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Harold Brackman, the embattled Wiesenthal
Center hireling, has contracted to produce a "scholarship"-to-order
response to The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.
He has produced a pamphlet allegedly to "refute" the
now irrefutably documented fact that Jews were involved in the
Black slave trade. Unbeknownst to his Jewish bosses, Brackman
received his Ph.D. from the University of California on the basis
of a dissertation he wrote entitled, The Ebb and Flow of Conflict: The History of Black-Jewish Relations Through 1900. It is
unpublished but available through University Microfilms International
Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 800-521-0600 (Excerpts from Brackman's dissertation). Brackman's 632-page document
casually presents the same material of Jewish slave dealing which
he is now employed to refute. A red-faced Brackman now must face
what is firmly fixed on paper in his own name. Discussing the
Jewish invention of the profoundly racist Hamitic Myth, Brackman
wrote:
"There is no denying that the [Jewish] Babylonian
Talmud was the first source to read a Negrophobic content
into the episode by stressing Canaan's fraternal connection with
Cush." The Jewish scholars, he said, advanced two explanations
for Ham and his children being turned black. According to Brackman,
"The more important version of the myth, however, ingeniously
ties in the origins of blackness - and of other, real and imagined
Negroid traits - with Noah's Curse itself. According to it, Ham
is told by his outraged father that, because you have abused me
in the darkness of the night, your children shall be born black
and ugly; because you have twisted your head to cause me embarrassment,
they shall have kinky hair and red eyes; because your lips jested
at my exposure, theirs shall swell; and because you neglected
my nakedness, they shall go naked with their shamefully elongated
male members exposed for all to see..."
When Brackman's astounding admission was published in The Jewish
Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront, by Wellesley
professor Tony Martin, Brackman recoiled and actually pulled his
"refutation" pamphlet off the market. Then, in the only
known instance of a White Jew bowing to a Black Jew in a matter
of Jewish Talmudic history, Brackman denied his initial testimony
("There is no denying..."), and found a Black Jew to
claim it is all false. Brackman included this new witness in the
re-issue of his "refutation" and eliminated some deceptive
characterizations of the NOI book before its resale.
Even Jews are embarrassed by the Brackman harangue which found
its way into every Barnes & Noble even as they refuse to sell
The Secret Relationship. Lenni Brenner, author of Jews
in America Today, titled his review in the Amsterdam News,
"Harold Brackman believes in recycling garbage," and
opened with this: "There are some books so bad that I have
to apologize for reviewing them. [Brackman's "book"]
is one of them."
Brackman is the front man for the Jewish position of denial in
the battle against the most controversial book in America, The Secret Relationship
Between Black and Jews.
Brackman, Harold David, The Ebb and Flow of Conflict: A History of Black-Jewish
Relations Through 1900 (Los Angeles:
University of California, 1977)
Jews and Black slavery:
p. 6 "For the American Jews, too, the twentieth-century encounter
with Blacks grew out of long past roots which, however, remain
very alive with contemporary implications. The Jews who struck
land in the Netherlands in 1654 found black slaves to greet them.
But their introduction to the peculiar institution long preceded
the greetings. They had owned slaves --black slaves -- in Brazil,
and their ancestors had lived for a thousand years in the Iberian
countries where slavery had been a thriving concern during the
middle ages and where Africans from South of the Sahara were not
the unknown quantity they were in Northern Europe. Moreover, they
were heirs of a distinctive Jewish law of slavery that continued
to develop in its own right and shape underlying attitudes up
through the Karo-Isserles Code of the sixteenth century and also
a distinctive Jewish lore of race relations with its own special
mix of unflattering allusions to the color and character of dark-skinned
Africans. The dramatic fault lines of change that run through
the subsequent three hundred years make problematical the continuing
hold of age-old traditions on immigrant Jewish attitudes...."
Jews and Medievel Slavery
p. 45 "Despite its relatively short duration, however, the
medieval era of Jewish slave-trading prominence left a deep and
enduring imprint on the rabbinic slave law. In order to accommodate
the activities of the Jewish slave merchants, the geonim
of the early medieval period and the rabbis of the middle ages
properly nullified the talmudic provisions requiring the purchaser
of a heathen slave to symbolically incorporate him within the
Jewish fold and not to resell him to a Gentile. Since these key
provisions formed cornerstones of the earlier Jewish slave law,
the whole structure of protections built into it over the course
of the preceding two millenia was grievously undermined."
pp. 47-48 "Yet just because Old World Jewish slaveholders,
especially in the Iberian countries, continued to own significant
numbers of household slaves but few industrial or agricultural
workers, this radical departure from the talmudic slave legislation
-- which, of course, had been primarily designed to reduce the
dangers inherent in domestic servitude -- was slow to win general
acceptance. The thirteenth century, however, commenced a process
of gradual acceptance that culminated three centuries later in
its adoption as authoritative by the Karo-Isserles Codes."
