The Uses of Malice

...The authors explain that the "residual effect of the Jewish presence in Brazil has been codified in the language...

...But he also wrote that Jewish involvement in slavery and the slave trade was "minimal...

...Each chapter lists a number, often quite small, of instances where an apparently Jewish person sold or owned one or more slaves...

...Max Ullman of Mississippi, was a private in the Confederate Army who served all through the war, was twice wounded, and nearly thirty years later became rabbi of a congregation in Birmingham, Alabama...

...The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews is less an attempt to tell of the past than to shape the future, and its failure in the former respect does not preclude success in the latter...

...The legacy of atrocity cannot be attacked exclusively in racial terms, because it cannot be explained by them...

...Great tracts of cultivated land were being constantly laid waste...

...and certain Afrocentric academics, who maintain that the great political and intellectual achievements of the Western world are African in origin, and that Jews, among others, have corrupted these works and stolen credit for them...

...not merely an academic) force, it had to find expression as Stalinism, Maoism, or Castroism, a body of deeds far more than thoughts...

...One reads, for example, "In 1722, Saint Eustatius Island in the Caribbean Netherlands had 1,204 inhabitants of which 4 families (22 people) were Jewish with 3, 7, 4, and 2 slaves respectively...

...Contemporary black anti-Semitism is most commonly cast in economic terms, though various expressions of it carry a charge of the mythic, conventional or otherwise...

...it bespeaks an individual Victorian Jewish perspective rather than the common medieval Christian one...

...Secret Relationship is brandished more often than read...

...During the thirty-year Dutch occupation of Brazil in the mid-seventeenth century, Jews comprised a third of the white population, and 30,000 African slaves were imported in that period...

...CI 42 The American Spectator April 1995...

...While Jewish merchants were certainly involved in the slave trade—as, to a lesser degree, were Jewish proprietors of the sugar plantations, the basis for the economy—Jews were banned from the Spanish colonies from the outset and from Portugal after 1654...

...that the relation between the words "Jew" and "jewelry" is a kind of semantic proof of their greed, in addition to the old canards about the media and international finance...

...Earlier in the book, the authors construct a capacious mythological framework to portray jarringly disparate incidents as a collective, criminal enterprise...

...Where character is defined at all, characteristics are both relative and pejorative: less clever, less determined, less effectual...

...Much is made of the relative absence of Jews in the antislavery movement...

...The great medieval African empires of Ghana and Mali were also slave-owning societies...

...for others, Jews are the bellwethers of oppression...

...If the Jews in the story are two-dimensional, the blacks do not achieve that meager degree of representation...

...Secret Relationship is brandished more often than read...

...Jewish merchants are regarded as instruments and emblems of their race, amateurs and crackpots are quoted as "respected authorities," and the work of serious historians is profoundly misrepresented...

...Several individuals—David Yulee, David de Leon, Judah Benjamin—warrant the charge...

...This desperate inclusiveness prevents the final chapter from coherent service as either an index or a cross-section of Jewish iniquity, and the attempt to compile a rogue's gallery reads instead like the diary of a madman...

...No matter that the swimming pool and the Mexican gardener were at least as novel to me as a shabbes dinner, our differences were minimal...

...The Europeans reacted by taxing the Jews and some were expelled from their host countries for this activity...

...Grayzel wrote a big book of popular history, well-enough regarded and still in print, but more often acquired for mantelpiece display than for scholarly research...

...The word "slave" is a cognate of the word Slav, as Slavic lands from central Europe to the Caucasus were raided by Viking, Russian, and Islamic slavers, who in turn supplied chattel for caliphates and kingdoms from the Crimea to Gibraltar...

...No doubt sales of Mein Kampf were brisk for a time, but it is generally considered an artifact of anti-Semitism rather than an inspiration for it...

...suffice it to say that until the mid-seventeenth century, few thought of slavery as much worse than an ugly necessity—quite like taxation in that it was abuse-prone, distasteful, and unavoidable...

...This conclusion is omitted from Secret Relationship...

...Eugene Genovese, whose admiration for the cause of John Brown is boundless, maintains genuine doubts as to his sanity...

...There is a cross-pollination among these groups, particularly between the latter two, and their views have been broadcast far beyond their immediate congregations by rap musicians and grass-roots political advocates...

...A table of forty-six expulsions of Jews from European nations and cities from the eleventh through the nineteenth centuries is prefaced by the terse explanation that "most of the complaints centered around economic exploitation, monopolizing, or 'sharp practice,'" which seems to be a rationalization, if not an endorsement, of the expulsions...

