perhaps numbered 100,000.

The indentured servants who served a tidy little period of 4 to 7 years polishing the master’s silver and china and then taking their place in colonial high society, were a minuscule fraction of the great unsung hundreds of thousands of White slaves who were worked to death in this country from the early l7th century onward.

Up to one-half of all the arrivals in the American colonies were Whites slaves and they were America’s first slaves. These Whites were slaves for life, long before Blacks ever were. This slavery was even hereditary. White children born to White slaves were enslaved too.

Whites were auctioned on the block with children sold and separated from their parents and wives sold and separated from their husbands. Free Black property owners strutted the streets of northern and southern American cities while White slaves were worked to death in the sugar mills of Barbados and Jamaica and the plantations of Virginia.

The Establishment has created the misnomer of “indentured servitude” to explain away and minimize the fact of White slavery. But bound Whites in early America called themselves slaves. Nine-tenths of the White slavery in America was conducted without indentures of any kind but according to the so-called “custom of the country,” as it was known, which was lifetime slavery administered by the White slave merchants themselves.

In George Sandys laws for Virginia, Whites were enslaved “forever.” The service of Whites bound to Berkeley’s Hundred was deemed “perpetual.” These accounts have been policed out of the much touted “standard reference works” such as Abbott Emerson Smith’s laughable whitewash, Colonists in Bondage.

I challenge any researcher to study 17th century colonial America, sifting the documents, the jargon and the statutes on both sides of the Atlantic and one will discover that White slavery was a far more extensive operation than Black enslavement. It is when we come to the 18th century that one begins to encounter more “servitude” on the basis of a contract of indenture. But even in that period there was kidnapping of Anglo-Saxons into slavery as well as convict slavery.

In 1855, Frederic Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York’s Central Park, was in Alabama on a pleasure trip and saw bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship’s hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes, the men in the hold were Irish.

Olmsted inquired about this to a shipworker. “Oh,” said the worker, “the niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything.”

Before British slavers traveled to Africa’s western coast to buy Black slaves from African chieftains, they sold their own White working class kindred (“the surplus poor” as they were known) from the streets and towns of England, into slavery. Tens of thousands of these White slaves were kidnapped children. In fact the very origin of the word kidnapped is kid-nabbed, the stealing of White children for enslavement.

According to the English Dictionary of the Underworld, under the heading kidnapper is the following definition: “A stealer of human beings, esp. of children; originally for exportation to the plantations of North America.”

The center of the trade in child-slaves was in the port cities of Britain and Scotland:

“Press gangs in the hire of local merchants roamed the streets, seizing ‘by force such boys as seemed proper subjects for the slave trade.’ Children were driven in flocks through the town and confined for shipment in barns…So flagrant was the practice that people in the countryside about Aberdeen avoided bringing children into the city for fear they might be stolen; and so widespread was the collusion of merchants, shippers, suppliers and even magistrates that the man who exposed it was forced to recant and run out of town.” (Van der Zee, Bound Over, p. 210).

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Forgotten-slaves5-300x207

Mine workers in England.

White slaves transported to the colonies suffered a staggering loss of life in the 17th and 18th century. During the voyage to America it was customary to keep the White slaves below deck for the entire nine to twelve week journey. A White slave would be confined to a hole not more than sixteen feet long, chained with 50 other men to a board, with padlocked collars around their necks. The weeks of confinement below deck in the ship’s stifling hold often resulted in outbreaks of contagious disease which would sweep through the “cargo” of White “freight” chained in the bowels of the ship.

Ships carrying White slaves to America often lost half their slaves to death. According to historian Sharon V. Salinger, “Scattered data reveal that the mortality for [White] servants at certain times equaled that for [Black] slaves in the ‘middle passage,’ and during other periods actually exceeded the death rate for [Black] slaves.” Salinger reports a death rate of ten to twenty percent over the entire 18th century for Black slaves on board ships enroute to America compared with a death rate of 25% for White slaves enroute to America.

Foster R. Dulles writing in Labor in America: A History, states that whether convicts, children ‘spirited’ from the countryside or political prisoners, White slaves “experienced discomforts and sufferings on their voyage across the Atlantic that paralleled the cruel hardships undergone by negro slaves on the notorious Middle Passage.”

Dulles says the Whites were “indiscriminately herded aboard the ‘white guineamen,’ often as many as 300 passengers on little vessels of not more than 200 tons burden–overcrowded, unsanitary…The mortality rate was sometimes as high as 50% and young children seldom survived the horrors of a voyage which might last anywhere from seven to twelve weeks.”

Independent investigator A.B. Ellis in the Argosy writes concerning the transport of White slaves, “The human cargo, many of whom were still tormented by unhealed wounds, could not all lie down at once without lying on each other. They were never suffered to go on deck. The hatchway was constantly watched by sentinels armed with hangers and blunder busses. In the dungeons below all was darkness, stench, lamentation, disease and death.”

Marcus Jernegan describes the greed of the shipmasters which led to horrendous loss of life for White slaves transported to America:

“The voyage over often repeated the horrors of the famous ‘middle passage’ of slavery fame. An average cargo was three hundred, but the shipmaster, for greater profit, would sometimes crowd as many as six hundred into a small vessel…The mortality under such circumstances was tremendous, sometimes more than half…Mittelberger (an eyewitness) says he saw thirty-two children thrown into the ocean during one voyage.”

“The mercantile firms, as importers of (White) servants, were not too careful about their treatment, as the more important purpose of the transaction was to get ships over to South Carolina which could carry local produce back to Europe. Consequently the Irish–as well as others–suffered greatly…

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Forgotten-slave4-185x300

“It was almost as if the British merchants had redirected their vessels from the African coast to the Irish coast, with the white servants coming over in much the same fashion as the African slaves.” (Warren B. Smith, White Servitude in Colonial South Carolina).

A study of the middle passage of White slaves was included in a Parliamentary Petition of 1659. It reported that White slaves were locked below deck for two weeks while the slaveship was still in port. Once under way, they were “all the way locked up under decks…amongst horses.” They were chained from their legs to their necks.

Those academics who insist that slavery is an exclusively Black racial condition forget or deliberately omit the fact that the word slave originally was a reference to Whites of East European origin – “Slavs.”

Moreover, in the 18th century in Britain and America, the Industrial Revolution spawned the factory system whose first laborers were miserably oppressed White children as young as six years of age. They were locked in the factories for sixteen hours a day and mangled by the primitive machinery. Hands and arms were regularly ripped to pieces. Little girls often had their hair caught in the machinery and were scalped from their foreheads to the back of their necks.

White Children wounded and crippled in the factories were turned out without compensation of any kind and left to die of their injuries. Children late to work or who fell asleep were beaten with iron bars. Lest we imagine these horrors were limited to only the early years of the Industrial Revolution, eight and ten year old White children throughout America were hard at work in miserable factories and mines as late as 1920.

Because of the rank prostitution, stupidity and cowardice of America’s teachers and educational system, White youth are taught that Black slaves, Mexican peons and Chinese coolies built this country while the vast majority of the Whites lorded it over them with a lash in one hand and a mint julep in the other.

The documentary record tells a very different story, however. When White Congressman David Wilmot authored the Wilmot Proviso to keep Black slaves out of the American West he did so, he said, to preserve that vast expanse of territory for “the sons of toil, my own race and color.”

This is precisely what most White people in America were, “sons of toil,” performing backbreaking labor such as few of us today can envision. They had no paternalistic welfare system; no Freedman’s Bureau to coo sweet platitudes to them; no army of bleeding hearts to worry over their hardships. These Whites were the expendable frontline soldiers in the expansion of the American frontier. They won the country, felled the trees, cleared and planted the land.

The wealthy, educated White elite in America are the sick heirs of what Charles Dickens in Bleak House termed “telescopic philanthropy”–the concern for the condition of distant peoples while the plight of kindred in one’s own backyard are ignored.

Today much of what we see on “Turner Television” and Pat Robertson’s misnamed “Family Channel,” are TV films depicting Blacks in chains, Blacks being whipped, Blacks oppressed. Nowhere can we find a cinematic chronicle of the Whites who were beaten and killed in White slavery. Four-fifths of the White slaves sent to Britain’s sugar colonies in the West Indies did not survive their first year.

Soldiers in the American Revolution and sailors impressed into the American navy received upwards of two hundred whiplashes for minor infractions. But no TV show lifts the shirt of these White yeoman to reveal the scars on their backs.

The Establishment would rather weep over the poor persecuted Negroes, but leave the White working class “rednecks” and “crackers” (both of these terms of derision were first applied to White slaves), to live next door to the Blacks.

Little has changed since the early 1800s when the men of property and station of the English Parliament outlawed Black slavery throughout the Empire. While this Parliament was in session to enact this law, ragged five year old White orphan boys, beaten, starved and whipped, were being forced up the chimneys of the English parliament, to clean them. Sometimes the chimney masonry collapsed on these boys. Other times they suffocated to death inside their narrow smoke channels.

Long after Blacks were free throughout the British Empire, the British House of Lords refused to abolish chimney-sweeping by White children under the age of ten. The Lords contended that to do so would interfere with “property rights.” The lives of the White children were not worth a farthing and were considered no subject for humanitarian concern.

The chronicle of White slavery in America comprises the dustiest shelf in the darkest corner of suppressed American history. Should the truth about that epoch ever emerge into the public consciousness of Americans, the whole basis for the swindle of “Affirmative action,” “minority set-asides” and proposed “Reparations to African-Americans” will be swept away. The fact is, the White working people of this country owe no one. They are themselves the descendants, as Congressman Wilmot so aptly said, of “the sons of toil.”

There will only be racial peace when knowledge of radical historical truths are widespread and both sides negotiate from positions of strength and not from fantasies of White working class guilt and the uniqueness of Black suffering.

Let it be said, in many cases Blacks in slavery had it better than poor Whites in the antebellum South. This is why there was such strong resistance to the Confederacy in the poverty-stricken areas of the mountain south, such as Winston County in Alabama and the Beech mountains of North Carolina. Those poor Whites could not imagine why any White laborer would want to die for the slave-owning plutocracy that more often than not, gave better care and attention to their Black servants than they did to the free white labor they scorned as “trash.”

To this day, the White ruling class denigrates the White poor and patronizes Blacks.

If this seems admirable from the pathological viewpoint of Marxism or cosmopolitan liberalism, the Black and Third World “beneficiaries” of White ruling class “esteem” ought to consider what sort of “friends” they actually have.

The Bible declares that the man who does not take care of his own family is “worse than an infidel.” This also applies to one’s racial kindred. The man who neglects his own children to care for yours has true love for neither.

White, self-hating liberals and greed-head conservatives who claim to care for the “civil rights” of Black and Third World people, discard the working class of their own people on the garbage heap of history. When they are finished with their own they shall surely turn on others.