Slavery Permitted in Jewish
Law
p. 46 "Two legal fictions were evolved which legitimated
slave trading without openly repudiating precedent. The first
of these actually seized on a provision of the talmudic slave
law itself. For in ruling out forced circumcision, the Sages had
declared that, under certain circumstances, a master could purchase
a heathen bondsman, retain him for up to a year in hopes of gaining
his consent to the operation, but then resell him outside the
Jewish fold if such consent was not finally given. Half a millenia
after the talmudic era had drawn to a close, one geonic responsa
stretched this proviso into a blanket sanction for slave trading
by Jews. Answering a question raised by an unnamed Jewish community
where most slaves were apparently held as speculative investments,
it endorsed the practice of reselling to Gentiles any and all
of those who during such a period of trial ownership demonstrated
an unwillingness to live up to the rudimentary moral obligations
which the Jewish law imposed on them. Maimonides, who headed the
slave-trading center of Cairo-Fustat's thriving Jewish community,
loosely grounded his even more sweeping rationale for Jewish participation
in the traffic in the same puntative talmudic precedent:
If the slave stipulates at the outset that he will not be circumcised
the master may retain him as long as he wishes, even as a heathen,
and then he may resell him to a heathen or to a foreign land."
Jews in the Slave Trade
in Sudan
p. 96 "Jewish merchants also participated in the trans-Saharan
trade with the Negro states of the Central and Western Sudan.
Black slaves formed one of the commodities (though not the most
important one) that the medieval Sudan exported to Moslem North
Africa; for this reason, they very likely also formed one of the
items of commerce dealt in by these camel-riding, merchant Jews.
Actually, the involvement of Jews in the traffic with the Sudan
seems to have antedated the rise of Islam by many centuries, having
its beginnings in the era when their fellow Semites, the Phoenicians
and the Carthaginians, established the North African trading communities
which were the first to cultivate commercial relations with the
Blacks to the south."
Jews in the Slave Trade
in Brazil (where as many as 9 of
10 of African slaves went)
pp. 163-164 "The Marranos in colonial Brazil became soldiers,
farmers, mechanics, planters, poets, and even priests; they played
in important role in the introduction of sugar cane, owning and
administering plantations and mills; and, almost from as early
a date, they entered the slave trade. During the 1600's, in fact,
slave trading in Brazil became a 'Jewish' mercantile speciality
in much the same way it had been in early medieval Europe. "
p. 164 "....The two chief weaknesses of the senhores de
engenho were their insatiable hunger for slaves and their
chronic lack of ready cash. The New Christian merchants [Marranos
or crypto-Jews] had the commercial connections and the capital
resources needed to profit from both. They would either import
the Blacks directly from Africa or else buy them up cheaply as
soon as the slave ships disembarked their cargoes of misery in
Brazil; then they would resell to the planters at prices anywhere
from 100% to 400% above cost and on terms netting 3% to 4% monthly
interest; and finally they would make a handsome, additional profit
by marketing in Europe the crop in which their sugar-rich but
cash-poor customers paid their debts."
pp. 164-165 "The system did not reach its full development
until the Dutch conquest of the 1630's -- when New Christian merchants
openly turned Jew and when Old Christian planters no longer had
a sympathetic government to turn to for relief. Its roots, however,
stretch back to the first century of Portuguese rule itself. Indeed,
by the opening decade of the seventeenth century, Brazilian New
Christians were already deeply involved in the trade of slaves
to Spanish as well as Portuguese America. In 1618 an official
at Buenos Aires deplored the 'facility with which Jews enter and
leave this port, without it being possible to stop it, since they
are all Portuguese and mutually conceal each other.' Later Dutch
power proved just as effective a means of entree as had the earlier
Portuguese possession of the Asiento, causing another such official
to protest in 1636 that Brazilian Jews controlled the trade of
Lima 'from the vilest African Negro to the most precious pearl.'
'When every allowance is made of the exaggerations of interested
parties and hysterical witnesses,' C.R. Boxer concludes, 'it is
clear that Jews from Brazil did in fact play a major role in the
Peruleiro trade of bringing in slaves from Africa and taking out
silver from Potosi.'"
Jews of North America in
the Slave Trade
p. 185 "New York Jewry was not active in this traffic, not
because of any scruples, but because this commodity more properly
concerned the rum-distilling Rhode Islanders and the rice and
indigo planters of South Carolina....From 1715 to 1743 the New
York Jewish shippers and their Gentile partners imported fewer
than eighty slaves. There was [only] one notable exception. In
1717 and 1721 the "Crown" and the "New York Postillion"
--owned by Nathan Simson and his New York and London Associates
-- sailed into the northern harbor with a total load of 217 Negroes.
The shipments came directly from the African coast, two of the
largest slave cargoes to be brought into New York in the first
half of the eighteenth century."
Southern Jews as Slave
Owners
p. 268 "One in four Southern Jews held slaves -- exactly
the same proportion that held for all Southern whites. They actively
participated in the internal slave trade, owning three of Richmond's
seventy, and four of Charleston's forty-four, slave-auctioning
emporiums. They produced the full panoply of classic Southern
types -- from plantation overseer to plantation mistress to plantation-owning
practi[ti]oner of the aristocratic refinements of interracial
sex, and from temporizing Unionist Whig to fire-eating Democratic
politician to embittered poor white hating nothing so much as
free Blacks. And they even tailored their important contribution
to Liberal Judaism in the United States to fit the prevailing
Southern Temper: Isaac Harby, the lay pioneer of Jewish Reform
in the South during the 1820's, was also a precocious South Carolina
fire-eater; and Charleston's Congregation Beth Elohim, the first
American Reform congregation, was also the first to raise an explicit
membership bar against 'people of color.'"
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