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."
"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,
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,
"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."
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.
"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's This 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]
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