Those who care for their own kind first are not practicing “hate” but kindness, which is the very root of the word.

by lizardking Tue Feb 02, 2016 2:58 am

Jewish Role in African Slave Trade Admitted by Rabbi in New Jewish Book

DECEMBER 31, 2013 AT 8:10 AM

A new book called The Jewish Slave, written by an orthodox rabbi in the Netherlands, has once again highlighted the role played by Jewish extremists in the African slave trade.

According to a report in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) and the Jewish Journal, the book will “remind[ing] Dutch Jews of their ancestors’ deep involvement in the slave trade.”

Written by Rabbi Lody van de Kamp, the book was sparked off by the ongoing controversy over an old Dutch Christmas tradition known as “Zwarte Piet” (Black Pete)—a mischievous character who accompanies the Dutch version of Father Christmas around Holland as his assistant.

Even though Zwarte Piet is actually supposed to be an elfish character whose black face is the result of his working in a coal mine, black activists in the Netherlands have claimed that it is in reality a racial parody of black people (which it is not).

Nonetheless, Rabbi Van de Kamp has joined the chorus calling for the abolition of Zwarte Piet, and at the same time, revealed that the Dutch Jewish community also has a Zwarte Piet tradition of its own, called “Hanukklaas.”

The article in the Jewish Journal is titled “How culpable were Dutch Jews in the slave trade?” and says that Rabbi Van de Kamp criticized the Zwarte Piet tradition on Republiek Allochtonie, a black news-and-opinion website based in the Netherlands.

On that site, Rabbi Van der Kamp wrote that the “portrayal of ‘Peter the slave’ dates back to a period when we as citizens did not meet the social criteria that bind us today.

“Speaking out against Black Pete is part of my social mission, an effort that extends to reminding Dutch Jews of their ancestors’ deep involvement in the slave trade,” the article continued.

Referring to his new book on the Jewish role in the African slave trade, Rabbi van der Kamp said that “Money was earned by Jewish communities in South America, partly through slavery, and went to Holland, where Jewish bankers handled it.”

In researching the book, Rabbi Van de Kamp said he discovered data that shocked him.

“In one area of what used to be Dutch Guyana, 40 Jewish-owned plantations were home to a total population of at least 5,000 slaves,” he says.

“Known as the Jodensavanne, or Jewish Savannah, the area had a Jewish community of several hundred before its destruction in a slave uprising in 1832. Nearly all of them immigrated to Holland, bringing their accumulated wealth with them.

“Some of that wealth was on display last year in the cellar of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue, part of an exhibition celebrating the riches of the synagogue’s immigrant founders.”

Rabbi Van de Kamp says the exhibition sparked his interest in the Dutch Jewish role in slavery, which, he says, was “robust.”

According to research, on the Caribbean island of Curacao, Dutch Jews may have accounted for the resale of at least 15,000 slaves landed by Dutch transatlantic traders, according to Seymour Drescher, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh.

Jews were so influential in those colonies that slave auctions scheduled to take place on Jewish holidays often were postponed, according to Marc Lee Raphael, a professor of Judaic studies at the College of William & Mary.

Dr David Duke has dealt with the issue of Jewish involvement in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in two remarkable videos, which are “must-see” material and can be viewed below:

by lizardking Tue Feb 02, 2016 3:01 am

Jewish Involvement In

Black Slave Trade
To The Americas

By Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael
2-24-6

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 husinessmen. 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 seven-teenth 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 steppng-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 interisland 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. (End of excerpt) Tony Martin is African studies professor at Wellesley College and has taught at Wellesley College, Massachusetts since 1973. He was tenured in 1975 and has been a full professor of African Studies since 1979. Prior to coming to Wellesley he taught at the University of Michigan-Flint, the Cipriani Labour College (Trinidad) and St. Mary's College (Trinidad). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, Brandeis University, Brown University and The Colorado College. He also spent a year as an honorary research fellow at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad. Professor Martin has authored or compiled or edited eleven books, including Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts and the Harlem Renaissance, and the classic study of the Garvey Movement, Race First: the Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association.. His most recent book is The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront. Martin qualified as a barrister-at-law at the Honourable Society of Gray's Inn (London) in 1965, did a B. Sc. honours degree in economics at the University of Hull (England) and the M.A. and Ph.D. in history at Michigan State University. Martin's articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Negro History, American Historical Review, African Studies Review, Washington Post Book World, Journal of Caribbean History, Journal of American History, Black Books Bulletin, Science and Society, Jamaica Journal and many other places. His work is to be found in several anthologies and encyclopedias. He has received a number of academic and community awards. Martin is well known as a lecturer in many countries. He has spoken to university and general audiences all over the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and England, and also in Africa, Australia, Bermuda and South America. In 1990 he delivered the annual DuBois/Padmore/Nkrumah lectures in Ghana. Professor Martin is currently working on biographies of three Caribbean women - Amy Ashwood Garvey, Audrey Jeffers and Trinidad's Kathleen Davis ("Auntie Kay"). He is also nearing completion of a study of European Jewish immigration into Trinidad in the 1930s. The Jewish OnslaughtDespatches From The Wellesley BattlefrontBy Tony Martin "...a polemic of the highest order... the best example of an African answering critics since David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World." - Molefi Asante, Journal Of Black Studies "Professor Martin at long last deals with the Henry Gates/Cornel West attacks on Afrocentricity.... Martin provides a solid analysis of the historical use of Blacks by whites to discredit original Black thought deemed unacceptable by non-Blacks.... "I compare The Jewish Onslaught to the classic third chapter of DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk entitled 'Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others....' Martin has written a book that years from now will be considered a classic.... It is simply a must reading on a controversial subject that needs greater airing than some of the more timid political attempts of recent years." - Raymond Winbush, The Voice Of Black Studies " Tony Martin has been forced to delve into the relationship between the Jews and Blacks and in the process, he has distilled a work that is informative, fascinating and one which will heighten the consciousness of Black people everywhere." - Carl Wint, The Sunday Gleaner #1 Bestseller(Your Black Books Guide) Best Book Of The Year(Black Literary Awards, 1994)1993. vii+137pp. ISBN 0-912469-30-7. Subject: Who owned the slaving ships? Name Of Slave Ships And Their Owners: The 'Abigail-Caracoa' - Aaron Lopez, Moses Levy, Jacob CrownIsaac Levy and Nathan Simpson The'Nassau' - Moses Levy The 'Four Sisters' - Moses Levy The 'Anne' & The 'Eliza' - Justus Bosch and John Abrams The 'Prudent Betty' - Henry Cruger and Jacob Phoenix The 'Hester' - Mordecai and David Gomez The 'Elizabeth' - Mordecai and David Gomez The 'Antigua' - Nathan Marston and Abram Lyell The 'Betsy' - Wm. De Woolf The 'Polly' - James De Woolf The 'White Horse' - Jan de Sweevts The 'Expedition' - John and Jacob Roosevelt The 'Charlotte' - Moses and Sam Levy and Jacob Franks The 'Franks' - Moses and Sam Levy A video, "The Jewish Role in the Black Slave Trade," a speech by Prof. Tony Martin with an introduction by Hoffman, remains online at Google, as of this writing. Viewers who wish to see it before it, too is censored by Google, can access it here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3435039175602962781

by lizardking Tue Feb 02, 2016 3:06 am

Tactics of Organized Jewry in Suppressing Free Speech

By Prof. Tony Martin

The Jewish Run Slave Trade Tony-martin-1

First of all, thank you very much, Greg, for the introduction. I’d like to thank also the IHR and Mark Weber particularly for inviting me here. I’m very happy to be here, to be part of this event. I like long-winded topics, at least topic titles, so I’ll read the topic which I have selected for today. It’s as follows: “Jewish Tactics as Exemplified in the Controversy Over Jewish Involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade.” So I won’t be speaking that much on the controversy itself. What I’m trying to do is to use my subjective experience, that is, the experience I’ve had, for close to a decade now, in dealing with this controversy.

And what I’m going to try to do now -- to use my concrete, subjective experience on the firing line, so to speak. And I’m going to try to extract from my experience certain basic sort of tactics that I think the Jewish lobby has used over the years pertaining to my particular situation. But in trying to extract these tactics from my own situation, I suspect that I may very well resonate with the experience of some other people here, because my suspicion is that there tends to be a generalized practice which transcends your particular situation. So, even though in my case I was dealing with a specific situation -- the transatlantic slave trade -- my suspicion is that the kinds of tactics which were used against me may be not very dissimilar to those experienced by many other folks who have been involved in other kinds of disputes with this particular lobby.

The first thing I should do by way of introduction is just to basically summarize precisely what my controversy was. I know it’s familiar to many people here, but I’m sure not to everybody in this audience. As was mentioned a minute ago in the introduction, I teach at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. For many years I’ve taught a survey course in African-American history. This is a one semester course, that moves very rapidly over the whole gamut of African-American history. In 1993 I introduced to this course a book which is on sale here, a book which then was fairly new, a book which I myself had only just recently become introduced to. This book, which is published by the historical research department of the Nation of Islam, is entitled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. And what that book did, relying primarily on sources written by Jews, and Jewish sources of a variety of types, is to try to sort of synthesize the existing information on Jewish involvement in the slave trade, the bringing of Africans as slaves from Africa to the so-called new world. There wasn’t that much in the book that was new -- all the information, practically, was secondary information, which had been already published, although hidden away to a large extent in very esoteric Jewish journals, which the average Jew, I discovered later, had no idea about.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t new information. It was new to many people, including myself, and I found it very interesting that even though I had taught African-American history for many years, I had been only dimly aware of the role of Jews in that slave trade. What I discovered was that the Jewish role in that slave trade had been very cleverly camouflaged for many, many years. Where Jews were involved, usually they tended not to be identified as Jews, whereas where Christians were involved, or where Muslims were involved. there was ready identification of such persons by their ethnicity, by their religious affiliation, and so on. In the case of Jews, they would be called other things -- Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian, whatever. But, you know, that crucial identification tended to be obscured. So, as a good professor – I think I’m a good professor. I’m always on the lookout for new information, to enrich my classes. So I was very fascinated by this new information, and decided to add a few readings from this book in my class. And that’s when, as the saying goes, all hell broke loose. [Laughter]

Apparently, I didn’t realize it, but I actually stumbled into a controversy which was already brewing because the book had apparently caused some consternation in Jewish circles. And it’s only afterwards, when I went back and did my research, that I discovered that one or two editorials had already appeared, by way of the Jewish power structure, in a sense warning people like myself to stay away from the book. There already apparently had been a full-page op ed piece in The New York Times, one that, I was told, was the largest, longest op ed that had ever been published in that paper. It was actually typeset in the form of a Star of David. It was written by someone called Henry Lewis Gates of Harvard University, one of the black spokesmen for the Jewish lobby. Even the paper from my basic home town, the Boston Globe, had carried an editorial, which I was unaware of at the time, not long before I began to use the book. And in a sense, the purpose of these editorials and op eds was to warn folks to stay away from that book, or else. But me, in my foolhardiness, ignored the warnings, being largely unaware of the warnings in the first place. And so I stumbled into this problem.

