|
|
|
|
When we were working in Chicago, we had
numerous rent strikes on the West Side, and it was unfortunately true that, in
most instances, the persons we had to conduct these strikes against were Jewish
landlords. There was a time when the West Side of Chicago was a Jewish ghetto,
and when the Jewish community started moving out into other areas, they still
owned the property there, and all of the problems of the landlord came into
being.
We were living in a slum apartment owned by a Jew and a number of others, and we had to have a rent strike. We were paying $94 for four run-down, shabby rooms, and we would go out on our open housing marches on Gage Park and other places and we discovered that whites with five sanitary, nice, new rooms, apartments with five rooms, were paying only $78 a month. We were paying 20 percent tax.
The Negro ends up paying a color tax, and this has happened in instances where Negroes actually confronted Jews as the landlord or the storekeeper. The irrational statements that have been made are the result of these confrontations.
Clayborne Carson, ed.,
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books,
1998), p. 309.
Rabbi Marc Lee
Raphael
"Jews also took an active part
in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia
congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five
soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West
Indies Company. Slave auctions were
postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In
Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of
Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, 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. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of
Philadelphia in the 1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's and
early 1770's dominated Jewish slave trading on the American
continent."
Read more of Rabbi Raphael's statement
"All through the eighteenth
century, into the early nineteenth, Jews in the North were to own black
servants; in the South, the few plantations owned by Jews were tilled with slave
labor. In 1820, over 75 percent of all Jewish families in Charleston, Richmond,
and Savannah owned slaves, employed as domestic servants; almost 40 percent of
all Jewish householders in the United States owned one slave or more. There were
no protests against slavery as such by Jews in the South, where they were always
outnumbered at least 100 to 1....But very few Jews anywhere in the United States
protested against chattel slavery on moral grounds." United States Jewry,
1776-1985 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), p.
586.
Isaac Mayer
Wise, the leader of the American Reform Jews, wrote
of the California Indians: Julius Kahn, San Francisco Jew
In
turn-of-the-century San Francisco the 12-term Congressman Julius Kahn was a Jew
who was affiliated with Temple Emanu El. "The oath to the Japanese," he said,
"would be but a hollow mockery, an empty formality signifying nothing. We do not
want that kind of citizenship, and we do not intend to have it, if we can
prevent it." He spoke vehemently against Japanese immigration and naturalization
even as Jews pushed mightily for Eastern European immigration. The early 1900
saw passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts which were enthusiastically supported
by Kahn and his constituents. He was such an advocate that the Acts were called
the Kahn Exclusion Acts.
The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Report of 1853
"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."
"Jews and Negro Slavery
in the Old South, 1789-1865," in Abraham J. Karp, The Jewish Experience in
America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish
Historical Society (Waltham, Massachusetts, 1969), pp. 184, 189. [Dr. Korn
is a rabbi, historian; A.B., Cincinnati, 1939; Hebrew Union College-Jewish
Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ordination M.H.L. 1949; Sr. rabbi, Reform
Congregation Keneseth Israel, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1949-; Chaplain, USNR,
1944-; Visiting professor, American Jewish History, Union College-Jewish
Institute of Religion, New York, 1962-; Honorary Overseer Gratz College of
Pennsylvania; visiting professor, American Jewish History, Dropsie University of
Pennsylvania; 1970-; Recipient Merit Award, American Association for State &
Local History, 1969.]
[Bloom is a rabbi; B.A., Columbia University, 1923, Ph.D., 1937; M.H.L., Jewish Institute of Religion, 1928, D.D., 1955; rabbi, Temple Albert, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1928-31. President Kingston Ministerial Association, 1945-46, and 1959-60; B'nai B'rith; Zionist Organization of America; vice-president, National Prison Chaplain Board, since 1962; Social Action Committee of Central Conference of American Rabbis, since 1947; Author: The Jews of Dutch Brazil, 1936; The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam, 1937.]
"[I]t remains a fact which cannot be gainsaid that in his own native home, and generally throughout the world, the unfortunate negro is indeed the meanest of slaves. Much had been said respecting the inferiority of his intellectual powers, and that no man of his race has ever inscribed his name on the Parthenon of human excellence, either mental or moral."
