Jews & Slavery:
Three Books by the Nation of Islam

2,594 words

Translations: French, German

Caught in an avalanche of anti-white propaganda and discrimination, it’s easy to forget that Jews and governments have other enemies, other people they hate besides whites. 

One such group is the Nation of Islam (NOI), a black American religious organization founded in 1930. Its national headquarters, Mosque Maryam, is located in Chicago.

NOI’s current leader is Louis Farrakhan, 79, born Louis Eugene Wolcott in the Bronx, but raised in Boston. Raised Episcopalian, he attended the Boston Latin School. Starting at age 6 he received rigorous training on the violin.

Interestingly, Farrakhan, like famed black nationalist Marcus Garvey, is of Afro-Caribbean descent: his mother was born in Saint Kitts and Nevis and his father, a taxicab driver, was from Jamaica. American blacks and Afro-Caribbean blacks are socially and ethnically distinct.

Prior to joining the Nation of Islam in 1955, he worked as a professional muscian.

Farrakhan is hated by Jews, and has long been targeted by powerful hate groups such as the ADL and SPLC.

Jews also detest the Nation of Islam itself. In 1942 a secret ADL file, “Temple of Islam Infiltration,” stated that “a Negro employed by us” proved “quite instrumental” in an FBI raid on the Chicago mosque that resulted in 82 arrests. In 1959 the American Jewish Committee sent black spies from the Urban League to report on an appearance by then-NOI leader Elijah Muhammed in Newark.

Here I will briefly survey three books published by the Nation of Islam that should be of utmost interest to white readers.

The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, vol. 1 (Boston: The Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam, 1991), 334 pp.

This now-famous book, relying primarily upon the works of mainstream Jewish scholars, demonstrates in meticulous detail and with formidable documentation that Jews were at the very center of the trans-Atlantic slave trade as merchants, financiers, shippers, and insurers. They also sold the products of slave labor on international markets.

The credibility of this underground classic speaks for itself. It relates a fascinating, previously invisible story that every educated American should know about.

According to the NOI, it is a “persistent but mythological claim that Jews were either co-sufferers or innocent bystanders” during the slaveholding era. (Compare Jews’ alignment with Aborigines against whites in current Australian propaganda: “[We are] two peoples with histories of dispossession and humiliation and killing who recognise each other, who find points of intersection and of parallel.”)

The first third of Secret Relationship surveys the role of Jews in colonial slavery in South America and the Caribbean, the middle third that of slavery in colonial North America and the antebellum South. The final 100 pages consists of an alphabetical list and capsule biographies with extensive footnotes of dozens and dozens of prominent Jews involved in slavery.

Their role was not small. Jews were particularly active outside the present borders of the US in Brazil and the Caribbean.

North American Jews owned black servants and Jewish plantation owners in the South worked their lands with black slaves.

“In 1820,” historian Jacob Rader Marcus wrote in 1989, “over 75 percent of Jewish families in Charleston, Richmond, and Savannah owned slaves, employed as domestic servants; almost 40 percent of all Jewish householders in the United States owned one slave or more.”

Refuting arguments that US census records confirm only a “modest” level of slaveholding among Jews, the authors point out that Jews were twice as likely as white Americans to own slaves.

In addition, Jewish merchants sold dozens, even hundreds, of slaves at auction, turning over their chattel inventory as rapidly as possible to maximize profits. Brief ownership by slave merchants of this kind is not captured in census records.

Not only were there no protests against slavery by Southern Jews, but very few Jews anywhere in the United States protested slavery on moral grounds.

Today, the Nation of Islam writes, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews “can be found in the collections of every major academic library, including those of every Ivy League college and university.”

Since its publication, the book has given the Jews fits. The ADL devoted a lengthy hit piece to it, and no less than three book-length attacks by Jewish authors have been “laundered” through mainstream publishers including New York University Press and Transaction Publishers. Hostile articles were also planted in scholarly journals.

Supportive white academics like Yale philo-Semite and convert to Judaism David Brion Davis were enlisted in the cause, as was Harvard University’s resident Uncle Tom, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

In a degrading act of self-delegitimation, the American Historical Association (AHA) issued a public statement at the behest of three influential Jewish members condemning any historical account “alleging that Jews played a disproportionate role in the Atlantic slave trade.” The AHA statement is frequently cited as “authority” to undermine the legitimacy of the book.

In the conventional slavery narrative of academia and the AHA, the Jews of history vanish, replaced solely by Christian and European evildoers.