...Moreover, the period of greatest activity for Jewish slave traders—excepting those in Spain—was largely confined to certain Romanized regions of Europe between the sixth and tenth centuries, when the Slav tribes converted to Christianity...

...Stories of Jewish-Catholic solidarity are more numerous than is widely assumed but still make for a too-slender book, and the selection of such a vivid page was a signal and a gift, a resolution of friendship as well as its instrument...

...The Historical Research Committee reads the verdict thusly: "Jews, as an elementary fact, participated in the process by which millions of African citizens were enslaved and murdered...

...after ninety-nine pages teeming with nonentities and non sequiturs, however, one gets a sense of authorial derangement...

...Saudi Arabia abolished slavery only in 1962, and the practice is still believed to continue in the West African nation of Mauritania...

...It has been argued that the controversy is a false one, that the malignant rants of Louis Farrakhan et al...

...They are hapless and remote, for the most part, an abstract disaster...

...The book makes the sense and the sound of a brick with a note tied to it, hurled through a window...

...The entries read like punchlines instead of counts in an indictment...

...While their numbers were greater than the Historical Research Committee allows, vocal Jewish abolitionists were few, even for their small percentage of the population at the time...

...lation of slavery than its Hebraic and Islamic counterparts...

...While most Judeophobia has an economic pretext, relying on some conception of Jews as parasitic or predatory in their financial relations with society, "the Jew" is a villain in various mystic, folkloric, religious, and scientific visions of human nature and history...

...Marcus, who is quoted more than two dozen times, did write that "Southern Jews defended the slave system...

...Secret Relationship accuses Jews of excessive effort on behalf of the Confederate cause...

...Lady Magnus was an English author of popular and children's books on Judaism who wrote at the turn of the century, the wife of an MP active in Anglo-Jewish affairs but "violently" anti-Zionist, according to the Encyclopedia Judaica...

...The first sentence, which has the air of indisputable fact, is false in its small and large meanings...

...Africans through history suffer the same reduction to type, and the counterpart of "the Jew" becomes "the black," a sorry and sketchy figure...

...that Zionism is racism, but Jews should not think of the Nation of Islam as racist because it is a kind of Black Zionism—describes in some measure the narcissism, the nullity and vanity of this anti-Semitic vision...

...The secret of The Secret is not anti-Semitism, as the Anti-Defamation League claims—nothing could be more obvious—but self-hatred...

...Wherever it is confirmed that Jews were among the slave traders or owners, for instance, "the Jews" become a ready synonym for that society in its privileged or official capacity: "Between 1690 and 1772, the Black man of Surinam rebelled against the Jewish slavemakers...

...1783-1857) was Charleston, South Carolina's deputy sheriff in 1822, whose job, like his father (above) was to punish runaway Blacks...

...Thus the ownership of six white and nine black slaves by one Isaac Pinheiro on the island of Nevis in 1707 is transformed from a small, stale fact from the remote past into an aspect of the ongoing dynamic of Jewish transgression...

...The perhaps not-so-lamentable truth is that few literary and scholarly works really have much effect on modern culture...

...While the book's ostensible subject is the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery from the fifteenth through the nine-teenth centuries, Secret Relationship is forthrightly a work of contemporary social polemic...

...y et the next page of The Secret Relationship ventures an even more nonsensical interpretation, adduced from appropriately outlandish evidence: The Jews' participation in the slave trade, particularly their trafficking in non-Jewish slaves, excited the moral indignation of Europe's gentile population...

...it is not serious scholarship, but it is dense and dull enough to be mistaken for it...

...This fact is confirmed by their own scholars and historians...

...Quarles received a sentence of five years confinement in the public jail and penitentiary house "on low and coarse diet, one-tenth part of the time to be spent in solitary confinement...

...A nti-Semitism may be the most durable form of prejudice known in the West because it is the most versatile...

...But to say that silence is better than sensationalism is to accept a poverty of alternatives as degrading as any other form of destitution...

...In his book, A History of the Jews, Solomon Grayzel states that "Jews were among the most important slave dealers"(3) in European history...

...My roommate encouraged me to wear my Loyola sweatshirt and, had it occurred to him, would have suggested a nightstick and crown of thorns...

...Was the crime of Aaron Hart his death, his servant, or his gown...

...It is a work of literature in category if not quality, but a vexatious one because it establishes the villain but not the hero...

...Like some Jewish slavers, these men were exceptional in their rarity and energy...

...David de Leon was the surgeon general of the Confederacy, and Judah Benjamin, another Southern senator, served in several cabinet positions under Jefferson Davis...

