Farrakhan’s claims against the Jews are absolutely bunk

Why are British left-wing activists so keen to join the attempts by Louis Farrakhan and America’s white supremacists to blame Jews for the slave trade?
By Liam Hoare, HAARETZ    June 2, 2016

[…]

Jewish responsibility for the slave trade is an idea imported from the United States, specifically from the chauvinist and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan. In 1991, his stooges at the Nation of Islam published a weighty and well-annotated tome entitled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: Volume One. The book — which had no named author or editor and manipulated the work of mostly Jewish historians in order “to defame Jews” — argued that the trade in African bodies “was initiated by Jewish ship owners and merchants, who as a group remained the main beneficiaries of the slave economy and who ‘carved for themselves a monumental culpability in slavery,’” according to a report on the book compiled by the Anti-Defamation League.

The Secret Relationship was bunk, of course. “The book massively misrepresents the historical record, largely through a process of cunningly selective quotation of often reputable sources,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in 1992 of a book he called “the bible of the new anti-Semitism.” Eli Faber, author of Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straighttold Tablet: “Overwhelmingly, Jewish merchants and shippers were not involved at all; they represent a minuscule portion of owners of ships.” Jews were involved with the slave trade “to an insignificant degree” and only to the extent that “everyone made money off African slaves.”

America’s white supremacists were and are partners in Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam’s endeavor to blame Jews for the slave trade. Alleged Jewish culpability in this crime is of particular interest to David Duke, who’s made two ‘remarkable,’ ‘must-see’ videos on the subject and has gleefully written about it on his website. “When Nation of Islam researchers began quoting what the Jews had written for Jewish consumption,” Duke has said, “Minister Farakhan [sic] and others were condemned as ‘anti-Semites’ simply for revealing that Jews controlled the historical slave trade!” Articles on the Jewish role in the slave trade are easy enough to come by on far-right, anti-Semitic websites, including the unsettlingly named Jew Watch and National Vanguard.

Gates wrote that underpinning The Secret Relationship and the anti-Semitism of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam was “the tacit conviction that culpability is heritable.” The book suggested “a doctrine of racial continuity, in which the racial evil of a people is merely manifest by their historical misdeeds.” This conviction also underpins the thinking of white supremacists, who also need the narrative that Jews were not only responsible for the African slave trade but for the institution of slavery itself in order to exculpate those who were in fact its main practitioners: white European Christians. As for Farrakhan, his motive, Gates asserted, was to be found in his desire to turn the tables on Jewish-black relations, “to convert a relation of friendship, alliance and uplift into one of enmity, distrust and hatred.”

Less evident is what motivates the British far-left to echo the old arguments of both American black and white separatists — intentionally or otherwise. It might have something to do with their tendency to no longer see Jews as a minority group, subject to prejudice and discrimination, but as white — oppressor rather than oppressed.

As an act of defamation and denial of Jewish victimhood, Walker’s charge is tied up with the far-left’s increasingly bitter and corrosive discourse on Israel and its desire to separate Labour and the left from pro-Israel politics. In the present as in the past, for the sake of intellectual ‘consistency,’ it is necessary to see Jews as oppressors.

But motivation, about which one can but speculate, is less important than the substance of her remarks. If it’s anti-Semitic when Louis Farrakhan or David Duke state that Jews were responsible for the slave trade, then it must follow that it is anti-Semitic when Jackie Walker says the same, however tightly she might wrap herself in the banners of internationalism and anti-racism.

How exactly the Labour Party concluded otherwise is a question only they can answer. It does make one wonder, to paraphrase the commentator Dan Hodges, if Jackie Walker is Labour’s example of an anti-racist, then what do their racists sound like? Next thing you know, Labour members will be suggesting Adolf Hitler was a Zionist.

Liam Hoare, a graduate of University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, is a freelance writer on politics and literature.

November 16, 2022 | 11 Comments »

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  1. @Edgar G.

    the considerable majority of African slaves sold by tribal chiefs were prisoners captured in wars -or slave raids- against other tribes.