In fact Jews had been involved not only in the African slave trade, but also, and for a very long period of time, in a variety of other slave trades as well. Apparently, they had actually dominated slavery and the slave trade in medieval times. A couple of days ago, while on the plane on the way here, I was re-reading a Ph. D. dissertation from 1977 [“The Ebb and Flow of Conflict: A History of Black-Jewish Relations through 1900”] by a man called Harold D. Brackman, who is a functionary of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In his dissertation, which details Black-Jewish relations from ancient times up to 1900, he actually acknowledges the fact that Jews were the principal slave traders in the world for several hundred years -- although, and in typical fashion, he puts a very interesting spin on it. He acknowledges, as I guess he has to, that Jews were the major slave traders in the world, trading slaves everywhere from Russia to western Europe, to India, to China -- but he says that they dominated the world trade only for a few hundred years -- only. [laughter] He said that they were the main slave traders from the eighth century to the twelfth century -- but that was no big thing. It was only a few hundred years.

I discovered also that the Jews were very instrumental in the ideological underpinning for the African slave trade -- the notorious Hamitic myth -- which more than anything else has provided a sort of ideological underpinning or rationale for the slave trade. This comes out of the Talmud. In fact, Harold Brackman himself acknowledges that this was the first explication of the story in the Biblical book of Genesis about Ham, the so-called progenitor of the African race, having been cursed by Noah, and so on. But apparently, according to Brackman, the Talmud was the first place that put a racist spin on this story. The Biblical story was racially neutral, but the Talmud apparently put a very awful racist spin on this story, which later on became the basis, the ideological underpinning, for the African slave trade. So all of this I was to discover as I became embroiled in the controversy.

One of the things that interested me, too, was that the Jewish element was apparently also a major element in what came to be known in the 19th century as the white slave trade. The white slave trade was a major multinational, international trading in women for immoral sexual purposes, as prostitutes, and so on. And I found, too, that Jewish entrepreneurs in Europe apparently were also major figures in that so-called slave trade.

So I became aware of all of this. Just to summarize briefly what I discovered in the book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, and in the subsequent readings, with regard to the African slave trade, is that once it got going in the 15th century, the Jews again were a very important part of it. The book was not suggesting, just I have never suggested, that the Jews were the only people involved, or even the major people involved. My basic point has always been that whereas everybody else that I’m aware of who was a part of the slave trade has acknowledged being part of it. In fact, many of the people who were a part of the genesis of the slave trade later also became part of the abolitionist movement to end the trade. But as far as I know, the Jewish element is the only one that has resisted acknowledging its participation in this trade. In fact, it has gone beyond merely resisting knowledge of this information coming out. It has become very upset when this information has come to the fore.

And that has been my basic problem. Why? What’s so special about this group that places itself beyond the pale, so to speak -- no pun intended -- beyond the pale of criticism. And whereas any other group can be criticized, this group -- it seems to me -- is beyond criticism. Especially for me as a black person, I become very upset if someone tries to walk into my classroom to tell me that I, as a black person teaching black history, have to sort of regard their involvement in my history as somehow out of bounds.

So, after becoming involved in this history, via the Hamitic myth, Jews were some of the important financiers of this slave trade in the very early periods. One of the major multi-national corporations that financed the Atlantic slave trade very early on was the Dutch West India Company. As we know, the Jews had been chased out of Spain, and chased out of Portugal. The Netherlands was the one area which welcomed them to some degree. And this was right around the same time, the 15th century, that the slave trade was gearing up -- so they were positioned, geographically and in other ways, to become an important element in the financing of the Dutch West India Company, a major multinational corporation that was involved in the slave trade.

In the early 17th century Jews were, in fact, a major element in the slave trade in places like Brazil and Surinam in South America, in places like Curacao in the West Indies, and in Jamaica, Barbados and other places. I discovered that they were also very well positioned in this country -- that many of the traders in colonial times who brought slaves across the Atlantic to this country were in fact Jewish ship-owners and slave traders. Some of the best known names in colonial North America who were involved in that traffic were people like Aaron Lopez of Newport, Rhode Island, who was one of the best-known names of all.

I discovered that Jews owned many of the ancillary corporations that sort of fed into the slave trade. For example, rum distilling was a major business that was ancillary to the slave trade because rum was used as an item of trade, to exchange for slaves in West Africa. And most of the rum distilleries in places like Boston and elsewhere in New England were, I believe, owned by Jews, and so on.

I discovered that according to the 1830 census, even though Jews were a small proportion of the population in North America, nevertheless they were inordinately represented among the slave owners. Yes, they were a small portion of the population overall, but on a percentage basis that were significant. Jewish historians who have analyzed the 1830 census have discovered that whereas something like 30-odd percent of the white population may have owned one or more slaves in the South, for Jewish households it was over 70 percent. So according to an analysis of the 1830 census by Jewish historians, Jews were more than twice as likely, on a percentage basis, to own slaves.

I also discovered that Jews, despite their involvement in the slave trade, were very few and far between in the abolitionist movement. They were much, much less likely than other groups to be involved in this movement. So that in a nutshell, then, is the set of facts that caused me to become involved in this interesting controversy. And what I want to do, then, is to dwell not on the facts themselves, but on what I perceive to be the main tactics that were used, because I found myself, like I said, on the front line of this situation, and I became very fascinated, looking at their tactics. And the more I began to read around this question, the more I saw patterns emerging.

The first and major tactic that I discovered in their attack on me was their reliance on lies -- just straight-up lies. There’s no other way to describe it, just telling lies. Many of the categories that I will enumerate overlap, and many of them could also come under this general rubric of telling lies. But I think that if one had to isolate a single tactic, it was a tactic of telling lies. I think they’ve elevated telling lies to a very high artistic form. [Laughter]. For example, very early in my controversy, the major Jewish organizations became involved. And this is very fascinating. Here am I, a professor in a very small college, teaching a class of maybe 30 students, but they attached such great importance to this, that within a very short space of time the major Jewish organizations became involved, and it became a national event. For example, one Sunday morning on the ABC network television program “This Week With David Brinkley,” there was a whole segment dealing with this question -- about my telling my students that Jews were involved in the slave trade.

Up to that point I was still a little astounded, considering the prominence given to what, to me, was a totally inconsequential thing. Shortly after all of this started, four of the major Jewish organizations issued a joint press release attacking me: the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston. Afterwards they said that this was somewhat unprecedented for these major Jewish organizations to combine their efforts to attack one little obscure professor at a small school. They also admitted that it was unusual to issue this press release in the middle of one of their high holy days -- of which there are quite a few, I understand -- to sort of disturb the sanctity of this high holiday by issuing something along these lines.

Now, I actually saw one of the original press releases, which I have likened to a medieval scroll. It reminded me of a movie I saw as a boy, with Robin Hood, in which the Sheriff of Nottingham went into Sherwood Forest [laughter], and he would unroll a long proclamation and tack it on a tree, saying “Robin Hood, beware. We’re looking for you.” That kind of a thing. [laughter]. This was literally a scroll. You couldn’t read it without having to unroll it. I’ve never seen anything like it. It had the logos of these four organizations. And this opened my eyes to the proclivity of these folks to tell lies.

This proclamation told the world that I was refusing to let my students discuss this information. First of all, it presented me as providing wrong information -- blatantly false information, as another Jewish person described it to my classroom. And it said that in the classroom I was apparently ramming this stuff down my students’ throats, and forbidding any discussion -- a claim that was absolutely, hideously untrue. It said that I had a history of all kinds of problems with my school, and that my colleagues had been complaining about me for many years. Up to now I have had no inkling of what these complaints could possibly be. I know of no such incidents, certainly not before this time.

I was able to take this press release and read it out to my class. It was a very good learning experience for the students, because here were the students who I was accused of misleading and whatnot, and I was able to show them the kind of information that gets into the major media. One of the interesting lies that came out around this time was by the campus rabbi. She came into my office -- yes this was a “she,” actually -- complaining about my teaching this information. So I told her: Well look, if you think this information is false, why don’t you come to my class? I will invite you to my classroom. I will allow you to stand up in front of my class and explain what’s wrong with this information, and then we can have a debate in front of the class. And she agreed. But of course she quickly changed her mind. And not only did she change her mind, but then she put it out that I had refused to discuss the material with her. [laughter].

So point number one is the proclivity to tell lies. Point number two was a very interesting proclivity towards attempting to damage one’s professional credibility. There was a tendency to libel and slander whoever they were upset with. In this case it was me. There was one Jewish gentleman, about 50 years old, who began making anonymous calls, random calls, to the campus. He would call the dorms, he would call people’s offices, just randomly. And he would tell them he was a Jewish student at Harvard University. He would tell them that he had discovered that I did not really have a PhD, and that I was not qualified to be teaching at Wellesley College. This was one of the more bizarre examples of the attempt to discredit me professionally.

There was a gentleman who I subsequently brought a libel case against, and lost. I brought three cases, but lost them all. This gentleman suggested that I was an affirmative action PhD, and that the only reason I got a PhD was because of affirmative action. He said the only reason I got tenure at Wellesley College -- I was one of the youngest professors ever tenured there -- was because they were afraid of me. I was portrayed as this great, black, loudmouthed person, so just to keep me quiet they decided to give me tenure. [laughter].

One of the most interesting of these efforts to discredit me was by a gentleman called Leon Wieseltier, who describes himself as a literary editor of the New Republic magazine. Now in 1994, I think it was, at the height of all this hysteria, The Washington Post Book World invited me to review four new books for an issue, which I did. They gave my review a lot of space. It was the longest book review in that issue.

And in the very next week’s issue, there were, predictably, two or three outraged letters from Jewish individuals asking The Washington Post Book World if had been aware of who this person was -- the great anti-Semite Tony Martin. Don’t you know who this is? [laughter] How can you let him write in this prestigious periodical? And this guy Wieseltier went a step further. The title of my book is The Jewish Onslaught, and the subtitle is “Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront.” Now, I spell despatches “d-e-s.” Most Americans spell it “d-i-s.” I grew up in a British tradition, in a British colony, and to this day I spell honor “h-o-n-o-u-r.” Most of you do not. The “e” in “despatches” is a British spelling. And this idiot [laughter] obviously didn’t realize that there are alternative spellings of the word. Again, so anxious to try to discredit someone they disagree with, this guy actually told The Washington Post Book World in his letter that I was so ignorant and stupid that I couldn’t even spell the word “despatches.” [laughter]. Look at how stupid I was, who had been allowed to publish in their journal. Luckily for me, the editor of The Washington Post Book World was one of those rare persons who was apparently not too cowed by the Jewish onslaught. And she wrote a very nice rejoinder telling Wieseltier that she had checked two dictionaries, and in both of them she saw “despatches” -- spelled with an “e” -- as one of the optional spellings of the word. [Applause]

Then there was Mary Lefkowitz, one of my colleagues at Wellesley College. In a little literary magazine I’d never seen before. she actually alleged that I had pushed, had physically assaulted, a white student. Now, I teach at a women’s college. So, here she is playing into, I guess, all these perceptions of a big, black rapist or whatever. But she actually alleged that I physically pushed down a white student. This would be a white woman, and the woman fell down. Then, she said, I bent over her and raged. That was the word she used: I bent over her and raged. One had a vision of a raging animal. [laughter]. So of course I brought a libel suit against her.