W.E.B. DuBois, future NAACP leader
"The Jew is the heir of the
slave-baron in Dougherty [Georgia]; and as we ride westward, by wide stretching
cornfields and stubby orchards of peach and pear, we see on all sides within the
circle of dark forest a Land of Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for
moneygetting, born in the swift days of Reconstruction'improvement'
companies, wine companies, mills and factories; nearly all failed, and the Jew
fell heir."
The Souls of Black Folk
(1903) note: When DuBois tried to republish the book in 1953, he succumbed to pressure to replace the word "Jew" with "foreigner."
The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion refers to
Moses Maimonides as "the symbol of the pure and orthodox faith." His Guide to
the Perplexed is considered the greatest work of Jewish religious
philosophy, but his view of Blacks was Hitlerian:
"[T]he Negroes found in the remote South, and those who resemble them
from among them that are with us in these climes. The status of those is like
that of irrational animals. To my mind they do not have the rank of men, but
have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher than the rank
of apes. For they have the external shape and lineaments of a man and a faculty
of discernment that is superior to that of the apes."
He was considered the most
distinguished Jewish layman in his time. He was such a prolific proponent of
slavery, that the first Black American periodical, The Freedom's Journal,
was launched in response to Noah's racist propaganda. He actually defended
slavery by calling it liberty:
"There is liberty under the name of
slavery. A field negro has his cottage, his wife, and children, his easy task,
his little patch of corn and potatoes, his garden and fruit, which are his
revenue and property. The house servant has handsome clothing, his luxurious
meals, his admitted privacy, a kind master, and an indulgent and frequently fond
mistress."
He argued that "the bonds of society must be kept as they now
are" and that "To emancipate the slaves would be to jeopardize the safety of the
whole country." The Freedom's Journal called Noah the Black man's
"bitterest enemy" and William Lloyd Garrison, the leading White
abolitionist, called him the "lineal
descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross.
Anti-Defamation League Charter
"What is amazing is the
extent to which they succeeded in promulgating this fiction throughout the
world. By making a "shadow" America, one which idealized every old glorifying
bromide about the country, the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of
images and ideas-so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American
imagination. . . . Ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the
movies the Jews made."Rob Reiner, Film Director, on Hollywood in 1992:
"It's all run by Jews, even Disney. That's funny, because Walt Disney was a terrible reactionary. If he found out that Jeffrey Katzenberg were running his company, he'd be spinning in his grave. That's a wonderful bit of poetic justice."
B'nai B'rith Magazine, May, 1925, vol. 39 :
"...it is true that the white
man (and by this I mean Christian civilization in general) has proved himself to
be the most depraved devil imaginable in his attitudes towards the Negro
race....The source and cause of this need for reaction can be attributed to
white contempt and neglect. The historical contempt that the white race held for
the Negroes has created a group of rootless degraded people. The current neglect
of the problem can only irritate this deplorable state of affairs. The Black
Muslims should constitute a warning to our society, a warning that must be
heeded if we are to preserve the society. The road to freedom must be uphill,
even if it is arduous and frustrating. A people must have dignity and identity.
If they can't do it peacefully, they will do it defensively."Most Blacks seem more concerned with separatism as a means toward goals of group identity, group pride, and local control, and as an intervening stage leading to the self-respect, autonomy, and power believed to be prerequisite before meaningful integrtion within a truly pluralistic society can occur.
In theory, these concepts are part of a philosophical comitment with which few Jews could quarrel. In fact, a persuasive argument might be presented to demonstrate how even a similar tactical approach to Jewish survival has been succesfully applied and has reulted in the current positive position and status of the American Jewish community. However, Black attempts to operationalize these concepts have raised sharply the question of the degree to which Jews here and now remain committed to that philosophical stance.
Jews in the Black
Ghetto
Long before Minister Farrakhan made any
reference to this phenomenon Jack Nusan Porter, a Jewish sociologist was very
clear about it in his article entitled "Mr. Goldberg and John Henry: The
Relationship Between Afro-Americans and American Jews":
"The common stereotype of Jews owning the businesses in Black ghettos is based on solid evidence, not fantasy. Jews in the East and Midwest own a disproportionate number of businesses in Black areas. [Two Jewish researchers have shown] that some 40 percent of the stores are owned by Jews. [Another] study of 458 merchants in 15 cities (14 of the largest plus Gary, Indiana but not including Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, or any other Southern city) had the following religious breakdown of retail merchants: 37.9% were Jewish; 36.0% were Protestant; and 22.9% were Catholic... The breakdown by religion, when race is considered, increases the number: 51.3% of the white merchants are Jewish; 18.7% are Protestant; and 27.0% are Catholic."
