Jews and the American Slave Trade

Saul Friedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780765806604
• eBook ISBN: 9781351510752
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: History

The Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semitic manuscripts published in years. This work of so-called scholars received great celebrity from individuals like Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, and Khalid Abdul Muhammed who used the document to claim that Jews dominated both transatlantic and antebellum South slave trades. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades.Jews and the American Slave Trade dissects the questionable historical technique employed in Secret Relationship, offers a detailed response to Farrakhan's charges, and analyzes the impetus behind these charges. He begins with in-depth discussion of the attitudes of ancient peoples, Africans, Arabs, and Jews toward slavery and explores the Jewish role hi colonial European economic life from the Age of Discovery tp Napoleon. His state-by-state analyses describe in detail the institution of slavery in North America from colonial New England to Louisiana. Friedman elucidates the role of American Jews toward the great nineteenth-century moral debate, the positions they took, and explains what shattered the alliance between these two vulnerable minority groups in America.Rooted in incontrovertible historical evidence, provocative without being incendiary, Jews and the American Slave Trade demonstrates that the anti-slavery tradition rooted in the Old Testament translated into powerful prohibitions with respect to any involvement in the slave trade. This brilliant exploration will be of interest to scholars of modern Jewish history, African-American studies, American Jewish history, U.S. history, and minority studies.

1

Handbook of Hate: The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews

Teaching Anti-History

On July 20, 1991, Leonard Jeffries, professor of African-American studies at City University of New York, provoked angry responses from both Italians and Jews with a two-hour speech he delivered before the state-subsidized Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany. In his remarks, subsequently broadcast over cable television in New York, Jeffries charged (a) there was a conspiracy on the part of Hollywood producers to denigrate African people; (b) this conspiracy was a product of cooperation between the Mafia and Russian Jews bent on “the destruction of black people”; and (c) Jews were no strangers to domination and control of blacks since they had financed the slave trade. Jeffries was especially exercised about this last point, taunting that Jewish grandees and court favorites had done the handiwork of slaving for the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Germans, and English. They were allegedly assisted in this enterprise by “their Jewish community brothers” who established the slave trade next to synagogues in Recife, Curasao, and New Amsterdam, The partisan audience at Albany gave Jeffries a standing ovation.¹

This was not the first time a black nationalist had come forward to heap the woes of his people at the doorstep of Jews. Marcus Garvey, the celebrated founder of the “back to Africa” movement, regularly used the editorial columns of his newspaper Negro World to flog “powerful” Jewish financiers whose goal was to submerge and destroy the black population of America. Whatever problems Jews experienced, said Garvey, had been brought upon themselves for … “Jews like money. They have always been after money. They want nothing else but money. A Jew is always a Jew. His history has been one of selfishness. His greed has clouded his judgment.”²

At least Garvey had the decency to denounce Adolf Hitler. Not so, some of his contemporaries. Visiting Harlem in the 1940s, Stephen Derounian (aka John Roy Carlson) listened as Arthur Reid, director of the African Progressive Business League, declared: “I like Hitler … Yeah, I like Hitler…. Let the White Man kill his brother white man. It’ll leave fewer whites to bother with later—when the black man can step in and get justice for himself.” When would that be? Two black youths volunteered: “Inside of five years you’ll see the fighting goin’ on in this country, man. I’ll fight like I never fought before. There’ll be race riots like they never was.”

