Jewish Abolitionists? Try to Find Them…

The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Report of 1853:

“The Jews of the United States have never taken any steps whatever with regard to the slavery question. As citizens, they deem it their policy to have every one choose which ever side he may deem best to promote his own interests and the welfare of his country. They have no organization of an ecclesiastical body to represent their general views; no General Assembly, or its equivalent. The American Jews have two newspapers, but they do not interfere in any discussion which is not material to their religion. It cannot be said that the Jews have formed any denominational opinion on the subject of American slavery….The objects of so much mean prejudice and unrighteous oppression as the Jews have been for ages, surely they, it would seem, more than any other denomination, ought to be the enemies of caste, and friends of universal freedom.“

The Jewish Forward of New York has never shied away from its role as bulwark for the American Jewish Racism Movement led by Abraham Foxman over at the ADL. Any anti-Black sewage, uttered or scrawled, will gain prominent placement in that pernicious two-ply rag.

Page 7 of the July 31st edition is case in point. The Forward has recently been running a column by The American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) based at Brandeis University. This latest installment is entitled “The Jew Who Fought Beside John Brown” and is designed to give the impression that three Jews named August Bondi, Theodore Wiener and Jacob Benjamin were abolitionists who joined the legendary Brown in his efforts to free the Black man. American Jews have been reeling since the publication of the Nation of Islam’s Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which, using Jewish scholarship (much of it from the AJHS), definitively linked Jews with the basest horrors of the African Holocaust. The book irreparably shatters the well-honed but fully mythical image of Jewish friendship to suffering Black slaves. The Forward article provides a clear view of how the mythology is spread.

Despite the deceitful presentation of the “prestigious” Society, it is a fact that the three “abolitionist” Jews in question—Weiner, Bondi and Benjamin—had all deserted John Brown well before the infamous Harper’s Ferry Raid of October 1859, at which Brown and 21 followers attempted to spark a massive insurrection of enslaved Blacks. Their reason for associating with Brown in the first place has only the slightest connection to Brown’s anti-slavery activities.

The three Jews, posthumously promoted to saviors of the Black race, were actually merchants who settled in Kansas with the intention of monopolizing trade in the region. In his memoir (a copy of which resides at the Society), August Bondi describes his partner Theodore Wiener as “a rank pro-slavery man” who considered reports of mob violence against abolitionists as “fakes and lies.” Described as a “big, savage, bloodthirsty Austrian,” Wiener’s customers, “were, nearly to a man, pro-slavery.” When they pressed him to choose sides in the escalating slavery feud, Wiener refused, “alleging that he had come to Kansas to trade and not for politics.” Hardly the stock of ideological abolitionism. Wiener’s association with John Brown came, not in the cause of Black emancipation, but when he asked the neighboring Brown family to help him oust a man who had squatted on his claim—which they did.

With their store becoming a central supplier and target in the battle between pro- and anti-slavery forces, the three Jews only then chose to join the Brown’s troops as a means to retaliate against the pro-slavery bullies. A 1970 Jewish publication states that Weiner’s motive in that alliance “may have been vengeance.” It should be noted here that most white abolitionists were no lovers of Black people. To them, the presence of slavery meant that wages of the white working class were severely depressed, causing white resentment and poverty. Twentieth century historians, the AJHS among them, have immensely amplified the bizarre notion that the term “abolitionist” meant some abiding affinity toward Blacks. Bondi himself makes the distinction: “It was not sympathy with the negro slave; it was antipathy against the degradation of labor” which dictated his actions.

The Forward’s re-constructed August Bondi is described as merely a “Jewish speculator” and a liar by Prof. James Malin of the Kansas Historical Society. In the words of the professor: “there is little if anything in [Bondi’s] story that is true.” But by 1858, even John Brown had no use for August Bondi. Bondi himself describes an incident in the fall of that year when Brown camped nearby with eleven former slaves he was moving to Canada:

He would not let me know of his presence and instructed all to whom he applied for supplies…to be closed-mouthed and never inform me…of his presence, as he well knew that we, Free State men, did not sanction an increase in the colored population [in the north], and I suppose he never forgot my opposition to his negro insurrection plans…

But even while the Forward’s fake “abolitionist” shlepped through his quixotic adventures, more substantial Jewish figures were weighing in with Jewry’s official position on the issue of African slavery. New York’s Rabbi Morris Raphall, the highest paid clergyman in America, proclaimed slavery to be sanctioned by the God of the Jews. He condemned the real abolitionists and was honored by the Confederacy. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Reform Judaism, would have made Hitler proud. Blacks, he said, “represent all that is debased and inferior in the hopeless barbarianism of six thousand years.” Other Jews like Judah Benjamin, enslaver of at least 140 Black Africans, was the Secretary of State and Vice President of the Confederacy! Those few Jews who actually stood up for the humanity of the Black man, like Rabbi David Einhorn of Baltimore, had to flee in the night, not from violent Gentile mobs, but from their own pro-slavery Jewish congregations.

The Forward can almost be discounted in this instance, having never been a slave to literal truth in matters concerning the shvartse (nigger), but the American Jewish Historical Society at Brandeis University has now resorted to Black Holocaust Revisionism on a grand scale. The most brutal chapter of World history finds the majority of the Jewish community siding with the enslaver. Historian Oscar Williams was plainly correct when he wrote “Jews were everything in the Old South except Abolitionists.” We say to the Forward and the AJHS: “Can the Devil fool a Muslim? No, not nowadays.”

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NOTES:

Jacob Rader Marcus, Memoirs of American Jews, 1775-1865 (Philadelphia, 1955).

James C. Malin, Kansas Historical Quarterly (February, 1940), Vol. 9, #1.

Maxwell Whiteman, Introduction of The Kidnapped and the Ransomed (Philadelphia, 1970).

Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown (Boston, 1910).

 

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