In addition to general polemical attacks tricked out in academic guise, the Jews viciously assaulted individual foes on a personal level.

One such victim preserved a record of his ordeal. Marcus Garvey scholar Tony Martin of Wellesley College wrote The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront (Dover, Mass.: The Majority Press, 1993).

Martin is another Afro-Caribbean black, born in Trinidad and Tobago.

He used The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews in his African-American history course at Wellesley. In January 1993, he says,

The long arm of Jewish intolerance reached into my classroom. Unknown to me, three student officers of the Jewish Hillel organization (campus B’nai B’rith stablemates of the Anti-Defamation League), sat in on my class and remained for a single period only. Their purpose was to monitor my presentation. As one of them explained in a campus meeting later, Jewish students had noticed The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews among my offerings in the school bookstore.

Mary Lefkowitz, a Jewish classics professor at Wellesley (she later wrote the anti-Afrocentric Not Out of Africa [1996]), also launched a public attack against Martin. The two had previously become embroiled in a public feud over an article she had written for The New Republic disputing Afrocentric accounts of ancient Greek history.

Martin, who happens to be a barrister-at-law from Gray’s Inn, London, sued Lefkowitz (justifiably, it appears) for libel.

In the ensuing six-year legal struggle, which Martin ultimately lost (the case was dismissed), Lefkowitz enjoyed the financial and legal backing of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. It was not a fair fight on the merits, but a gang of bullies slugging and kicking their weak victim.

Exemplifying great personal courage and devotion to freedom of speech, Professor Martin spoke to the Institute for Historical Review during its heyday, to David Irving’s Real History Conference 2001 in Cincinnati, and served as a witness for Ernst Zündel  before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. His focus was not revisionism, but the systematic suppression of speech.

Martin’s book provides a good, detailed case study of how Jews deployed power against a black academic, just as former US Rep. Paul Findley’s (R.-Ill.) They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby (1985) is a useful handbook detailing numerous assaults against Left-wing critics of Israeli policies.

Whites can profitably study and learn from such studies of Jewish intellectual terrorism because they employ the same tactics over and over again.

One black website wrote of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews:

It was not until the revelation [by Nation of Islam researchers] of the significant involvement of the Jews that their scholars (and their impish Black lackeys and mouthpieces) sought to highlight the actions of others (i.e., African chiefs, Arab traders [the NOI has noted that prominent merchants in the Arab slave trade were Jews!], so-called “free” Blacks etc.) in an attempt to change the focus of the discussion and documented research.

It is strange that prior to the Nation of Islam’s research, those who had studied history and this critical aspect of the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on American society were perfectly content allowing the blame to fall squarely on the shoulders of the White Anglo Saxon Protestants in the South.

The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, vol. 2: How Jews Gained Control of the Black American Economy) (n.p.: The Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam, 2010), 509 pp.

In the Preface to the second volume the authors point out that since the beginning of the 20th century nearly every black leader at some point in his or her public career has been labeled “anti-Semitic.”

Examples include Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Julian Bond, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Andrew Young, Kweisi Mfume, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Joseph Lowery, John Hope Franklin, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Julius Lester, Alice Walker, Michael Jackson, Spike Lee, rapper Ice Cube, Arsenio Hall, Muhammad Ali, hip hop group Public Enemy, Oprah Winfrey, and Barack Obama.

It has reached the point where any prominent black “must first declare publicly his or her galactic distance from Black leaders branded” anti-Semitic by Jews. The same is true, of course, for whites.

The “anti-Semitism” canard (along with, in the case of whites, the “racist” one) has been enormously effective. Jews have applied it time and again to virtually everyone in public life.

How does it retain its deadly effectiveness despite being so frequently and sloppily employed? Its many victims, members of every race and religion under the sun, are subjected to extreme psychic and emotional abuse, and suffer serious damage to their reputations, careers, and livelihoods whenever Jews level the charge. Yet no matter how often it is used, it never gets old.

Why does the groundless accusation work? How does it transform prominent, accomplished men and women into compliant lickspittles and toadies, willing to throw their own principles, people, or religious convictions under the bus in order to appease their Jewish persecutors?

In a white or black world such a cheesy stunt, pulled over and over again by a slimy gang of criminals, would long ago have lost all effectiveness.

The primary purpose of volume two is to elucidate the hidden political, economic, and social influence of Jews in the post-Civil War South between roughly 1860 and 1925.

Their influence was amazingly extensive.

