41845358-Antisemitism

238 ANTISEMITISM
two hundred years Jews have been blamed for causing the French Revolution,
the Russian Revolution, both world wars, and the disintegration of the Soviet
Union. Depending on their politics, detractors have accused Jews of being the
architects of liberalism, capitalism, and communism. To this long list of
bizarre accusations directed at Jews, Secret Relationship has added a new one:
the Jew as the mastermind behind slavery. And to compound the lie, the compilers
of Secret Relationship argue that Jews have kept this fact from being
known. In an interview with the Amsterdam News (January 8, 1994), Farrakhan
stated that Jews “have never admitted until recently that they were involved in
the slave trade. They put it on the Gentiles. They put it on the Arabs, but they
never came out publicly until we published that book and said that they were
involved.” The authors of Secret Relationship represent themselves as enlightened
researchers who have courageously lifted this veil of deception and exposed
how their ancestors were cruelly victimized by Jewish people.
But the book has provided absolutely nothing new—neither new information
nor new insights into the four-century Atlantic slave economy. That Jews
were both slave traders and slave owners is well known. Since 1915 there has
been a steady line of Jewish-authored monographs dealing with the Jews and
African slavery. The issue also has been discussed in general histories of the
Jews and in Jewish encyclopedias. The involvement in slavery is a distasteful
part of Jewish history that Jewish scholars have unflinchingly explored. In
their search for understanding, they have produced responsible works of
scholarship. Secret Relationship, in contrast, is written by people whose only intent
is to defame Jews. Consequently, it misuses and distorts the historical
record to give the impression that Jews were the principal wheel in the slave
trade and the principal exploiters of black slave labor, two conclusions that students
of the subject simply dismiss as preposterous. The important scholarly
works on slavery barely mention Jews, not because there is a conspiracy of silence
imposed on scholars by Jews, as Secret Relationship implies, but for the
simple reason that in the four centuries of Atlantic slave trading and slave
labor, Jews were merely bit players.
Secret Relationship totally lacks a historical perspective. What is the purpose
of relentlessly mentioning the names of Jews who participated in the
slave trade, who owned slaves and the number each possessed, or who fought
for the Confederacy without at the same time comparing this data with the activities
of non-Jews? If one did this, the obvious conclusions are that Jews accounted
for a small fraction of the slaves imported from Africa to the New
World, owned a minute fraction of the slaves in the United States, and made
up a miniscule portion of the Confederate army. Some three to four thousand