...By interpreting the action of one Jew at a particular time and place as the behavioral and historical constant known as "the Jews," the book is not history, as such, but a species of allegory...

...The visit, my first with the people and the place, was imbued with the mild qualms of new acquaintance, heightened somewhat by the fact that my roommate looked forward to the raising of a parental hackle or two...

...are almost wholly unrepresentative of American blacks, and that the ferocity of media attention lends the glamour of martyrdom to those who would be otherwise consigned to the far margins...

...I don't recall now where or when such things took Edward Conlon is a writer living in the Bronx...

...Support for this statement is drawn from the works of a Lady Katie Magnus, who wrote: The ownership of six white and nine black slaves by one Isaac Pinheiro on the island of Nevis in 1707 is transformed from a small, stale fact from the remote past into an aspect of the ongoing dynamic of Jewish transgression...

...We got along splendidly, and had to content ourselves with fine times instead of funny stories...

...The shirt may have raised an eyebrow—the Jesuit saint was an historical neighbor of Torquemada—but overall appeared to fail in its desired effect...

...The second sentence combines the trivial with the untrue, as smuggling arms to the colonial rebels, whether seen as noble service or vile treachery, is thoroughly off the point...

...If the presumption is that economic resentment might be justified in a way that religious intolerance is not—as the result of bitter experience rather than pathological imagination—the charge does not survive the contradiction...

...The distinction between the theological and economic is thus abolished, and the acquisition of wealth becomes not just the ambition of the Jews but the purpose of Judaism...

...The list contains entries for figures such as Aaron Lopez, a prominent late eighteenth century merchant and slave trader from Newport, Rhode Island...

...what was to be done with the vanquished dwellers thereon...

...For some believers and beliefs, anti-Semitism is a minor strain in a larger anti-white demonology...

...The practice has a dual purpose: it is a laborsaving research device, and it lends authenticity to the claim, styling it as an "admission" by a Jewish author...

...Its 334 pages are replete with tables and lists, buttressed by 1,275 footnotes, most of which refer to works by "the most respected of the Jewish authorities...

...it is not serious scholarship, but it is dense and dull enough to be mistaken for it...

...Yulee was the first Jewish senator, from Florida, and his views on slavery were ardent, if typical of his time, place, and position...

...A hypothetical case, to eliminate other intermediaries, might run from the capture of a Yoruba tribesman by a Hausa slaver to his sale to a Portuguese sea captain, transport to Brazil, purchase by a Jewish merchant in Bahia, and auction to a Catholic sugar planter in the countryside—a complex series of transactions that could hardly in fairness or accuracy be described as a "Jewish enterprise" even when Jews took part in the process...

...The past writes the present, in rough draft, and while objectivity may forever elude mortal historians, goodwill and malice succeed in some measure whenever attempted...

...History is conceived as a mystery novel: there is a crime to be solved, and clues will lead us to the culprit...

...Many entries are almost artfully anticlimactic, and these are quoted in their entirety: -4 The American Spectator April 1995 41 Henry Benjamin Franks (d.1758) of Trenton, New Jersey, identified a "Negro Wench Prisula" as his property in his 1758 will...

...You cannot connect these dots: Myer Angel, of Richmond, Virginia accused "Walter Quarles, Colored" of stealing two silver watches of the value of $40 each in 1832...

...As such, the Jew is no longer even a racial type but a unit of historical function...

...that Jewish merchants domi38 The American Spectator April 1995 nated the African slave trade, and that 75 percent of slave-owners in the antebellum South were Jews...

...T he authors' account of "monumental culpability" continues in colonial North America and the antebellum United States, and its methodology remains the same...

...T he final section of Secret Relationship, called "Jews of the Black Holocaust," is also the longest, accounting for almost a third of the book, and the strangest, which provides some relief from its monotony...

...It is a summons served to the wrong party...

...The anecdote was also an example, in delightful miniature, of the way history is written for contemporary needs...

...Aaron Hart, in his will of 1762, bequeathed to his servant, "a mourning gown...

...But an escape from this logical cul-de-sac can be found in a thesis that rivals the expulsion theory in its flight from decency and sense: "Europe's experience with 'Mosaic Law' was that it very closely resembled business law, and that money, not worship, was the main objective...

...That the Brazilians spoke Portuguese, and not the quoted Spanish, is less material than the acceptance of historical libel as hereditary wisdom...

...The serious anti-Semite is bound to be disappointed by such slim pickings and strange asides...

...Stories and statistics in circulation include beliefs that Jewish scholars invented the theological justification for African slavery...

