America’s 1st “Anti-Semite” & Slave-Trading Jews: A Trip Down New York’s Memory Lane
Nation of Islam Research Group
“The most prominent Jewish leaders in New York, reflecting the city’s strong southern attachments, were anti-abolitionist and, to varying degrees, proslavery.”
—Howard B. Rock, Haven of Liberty
Last October the Nation of Islam filed a landmark federal lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) in New York City for relief and damages from their malicious practice of labeling anyone they disagree with as “anti-Semitic.” As The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan said on October 28, 2023: “We have borne a lot in these last 40 years in the absence of our great leader and teacher, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. And he, Elijah Muhammad, prepared me to receive the insults, the sneers, being evil spoken of, and my and our reputation being scarred and bruised by the false charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ by the Anti-Defamation League. And with their influence over the media, these false charges have been spread throughout the Earth.” The Nation of Islam lawsuit signals that it is time for something else to be spread throughout the Earth, namely, the true history of these Jewish merchants of smear and the role they’ve played, and continue to play, in the devaluation of Black life.
Significantly, the Nation of Islam filed its case to fight this weaponized charge of “anti-Semitism” in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. According to its website, that Court has been functioning since 1789 and has heard cases related to the sinking of the Titanic, the espionage cases of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the New York Times’s Pentagon Papers. And now it will hear the most momentous of cases that will determine if a private gang of Jewish censorship thugs can continue to freely obliterate the Free Speech guarantees of the U.S. Constitution.
So, let’s examine why the Nation’s filing of the “anti-Semitism” case in New York City is so historically significant. For it is in New Amsterdam (it would be renamed New York when England took over from the Dutch in 1664) 370 years ago where we find the very first case of alleged “anti-Semitism” on what is now American soil. It is also where Jews first entered North America—an arrival fraught with controversy.
Bedford–Stuyvesant (or Bed–Stuy) is the Brooklyn neighborhood made famous in the works of cultural giants as Spike Lee, the Notorious B.I.G., and Jay-Z. It is named after Peter Stuyvesant, who in 1647 was appointed by the ruling Dutch West India Company to govern that region. In 1654, the slave-based sugar colony of Brazil expelled Jews, and 23 of them sought refuge in New Amsterdam. But Stuyvesant knew that Jews had breached previous contracts with the Company resulting in costly losses to the colony, so Stuyvesant refused entry to these Jews. But he was soon overruled by his bosses in Holland, who reminded him of the Company’s many Jewish investors.
Stuyvesant wasn’t the only one resistant to these Jewish traders. Rev. Gutwasser, a Lutheran preacher, complained bitterly about the Jews and “their blasphemous religion”: “These people have no other God than the unrighteous Mammon, and no other aim than to get possession of Christian property, and to win all other merchants by drawing all trade to themselves….[T]hese godless rascals, are of no benefit to the county.”
Nonetheless, even over these strenuous objections the Jews were allowed to settle and do business in the colony but the dispute earned Peter Stuyvesant the label of America’s first “anti-Semite.”
So egregious is Stuyvesant’s “anti-Semitic” legacy that in 2017, the New York Post reported that a Jewish rights group demanded that New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio “scrub all traces of the anti-Semitic Dutch governor from city property….Not only do they want monuments of him removed, but his name erased on everything from the public Stuyvesant High School to Stuyvesant Square Park to the entire neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant.”
Stuyvesant & the Slave-Trading Jews
But before he is scrubbed from memory let’s look at the Jews Stuyvesant unsuccessfully tried to keep out. As with all European settlements after the invasions of Christopher Columbus, colonial New Yorkers were desperate for free labor and according to documents it was common knowledge that if they wanted a steady supply of Black Africans, they must consult the Jewish merchants of Brazil, who by then had monopolized the slave trade for all of the Western Hemisphere. Jewish slave traders in Brazil—the place where 90% of Africans were shipped in slavery—were known to “buy up the slaves for cash” at Brazilian auctions and then re-sell them to the sugar planters at an immense profit.
