Back-Peddling Back to God
By The Nation of Islam Research Group, 2011
Though Jews have maintained that they came from “the ghetto,” they often fail to mention that their “ghettos” were not crime-ridden centers of poverty and despair.
(Final Call, Vol. 31 No.8) – In his latest public messages The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has asked us to consider the intriguing but mostly hidden history of the backpack peddlers whose honeybee-like commercial activities originally built the American economy. This is a fascinating idea with immense possibilities that any people seeking to establish an economic foundation must examine. It might seem at first to be an odd, even archaic concept, but it turns out that the humble peddling trade was the route to success for the wealthiest people in the history of the world.
By all accounts, Jews in America became the richest of all the immigrant groups and accumulated their wealth faster than any other subcategory of Caucasians. Columbia University’s Eli Ginzberg was unequivocal when he wrote that Jews in America “were able to create the largest, most affluent, and secure community in the recorded history of the Jewish people.” So, if the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad instructed us to “observe the operations of the white man [for] He is successful,” there is no better model to observe than the Jews. Significantly, he further directed that we “Make the Mosque an employment center. We have to pool our resources intellectually and financially!”
Well, this describes the Jewish experience in America to a T! They have become giants in every field of endeavor, and we now know that the blueprint they used long predated America, Columbus, and even Jesus. A few principles are worthy of note: Do you know that when the Jews form a community they will not set up a synagogue unless they also set up a Jewish school and a Jewish cemetery? They immediately employ a kosher butcher and establish a method for producing and importing their own kosher foods. Soon, we see a Jewish social service agency, a Jewish hospital, a Jewish community center, a Jewish elderly home, and a Jewish newspaper. Jewish judges who sit in Gentile courtrooms in the daytime also serve at night in their Beit Din—a Jewish court that judges conflicts between Jews. And anchoring this communal infrastructure are the omnipresent Jewish retailers, wholesalers, and banks.
These are acts of a people who thoroughly believe from ancient times that they—and only they—have the authority to serve and control their own people and to determine their own destiny from the cradle to the grave. Isaac Mendelsohn wrote of the role of the Jewish temple in ancient Babylon. In many respects it mirrors the vision The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad has for our Black American religious institutions:
“At the dawn of history the temple, with the vast wealth at its disposal, already constituted the richest agricultural, industrial, commercial, and financial single unit within the community. It was a well-organized and efficiently run corporation controlling in its hand extensive tracts of land, enormous quantities of raw material, large flocks of cattle and sheep, [and] sizable amounts of precious metal. … In short: the Babylonian temple, in the Sumerian as well as in the later Semitic period, was the largest landowner, the greatest industrialist, [and] the richest banker … in every city of the country.”
It was these committed Jewish peddlers following an ancient Judaic blueprint who built the Southern economy house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, town by town, until they could truly represent to their God that their sacred mission was accomplished—total mastery of the country they call their “Promised Land.”
The centrality of the synagogue in the affairs of the community is what the Jews achieved in Babylon, and indeed throughout the early history of America. And though Jews have maintained that they came from “the ghetto,” they often fail to mention that their “ghettos” were not crime-ridden centers of poverty and despair—they were self-sustaining commercial centers that governed and policed and educated their own people within their boundaries, and all their affairs were Jewish-run and -maintained. They imported raw materials and exported manufactured goods to be sold to the surrounding Gentiles. Jews actually preferred to live in these enclaves, where their wealth grew and their religion and culture prospered. Our so-called Black ghettos bear no similarity to this Jewish model, but they soon can be.
And this is precisely the vision that has eluded us in our Black leadership strategies. Who controls the banking, the commerce and trade—the economic and financial aspects—of our Black communities? We KNOW we don’t control any of it, but why don’t we feel as though it is our divine right to exercise this control for our own benefit? Answer: Because we have not yet understood what Minister Farrakhan has been saying: that we are the Chosen People of God, the REAL Children of Israel—Gods, Children of the Most High God.
In “observing the operations” of those who DO believe they are the Chosen People, Minister Farrakhan released The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 2 (TSRv2) and wisely pointed us to the Jewish peddler model. European Jews flooded into the South where millions of Africans were enslaved and walked from town to town with 100-pound backpacks filled with much-needed goods and supplies that could be sold in the remote plantation communities. They also traded their goods for the valuable produce of these plantations—the cotton, tobacco, wheat, etc.—which served to make the slavery system more efficient and profitable. According to documents revealed in TSRv2, “anti-Semitism” in the slavery South was almost non-existent! Because they provided this important door-to-door service, they were welcomed with open arms. One might behold the travels of the honeybee to fully appreciate the comparison. A honeybee visits up to 100 flowers during a single flight from the hive to collect the valuable nectar. A hive of bees must fly 55,000 miles to produce a pound of honey, all while serving to pollinate 80 percent of the fruits, vegetables, and seed crops in the U.S. One study concluded that the direct value of honeybee pollination to U.S. agriculture is $14.6 billion annually. Can we see the peddler as a human honeybee? “Therein is surely a sign for a people who reflect.” (Holy Qur’an 16:68-69)
But the Jewish peddlers were not simply looking to make a buck for themselves, they were actually surveying the Southland and gathering intelligence about its unique political, economic, and cultural dynamics, seeing what the people wanted and needed, what they believed, and how they behaved; seeing what inspired the people and what inflamed them; becoming keen observers of what would appeal to their hearts, their minds, as well as their wallets. Once this critical information was collected they returned to the synagogue, just as honeybees return to the hive, to share this intellectual and financial nectar and to strategize about how to MANAGE and CONTROL the territory and its dynamics.