A crowd, gathered at the comer of 131st St. and Lennox Avenue, listened as a black woman shouted: “Do as Japan does. Copy like she does. She don’t preach no social equality stuff. There ain’t no such thing. She just walks in and takes what she wants. Be like her. Step up and take your freedom. Don’t you believe all them things about brotherhood. There ain’t no brotherhood for the colored man, except in his own kind. The white man can never do you no good.” There was a more familiar refrain to the harangue offered by one Carlos Cook to a group at the comer of 116th Street: “Jews are all Communists and Communism wants to exploit the Negro just like the white man. I wouldn’t lift my finger to save a Jew. We came here against our will. They brought us here as slaves and they’ve treated us as slaves [italics mine]. We owe nothing to America. America owes everything to us. This isn’t my home and my culture and my name are in Africa.” These were voices of despair, voices of anger, voices of hate. Astonishingly, these statements were uttered by young blacks in Harlem, not in 1968 or 1991, but in 1942, at a time when every Jew in the world was threatened with extermination by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.³

What is especially distressing among the accusations of Professor Jeffries today and street radicals in Harlem in 1942 is the claim that Jews controlled the chattel slave trade in and about the Western Hemisphere. This hoary canard, repeated in the respectable chambers of black churches in Cleveland and Youngstown as well as on the stage of the Apollo Theater when Morton Downey, Jr. brought his travelling video circus to Harlem a few years ago, owes its revival to Nation of Islam spokesman Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan, the former Louis Eugene Wolcott, a onetime calpyso singer from Bermuda, joined Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam in the early 1960s. Displaying a bent for oratory, Farrakhan denounced Malcolm X when the latter questioned the direction of the movement shortly before Malcolm’s assassination in 1965. Thirteen years later, following the death of Elijah Muhammad, Farrakhan assumed a greater leadership role in the Nation of Islam and proceeded to outrage many Americans with his rhetoric that helped rupture the civil rights alliance between blacks and Jews. For Farrakhan, Adolf Hitler was a “great man,” albeit a destructive one. Far worse were the Zionists who had conquered and persecuted the Palestinians. Or American Jews, who were admonished not to criticize Jesse Jackson after the onetime presidential candidate had referred to New York as “Hymietown.” Jews in general followed a corrupt, “gutter religion.” In 1984, Farrakhan gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he declared “a small clique of Jews” were responsible for “the ships that brought our fathers into slavery.” For Farrakhan, his disciples and allies, the transatlantic slave trade was a human tragedy far outstripping the Jewish Holocaust. From Jeffries, Tony Martin of Wellesley and Farrakhan’s lieutenant, the self-proclaimed “Doctor” Khalid Abdul Muhammad, came figures of 60, 100, even 600 million Africans slain in the overall operations of African slavery. And much of it could be blamed upon Jews.

To validate these charges, the Nation of Islam assigned its “Historical Research Department” to document Jewish involvement in the slave trade. Actually a group of graduate students from the Boston area, the Research Department published volume one of The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews in 1991 (suggesting that further volumes were to follow). A slick paper publication, laced with tables and charts appealling to a mass audience, The Secret Relationship contains citations from prominent American Jewish academics (e.g., Jacob Marcus, Salo Baron, Leonard Fein, Leonard Dinnerstein, Bertram Korn, Marc Raphael, Henry Feingold, and Jonathan Sama). Readers who desired more information were invited to call a toll-free number—1-800-48 Truth.

Far from serving as a useful tool of research, The Secret Relationship violates the basic canons of historical methodology. Designed to capitalize on the victimization of two peoples, it may properly be termed a handbook of anti-history. Instead of attempting a thoughtful study of black-Jewish relations, the editors have indulged in (a) distortion; (b) exaggeration; (c) emendation; (d) use of ben trovato (made-up tales); (e) prevarication; (d) misquoting sources; (d) citing shaky sources; and (e) citing no sources.⁴

A common (and obvious) failing of pseudo-scholarship is to take the words of an author out of context. Thus, in the Secret Relationship the name of Jonathan Sama is invoked to suggest “there is ‘much evidence’ to show that many Jews decided to remain loyal to the crown in the American Revolution” (p. 17), that of Marc Raphael to suggest that the slave trade was “a major feature of Jewish economic life” in Surinam (p. 36), that of Judith Elkin cited to prove thirteen Portuguese Jews managed to build up the trade of Buenos Aires through the illegal import of West African slaves (p. 83) and that of Henry Feingold, utilized in a section dealing with Jews and the rape of black women, to suggest that the number of mulattos counted to Jewish parents was only “the tip of an iceberg” (pp. 196–201).