A list of Jewish public officials by state, compiled from numerous scholarly sources, covers 9 pages in small print.

Jews were elected to office in the South in surprisingly large numbers. Jewish officeholders helped create and enforce segregation laws.

An abbreviated list of Jewish bankers in the south covers 8 pages. The authors note that the Jewish banking network was not limited to the South, but extended to every region of the continent where Jews settled and opened businesses.

There is extensive discussion of both the Ku Klux Klan and white racist Southern politicians, the attitudes of both toward Jews, and the substantial Jewish role in Southern racism.

This analysis raises intriguing questions about the structure of white racialism.

For example, it is well-known that the original Ku Klux Klan was Freemasonic, philo-Semitic, and welcomed Jews as members. But a persuasive case is made that even the second Klan of the 1920s was not anti-Jewish.

Similarly, several noted racist white politicians are shown to have been either philo-Semites or indifferent to Jewish power (most were philo-Semitic).

Such individuals included US Sen. “Cotton Ed” Smith (D.-S.C.), US Sen. Robert Reynolds (D.-N.C.), Eugene and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, Sen. Theodore Bilbo (D.-Miss.), Democrat Josephus Daniels (anti-black and repulsively philo-Semitic), Sen. Tom Watson (D.-Ga.), Sen. “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman (D.-S.C.), and others.

George Wallace is not mentioned because he falls outside the time period covered by the book, but I am very familiar with his career. He, too, was characteristically anti-black (prior to being crippled by an assassin’s bullet) and philo-Semitic.

Clearly, not all white “racists” are necessarily valuable assets to the anti-genocidal cause.

Could such a persistent pattern signify a fundamental divide in the collective consciousness of white people? Perhaps it is fallacious to assume that generic “racism” that warmly embraces (or ignores) Jews on the one hand, and opposition to Jewish power on the other, bear a deep or necessary relationship to one another. They may even work at cross-purposes.

Finally, a major theme of the book is that liens, sharecropping, and other aspects of commercial law in the South facilitated Jewish (and white) economic exploitation of blacks. These, it is maintained, were adaptations of age-old Jewish laws found in the Talmud, which is described as a “business manual for the Jewish people.”

At the very least, the economic exploitation of Southern blacks after the Civil War was ruthless and unscrupulous in the extreme.

Jews Selling Blacks: Slave Sale Advertising by American Jews (n.p.: Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam, 2010), 144 pp.

This companion volume to The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, billed as “the largest collection of Jewish slave-sale ads ever published,” is an illustrated collection of 283 ads from American newspapers spanning more than one hundred years.

It shows Jews seeking to buy hundreds of blacks; Jews selling blacks with warranties, bank financing, chasing runaways, selling “wenches,” “families,” “gangs,” “infants”; and Jews selling entire plantations, slaves and all. The Jews in question were leaders of synagogues and upstanding founding fathers of today’s American Jewish community.

A brief YouTube promo for the book [3:00 mins.] notes that “The largest Gentile slave dealer was Franklin & Armfield . . . but they only operated in the South for 8 years. Jewish slave dealers operated in every place slavery existed . . . North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa—for 400 years.”

The promo, which is not particularly remarkable or scandalous, was posted just a month ago and will probably be pulled. Internet media giant Google, the site’s owner, is a Jewish corporation that censors video uploads for ideological and racial reasons in conjunction with the ADL.

The company has already censored one promo for Jews Selling Blacks. The place-marker for the banned video reads, “This video has been removed as a violation of YouTube’s policy prohibiting hate speech.” (News article and screen shot at the NOI Research Group’s website.)

Although NOI has commendably moved the suppressed clip to its own site, at YouTube there was potential for mass general viewership, while at the new site only a numerically small audience already receptive to its message is likely to see it.

The black scholars who wrote these invaluable books, while not friends of the white man and partisans of their own people, for the most part display admirable objectivity, coupled with a determination to view the historical record in its entirety and full complexity. They could easily have taken the safe, conventional route of repeating anti-white slurs and ignoring the Jewish role entirely. But they did not.

These fascinating works bring to light facts about Jews and blacks that are necessary for non-Jews to understand in order to view this key facet of history in proper perspective.

The books are partial antidotes to prevailing academic and media lies—and corking good reads besides!

Websites

• Nation of Islam Research Group http://noirg.org/
• The Nation of Islam http://www.noi.org/
• The Final Call Online Edition http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/index.shtml (online companion to The Final Call newspaper, the official newspaper of the Nation of Islam)