Before long, the peddlers put down their backpacks and opened brick-&-mortar retail shops at the best commercial locations along critical supply routes. Then came the infrastructure of warehouses; then riverbanks became ports, rude dirt trails became solid stone roads with sturdy bridges, and railroads ultimately joined America’s vast regions together and moved produce and supplies in and out of the plantation South. Having achieved stability, they sent for their brother, cousin, nephew, or son back in Europe and supplied him with a backpack filled with goods to start the cycle all over again in new regions and territories. Now that’s truly “pooling resources intellectually and financially.”
On the surface these family operations appeared to be independent mom-and-pop businesses, but in reality they were part of an interconnected network of Jewish retail/wholesale businesses and finance houses that reached around the globe—from the most remote Mississippi Delta cotton plantation, through the Jewish banks in New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York, all the way across the ocean to the coffers of European banking families like the Erlangers and the Rothschilds. So in the Deep South, places like Montgomery, Alabama, where Black slavery and racism were the most vicious, the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life confirms that “the important banks and institutions were owned and operated by Jews.”
It was these committed Jewish peddlers following an ancient Judaic blueprint who built the Southern economy house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, town by town, until they could truly represent to their God that their sacred mission was accomplished—total mastery of the country they call their “Promised Land.” No unemployment lines for them; no last-hired-first-fired belly-aching; no mistreatment or mis-education; no soup-lines and no hat-in-hand begging for handouts. Humble peddlers to international bankers is the story of Jewish success, but at the same time, it cannot be hidden anymore that on the way to that success they have exploited, oppressed, and undermined Black people in America.
They have used this commercial honeybee role both to pollinate and to sting us, taking advantage of our enslavement to achieve immense success and unprecedented riches. And as the Jews are seeing the highest stages of civilization in recorded history, Blacks are simultaneously seeing the lowest. The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan pointed out this dichotomy in his poignant musical lament, “A White Man’s Heaven, Is a Black Man’s Hell.”
The ancient roots of the word PEDDLER carries that same duality and yet again harks back to the lessons we study in the Nation of Islam. We learn that Yacub’s Devils “started making trouble among the righteous people telling lies. They accused the righteous people causing them to fight and kill one another.” If we ask, How were these Devils able to get in “among the righteous”? Well, the lessons also say that we allowed them to “come and do trading among us…” The Jewish Encyclopedia explains that the Hebrew “rakil,” meaning slander, is derived from “rokel,” meaning peddler, “because the talebearer is like a peddler who ingratiates himself with his customers by telling one what another says about him.” One can easily see how such slanderous behavior could cause his clientele “to fight and kill one another.” The next passage carries this “devilishment” right on up to today’s world. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia: “Articles of luxury and the products of foreign countries were brought to Germany and eastern Europe by traveling merchants, who also exported amber and other goods, and especially slaves. This trade, at least after the eighth century, was principally carried on by Jews.”
Mr. Yacub couldn’t have had better students than our best friends, the Jews. We see how their presence among Blacks as peddlers has had a damaging effect on Black fortunes and progress. We certainly are fighting and killing one another, and now that we have identified the source of this dysfunction, can we now use this very important peddler function for a higher, righteous purpose? More of the honeybee, and less of the talebearer?
In 2011, and at the end of the White Man’s rule, The Minister is showing us that the peddler as honeybee of truth and justice may also be a model for our salvation! Did not Allah in Person, Master Fard Muhammad, first come among us as a peddler of fine silks? And was He not using this disguise (“The Son of man came as a thief in the night”) to gain access to our homes, to surveil our condition and to assess our needs? Just as with any useful tool, like a hammer or a saw, the art and business of peddling can be used to build or to destroy with equal effect. And as America the once indomitable lion dies of its own evil, ought not we become that which Samson observed, a swarm of bees making this healing honey in its carcass? (Judges 14:8)
Allah came in the Person of Master Fard Muhammad and presented Himself to us, not just as a peddler, but as a sign of a role in which we would soon see great value. The Hon. Min. Louis Farrakhan is presenting that impeccable model to us as a way out of our condition and back on the road to Allah! Let us heed this divine guidance and make this our Promised Land, truly a land, as Exodus teaches, “flowing with milk and honey.”
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.