Frequently, the editors of Secret Relationship stretch their sources or even turn them on their heads to prove a point. Arnold Wiznitzer, perhaps the foremost scholar of Brazilian Jewry, is cited as claiming that Jews held economic dominance over colonial Brazil, especially in the slave trade (p. 31–32). The evidence: a twelve-line quotation pasted together from four separate references in Wiznitzer to read: “Portuguese merchants, many of them [Jews] had controlled most of the slave trade between Africa and America until the Portuguese rebellion of 1640” (p. 28) Unsophisticated readers would not suspect that the word Jews does not appear in the original quotation. The actual term was “New Christian,” applied to Portuguese whose ancestors once had been Jews. According to Wiznitzer, many of these individuals never practiced Judaism and “there is no reason or basis to call them Jews.”⁵ Moreover, he writes, “It cannot be said that the Jews played a dominant role in Dutch Brazil as señhores de engeñho (operators of sugar mills).”⁶ As for their role in the slave trade, Wiznitzer says that between 1636 and 1645 23,163 African slaves were brought to Brazil through its four functioning ports. There were approximately 1,000 to 1,400 Jews in Brazil at the time. Using Wiznitzer’s own formula of one adult male for every four women and children, we may estimate 250 adult Jewish males in the land. Most were merchants or small farmers, only a handful (20-30) were brokers. Yet Jews, everywhere, bear responsibility for the slave population of Brazil which reached more than four million when the institution of slavery was abolished in the nineteenth century

Equally sloppy scholarship is evident in the misuse of Rabbi Max Kohler and Elizabeth Donnan who are cited in support of the claim that Jews of Curasao were forbidden by the Dutch West Indies Company to purchase more slaves because they were “notorious for their perceived ability to control trade” and “flout established rules of trade” on the island in the seventeenth century (p. 66). A search of Donnan’s writings reveals very much the opposite, for the Amsterdam Directory instructed Peter Stuveysant to foster agriculture with the import of African slaves “by any means,” including barring anyone from leaving the country.⁷ Such topsy-turvy methodology is evident also in the attempted manipulation of Jacob Marcus, dean of American-Jewish historians. Marcus is quoted as saying that Jews in the Caribbean secured domination in sugar production, when he clearly states “there is no evidence that Jews or persons of Jewish ancestry ever dominated the industry.”⁸ Even the venerable Simon Wolf is abused. Using his American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, the editors of Secret Relationship conclude that Jewish enrollment in the Confederate forces (1,324 men) demonstrates the pro-slavery sentiment of the 150,000 Jews who lived in the United States at the time of the Civil War (pp. 157–59). Such a conclusion, of course, overlooks Wolf’s figure of 6,611 Jews who fought for the Union, including six young Jewish men who won the Congressional Medal of Honor while participating in the conflict.⁹

The editors of the Secret Relationship do not distinguish between legitimate scholars and people who simply have managed to publish a book. Thus George Cohen, Rabbi Harold Scharfman, Philip Birnbaum, and the radical Lenni Brenner are cited as authorities on Judaism and the Jewish way of life when they support the editors’ position. Brenner is even a victim of emendation. He is quoted denouncing “Sephardic merchants” and cotton factors who brought thousands of Africans to America. Brenner goes on to remind his readers that 7,000 Jews fought for the Union, that many were committed to abolitionism in part because they had been oppressed in tsarist Russia or because being German “48ers” (the liberals who tried to revolutionize Central Europe in 1848) they were “light years ahead of most Northern whites in this regard.”¹⁰ Readers are not told that. Nor are they offered sources for charts listing slave owners in Surinam (48) or Jamaica (77) or the fifty New York Jews simply listed as prominent slave owners (97).