Elie Weisel, Hate Teacher
"There is a time to love and a time to hate; whoever does not hate when
he should does not deserve to love when he should, does not deserve to love when
he is able. Perhaps, had we learned to hate more during the years of ordeal,
fate itself would have taken fright. The Germans did their best to teach us, but
we were poor pupils in the discipline of hate....Every Jew, somewhere in his
being, should set apart a zone of hate - healthy, virile hate - for what the
German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be
a betrayal of the dead."
Legends of Our Time (1968),
pp.177-78:
Adolf Hitler
Hitler HATED Black
people. His comments are included for the reader to
compare to the many Jewish notables discussed here. Here is a sampling of Adolf
Hitler's beliefs about the Black African:
"It does not dawn upon this depraved
bourgeois world that here one has actually to do with a sin against all reason;
that it is a criminal absurdity to train a born half-ape until one believes a
lawyer has been made of him, while millions of members of the highest culture
race have to remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the
will of the eternal Creator to let hundreds and hundreds of thousands of His
most talented beings degenerate in the proletarian swamp of today, while
Hottentots and Zulu Kafirs are trained for intellectual vocations. For it is
training, exactly as that of the poodle, and not a scientific
'education'."
"In the most critical hour of our people, in the moment
when we, practically abandoned by all the world, made defenseless by our own
fault, have to watch France setting out to occupy new territories, while African
negroes rape our women and children,..."
"The black disgrace works havoc
on the Rhine. Women, girls and children pay for the bestial negroes' lust with
their death. An uninterrupted stream of poison and disease flows into the blood
of our people. Moroccan syphilis drives thousands of victims towards a cruel
death..."
"All great cultures of the past perished only because the
originally creative race died off through blood poisoning."
"...and one
seeks compensation by success with Hottentots and Zulu Kafirs, with the blessing
of the Church. While our European peoples, the Lord be praised and thanked, fall
into a state of physical and moral leprosy, the pious missionary wanders to
Central Africa and establishes negro missions, till there our 'higher culture'
will have turned healthy, though primitive and inferior, human children into a
foul breed of bastards."
"What we see before us of human culture today,
the results of art, science, and techniques, is almost exclusively the creative
produce of the Aryan....Without this possibility of utilizing inferior men, the
Aryan would never have been able to take the first steps towards his later
culture; exactly as, without the help of various suitable animals which he knew
how to tame, he would never have arrived at a technology which now allows him to
do without these very animals. The words 'Der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit getan,
er kann gehen' (The Moor has done his duty, he may go) has [sic] unfortunately
too deep a meaning."
Robert A.
Rockaway, is a senior lecturer in the Department of
Jewish History at Tel Aviv University.
"After the first World War, Jewish Gangsters became major
figures in the American underworld and played prominent roles in the creation
and extension of organized crime in the United States. During Prohibition fifty
percent of the leading bootleggers were Jews, and Jewish criminals financed and
directed much of the nations narcotics traffic. Jews also dominated illicit
activities in a number of America's largest cities, including Boston, Cleveland,
Detroit, Minneapolis, New York, and Philadelphia."Let me say just a word about the Jew and the black man. The Jew is always anxious to advise the black man. But he never advises him how to solve the problem the way the Jews solved their problem. The Jew never went sitting in and crawling in and sliding in and freedom riding, like he teaches and helps Negroes to do. The Jews stood up, and stood together, and they used their ultimate power, the economic weapon. That's exactly what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is trying to teach black men to do.The Jews pooled their money and bought hotels that barred them. They bought Atlantic City and Miami Beach and anything else they wanted. Who owns Hollywood? Who runs the garment industry, the largest industry in New York City? But the Jew that's advising the Negro joins the NAACP, CORE, the Urban League, and others. With money donations, the Jew gains control, then he sends the black man doing all this wading in, boring in, even burying in-everything but buying in. Never shows him how to set up factories and hotels. Never advises him how to own what he wants. No, when there's something worth owning, the Jew's got it.
Prof. Selwyn Cudjoe:
"The position then is very clear, Zionism is racist, it is colonial and perforce expansionist...it constitutes an intolerable and repulsive ideological position that is detrimental to peace in the world. It must be equated with South African apartheid."