    OK.

    So, who was in the minority the chiefs were selling?

    And if the majority of the people they were selling were still their fellow black Africans, albeit from the tribes different from those of the chiefs , does it make the chiefs a whole lot more virtuous?

    The fact remains that it was black Africans who captured and sold other black Africans into slavery, and it was the Arab Muslims who dragged them to the sea shore to be shipped out of Africa.

  2. To straighten out a misconception. Documentation , diaries, National archives and records show that the considerable majority of African slaves sold by tribal chiefs were prisoners captured in wars -or slave raids- against other tribes.

    I thought this was well known, and that only chiefs depraved by drunkenness, would sell their own people. There have been discoveries of stockades built to hold slaves until the ships came.

    How long would those chiefs last….I wonder. Not long -…..

  3. It should also be noted that the first legally recognized slaveholder in the US was, himself, a former indentured servant who was also black. Having raised himself from being an indentured servant to a successful planter, Anthony Johnson took on indentured servants to help maintain his 250 acre of crops. Johnson refused to recognize that a black man named Casor had fulfilled his contract of 7yrs indentured labor. It is a bit complicated, but the issue went to trial and the court recognized the first instance in the British colonies where one man was legally described as being the property of another man for life, ie a slave, and coincidentally both men, master and slave, were black.

  4. Authentic documentation pre-Civil War shows that of 11,000 southern slave owners there were 4 Jews who owned more than 50 slaves. Most other slave owning Jews had s handful 3-4-5-6 who were mainly house servants

    Farrakhan’s approval automatically shows that the truth is exactly the opposite.

    I have a book written by a former slave describing his owners (2 Jewish brothers mentioned here several years ago) who taught their few slaves trades, and allowed them to work in the area, saving their earnings and buying themselves free.

    The book mentioned in this article “The secret relationship between blacks and Jews” is an Anti-Semitic polemic.

    Many prominent African scholars have attacked and condemned it’s faulty scholarship and racist conclusions.

  5. Authentic documentation pre-Civil War shows that of 11,000 southern slave owners there were 4 Jews who owned more than 50 slaves. Most other slave owning Jews had s handful 3-4-5-6 who were mainly house servants

    I have a book written by a former slave describing his owners (2 Jewish brothers mentioned here several years ago) who taught their few slaves trades, and allowed them to work in the area, saving their earnings and buying themselves free.

    The book mentioned in this article “The secret relationship between blacks and Jews” is an Anti-Semitic polemic.

    Many prominent African scholars have attacked and condemned it’s faulty scholarship and racist conclusions.

  6. Authentic documentation pre-Civil War shows that of 11,000 southern slave owners there were 4 Jews who owned more than 50 slaves. Most other slave owning Jewshad s handful 3-4-5-6 who were mainly house servants

    I have a book written by a former slave describing his owners (2 Jewish brothers (mentioned here several yeers ago) who taught their few slaves trades, and allowed them to work in the area, saving their earnings and buying themselves free.

    The book mentioned in this article “The secret relationship between blacks and Jews” is an Anti-Semitic polemic.

    Many prominent African scholars have attacked and condemned it’s faulty scholarship and recist conclusions.

  7. They completely ignore several interesting facts:

    1) the African tribal chiefs were themselves selling some of their tribes’ members into slavery;

    2) the slaves were delivered to the sea shore (where they were to board the slave ships) by the Arab Muslims;

    3) slavery still exists in Africa, as well as in some Arab countries (I think one of these countries is Saudi Arabia).

  8. When we brought the slaves over via our complete monopoly in that trade, did the salesmanship we exhibited to sell them off at our typical, invariably high profit stress how intelligent, motivated, law-abiding and educable they all were?

  9. Ministry of Lies: The Truth Behind “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews”‘
    by Harold Brackman (1994)

    and

    “In the Almost Promised Land, American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935” by Hasia Dinar (1996, 1995)

    were 2 books which I believe calmed the antisemitic storm in the Black community of the early 90s.