Enough! Is EVERY Black Person AN ‘Anti-Semite’?

By Tingba Muhammad

(Final Call, October 8, 2013) – Over the years Blacks have been bludgeoned by Jews with the false and despicable charge of “anti-Semitism.” The strongest advocates of Black freedom such as the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan have borne the brunt of this Jewish abuse, but lately ANY Black person who can complete a full sentence is vulnerable to the charge. U.S. President Barack Obama, possibly the most pro-Israel Black man in America—has been viciously attacked as an “Anti-Semitic Jew-hater.”

A Google search of “Obama and anti-Semitism” returns over five million hits; a search of “Farrakhan and anti-Semitism” returns a tiny fraction of that number—just under 65,000! This shows that it absolutely does not matter what a Black authority says or does—he or she is an anti-Semite.

Of course, neither of these extraordinary Black men is anything close to a Jew-hater, but now both have decided to respond to the charges. President Obama has finally stood up to Israeli oppression of the Palestinians; Minister Farrakhan, on March 14, revealed the EXTENSIVE history of Jewish involvement in the Black Holocaust.

Jewish Slave-Dealing in the New World

Jews owned, insured, and financed slave ships and outfitted them with chains and shackles for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. They were auctioneers, commission merchants, brokers, and wholesalers, keeping the slave economy oiled with money, markets, and supplies.

Christopher Columbus—whose Trans-Atlantic exploits initiated the brutal genocide of the Red man and forecasted the African Holocaust—was financed by wealthy Spanish Jews and is claimed by some scholars to be a Jew himself.

Nine out of ten captured Africans were shipped to Brazil. Jewish scholar Dr. Arnold Wiznitzer described the early Jewish presence: “[Jews] dominated the slave trade … The buyers … at the auctions were almost always Jews, and because of this lack of competitors they could buy slaves at low prices.”

According to Jewish scholar Dr. Harold Brackman, during the 1600s “slave trading in Brazil became a ‘Jewish’ mercantile specialty in much the same way it had been in early medieval Europe.” In fact, wrote Jewish scholar Jonathan Schorsch, “Jewish merchants routinely possessed enormous numbers of slaves temporarily before selling them off.” If a slave auction fell on a Jewish holiday it was postponed due to lack of buyers and sellers!

The Jewish Encyclopedia adds that “Jewish commercial activity” in this time included a “monopoly of the slave trade.” Jewish traders bought Africans in lots from the Trans-Atlantic shippers and retailed them to inland plantation owners.

The Jews of Surinam gave their slave plantations Hebrew names such as Machanayim, Nachamu, and Goshen. According to Dr. Marcus Arkin, they used “many thousands” of Black slaves. Rabbi Herbert I. Bloom added that the “slave trade was one of the most important Jewish activities …” In 1694, Jews owned 9,000 Africans, and by 1791 there were 100 “Jewish mulattoes” in Surinam—the result of the rape of African women by their Jewish enslavers.

The prominent Jewish historian Dr. Cecil Roth wrote that the slave revolts in parts of South America “were largely directed against [Jews], as being the greatest slave-holders of the region.” Jews set up militias with the sole purpose of fighting the Black Maroons, the escaped Africans who were fighting to free their enslaved brethren.

The first Hebrew poem written in the New World was an attack on the Black Maroon leader. The Jewish militias murdered the Maroons and cut off their hands to award as trophies.

The Jews of Barbados, wrote one Jewish scholar, “made a good deal of their money by purchasing and hiring out negroes …”

All Barbadian Jews—including the rabbi—owned Black slaves. Jews warehoused so many African slaves in Barbados that authorities moved to limit the number of captives they could possess. Jews became the major traders in “refuse slaves”—Africans who were weak and sick from the Middle Passage voyage. Jewish traders “fattened them up” and sold them at a profit.

A major Jewish shipper from France had a monopoly on trade to the notorious slave dungeon at Gorée Island—the Auschwitz of the Black Holocaust. Sugar fueled and expanded the slave trade, and according to Jewish scholars, Jews “acquired large sugarcane plantations and became the leading entrepreneurs in the sugar trade.”

