Rabbi Boteach and Reverend Sharpton: A Trip Down New York’s Memory Lane
by Tingba Muhammad
In his recent commentary titled “Time for the Jewish Community to End the Sharpton Wars,” the self-proclaimed “America’s Rabbi,” Shmuley Boteach of New York, calls his friend the Reverend Al Sharpton “dishonorable and incendiary,” an anti-Semitic “rabble-rouser,” and even charges him with collaborating with “terrorists.” The Reverend Sharpton has travelled to Israel with Rabbi Boteach, broken bread with him at a kosher restaurant, and interceded at his request with Governor Patterson to try to obtain a pardon for a Jewish murderer. As the rabbi himself might say, “This, you call friendship?”
But that is INDEED what passes today as the “Black–Jewish” relationship. Blacks must comply with incessant Jewish demands for apologies, and the Jews maintain a deliberate amnesia of their own “dishonorable and incendiary” racist past. The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan accurately characterized the dysfunctional relation-ship that Rabbi Boteach remembers so fondly:
Whenever the Light of Truth has been shone on them, they reach for you [Black leaders] to defend them against the Truth that uncovers the horror that has been done to us. They have always been successful pitting us against each other thus keep-ing them from facing the Truth of their real relationship with us.
And this is precisely what Rabbi Boteach is now trying to do with the Reverend Al Sharpton. The substance of Boteach’s poisonous appeal is to urge his Jewish brethren to give Sharpton a mulligan—a pardon—a do-over—for all his “anti-Semitic history.” After all, con-cludes the rabbi, he’s not like “Louis Farrakhan.” Yes, he did say that.
Boteach and Sharpton are both from New York, where that cherished and fabled Black–Jewish relationship started—not in the civil rights movement of the 1900s, but way back before Rabbi Boteach would care to remember—back in the 17th century. Like all European settlements after Christopher Columbus, New Yorkers were desperate for free labor and so, predictably, they turned to the African, the greatest builder in world history. But FIRST, they turned to Rabbi Boteach’s people, the Jews. Early New Yorkers knew that if they wanted Black Africans, they must consult the Jewish merchants of Brazil, who had monopolized the slave trade for all of the Western Hemisphere. According to their own words, they needed to contact the “Jobbers and Jews,” who were known to “buy up the slaves for cash” and sell them on credit. Through these Jewish slave merchants New Yorkers hoped to “be adequately supplied with laborers,” and hoped that the slave trade “might be again revived.”
It was 1655 when enslaved Africans started arriving in New York in great numbers, and not coincidentally, that was just one year after Jews first settled in New York; and these Jews just happened to be from Brazil!
The most important Jewish American historian Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael went further in his “incendiary” language than Reverend Sharpton ever did when he wrote that Jews “frequently dominated” the slave trade. He said that in Brazil “Slave auctions were post-poned if they fell on a Jewish holiday,” and throughout the Caribbean, “Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade.” So, Rabbi Boteach, this is why early New Yorkers needed a relationship with the “Chosen People.”
In 1717 and 1721, two slave ships owned by Jewish merchant Nathan Simson sailed into the New York harbor with a total of 217 enslaved 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.” So it may have been by Rabbi Boteach’s ancestors that many Blacks, perhaps even Sharpton’s ancestors, came to New York as slave laborers.
By 1743, according to New York tax records, of 422 Jews listed, 2 had seven slaves, 5 had six slaves, 14 had four slaves, 21 had three slaves, 54 had two slaves, 282 had one slave, and only 39 reported none—but they probably hired slaves from the others. There are several advertisements reprinted in the book Jews Selling Blacks showing New York Jews actually seeking the return of their runaway slaves! The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 1 (TSRv1) lists many NEW YORK JEWS who owned and forcibly worked Black human beings—a list that has never been disputed!
Twenty years ago near Manhattan’s Foley Square, 415 graves were uncovered with as many as 20,000 of these forgotten, hopeless Black human beings. Stacked five deep, their decayed bones told a chilling tale of violent oppression, starvation deaths, chronic infec-tions, 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. How many of these 20,000 were enslaved by these 422 Jewish people, we may never know.
Go a few blocks to Wall Street, which became the financial center of the world through slave dealing and cotton trading. The Lehman Brothers had grandiose offices at that prestigious address, but before that they could be found with many, many other Jewish firms in the cotton plantations of Alabama when slavery was at its peak. They gave loans to White plantation masters to buy Black slaves and expand their slavery operations. Then at harvest time they took the cotton bales to sell on the world markets. One of the Lehman Brothers was actually in charge of ALL cotton production in the state! Think about that, Rabbi Boteach. That would be like Motown Records or Ebony Magazine setting up in Nazi Germany and using Jewish concentration camp inmates for labor. And when the Lehmans made all that cotton money in Alabama, they then moved to Wall Street, where a market had been established in 1711 to be a “place where Negroes and Indians could be bought, sold, or hired.”
We now know, through the research in The Secret Relationship, that the Jewish cotton/slavery merchants in the American South had cornered the cotton trade. They laundered this dirty slavery lucre in New York banks, which then financed the expansion of the infamous New York “Needle Trades”—the ubiquitous Jewish-owned sweatshops where women and children turned that cotton into even more profitable clothing for the world market. This is how Rabbi Boteach’s people used the Reverend Sharpton’s people to build their mighty financial infrastructure, making themselves the “Giants in the Land” the Bible speaks of in Numbers 13:33.
Rabbi Boteach’s rabbinical predecessor, Morris Jacob Raphall, delivered a sermon to his delighted Jewish congregation 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 negro,” he taught, has inferior intellectual powers, and “no man of his race has ever inscribed his name on the Parthenon of human excellence, either mental or moral.” The slave-owning Southern Confederates couldn’t have been happier! They printed and reprinted this divine ruling from the New York-based leader of the “Chosen People.” His New York Jewish congregation did not repudiate and denounce him for this “dishonorable and incendiary” speech—as they do to Reverend Sharpton—they made him the highest paid clergyman in America!
Rabbi Boteach has never repudiated this hateful Talmudic nonsense, though he continually reminds his readers of all the “crimes” Sharpton has committed against the Jews. And though these alleged crimes are entirely in the form of spoken WORDS they say emerged from the Reverend’s mouth, the REAL Black–Jewish relationship goes WAY BACK and covers not only Jewish words of pure anti-Black hatred, but incredibly wicked Jewish DEEDS as well—including robbery, enslavement, and murder.
Rabbi Boteach is part of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic move-ment in New York City. They adhere to the Talmud, which teaches that Jesus—the Christ—is now in hell boiling in excrement for his crimes against Jews. Further, the Chabad school system in Israel re-fuses to admit Ethiopian Jews because of their skin color. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and some of his two million fellow Jewish New Yorkers, including standouts like the ADL’s Abraham Foxman and former mayor Ed Koch, have made careers of punishing Reverend Sharpton, who has done nothing but stand up for the rights of his people. They obscure the fact that they are all still benefitting from the financial foundation that their ancestors’ DEEDS laid for them (the list of public and private enterprises supported by the Lehman Brothers is astounding).
New York Jews were heavily involved in every aspect of this unforgivable behavior, often as leaders. They gave aid and comfort to our enemies, and have proved themselves—by their own historical record—to be our most consistent enemies of all the Caucasians. Be-fore the “never-forgetting” New York rabbi admonishes our brother and friend the Reverend Al Sharpton, maybe he ought to first “never forget” the role his people played in creating the dire condi-tions that our people suffer—to this very moment.
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.