- Wellesley College Prof. Selwyn Cudjoe in the Trinidad Guardian, 1975, as quoted in the Trinidad Guardian, May 22, 2000, p.13. Cudjoe was the "responsible" negro-on-duty representing the Jews at Wellesley College in their attack on Prof. Tony Martin. His shameless angling for Jewish rewards is now exposed.
Jesus Christ
Joh:8:31: Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed;
Joh:8:32: And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
Joh:8:33: They answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?
Joh:8:34: Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.
Joh:8:35: And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever.
Joh:8:36: If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.
Joh:8:37: I know that ye are Abraham's seed; but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you.
Joh:8:38: I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father.
Joh:8:39: They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus saith unto them, If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham.
Joh:8:40: But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham.
Joh:8:41: Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.
Joh:8:42: Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.
Joh:8:43: Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word.
Joh:8:44: Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
Joh:8:45: And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.
Joh:8:46: Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?
Joh:8:47: He that is of God heareth God's words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.
Joh:8:48: Then answered the Jews, and said unto him, Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?
Joh:8:49: Jesus answered, I have not a devil; but I honour my Father, and ye do dishonour me.
Joh:8:50: And I seek not mine own glory: there is one that seeketh and judgeth.
Joh:8:51: Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.
Joh:8:52: Then said the Jews unto him, Now we know that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets; and thou sayest, If a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death.
Joh:8:53: Art thou greater than our father Abraham, which is dead? and the prophets are dead: whom makest thou thyself?
Joh:8:54: Jesus answered, If I honour myself, my honour is nothing: it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that he is your God:
Joh:8:55: Yet ye have not known him; but I know him: and if I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying.
Joh:8:56: Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.
Joh:8:57: Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?
Joh:8:58: Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.
Joh:8:59: Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going
through the midst of them, and so passed by.
Ralph A. Austen of the University of Chicago candidly described one instance in 1994 of how Blacks and Jews in a scholarly setting collaborated in obfuscating the true nature of the historical relationship. Prof. Austen describes a faculty luncheon at the University of Chicago Hillel House, where he and Black historian John Hope Franklin, gave a talk on the American Jewish community in the nineteenth-century South. His words are re4vealing and instructive:
After the formal presentation, a member of the audience asked a question about Southern Jewish participation in the debate on slavery. As I remember it, Franklin replied that he did not know too much about the subject. I recall very clearly one of the Hillel regulars remarking that since many of the early Southern Jews were Sephardim who had fled Spanish and Portuguese persecution, they must have been sympathetic to the plight of Black slaves.I remember this statement because it was allowed to pass without comment, although John Hope Franklin and I (we discussed it afterwards) were both aware that Sephardi Jews in the New World had been heavily involved in the African slave trade. Why did two professional historians in a university setting hesitate to provide our colleagues with such an important piece of information? I cannot answer for Franklin but I, as a Jew sitting in a Jewish institution that was entertaining an African-American guest, felt that pointing out the role of Jews in the history of Black slavery would, in this context, have constituted something of a betrayal. I did not want to undermine the sense of solidarity between the two communities which had been reinforced by Franklin's very presence, as well as through his references to our common confrontation with white Gentile Southern bigots.
Franklin and I, in effect, were condoning a benign historical myth: that the shared liberal agenda of twentieth-century Blacks and Jews has a pedigree going back through the entire remembered past. Avodim hayinu! We, the Jews, had also experienced history on the side of the enslaved and always cried out in anguish against the oppression of the enslavers.For better or worse, it is no longer possible to maintain that this myth has any but the most abstract bearing on the facts of our pre-emancipation relationship with Africans and their New World descendants. Jewish students of Jewish history have known it was untrue and, over several decades, have produced a significant body of scholarship detailing the involvement of our ancestors in the Atlantic slave trade and Pan-American slavery. Until recently, this work remained buried in scholarly journals, read only by other specialists. It had never been synthesized in a publication for a non-scholarly audience. A book of this sort has now appeared, however, written not by Jews but by an anonymous group of African Americans associated with the Reverend Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.
Home B&J Newspage | Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Jews | The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews | Black Slavery and the Jews | Prof. Tony Martin and Wellesley College | Facts and Quotes | Trends in Black/Jewish Affairs | Current Issues | Open Letter to Uncle Toms | Blacks & Jews Historical Bibliography | E-Mail, Letters & Correspondence | Links