And one of the things I discovered was that these folks are very, very well positioned in the court system. In fact, after having lost, well, I guess, two libel suits, I was beginning to think they must have had something to do with fashioning the libel laws in this country. [laughter]. Because in this case, you know, Lefkowitz actually acknowledged that what she said was wrong, and she acknowledged that she had not taken due care in ascertaining the facts. But even those acknowledgements were not enough for me to win the case. I had to prove that she had acted with reckless abandon, and all kinds of things. But it was a very interesting learning experience for me. The way libel laws work in this country, once they identify you as a “public person,” anyone basically has carte blanche. A person can say anything he wants. It can be true. It can be false. He doesn’t have to do research. He can say anything he wants. It’s almost literally that bad.

So, those are some of the efforts that were made to discredit me. Of course, I don’t think they succeeded. But again, this was a very persistent effort to sort of tarnish my image. And very much aligned with this, of course, was the generalized question of character assassination. This was part of that effort to damage one’s credibility.

There was also the tactic of what I describe as dirty tricks. Of course, this too is a subset within the general rubric of lies, I suppose. At Wellesley College there is a Hillel group. Hillel is the Jewish student organization that exists on campuses around the country. I remember reading in Paul Findley’s book, They Dare To Speak Out, that the Hillel people are formally trained, apparently by the ADL and other organizations, in tactics: how to disrupt meetings, how to push false propaganda on campuses, and so on. And even though I don’t know it for a fact, certainly those Hillel students who were part of the campaign did appear to be professionally trained.

In fact, the whole campaign against me was initiated by students from the Hillel group. They sat in on my class on the first day of the semester, just for one day. And somehow from that one day’s class they somehow figured out that I was teaching this book as fact. Apparently they figured that if I was teaching the book as “hate literature,” quote unquote, that would be okay. But the fact that I was teaching the book just as any other book, as one having some basic academic credibility -- they considered that, of course, to be a grossly anti-Semitic thing. And they were the ones who raised the hue and cry.

There’s a group on campus called “The Friends of Wellesley Hillel.” This is a group of faculty and alumni who work very closely with the Hillel students. In the midst of this campaign they actually put together a packet of mostly libelous information, and mailed it to the mother of one of the students who was very, very vocal on my behalf. The students rallied around me. It’s quite incredible the extent to which these folks would operate. This is a group of grown people, such as deans of the college, professors, who take the time to sit on committees to put together a packet of basically lies and misinformation, and send it out. They actually targeted this one student because she was a leader of the students who were supporting me, and they sent this information to her mother.

Somebody came and tacked up a flyer around my office one day -- I wasn’t in the office at the time – alleging sexual misconduct between myself and this same student who was vocal on my behalf. Fortunately for me, it didn’t work. And at one point they started a rumor that if I wrote recommendations for those students, they would not get jobs and would not get entry into graduate school, or anything. These are some of what I call dirty tricks.

There was also the tactic of what I call “going for the economic jugular” -- to remove my ability to survive economically. An example of that was a joint press release that called for my expulsion from the college. It called for my tenure to be revoked. So again, that’s one of the hallmarks of their tactics, it seems to me. And I am sure that this is of wider application than in just my own case.

There was also the tactic of what I call Great Presumptuousness. I heard somebody last night mention the word “chutzpah.” I call it presumptuousness -- the idea that a rabbi, a student chaplain, could come into my office to demand an explanation for why am I teaching this information. That to me is sheer presumptuousness. Even though I was polite, the essence of my response was, basically, “Who the hell are you to come here to tell me what I must teach [laughter] in a black studies class. I’m an expert on black studies. Who the hell are you?” I didn’t say it in those terms, but that was the import [applause] of what I was saying.

Before this Jewish onslaught began with me, just by sheer coincidence a few months earlier, I had been doing some research in a Jewish archive in New York City, and at that time a case similar to mine had just erupted concerning Professor Leonard Jeffries at City College in New York City. He had made a speech in Albany in which he had pointed out that Jews had a very large hand in fashioning Hollywood. In fact, there’s a book by a Jewish author, Neil Gabler, called An Empire of Their Own. And the subtitle, interestingly enough, is “How the Jews Invented Hollywood.” [Laughter]. What could be more explicit than that? The author is boasting about the way Jews basically shaped American popular culture.

So Len Jeffries, in his speech in Albany, had said Well, okay, so you all [Jews] invented American popular culture. You therefore have to take a large portion of the blame for the negative stereotypes concerning black folk that have been nurtured by Hollywood over the years. But of course they want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to invent Hollywood, but they don’t want to take responsibility for the negative elements coming out of Hollywood. So Jeffries was branded as anti-Semitic, as usual, for having said that. So at that time, when I was visiting the Jewish archive, my own case had not yet emerged. But they tried to put me through this litmus test. It was almost as though they would not let me use the archives unless I disavowed any kind of association with Jeffries. The woman in charge asked me: “Do you know Len Jeffries?” I said Yes, I know him. He’s a good friend of mine, a colleague of mine. And she was very upset.

Again there’s this presumptuousness, this feeling that they have a right to put you through all these litmus tests -- a right to demand of you why you are doing something that, to anybody else, is totally correct, and totally inoffensive.

Another tactic which I think I can distill out of my experience is a tendency to sidestep the real issues. I discovered that throughout this whole period of almost ten years now, they would almost never engage me on the facts of the matter. They would say: Okay, you say that Jews were involved in the slave trade. You’re a big anti-Semite. So I’ll say: Okay, let’s discuss it. Were Jews indeed half of the slave owners in Brazil in the 17th century? I’ll say, look at your own Encyclopaedia Judaica. It says that Jews were half the slave owners in Brazil. But they would never engage in that kind of factual debate. Never. They would always go off on a tangent, trying to besmirch your character, trying to take away your economic wherewithal, and so on. But they studiously avoid ever engaging in a discussion of the actual facts of the matter.

I had a graphic illustration of this just a few weeks ago when this question flared again, very briefly, on my campus. Somebody mentioned that ten years ago I had taught these [allegedly] blatant falsehoods, and whatnot. So I responded in the newspaper. And a couple of Jewish students wrote back, responding to me. And again, although I laid out several examples of Jewish historians acknowledging the Jewish involvement in the slave trade, there was no reference to this at all by the Jewish students. Instead, they began talking about stories from Europe in the Middle Ages, or some other era, about Jews killing white kids to take their blood and put it in matzos, and stories of their Jewish holocaust. In short, all kinds of stuff that had nothing to do with anything. In fact, I responded asking them what any of this has to do with the point that I was making. They did not read my article. They did not acknowledge the evidence I had given concerning Jewish involvement in the slave trade. What do stories of Jews killing somebody for their blood to put in matzos have to do the slave trade? But this was always their tendency. They would studiously avoid the facts and avoid the issue at hand, but instead bring in what we call Red Herrings -- off the wall stuff. And this was a very persistent tactic, which I’ve been able to discern.

Another tactic -- which may be just saying the same thing in a different way -- is the tendency to introduce “straw men.” For example, I’m discussing Jewish involvement in the slave trade, but somebody responds by writing an article saying that I alleged – which is not true – that Jews were genetically predisposed towards enslaving others. This has nothing to do with anything that I was talking about. But again, they would totally disregard the facts of the case and introduce something totally different. They would introduce a “straw man,” get it on the record, and then they would attack the “straw man” they’ve created. And because they have such great influence in the media, this “straw man,” this false information, all of a sudden becomes part of the record. Even in court they’ll reference the same lies that they put in the newspaper, as though this is some disinterested source, some third party. And then this brings me to my next point -- their ability to plant misinformation in the record, and then use that misinformation as though it’s some kind of well-documented, primary source.

Point number ten. This is what I call the use of quislings or surrogates, or what we in the black community call Uncle Toms. They have developed this art to a very high level -- at least in my case, or in the black community. I’ve mentioned Henry Louis “Skip” Gates. There are many other notorious figures like that in the black community, who are all too willing to do their bidding. I must say that these folks are very, very well recompensed. These folks have been given incredible prominence. They go around the world speaking, sometimes for fifteen thousand dollars at a time. Those are the kind of honorariums these folks get. They’ve been given endowed chairs in their universities. Many of them can hardly put two sentences together. But because they’ve been willing to play this game, they’ve been elevated to prominence. When you pick up The New York Times, you’ll see them on the cover of the Sunday magazine section with regard to issues that pertain to black folk. And it doesn’t matter what it is specifically. It can be the history of Africa. It can be contemporary politics in the Caribbean. It doesn’t matter. They are quoted as the authorities, and so on. You’ll also see them on PBS television, on multi-million dollar programs and documentaries, and so on. And this has been a very effective tactic on their part; to pick out people from within, in this case, my own group -- that is, people who are willing to, in a sense, sell themselves for the admittedly very ample rewards they’re given as a result.

Another tactic is their ability to leverage off of the influence which they undoubtedly have in high places. At Wellesley College, for example, a new president was coming on just as my case was moving to its climax, so to speak. And this new college president came in not knowing anything about what had been happening. And somehow these folks got her to write a letter, which I suspect they must have drafted themselves because she had no real knowledge of the background of what was happening. This was a letter condemning me for teaching that Jews were involved in the slave trade. This letter, according to newspaper reports, was sent out to maybe 40 to 60 thousand people. So you had the incoming president of Wellesley College sending out 40 to 60 thousand letters. This must be unprecedented in the annals of American higher education, I think. This is something for the Guinness Book of World Records [Laughter]. A university president sending out as many as 60, that’s six-zero, thousand letters, condemning one of her own professors for teaching something that is historically true. I’ve never, ever heard of such a case. Maybe I should indeed write to the Guinness Book of World Records and see if they can immortalize me by mentioning this.

Then there was the American Historical Association. Three Jewish historians actually went to the American Historical Association and got it to decree – that’s the only term I can use – to decree, by executive fiat, that the Jews were not involved in the slave trade. [Laughter] I’ve never ever heard of any such thing. This is totally antithetical to the way that academia operates. Who’s ever heard of such a thing: historical fact being determined by presidential decree from the American Historical Association. “We decree…” [mocking]. It’s like a Papal Bull in the Middle Ages… “We decree: The Jews were not involved in the slave trade.” [Laughter] It is absolutely amazing, but they actually succeeded in having this done.

