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'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]
