The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume 1: The Jewish Role in Black Slavery by Nation of Islam

Author:Nation of Islam [Nation of Islam]
Language: ara
Format: epub
Publisher: The Nation of Islam
Published: 2015-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

Jewish Public Opinion

Those Jews who took a stand stood with slavery, while other Jewish organizations vacillated, taking no forthright position in the midst of the national crisis. Rabbi Korn:

The Independent Order of B’nai B’rith and other fraternal groups appear to have ignored the South-North turmoil in pre-war years, tolerated the enforced separation of the war years, and continued as before once the war had been ended; indeed, in 1866, the Memphis Lodge of B’nai B’rith urged that the annual district convention be held in a Southern city because “it would tend greatly to the extension of our beloved Order in the South.” The Board of Delegates of American Israelites discussed only Jewish subjects during its few pre-war years, and hardly even met during the period of the war. It was a weak, incomplete organization, altogether, but its leaders were moderates who would not for an instant have injected into its proceedings.601

Presumably, the Civil War divided the country, “pitting brother against brother” in a bitter ideological battle. Not so among the country’s Jews, who carried on lively interaction—social and commercial. Northern Jewish congregations “responded generously” to the call for help from their brethren in the Confederacy. In 1865, says Feingold,

the Jewish communities of Philadelphia and New York shipped two-and-a-half tons of Matzohs, the special unleavened bread required for the Passover holidays, to the Jewish congregations in Columbia and Charleston in South Carolina.602

In the West, Jewish loyalties were questioned. One editor reported confidentially on the composition of a local secessionist movement. They were mostly “Mormons, Mormon Apostates (who are even worse), gamblers, English Jews and the devil’s own population to boot.” A Union major was dispatched to San Bernadino and reported that of the approximately 1,500 inhabitants of the town about 1,000 were Mormons. “The remainder consisted of a few respectable Americans, and a good many Jew merchants who control the business of the town and go along with any side that pays best for the time being.”603

In Los Angeles, the elections in the fall of 1861 fulfilled the Unionist’s fears as the Secessionists swept to victory. The News (September 6, 1861), appalled at the outcome, turned in anger upon Jewish Democrats:

The Union party has been utterly defeated in this country. Secession and disunion have carried the day and years of repentance cannot wash away the stain....Nearly the whole of the Jewish population of this city voted the secessionist ticket, and we sincerely believe many of them will live to rue the day they did so. That a foreigner should come from a land where he is no better than a serf, having no choice in the selection of his rulers; should come here and give his vote and influence against our government and in favor of the same state of affairs he left behind in the old world, seems passing strange.604

The Jewish community responded by branding the newspaper “anti-Semitic,” drawing from the News an angry rebuke:

It is not denied that nearly the whole of the Jewish population voted the disunion ticket....How

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