41845358-Antisemitism

ANTISEMITIC MYTHS BLACKWASHED
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Jews served in the Confederate Army, but twice as many served in the Union
Army, a fact Secret Relationship does not mention. Why does Secret Relationship
not mention that freed blacks in the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean
were engaged in the slave trade and utilized slave labor? While black slave
masters were not very significant numerically in the overall picture, they
dwarfed the number of Jews who either traded in slaves or profited by their
labor. According to the 1830 census, black slave owners in the South outnumbered
Jewish slave owners by 15 to 1 and owned far more slaves than did Jews.
By simply discussing the activities of Jews involved with slavery without employing
a comparative approach, Secret Relationship leaves the reader with the
impression that wicked Jews were primarily responsible for enslaving and
abusing Africans and profiting from their labor.
Similarly, failure to provide the reader with the historical background
needed for an understanding of slavery in general and African slavery in particular
leads to the same erroneous conclusion—that slavery was largely a Jewish
enterprise. Readers of Secret Relationship are not made aware that the
institution of slavery was a worldwide practice since the time of recorded history.
The peoples of the ancient Near East—Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Assyrians,
and Persians—and the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome took
slavery for granted. It was also practiced in Asia, Africa, and by Amerindians in
both North and South America. The word slave derives from Slav, eastern European
Caucasians who, from the seventh through the tenth centuries, were
carried off by Viking marauders to the insatiable slave markets of the Byzantine
Empire and of Muslim Arab societies. Beginning in the seventh century,
seven hundred years before the Portuguese descended on the African continent
in search of slaves, and well into the twentieth century—long after Westerners
sought to stamp out the slave trade—Muslim Arabs were relentlessly
dragooning Africa of its manpower, 25 an irony lost on the authors of Secret Relationship.*
And Africans rulers themselves played a decisive part in the whole
* Both the slave trade and slavery itself, particularly plantation slavery, were indefensible
atrocities. Slavery seems always to have had its defenders, but some thinkers, inspired
by the Enlightenment or Christian teachings, denounced it as a great evil. What
is unique about Western civilization is not that it practiced slavery—what civilization
did not?—but that some enlightened people raised a voice against it and eventually it
was abolished. The abolition of slavery was a momentous stage in world history that
was made possible by the Industrial Revolution. A society can afford the moral luxury
of abolition when it has machines to take the place of slaves. It was no accident that
Britain, the pioneer of industrialization, initiated the end of the slave trade and slavery
in 1807, 1811, 1815, and 1833. It was the British navy that enforced the prohibition
more and more widely in the nineteenth century, although it never managed to shut