Then there’s one of the most amazing cases of all. I was invited to speak in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, by Worcester State College, round about 1994 or 95. And the Jewish groups were actually able to get the mayor of Worcester – one of the largest cities in the state – to call together a special press conference, in which he had leaders of all the major religions. He had a Roman Catholic head. He had a Baptist head -- heads of various Protestant denominations -- and rabbis, ADL types, and so on. The mayor assembled an entire coalition of religious and apparently civil rights organizations. For what? To denounce me prior to my appearance at Worcester State College. They had already tried to put pressure on the college, and on the people who’d invited me. To their great credit, those people stayed strong. They refused to bow, and I spoke. You would think that the mayor had more important things to do. [Laughter]. But here these groups were powerful enough to get the mayor of a major city to pull together a special conclave on a Jewish press release to denounce me.

Of course, the result was that my speech, when indeed it did take place, drew the largest audience in the history of the school. [Laughter and applause] Actually, I didn’t originally include this in my talk, but I really should mention their tendency on occasion to shoot themselves in the foot. [laughter] If they had left me alone, I think the only people who would have known of the Jewish involvement in the slave trade would have been my 30 students and myself. [Laughter, applause]. But now, of course, the whole world knows about it. And, as a result, the question of African slavery will never ever again be raised without the question of the Jewish role being part of the discussion. It’s now in the forefront of people’s consciousness. And that’s due to them. I mean, I never could have promoted this idea the way that they did. [Laughter].

Another tactic, of course, is their use of the major media. They become very agitated when one speaks of their control of the media. That’s one of the worst anti-Semitic things it’s possible for anybody to say. And yet, as in the case of the Jewish involvement in Hollywood, they themselves boast about their prominence in the media. In fact, in my book, The Jewish Onslaught, I quote Charles Silberman, a Jewish author, who wrote a book in the 1980s called A Certain People. And in it he boasts that of the seven top editors of The New York Times, all seven were Jews. He wrote about the major TV networks, and although I forget the precise figure, he mentions that the majority of the senior television network producers were Jews, and that it’s these producers who really determine what gets on the news, what stays out, what spin is put on information, and so on. So the people who are crucial to spinning the news, he wrote, are primarily Jews. He named names. And I quoted him in my book. But I was anti-Semitic for quoting him [laughter], which was not unusual.

When that huge scroll, that press-release scroll, was issued by the four major Jewish organizations, the Boston Globe, the city’s leading newspaper, published four major articles, including editorials and op eds, within about six days, attacking me on that question. That included an op ed in the Sunday paper and a major editorial on the editorial page. Again, these were filled with lies and distortions. I responded with a letter, which they refused to publish. So they had four major items attacking me in less than a week, but they refused to publish my rejoinder. And so, because these folks have such a sway over the major media, it gives them a very great advantage.

I remember being interviewed for the Fox front page program. They interviewed me for over an hour, but I guess that my responses to their questions were so tight that they could not find any sound bite to extract to make me look bad. So they gave me a couple sound bites, maybe half a second each, but instead of letting me talk, they had a narrator of some kind who spent about five minutes telling folks what I had said, but not letting me say anything, practically. And that, too, is one of their tactics.

The use of organizations is another tactic. Of course, I don’t have to tell this audience about the Anti-Defamation League. I think I also have pride of place on the ADL website. Although I haven’t checked recently, for several years I had Honorable Mention every year in their listing of anti-Semitic occurrences, and so on. In their listing of anti-Semitic occurrences of the previous year, there would be an item like, “Tony Martin gave a lecture at XYZ college.” That would in itself be cited as an anti-Semitic event -- the fact that I gave a lecture someplace. The ADL actually issued a book about me. And although I’ve had it for years, I haven’t got around to reading it. They took the title of my book and turned it around. This ADL report is titledAcademic Bigotry: Professor Tony Martin's Anti-Jewish Onslaught.

Another tactic is what I call their unseemly histrionics. When I spoke at Worcester State College, there was a Jewish lady (I think her name was Schneider) who was on the College’s board of trustees. Amidst great fanfare, she resigned from the board because of the school’s invitation to me. But that’s what I call nothing but stupid histrionics. It got a lot of press, of course. It created a lot of media interest. But again, this was a case of shooting herself in the foot. As I remember they had initially scheduled me to speak in an auditorium that held about a hundred people. But after all the hysteria, which they themselves had generated, they had to change the venue to the largest auditorium they had, which held about 300 people. And even that wasn’t big enough. So eventually, when I turned up on a cold, wintry morning in February, they had that 300-capacity auditorium totally full. Then they had to run closed-circuit televisions outside for another 300 people to hear what I had to say. And of course, my speech got to be front-page news the next morning in the WorcesterTelegram & Gazette, and so on.

Another thing they try to do is to pin what I call a nickname on you. They try to find some little slip of the tongue, or some little thing they can take out of context. And if they find it, then every time your name is mentioned in the media, they stick that on you. For example, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam once made a slip. He was talking about a fact, as I mentioned earlier, that 75 percent of Jewish households in 1830 owned slaves. But he kind of got it wrong, as one often does in the midst of a speech -- a slip of the tongue. And it came out, when he said it, that Jews owned 75 percent of the slaves. It was obviously a slip of the tongue. But they mentioned it repeatedly ever since, often using that sound bite to make it look like he was a great distorter of the truth.

In my case, fortunately for me, the most they could pin on me was the term “controversial.” So every time they mention me, I get to be the “controversial” professor. [Laughter]. They’re also very good at the good cop/bad cop game. While someone is trying to destroy you on one side, someone will come on the other side, all smiley and whatnot. But beware of the good cop. Very often it’s better to deal with the bad cop because the good one will often get you in jail much more quickly and smoothly than the bad one.

And sometimes they try to play you for a fool. At the same time they’re trying to destroy you, they’re trying to give you advice. [laughter] Last year, for example, when I decided to accept David Irving’s invitation to speak in Cincinnati, there was guy whose name I don’t recall who sent me an e-mail telling me what a racist David Irving was. He sent me this copy of some poem that Irving had written, saying he didn’t want his daughter to marry a Rastafarian or something -- which is neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned. If he wants he wants his daughter to marry a Rastafarian or anybody else, or not marry them, So what? That has nothing to do with anything as far as I’m concerned. But again, here are people who are trying to destroy me, people who have spent the last ten years trying to portray me as all kinds of things, trying to take my livelihood away. and these same people can have the chutzpah, I guess, to warn me against somebody else. The whole idea is just totally amazing to me. Of course, I didn’t pay any great attention to what these guys are trying to say.

Another one of their tactics is hate mail. Their propensity for hate mail, I discovered, is absolutely amazing. Up to now, I still get a lot of hate emails. And a few days ago I got a hate postcard. On the one hand they try to portray themselves in public as these great liberals and nice folks and whatnot, but at the very same time they’re getting out this other kind of stuff.

Which also reminds me of the tendency towards violence. There was one Jewish guy, he said he was a Russian Jew, called Alexander Nechaevsky, who actually came onto my campus saying that he had come to get me. Luckily I wasn’t there to be gotten that day. I was somewhere out of town. But he came to the office, saying he had come to get me, and whatnot. They had to call the campus police, and he was given an order -- a trespass order, I think they called it -- not to appear on the campus again.

So these, then, are some of the kinds of tactics that I’ve been able to distill from my interaction with these folks over the last nine or ten years. Again, I’ve been very fascinated by the fact that I’ve become more broadly aware of similar situations involving others so that, it seems to me, many of these tactics may be of much more generalized application.

I don’t necessarily know the best way to respond. But I can just maybe outline, very quickly, the ways that I have tried to respond. I have tried to respond, first of all, by trying to stand on principle. From the very beginning, as far as I’m concerned, I’m talking the truth. I’ve said that the Jews were indeed involved in the slave trade. And as long as I am convinced in my own mind that I’m talking the truth, then that’s it. I’ve tried to disregard all of the other foolishness, and I’ve tried to stand on the truth. I’ve been on TV many times, debating people from the American Jewish Committee, and so on. And again, in such face to face debate, all of these tactics come into play. They try to attack your credibility, your character. But what I’ve always tried to do in those exchanges is to ignore, as far as I can, all of the ad hominem attacks, and concentrate on the facts. So they’ll say “Tony Martin is an anti-Semite.” I’ll just ignore it. I’ll say, 75 percent of Jewish households owned slaves, according to the 1830 census. I’ll stick to the facts, and I’ll use those kinds of media appearances as an opportunity to inform whoever happens to be listening.

I’ve also tried , where I could, to myself leverage off of their media power. There have been times when they have unwittingly given me an opportunity to appear before the mass media, and I’ve used those opportunities to the hilt -- again, to push facts. I know in advance that I have only 30 seconds, so I try to ram as many facts into those 30 seconds as I can, and just forget all the anti-Semitic stuff. I can deal with that later.

I’ve also tried to develop, to the best of my limited resources, some kind of independent response. I find that independence is a very, very great benefit. I started my own little publishing company. It’s a little company, but it was very, very effective. My book, The Jewish Onslaught got out and sold like hotcakes. It’s really made a difference, just to have some kind of an independent medium. It wasn’t a major corporation or anything, but it was independent. I controlled it, and I was able to fight back to some degree.

I also think it’s important to have some kind of a support structure. I was very fortunate. They attacked me at a time when I already had established a pretty good sort of a support structure in academia. I was relatively well known. It wasn’t as easy for them to destroy my credibility as it might have been for people who were perhaps less accomplished. But I found that having a support structure and being able to avail oneself of it was very important.

And finally, in my case I tried wherever possible to take the matter to them. I didn’t sit back and wait, once the battle was joined. I found it, in fact. In the early days especially I think that they weren’t used to having people fight back the way that I did. I think it sort of threw them off balance. They came at me with all their usual bag of tricks, expecting me to fold immediately. But I once I was able to fight back, and once it began to appear to them that they had a long protracted struggle on their hands, and not an easy victory, it took them a while to actually try to regroup and figure out what to do.

So, I just offer these as perhaps things for folks to think about in their response. Thank you very much.

This is an edited transcript of Prof. Martin’s address given in June 2002 in Irvine, California, at the 14th Conference of the Institute for Historical Review.

About the Author

Tony Martin, a historian, was best known as a specialist of African American history. For years he served as a professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College (Massachusetts).

He was born in 1942 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. He earned a B.Sc. honors degree in economics at the University of Hull (England), and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history at Michigan State University. He authored, compiled or edited 14 books. He was perhaps best known for his work on the life and legacy of the Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. Martin’s many articles and reviews appeared in a variety of academic journals and popular periodicals, as well as in reference works and anthologies. He was also a popular lecturer, and addressed general and scholarly audiences across the US, in Canada, and in other countries. Martin retired in June 2007 as professor emeritus after 34 years with Wellesley College’s Africana Studies Department. He died in January 2013 at the age of 70 in Trinidad.

by lizardking Tue Feb 02, 2016 3:11 am

THE JEWS AND SLAVERY

https://www.radioislam.org/thetruth/08slave.htm

In our own time, as throughout history, Orthodox male Jews still must daily thank God for not being born Gentile, as well not being born a woman. Such ritual thanks branch out into other areas as well.