Occasionally, the editors of Secret Relationship bend their own facts to fit their prescribed goals. On one page (22) the reader is told that Jews contributed less than 0.5 percent of funds that originally capitalized the Dutch West Indies Company in 1623. On the very next page, however, we read that within a century as many as one-fourth of the directors of the Dutch East Indies Company were Jews. The confusion of one stock venture which focused primarily upon Indonesia with an other dealing with fading Dutch ventures in the Caribbean could only be deliberate.

If there are no facts, the editors of Secret Relationship just make them up. Thus we learn that Jean Lafitte, the pirate who fought alongside Andrew Jackson in the battle of New Orleans, was actually a Jew more interested in smuggling slaves past the British (86-87). Without providing a shred of genealogical evidence, the research staff devotes two pages in their chronicle of “Jews responsible for the Black Holocaust” to the De Wolf family of Rhode Island. John C. Femont, son of a ne’er-do-well Catholic from Lyons and a Norfolk, Virginia Protestant woman, is also transmuted into a Jew. So, too, was Joseph Ottolenghe, referred to on three pages (133–36) as “A Jew Teaches Slave Religion.” Ottolenghe, an eighteenth-century immigrant to Georgia from England did teach the catechism to slaves—after he converted to Anglicanism at the age of twenty-eight and remained a devout Christian for the rest of his life.¹¹

The editors are not above repeating legends and applying new spins to them. Thus we have conjecture about the ancestry of Christopher Columbus definitely resolved. Columbus is presented as a Jew and slave trader (14–17), a brutal warlord who enslaved natives in the New World. Those fluent in Spanish will delight in learning that the admiral managed to set sail not through the presentation of jewels (joyas) to Isabella. Rather, he used the influence of Jews (judios). An even more bizarre twist of an old wives’ tale concerns Lord Jeffrey Amherst (1717–1797), victor at Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and Montreal in the French and Indian Wars. This vaunted British commander is accused of deliberately spreading smallpox among Indians through the gift of infected blankets. It is a vicious, unsubstantiated canard which pops up from time to time in badly written American history books, infuriating legitimate colonial historians. The tale is revived and refined in The Secret Relationship. In this telling, Amherst was assisted by eight Jewish contractors who also exploited the “hapless Indians” by selling them liquor and the diseased blankets. “It was only a matter of time before the pogrom reduced the once mighty Indian nation to but a few holocaust survivors.” (105–13).

The widespread deaths of Native Americans, through disease and brutality is well-chronicled. It makes no sense to impute these deaths to a deliberate scheme on the part of Amherst and his Jewish commissariat.¹² According to John Long, Amherst’s principal biographer, the Baron was very supportive of Indian agent William Johnson. Writes Long, Amherst solicited the support of the Six Nations (e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Handbook of Hate: The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews
• Chapter 2. Slavery in Antiquity
• Chapter 3. Jews and Slavery
• Chapter 4. Marranos and New Christians: Jews as Traders in the Hispanic World
• Chapter 5. Haven: Holland and the Dutch West Indies
• Chapter 6. Unwelcome Visitors: France and the Code Noir
• Chapter 7. The Age of British Mercantilism
• Chapter 8. The First Jews in America: New York and the Middle Colonies
• Chapter 9. Jews in the Triangular Trade: Colonial New England
• Chapter 10. The Old Dominions: Virginia and Maryland
• Chapter 11. The Carolinas
• Chapter 12. Georgia: The Land Closed to Slaves, Rum, and Lawyers
• Chapter 13. Louisiana: The Sugar Kingdom
• Chapter 14. The Cotton Kingdom
• Chapter 15. Jews and the Great Moral Debate
• Chapter 16. Myth-Making and Afrocentrism
• Chapter 17. Blacks and Jews: An Alliance of Convenience
• Bibliographic Comment
• Notes
• Index