Jewish scholars Isaac and Susan Emmanuel reported that in Curacao, which was a major slave-trading depot, “the shipping business was mainly a Jewish enterprise.”

Jewish Slave-Dealing in the United States

Jews were twice as likely to be slave owners as the average Southerner. Rabbi and historian Bertram Korn, the acknowledged expert on 19th-century Jews, wrote: “It would seem to be realistic to conclude that any Jew who could afford to own slaves and had need for their services would do so … Jews participated in every aspect and process of the exploitation of the defenseless Blacks.”

The very first Jewish communal settlement in the United States was a Florida sugar plantation supported entirely by the labor of dozens of enslaved Africans.

According to documents, when the earliest settlers in New York decided to enter the slave trade, they contacted “the jobbers and the Jews,” who were the recognized international dealers. The largest shipments of Africans arriving in New York in the first half of the 18th century were commissioned by Jewish merchants.

Jews owned slave pens where they warehoused Africans and sold them wholesale. They smuggled slaves to places where slavery was illegal, rented them when they did not want to buy, and bred African women for sexual purposes. Jews ran jails and imprisoned and punished Black slaves; they served as constables, sheriffs, detectives, and bounty hunters. Jewish peddlers traveling the countryside were known to search for and capture runaway slaves and bring them in for the bounty.

The founders of Richmond, Virginia’s Jewish community were all slaveholders. When slavery was outlawed in Georgia, Jews left; they returned only when slavery was reinstated.

In Newport, Rhode Island—the center of the rum and slave trade—every Jewish family owned Black slaves. Their synagogue was built by Black slaves “of some skill.” Of the 22 Newport distilleries serving the triangular slave trade, all were owned by Jews. American rabbis owned and rented slaves. The leading abolitionist organization bitterly complained that Jews “have never taken any steps whatever” against slavery.

The nation’s highest paid clergyman, Rabbi Morris Raphall of New York, defended slavery and claimed God Himself had sanctioned it. The one rabbi who forcefully attacked slavery, Baltimore’s David Einhorn, was thrown out of his own Jewish congregation and forced to flee the city.

The Jewish writer Mordecai Manuel Noah was such a virulent racist that the very first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, was started in 1827 just to combat his racist attacks.

Jews helped to suppress slave uprisings and in 1831, Jews were involved in hunting down the great Nat Turner and his freedom fighters. More than 3,000 Jews fought for the slaveholders in the Civil War, and a Jewish owner of a 140-slave plantation, Judah P. Benjamin, was secretary of state for the Confederacy.

His picture is engraved on Confederate currency. Jewish bankers like the Erlangers financed the Confederacy. Benjamin financed the Ku Klux Klan after the war.

Jews willed Black humans from one Jewish generation to another, and sold Black babies away from their parents. One Jew stipulated in his will that the sale of his slaves should be used for his son’s Yale tuition. When their slaves grew elderly and infirm and were unable to work Jews “freed” them, forcing them to fend for themselves in their old age.

The first Jew elected to the U.S. Senate, Florida’s David Yulee, was one of the most strident haters of Indians and defenders of slavery in American history. The distressing reality is that nearly all the Jewish slave dealers enjoyed prominent and honored places among their co-religionists. The profits from their slavery-based enterprises helped finance Jewish community development, built synagogues, homes, schools, businesses, and institutions, and in many untold ways enriched their lives and communities. Actually, one is hard-pressed to name a single prominent American Jew in the slavery era who did not own slaves or profit directly from Black African slavery.

In his 1983 book Jews and Judaism in the United States, Rabbi Dr. Marc Lee Raphael, the longtime editor of the most prestigious Jewish historical journal wrote in two paragraphs (p. 14) one of the more definitive statements on Jewish involvement in the Black Holocaust: “… Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated. This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the “triangular trade” that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa …”

Given the extraordinary history of Jewish involvement in the Black Holocaust, it is a wonder how any Jew could call any Black person “anti-Semitic.” But it gets worse—Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation didn’t stop Jewish merchants and traders from their oppressive ways during the Jim Crow and sharecropping era and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.