"One specific mitzvah [religious commandment] required of traditional Jews each day," says Arthur Kurzweil, "is [a reminder] that we were slaves in Egypt. This mitzvah is not performed with a ritual object, nor is it an act that would cause some to think you looked religious. Merely reflecting in your mind and hearing that we were slaves is, in itself, considered a spiritual act of great significance." [KURZWEIL, p. xxii]  Jewish victimhood tradition ritually underscores their roles as slaves thousands of years ago. In Orthodox households, says Evelyn Kaye, "bitter herbs [are dipped] in salt water at Passover to remind [Jews] of the tears of the slaves in Egypt." [KAYE, p. 45]

The traditional daily reminder of slavery and the supposed fact that thousands of years ago Jews were held in bondage is all the more peculiar when one tries to imagine what thoughts went through the minds of the many Jewish slave traders throughout history, merchants who were instrumental even in the slave trading of Europeans. These are the words of James Parkes, a respected philosemitic scholar, extremely sympathetic to Jews in his many volumes about their history:

                  "In the period from the fifth to eight centuries [Jews] gradually
                   took the place previously occupied by the Syrians as
                   'international' traders; and they continued, and perhaps,
                   developed, the trade in slaves." [PARKES, p. 17]

                   "While the Jews were... never... the only traders, it is possible
                   that the slave trade through north-eastern Europe to the Slav
                   countries and the land trades to the East were for practical
                   purposes Jewish monopolies. " [PARKES, p. 25]

                  "It would appear that Jews had little difficulty in obtaining slaves
                   in the eastern provinces of the empire and Poland, in spite of
                   the protection which acceptance of Christianity in those regions
                   should have given the inhabitants. References to this traffic in
                   Christian slaves are not infrequent. [PARKES, p. 45]

                    "The evidence is thus enough to show that the Church
                    possessed a genuine grievance against the section of the Jewish
                    population involved in the slave trade. But the misdeeds of
                    slave traders did not cease at the purchase of Christians in
                    eastern Europe. Agobard quotes cases -- and there is no reason
                    to refute his evidence -- of the theft of children in France for
                    sale to the Moors of Spain; and a chronicler of the middle of
                    the tenth century brings an even more unpleasant story of the
                    castration of boys in eastern France for their sale as eunuchs to
                    the Moorish harems, a trade which was, apparently, extremely
                    profitable." [PARKES, p. 46]

"In the tenth century," notes Jewish (and Zionist) author Julius Brutzkus, "the Jews possessed salt mines near Nuremberg. They also traded in arms, and exploited the treasuries of the churches. But their great specialty ... was their trade in slaves." [LEON, p. 124] "The first Jews that Poles encountered," states the Encyclopedia Judaica, "must certainly have been traders, probably slave traders, of the type called in the 12th-century Jewish sources holekhei rusyah (travelers to Russia). [EN JUD, v. 13, p. 710]  "In the tenth century," notes Israel Abrahams, "the Spanish Jews often owed their wealth to their trade in slaves." [ABRAHAMS, p. 98]

Jews, says Lewis Browne, "traveled everywhere from England to India, from Bohemia to Egypt. Their commonest merchandise in those days, beginning with the eighth century, was slaves. On every high road and on every great river and sea, these Jewish traders were to be found with their gangs of shackled prisoners in convoy." Such disturbing facts that impugn the Jewish myths of perpetual victimhood must of course be apologized away. "Slave trading," says Browne, a Jewish scholar, "seems irredeemably vile and hateful to us today, but we must remember here again the standards have changed ...And in light of the customs of those times, the slave-traffickers were actually doing almost a moral act. They alone were keeping the conquering armies from slaughtering every one of their defeated foes after each battle." [WILLIAMS, J., p. 230]

Jewish apologists of course further argue that Jews were involved in the trade of European slaves (the English word "slave" is reputed to come from "Slav") because "they were forced into it" by others, they were only "doing the dirty work for Christians," it was a norm of the era, or that extensive Jewish slave trading was a "Christian ecclesiastical myth."  Another Jewish apologist justifies the Jewish slave trade of Europeans during the era of Pope Gregory this way:

            "Had the Jews been prevented from owning slaves it is likely that
             they would have given up the slave trade and had they done this
             the labor shortage that would have been created might have
             caused an inestimable loss of life through sheer starvation."
             [ABEL, p. 197]

"Slave traders were proverbially dishonest." [BARON, p. 193] And there were many legal hurdles that Jewish slave traders had to face, both from Christian authorities (who grew increasingly outraged by Jews owning Christian slaves), and their own rabbinical authorities when faced with the necessity of slaves' castration, for instance, to be eunuchs. Jewish religious texts forbade mutilation. This problem was easily resolved by resorting to a technicality; prospective Jewish slave owners merely hired non-Jews to do the operation before they formally bought them. [BARON, p. 191]  Jewish writers in Spain complained more frequently than other places about the ethics of having slave concubines in Jewish households. [BARON, p. 194]

Jewish mythology claims a long history of moral superiority over others, and innocence. The original Ku Klux Klan (1865-1876), however, was not hostile to Jews and even had Jewish members, including Simon Baruch, the father of the Quarter-Master General of the Confederate Army. (The father of Bernard Baruch, the Chairman of the War Industries Board under President Woodrow Wilson in World War I, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan). [COIT, M., 1957, p. 12-13] The Secretary of State of the Confederacy (initially its Secretary of War) was also of Jewish birth, Judah P. Benjamin. [RUBINSTEIN, p. 20] After the war Benjamin fled to England. David de Leon was the first Surgeon General of the Confederacy. [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 172] Other prominent Confederate Jews included Edwin Moise, Speaker of the Louisiana House; Raphael Moses who "was influential in leading Georgia out of the Union;" Henry Hyans, the Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana leading up to the Civil War; and Edwin de Leon, "whom Benjamin sent to Paris to handle public relations and propaganda for the South." "The prominent role of Jews in the Confederacy," notes Nathaniel Weyl, "is generally either ignored or condensed into shamefaced footnotes by those historians of American Jewry whose opinions conform to the liberal-leftist stereotype." [WEYL, N., 1968, p. 54]

"Not a single Jew," notes Stephen Isaacs, "has been identified among the abolitionists in Charleston, South Carolina, which had been home to the largest Jewish community in the United States at one time." [ISAACS, p. 180] "[The Jew] somehow feels that in the Great Democracy he is 'the other' Negro -- a white-skinned one," wrote Isaac Deutcher in 1968, "And how very often he gets his own back on the black Negro: in the Southern States more often than not it is the Jew who is one of the most fanatical upholders of white supremacy." [DEUTCHER, ., 1968, p. 43]

Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a champion of liberal Reform Judaism and "the most active and renowned rabbi in the United States" in the nineteenth century [SACHAR, p. 196], actively supported the enslavement of Blacks, called Abraham Lincoln an "imbecile," and argued that Blacks were "beasts of burden." [LINDEMANN, p. 210] Other of his words were later engraved on a memorial tablet in the Memorial Hall of Temple Emanu-El, the great Reform Judaism synagogue in New York City:

      "American Judaism. A religion without mystics or miracles. Rational and
       self-evident, eminently human, universal, liberal and progressive. In
       perfect harmony with modern science, criticism, and philosophy and in
       full sympathy with universal liberty, justice and charity. There are no
       better American citizens than the Jews and no religion better befitting a
       free people than Judaism." [GOLDSTEIN, D. p. 68]

Jonathan Kaufman notes the case of another very prominent New York Jewish rabbi in 1861:

     "Rabbi Morris Jacob Raphall ... brought the full force of Jewish
     learning to a defense of slavery, preaching a lengthy sermon that
     defended its biblical roots and noting that 'Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,
     Job -- the men with whom the Almighty conversed, with whose
     names he emphatically connects to his own most holy name ...
     all these men were slaveholders.' Raphall was no fringe figure. He
     was one of the most prominent rabbis of his day; the year before
     he had been chosen to be the first Jew to open a session of the
     House of Representatives with a prayer." [KAUFMAN, J., 1988,
     p. 22]

       Modern scholar Judah Rosenthal notes rabbi Raphall's effect on the slavery debate in America:

      "Rabbi [Morris] Raphall delivered a sermon entitled 'The Bible View
      of Slavery.' Raphall attempted to prove 'that according to the Talmud
      there is no difference between a lost ox, donkey, or slave, and that
      the Talmud recommends turning over a fugitive slave to its master.
      The discourse of Rabbi Raphall which appeared in print caused a
      public stir. It was reprinted many times in the pro-slavery press.
      It produced a sensational effect coming from a popular rabbi who
      had the reputation of being a biblical scholar ... Raphall was right
      in his Biblical exegesis." [ROSENTHAL, J., 78]

In 1896 an editorial in the Jewish South of Richmond, Virginia, argued that "Negroes are intellectually, morally, and physically an inferior race -- a fact none can deny, " [LINDEMANN, p. 225] and with the death of a particularly racist Jewish senator from Maryland, Isador Rayner, a Black journalist wrote that Rayner "invoked upon his colored neighbors the terrors of (a pogrom)." [LINDEMANN, p. 233]

In 1991 a book was published by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, described by one Jewish author as "a masterful piece of propaganda." [MAGIDA, p. 171]  This work, and some of the issues surrounding it, merit some special attention here. Aside from a handful of obscure, rarely read volumes that challenged the commonly accepted facts of the Holocaust, the Nation of Islam's new volume was the most controversial book about Jews published in decades and helped in securing a deeper rift between American Black and Jewish communities. Available from a 1-800 telephone number, the book received relatively wide circulation in the African-American community. The volume, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, seeks to document Jewish historical involvement in the African slave trade and severely taints, by association, Jewish luster in the later American civil rights record. In a word, the book -- which is a direct assault upon the myths of Jewry's self-perception of a higher moral ground than other people -- must somehow be dismissed by the Jewish community to avoid considerable embarrassment.

In fact, dismissal is quite easy. The Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan are in such serious disrepute in the Jewish, and other non-Black, communities that few people, other than those in the African-American world, have actually read the NOI book. Though most Jews have heard of it, it is automatically understood to be "hate literature," molded of entirely anti-Semitic nonsense and unworthy of anyone's serious attention. No Jew in his or her right mind would ever dare to purchase such a thing and add to anti-Semitic coffers.  (Reluctance to read the book, on principle, is deep. At the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, by late 1997 the 1994 edition on its library shelves -- the sole copy -- had never been checked out). This situation has allowed Harold Brackman, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (one of the various Jewish "defense" agencies), to write a few versions of his rebuttal to Secret Relationship charges, counterclaims that serve completely as the relevant truths for Jews -- and sympathizers -- interested in the matter. Brackman and the Jewish community rely upon the fact that most (non-Black) people will probably only read his book about the controversial subject, if any.

