Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype by Foxman Abraham H

Author:Foxman, Abraham H. [Foxman, Abraham H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

So popular is this farrago that Henry Louis Gates, the distinguished professor who heads the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, denounced The Secret Relationship as “the Bible of the new anti-Semitism.”

Were there actually any Jews among the many slave traders who created and maintained the tragic, shameful practice that is such a blot on American and world history? Yes, there were some—and their existence, far from being some kind of secret suppressed by a Jewish conspiracy, has been thoroughly documented by genuine scholars. Historian Saul S. Friedman, for example, is one of several experts who have examined the extensive documentary evidence about Jewish involvement in slavery. His conclusions: Jews owned less than 0.03 percent of all the slaves in America; less than 2 percent of the 600,000 slaves imported to the United States were handled by Jewish traders; and less than 1 percent of the ten million slaves imported to other countries in the New World involved Jews.

In short, the participation of Jews in the slave trade—while deplorable—was minimal. It would appear that the purpose of The Secret Relationship was not to set the historical record straight but rather to stir up hostility between the black and Jewish communities by retailing a new variation on old anti-Semitic stereotypes—specifically, by claiming that Jewish merchants were so greedy and ruthless that they far outcompeted Christian traders when it came to trafficking in human beings. Like the other versions of the Jewish money canard, it’s simply not true.

Anti-Semitism in the Nation of Islam isn’t merely backwardlooking. Farrakhan is also an active promoter of myths about Jews and money currently. A series of lectures by Farrakhan in early 2010, rife with conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel, and Jewish control of government, finance, and Hollywood, leave little doubt that anti-Semitism and racism remain a central part of his message. The series of three speeches, beginning with his February 28 Saviors’ Day speech and culminating with an address on March 14 at Mosque Maryam in Chicago, put Farrakhan’s use of anti-Semitism on full display. Farrakhan accused some Jews of belonging to a “synagogue of Satan,” asserted that Jews control the entertainment industry and exploit black performers for their own financial gain, and repeated the lie that Jews were disproportionately involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Some of the more blatantly anti-Semitic slurs from Farrakhan’s recent speeches include:

• “The Federal Reserve is the synagogue of Satan, the Rockefellers, the DuPonts, the House of Rothschild, these are the people that have corrupted the entire world.”—Speech at Mosque Maryam, Chicago, March 14, 2010

• “The Black man and woman have always been looked upon as the ‘property’ of White America; and particularly, members of the Jewish community. They’ve always looked at you as ‘belonging’ to them.”—Speech at Mosque Maryam, Chicago, March 7, 2010

• “The Jewish people have said that Hollywood is theirs. Can any of you deny that they are the masters of Hollywood, where sex, lesbianism, homosexuality and violence

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