The foremost Jewish American historian, Rabbi Dr. Marc Lee Raphael, incontrovertibly established that point when he wrote in 1983 that in Brazil “Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday,” and throughout the Caribbean “Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade.” Indeed, the rabbi emphasized, “Jewish merchants frequently dominated.”
Jewish historian Dr. Eli Faber concurred, in describing the Jews of Brazil: “Many individuals prospered economically, as well—notably in the slave trade…” So, the fabled Black–Jewish relationship in New York began when these Jewish slave traders from Brazil showed up in Manhattan in 1654. Is it then a coincidence that just a year later forcibly enslaved Africans started arriving in New York in great numbers? The first slave auction in the city took place in 1655, and a formal “slave market” was established in 1711, right in the center of the Jewish enclave at Pearl Street and Wall Street, not far from America’s first synagogue on Mill Street.
Among those 23 Jewish “refugees” spurned by Stuyvesant was their leader Asser Levy, a butcher by trade and the first Jewish landholder in New York. The official New York City government website calls Levy “a leading advocate for the civil rights of Jews.” But Levy held in slavery at least one “negro boy” and very likely more, and it was Levy who bought the land for the first synagogue, with some members paying their dues by sending “a Negro slave to clean the synagogue.”
After Asser Levy Jewish criminality only gets more egregious. Jewish professor Howard B. Rock stated plainly in his deceptively titled book— Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654-1865—that “Jewish merchants took part in New York’s slave trade, a trade that provided income for a few leading families…” And that’s an understatement. Slave ship owner Moses Levy, Asser Levy’s relative, “became probably the most prominent and wealthiest New York Jew,” having brought in at least 24 enslaved Africans between 1718 and his death in 1728. By 1743, according to New York tax records, 90% of New York Jews—that’s 9 out of 10—were slaveowners! Of the 422 Jews that were listed:
282 had one slave,
54 had two slaves,
21 had three slaves,
14 had four slaves,
5 had six slaves,
2 had seven slaves,
and only 39 reported none—but they probably hired slaves when needed from the others (or had slaves that went undocumented to avoid paying taxes).
In 1717 and 1721, two slave ships owned by Jewish merchant Nathan Simson sailed into the New York harbor with a total of 217 chained Africans. Another Jewish historian confirmed that the shipments were “two of the largest slave cargoes to be brought into New York in the first half of the eighteenth century.” Thanks in no small part to Jewish slave traders, at one time New York had a larger population of African slaves than did Maryland or Virginia.
While the Nation of Islam is suing in a New York court for redress of slander and defamation, the early Jews of New York also sued for their “civil rights.” Incorporated into some of the New York laws was the phrase “Slaves are the property of Christians.” The Jews, offended by this discrimination, successfully petitioned so that subsequent anti-Black laws made it clear that Black slaves were the property of “Christians and Jews.”
Lewis and Mordecai Gomez were New York synagogue officials and the owners of the ship Greyhound that imported “merchandise and negroes” into New York in late 1722. Lewis, in his will, left his wife “with as many of my slaves as are necessary to attend her.” Mordecai bequeathed to his sons Isaac and Jacob “Equally to be divided between Them my Two Negro Men Slaves…” There are multiple examples in the wills of Jewish New Yorkers mentioning ownership of Black slaves.
In 1991, 415 graves were uncovered in the area now known as Foley Square, with as many as 20,000 forgotten Black human beings. Stacked five deep, their decayed bones told a chilling tale of violent oppression, starvation deaths, chronic infections and unspeakable suffering. Muscles had been ripped from bone, necks had been broken and spines jammed into skulls—all injuries from lives cursed with carrying heavy loads. If they had not perished in infancy, they had lived just long enough to be worked to death. There is a high probability that many of these 20,000 were enslaved by the aforementioned 422 Jewish people, though we may never know. But we do know that New York’s early Jews formed their own residential enclave just south of the “Negroes Burial Ground.”