"Among [the arguments in support of the Secret Relationship]," says Ralph Austen (who read the book) in the Jewish journal Tikkun, "there is one which Jewish intellectuals need to take seriously: that few of the Jewish leaders who have attacked the book have actually read it." [AUSTEN, p. 66] And what is the essential impact one gets out of reading it? "There were not many Jews in America between 1492 and the 1860s," says Austen, "and quite a few had been involved in the slave trade." [AUSTEN, p. 68]

The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews seeks to tell the story of Jewish involvement in the African slave trade, largely throughout the Americas. The book's strategy is to use nearly 1,300 (mostly) scholarly citations to present its argument. Seeking maximum credibility, the overwhelming majority of the excerpts from historical sources are indeed "authoritative," i.e., the quotes are not only from respected academic volumes, but most authors are Jewish scholars in various fields of expertise.  As many African-Americans bitterly complain, a very large number of Jews are preeminent in the academic world, even in African-American studies, a situation that has for decades found Jews (and other non-Blacks) dictating to African-Americans the facts and parameters of their own history. Some citations in The Secret Relationship are from less academically pedigreed commentators, but most of these are also Jewish which, as the Nation of Islam intended, confers a dimension of legitimacy to the quote, even if it is only opinion.

The quotes, facts, and figures by legitimate and well-respected Jewish academics (who usually address the subject of Jews and slaves peripherally in the course of  their own other interests) do not depict, in any way, a morally superior people. They underscore the Jewish role in the African slave trade and they are collected in the Nation of Islam volume by the hundreds. Take, for example, the following excerpts:

       "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. [LOUIS EPSTEIN, Sex Laws and Customs
       in Judaism, in SEC.LIFE, p. 196]

       "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." [SEYMOUR
       LIEBMAN, New World Jewry, SEC LIFE, p. 55]

       "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 ... [LIEBMAN, in SEC.
        LIFE, p. 55] ... [The Jews] 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."
        [SEYMOUR LIEBMAN, New World Jewry, 1493-1825 , in MARTIN,
        p. 113]

       "The West India Company, which monopolized imports of slaves from
        Africa, sold slaves at public auctions against cash payments. It happens
        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 was also no competition in the selling of the slaves to the
        plantation owners and other buyers ... Profits up to 300 per cent 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." [Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial
        Brazil, in SEC. LIFE, p. 29]

       "Just as a disproportionately large number of Jews were slave
       owners, a disproportionately large number of Jewish merchants sold
       slaves as they would any other goods. Several of these merchants
       were prominent in their communities: an acting rabbi, the president
       of a congregation." [ROBERTA FEUERLICHT, in SEC LIFE, p. 179]

The Nation of Islam's own racist reputation, Jewish lobbying power (and the fear of it), and the obvious fact that few -- if any -- pedigreed historians have bothered to read the Secret Relationship can only explain the following  resolution by the American Historical Association about the controversial book:

     "The AHA deplores any misuse of history that distorts the historical
     record to demonize a particular racial, ethnic, or cultural group. The
     Association therefore condemns as false any statement alleging that
     Jews played a disproportionate role in the exploitation of slave labor
     in the Atlantic slave trade." [RESPONSE, p. 9, SPRING, 1995]

But Jews did, it would seem irrefutably, have (at the very least) a "disproportionate role" in the slave trade even in the southern United States, where they were not -- as the NOI book shows -- as involved as in other places in the Americas. According to one survey noted by Jewish scholars Lee Soltow and Ira Rosenwaike, 75% of Jewish households surveyed in the American South owned slaves, more than double the average 36% for all southern households. [ROSENWAIKE, in SEC. LIFE, p. 180]  And Jews, as we will continue to witness, have always been "disproportionately" represented in virtually any field where there is serious money to be made. (In Port Royal, Jamaica, in 1680, about 16% of Jewish households had no slaves; in the non-Jewish community, this figure was over 47%. Likewise 73.7 % of Jewish households had between one and four slaves; in the non-Jewish community the figure was 41.8 %.) [SCHORSCH, J., 2000]

Ultimately, the much-maligned NOI volume does not assert that Jews ran the whole slave trade from a back street in Amsterdam, but rather that they held indeed a disproportionately significant role, a factor that should be considered in modern Jewish-Black relations, the way it is an important factor in Black-White relations. The book's fundamental charge is so stated: "The most prominent of Jewish pilgrim fathers used kidnapped Black Africans disproportionately more than any other ethnic or religious group in New World history and participated in every aspect of the international slave trade." [SEC. LIFE, p. vii]  Behind Jewish resistance to take responsibility (whatever its dimensions) for the more distasteful parts of Jewish history is the fact that such concessions imperil the mythos of modern Jewish identity itself:  i.e., that Jews are morally superior to all others, for which they are humanity's consummate (and innocent) Victims.

Albert Lindemann notes the typical case of prominent Jewish historian Oscar Handlin's volume Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life in America:  "[Handlin] ignored the issue [of slavery in his volume] ... even while mentioning by name the 'great Jewish merchants' who made their fortunes in the slave trade." [LINDEMANN, p. xx]

It is clear that the issue of Jewish influence in the African-slave trade in many parts of the world was significant. And this is the value of the NOI book (along with, perhaps, the idea that Jews are not, as so often depicted in the popular media, necessarily the "best friend" of the Black man). How much significant the slave trade was Jewish-inspired can only be a matter of endless disputation. Considerably less than one percent of North America's population were Jews and it's hard to imagine that, by numbers alone, 18th and early 19th century Jewry could have possibly controlled the huge slave market in this area. (As late as 1817, there were only 3,000 Jews in all of America. [ROSENWAIKE, p. 13] ) Nonetheless, in considering the evidence -- Jewish and otherwise, it is clear that Jews were very much disproportionately involved in, and important to, the trade in human chattel.  In some colonial posts they were no doubt preeminent in the business. The largest Jewish exploitation of slaves seems to have been in Barbados, Brazil "In the first half of the seventeenth century," notes Abram Leon, "all the great sugar plantations in Brazil were in the hands of Jews." [LEON, p. 176], Curacao, Jamaica, and Surinam (Dutch Guinea). Jewish historian Arnold Wiznitzer adds that "Jews dominated the slave trade" in Dutch Brazil. [SCHORSCH, J., 2000]

Historian David Brion Davis notes that in the Jewish-founded town of Joden Savanne in Surinam, they "extracted labor from African slaves in one of the most deadly and oppressive environments in the New World." [MAGIDA, p. 184]

    Jewish scholar Harold Bloom also noted that, in the early 1700s,

    "Colonists [in Surinam] were troubled by attacks of 'Bush
    Negroes,' former slaves who had escaped inland and refused
    to return to their owners. They declared themselves independent
    and set fire to many plantations ... [BLOOM, H., p. 121] ... Slave
    trade was one of the most important Jewish activities here as
    elsewhere in the colonies." [BLOOM, H., p. 123]

And as scholar Jacob Marcus, also Jewish, observes:

     "Some writers of the eighteenth century, in attempting to account for
     repeated flights by Negro slaves, accused Jewish owners of mistreating
     their charges, and indictment the [Jewish] authors of the Historical
     Essay [on the Colony of Surinam (1788] ascribed to anti-Jewish
     prejudices and vigorously denied. It is a fact, however, that the wars
     against the French and the Bush Negroes called into being among the
     Jewish planter class a specific type of individual: the aggressive, brutal
     fighter, politically ambitious and resentful of every limitation and
     infringement of their personal liberty." [SCHORSCH, J., 2000]

Whatever its faults, the Secret Relationship is legitimate in laying out the historical role between Blacks and Jews in the New World on the table for scrutiny. While this relationship has not really been "secret" in the literal sense (the information is freely available to anyone who cares to tediously find it) it certainly has never before been fore grounded nor popularly addressed; rather, it has been buried from public discourse in the obscure pages of esoteric academe. It has taken the growth of African-American scholarship (whether others like its accentuations or not) to frame discourse about the slave trade to their own -- not Jewish -- perspective. As one can see in this book, existing Jewish scholarship on Black history -- originally framed to Jewish interests and concerns -- is voluminous.

The Nation of Islam's intention in their volume was to quote from expressly Jewish sources as much as possible and overlooked those many non-Jewish sources that would instantly fall prey to discredit by the omnipresent charge of anti-Semitism. Citations from Jews would presumably render the NOI's arguments all more authoritative, resistant to the inevitable charge that the book was unfairly biased against Jews.

What the NOI apparently didn't recognize, of course, is that Jewish convention asserts that many Jews themselves are tainted by the dreaded virus of anti-Semitism. Thus, at the bottom line, it only slightly matters whether the NOI had quoted Adolf Hitler's view about the Jews (which they did not) or critical Jewish authors of Israel and Jewish life like Roberta Feuerlicht and Lenni Brenner (which they did). Jews or not, such people are not -- to the standards of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Harold Brackman, "respected authorities." "The truth of the matter," writes Brackman, "is that The Secret Relationship validates Feurlicht and Brenner as 'authoritative' for precisely the same reasons that the Nazis exploited the writings of selected Jews in that earlier era." [BRACKMAN, p. 57]

This, then, is the tone of debate -- not uncommon in the Jewish community -- over the book: the inevitable dragging of even Brenner's and Feuerlicht's criticism of Jewry into an association with Hitler and the very thought of an investigation into the facts of Jewish influence in the slave trade as opening doors to another Holocaust.

As The Secret Relationship was disseminated among segments of the African-American community, the Jewish community ignored it as much as possible, sometimes attacking it generally, categorically, as merely an anti-Semitic tome. "The book is a remarkable work of hate," says Jewish author Richard Bernstein in his own volume about the "multiculturalist" political wars of today's society .... I myself saw copies of it for sale at an Afrocentric conference I attended in Atlanta." [BERNSTEIN, p. 117] But silence by the Jewish community was perceived by many in the Black community as an admission of  guilt, and Brackman eventually came forward to "point-by-point" discard the allegations posed in the controversial volume.

Harold Brackman's credentials include the facts that he has taught -- like so many Jewish scholars -- African-American history at three major American universities. One of his book rebuttals to the Secret Relationship outshines even the NOI's reputed capacity for hyperbole, entitled:  Ministry of Lies, The Truth Behind the Nation of Islam's The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. The Nation's 1300 citations cannot be reasonably addressed in a digestible volume, so Brackman goes for what he considers to be the "anti-Semitic" volume's weakest links.

Unfortunately, for the Jewish argument, upon close examination, the very foundation of Brackman's scholarship is shaky from the start, as evidenced in the very methodology of his attack to deconstruct the Secret Relationship as "lies." Brackman begins a chapter entitled "Methods ( ... of Deceit and Distortions to Falsify History)" by stating that

      "the Secret Relationship is an anonymous production. 'The Historical
      Research Department ' [the formal author of the NOI book] identifies
      no individual members, nor does it indicate their academic credentials.
      In other words, those responsible themselves remain secret -- choosing
      to hide rather than stand behind their scholarship."
      [BRACKMAN, p. 45]

Curiously, such impugning based on anonymity can likewise be made about the magazine Response, the journal of Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Los Angeles Holocaust-oriented "education center"  that sponsored Brackman's own work. While a Response "staff" is noted at the end of the magazine -- an Editor in Chief, and Editor/Supervisor, Senior Researcher, et al, the text of the magazine itself is never credited with an attributable author (except a brief editor's column). Even the Wiesenthal Center's educational resources kit for teachers, The Holocaust, 1933-1945, does not provide authorship for most of its pages of factual assertions.

Brackman continues:

     "The reader is asked to proceed on blind faith supported only by the
      assurance that: ‘The facts, we believe, speak for themselves.’"

The purported facts, of course, are excerpts from mostly Jewish authors, most of them credible scholars. Brackman pushes foreword, now on a rhetorical soapbox:

     "No thoughtful person should accept this statement at face value.
     Historical facts and historical truth are not identical. The indispensable
     link between them is the historian's commitment to the honest evaluation
     and presentation of evidence. Two thousand years ago, the Roman orator
     Cicero enunciated what might be called 'The Historian's code of Ethics':

              "The first law for the historian is that he shall never utter an
               untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is
               true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality, or
               malice."  [BRACKMAN, p. 45]

Brackman's championing of Cicero as a paragon of moral virtue and truth-finding is a bizarrely unsupportive selection for the foundation of his own arguments. Certainly Cicero was a virtuous figure, committed to telling the truth with no malice, et al.  But as Brackman should have known, in the common Jewish rush to condemn nearly every important thinker in history as somehow anti-Jewish, Cicero is often cited in books about anti-Semitism as a seminal "anti-Semite" himself; he is to be found in such titles as History and Hate, Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, A Short History of Antisemitism, and others.

Jewish professor Peter Schafer in his Judeophobia. Attitudes Towards the Jews in the Ancient World, even writes that, in Rome, "the first voice to be heard, and one regarded as the first evidence of Roman 'anti-Semitism' is that of the great orator of the late Republic, Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.) in his famous speech Pro Flacco ... It is the Jews as a pressure group, influential in public assemblies, who are attacked by Cicero." [SCHAFER, 1997, p. 180]

Taking careful account of Cicero's aforementioned reluctance to "utter and untruth," the ancient sage says this about Jews:

        "How numerous they are, their clannishness, their influence in the
         assemblies." [FLANNERY, p. 15]

These are charges that are among the foundations of "anti-Semitic" arguments to our own day.  And of course they remain, after all these centuries, "true," as we shall soon see. Cicero also called Judaism barbara superstisios  (a barbarous superstition) [MORAIS, p. 40] and his teacher, Apollonius Molon of Rhodes (presumably one of Cicero's seminal inspirations for the truthful approach to history) "was the first to compose an entire work against the Jews, thus launching the endless chain of adversus Judaeos [criticism of Jews] that reaches us to the present day." [FLANNERY, p. 12]

So begins Professor Brackman's defense of Jewry against the anti-Semitic "lies" of the Secret Relationship.

Obviously, anyone interested in the relationship between Jews and the slave trade should read both books, the NOI's and Brackman's. Rather than go through a tedious point by point refutation of a range of Brackman's own refutations of the Secret Relationship, suffice it to note that in his little 100 page book, Brackman often manages to stray considerably off the subject of Jews and the slave trade, rhapsodizing about Jewish altruism in the Civil Rights movement, chronicling the deteriorating Black-Jewish relations since 1991, arguing that calling the Black slavery experience a "Holocaust" (as the NOI book does) is inappropriate, and that African slavery deaths are often exaggerated. Most significantly, Brackman renders the Nation of Islam book to be merely "a hateful fantasy ... originally concocted by white anti-Semites ... who throughout history have demonstrated that they have no more true regard for Blacks than Jews." [BRACKMAN, p. 91]  This standard Jewish tact of shirking responsibility and passing it all along elsewhere upon someone else’s' head is a historically Jewish as the Talmud. And drawing a connection, as Brackman does, between automobile baron Henry Ford's belief in a world Jewish conspiracy and the NOI's examination of Jewish involvement in slavery is to find, in Jewish minds, the very equivalent obsession with "conspiracy" theories as those they condemn in "anti-Semites."

In 1993 a tenured Black professor, Tony Martin, of Wellesley College (the alma mater of Hilary Clinton) made national attention by committing the crime of using the Secret Relationship (as one of seven other course books) as a reading assignment in an African-American studies class. Martin found himself in a struggle for academic freedom against a massive -- and unified -- campaign by national Jewish agencies to censor and defame him, attempting to get him fired as an academically incompetent anti-Semite. The Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Community Relations Council and others joined to charge Martin with "clear-cut anti-Semitic prejudice in his classroom and on the Wellesley campus and demanded his firing." [MARTIN, p. 8-9] Martin and the book were soon attacked in four articles in the Boston Globe, on National Public Radio, the New York Times, the Associated Press, ABC'sThis Week With David Brinkley, the Today Show, and others. [MARTIN, p. 13-14]

In an attack on professor Martin, a Jewish fellow faculty member at Wellesley College, Jerold Auerbach, wrote that "Anti-Semitism ... is quietly diverted into the channel of academic freedom ... Professor Martin and his ilk are free to emulate [Nazi ideologue] Joseph Goebbels ... It is sufficient, perhaps, to note that anyone who teaches The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews as serious history has entered the realm of academic charlatanism." [AUERBAC H., p. 1]

One wonders how an ideologue like Auerbach musters the gall to smear Martin as a veritable Nazi when Auerbach's own ideological allegiance and attention to "serious history" is so morally questionable. In 1984 professor Auerbach sported an article in the Zionist journal, Midstream, in defense of twenty-two members of the messianic fascist Gush Emunim organization who faced court trials for a variety of crimes in Israel. "Accused of murdering Arabs at the Islamic College in Hebron, and of attempts to assassinate Arab mayors, bomb Arab buses, and destroy the Dome of the Rock," Auerbach sees such charges as "inflamed rhetoric [that] obscures principles of Jewish religious nationalism .... To describe these defendants as 'West Bank terrorists' prejudges their guilt and distorts their identity ... A lunatic fringe can easily be dismissed, but Gush Emunim draws too heavily upon Judaism and Zionism for such cavalier treatment. The credo of Gush Emunim ... may ... be enchantingly simple. But it can also be urgently compelling for in Judea and Samaria [these are the right-wing land expansion terms Auerbach chooses in reference to what is more commonly known as the "occupied territories"] Jews are struggling to explore and express intimate relationships -- between a people, its God, and its promised land -- that have defined Judaism since the 'Exodus.'" [AUERBACH, 10-84]

The group Auerbach fawns over -- Gush Emunim,  its messianic world view, and its hostility to all non-Jews, we have run across before and will visit again in this volume. Its credo is messianic land expansion and Nazi-like attitudes towards non-Jews based on the worst tradition of talmudic interpretation. "Gush Emunim leaders," says Israel Shahak, "have quoted religious precepts which enjoin Jews to oppress Gentiles." [SHAHAK, p. 96]  Israeli Uri Huppert notes that Miriam Levinger, wife of prominent Gush Emunim leader Rabbi Moshe Levinger, "expressed the extremist attitude now prevalent in the Orthodox, religious-nationalist camp in her well-known remark that 'democracy' is not a Jewish value." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 18] Ideologues of Gush Emunim-style teachings who have risen to fame in recent years include Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Baruch Goldstein, mass murderer of 29 Arabs in a Hebron mosque as they prayed. More about Gush Emunim later.

Among the most prominent (of the few) African-Americans attacking Martin's "anti-Semitism" was Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard professor, who was afforded space on the subject in the Op Ed section of the New York Times. (Gates, notes the African-American Los Angeles Sentinel, is seen by "many African-Americans ... as a pawn of Jewish leadership who never misses an opportunity to attack Black scholars and Afro-centrism, while ignoring rampant Jewish racism." [LEWIS, p. A7] Gates wrote that:

      "The Bible of the new anti-Semitism is the Secret Relationship Between
       Blacks and Jews, an official publication of the Nation of Islam that
       boasts 1,275 footnotes in the course of 334 pages. Sober and scholarly
       looking, it may well be one of the most influential books published in the
       Black community in the last twelve months ... To be sure, the book
       massively represents the historical record, largely through a process of
       cunningly selected quotations from often reputable sources. [GATES,
       p. 219] ... The authors of the Secret Relationship Between Blacks and
       Jews boast that they're hanging the Jews by their own words!" [GATES,
       p. 225; original emphasis]

And what of Gates' authoritative reference to categorically refute the 1,275 "misrepresenting" citations in the Secret Relationship? Harold Brackman. Gates' rebuttal to the Secret Relationship, proudly proclaimed in the Simon Wiesenthal Center's magazine, Response, "drew of Brackman's scholarship." Hence, Gates' foundation as an African-American scholar attacking the NOI book is not largely -- if at all -- his own research, but that from a polemical Jewish scholar working for the Wiesenthal Center [See later chapter for a discussion about its role as a pro-Israel, Judeo-centric propaganda center].  In a thank you letter to Brackman (published in the Wiesenthal's journal), Gates wrote:

     "I want to say how appreciative I am for the ground-clearing work you
     performed in your paper on 'The Secret Relationship.' It's a subject I had
     been addressing for a while, addressing the book's insidiousness in fairly
     general terms but I think anyone interested in truly thrashing through the
     issues has to be immediately grateful, as I am, for your splendidly detailed
     and meticulous work of reason and analysis."
     [RESPONSE, p. 11, FALL 1992, v. 12, no. 6]

by lizardking Wed Feb 03, 2016 4:56 pm

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.

by Thinkforyourself Wed Feb 03, 2016 6:23 pm

Here is a link to a PDF of the incredible book 'The Secret Relationship Between Jews and Blacks':

https://www.radioislam.org/islam/english/books/secrrel1/The%20Secret%20Relationship%20between%20Blacks%20and%20Jews.pdf

by Ziggy Kelleher Thu Aug 17, 2017 8:50 pm

My Video.
Clip on Dr. Tony Martin discussing Bible,Talmud and the movie Amistad

by Jadepurplelover Sat Aug 21, 2021 8:16 pm

And now everyone is a slave to their corporate masters , how ironic slavery is ok now and let's not forget about the fishing asian slave ships where people who eat fish get it from .

by its_Goyim Wed Oct 27, 2021 2:53 am

https://odysee.com/DavidIrvingTonyMartinTheJewishRoleInTheTradeInAfricanSlavesmp4:7

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The Jewish Run Slave Trade