And while New York was a boon to Jewish wealth, Blacks faced a life of terror and oppression. As the Black population grew, lynchings, burnings-at-the stake, and other ghoulish tortures became commonplace. It was reported that after the New York lynchings, “The swaying corpses of such Negroes often remained suspended for several days after the execution to terrorize slaves into good behavior.” Even suicide would not deprive the white man of his thirst for Black suffering. In 1697, a courageous African justly killed a white man but received a death sentence. He took his own life before the execution but officials ordered that punishment be inflicted on his dead body.
In 1741, a largely forgotten event occurred where Blacks were accused of plotting a massive rebellion. Just as with the Salem “witches,” it appears to be more a figment of white imagination than a reality, yet more than 200 were arrested and tried. By the time the slaughter had subsided, 154 innocent Blacks had been cast into the dungeon, 14 of them burned alive, 18 hanged, 1 gibbeted (hanged in chains while alive), and 71 transported from the colony. Twenty whites who were thought to be collaborating with the Blacks were also imprisoned, four were executed, and one gibbeted. Among the accused were five Black slaves of prominent New York Jews, including Mordecai and Luis Gomez, Samuel Myers Cohen, Jacob Franks, David Machado, and Judah Hays.
Just a few blocks from that Black burial site is Wall Street, which became the financial center of the world through slave dealing and cotton trading. Before the Jewish Lehman Brothers had grandiose offices at that prestigious address, they could be found amid the cotton plantations of Alabama when slavery was at its peak. They loaned money to planters to buy Black slaves and expand their slavery operations. Then at harvest time the Lehmans took the cotton bales to sell on the world markets. By 1864, one of the Lehman Brothers was actually in charge of ALL the slave-picked cotton in the state! The Lehman’s slave- and cotton-trading trajectory to Wall Street provides an almost perfect historical blueprint for how many, many Jewish businesses built unprecedented wealth in America.
In the Civil War era the most outstanding rabbi in the country was New York’s Morris Jacob Raphall, who delivered a sermon in which he authoritatively asserted that the slave trade and African slavery were perfectly moral and indeed ORDERED BY GOD! It was the most publicized sermon ever delivered by an American Jew up to that time. The slave-owning Southern Confederates were so delighted with the speech that they printed and reprinted this divine ruling from the New York-based leader of the “Chosen People.” His New York Jewish congregation made him the highest paid clergyman in America.
New York Jews were heavily involved in every aspect of the slave trade and the commodities it produced. They bitterly denounced the abolitionist Abraham Lincoln and overwhelmingly supported his opponent Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 elections. A New York Jewish newspaper denounced “that nigger” Frederick Douglass, and another Jewish newspaperman Mordecai Manuel Noah was such a vicious proponent of slavery that the first Black American periodical, The Freedom’s Journal, was launched in response to Noah’s racist propaganda.
The white supremacist historical record of New York’s Jews is undeniable and unforgivable, and only partially presented in this article. Yet the “never-forgetting” New York Jews at the Anti-Defamation League—who delight in labeling everyone from Peter Stuyvesant to The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan as an “anti-Semite”—seem to have forgotten the extraordinary role their Jewish fathers played in creating the dire conditions that Black people suffer to this very moment.
The Nation of Islam lawsuit filed in New York against the ADL documents the treacherous acts of the same people Stuyvesant fought 370 years ago. It outlines “a systematic, long-term, professionally organized political espionage operation complete with informers, infiltrators, money laundering, code names, wiretapping, and secret meetings.” The lawsuit reveals the ADL’s spying on 950 organizations and nearly 10,000 individuals; how the ADL abuses the term “anti-Semitic” to “‘trick,’ manipulate [and] to punish”; and the ADL’s training of law enforcement agencies to use brutal policing methods against Blacks.
Peter Stuyvesant in 1654 did his best to keep Jews from settling in New York. But now that we know the true history of those early slave-trading Jewish New Yorkers, we must ask today whether the “anti-Semite” Peter Stuyvesant had a point.
Sources: The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews multi-volume series; The Hidden History of New York; Howard B. Rock, Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654-1865.
For more on this topic see the Nation of Islam book series The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews. Download the free guide by clicking here.
To purchase the series click here.