...Christian legal and religious tradition placed less emphasis on the benign reguslaves to their own faith weighed heavily in the concerns of the authorities...

...The book relies on the broadest generalizations and most compact treatment of events, equating what "the Jew" is with what certain Jews are alleged to have done...

...The flat, declarative sentences are provocative in content but neutral in tone, defensively qualified with the trump ending of a Jewish footnote...

...There is no Jewish presence that is not "significant," and the adjectival progress to "major" and then "predominant" is swift and sure...

...The historical manhunt for a Jewish Simon Legree ends instead with the apprehension of poor Deputy Junior Moses and the lonely spinster Baruh...

...Rhetorical sleight of hand is therefore necessary to expand the Jewish role...

...Jewish wealth and freedom established, they set their sights on the north...

...These are the slaves that Grayzel refers to in the solitary paragraph he devotes to medieval slavery in his massive single volume history of the Jews published in 1947...

...Nonetheless, there must have been some palpable sense of difference, because my friend's father took it upon himself to mention, in a not quite casual aside, that in times past, in a dank corner of old Mitteleuropa, the custom of the overlord was to hang a dog, a Catholic priest, and a Jew in the village square...

...According to [historian Jacob Rader} Marcus, it soon became the center of the smuggling traffic, particularly in munitions during the American Revolution, and the largest North American Jewish settlement...

...Moreover, his judgment on the medieval slave trade is considered by the magisterial Salo Baron to be "vastly exaggerated...

...Its past masters have portrayed Jews as the causal or controlling force behind almost any political adversary as well as its opposite: international finance and organized labor, Communism and capitalism, decadence and authoritarian rule...

...place, but the gesture touched me quite deeply...

...a Christian convert, Yulee also claimed to be descended from Moroccan royalty...

...Throughout history, slavery has been widespread, though not universal, in both hemispheres...

...The Jews are cartoons but the blacks are the scenery, and the black experience of five centuries becomes a plot device to expose Jewish evil...

...The record of barbarity, even in more credible presentations, cannot be explained simply in racial terms—not white racism, still less "Jewish racism"—because the breadth, depth, and duration of this human evil cannot be reduced to a single social pathology...

...The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, a cyclopedia of Jewish misdeeds published in 1991 by the Historical Research Committee of the Nation of Islam, is perhaps the definitive textbook of contemporary prejudice...

...The entries for "African" or "Negro" in the Diccionario are likely far less flattering.' W hile Secret Relationship initially takes pains to stress that European antipathy toward the Jews was chiefly economic, the section on the Spanish Inquisition asserts that the fear that Jews would convert their comment from the secondary source author...

...Like Roman Catholics, most Jews were a new and nervous minority who largely opposed slavery but dodged the debate that was to provoke civil war...

...40 The American Spectator April 1995 `Jews flocked to the 'golden rock' and some North American Jewish merchants even established branch offices there.' " All that is established in the first sentence is that there were very few Jews on the island, and that they didn't have many slaves...

...Lady Magnus is hardly reckoned among the "most respected Jewish authorities," and the citation from her work, however odious, is entirely irrelevant...

...Anti-Semitism in contemporary America has next to nothing in terms of leadership, organization, resources, or support...

...A pertinent section of the Diccionario de la Academia Espanola is cited, with translated definitions of "Judio" (miser, usurer), "Judaida" (inhuman action, excessive and scandalous profit), "Hebreo" (merchant or usurer), "Sinagoga" (conspiracy, among others), and "Cohen" (soothsayer, sorcerer, bawd...

...The authors of Secret Citations from primary sources—wills, bills, census lists, legal actions, letters—are always supplied secondhand, from books by Jewish authors or articles in Jewish historical journals, and often are accompanied by some Relationship view the systematic persecution of Jews as circumstantial evidence of their propensity for despicable activities, and the inference of provocation is difficult to avoid...

...Marcus estimates that Jewish merchants were "accountable for considerably less than 2% of the slave imports into the West Indies and North America," but the process by which Africans became Americans cannot be so simply reduced...

...Its three main sources are the radical left, where the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is blurred in both the point and the counterpoint...

...Some charges are almost whimsical in their concoction—Farrakhan has characterized industries as Jewish-dominated on the basis of "Jewish-sounding" names associated with a particular company—while others are the reflection of serious (if seriously flawed) scholarship, converted into a kind of urban legend...

...The relation between the words is purely phonetic, although there are several ugly ethnic cognates in the language, among them philistine and Palestine, ogre and Hungarian, and, as noted above, Slav and slave...

...When the Portuguese reclaimed the colony in 1654, the Jews were expelled—and hence absent for the subsequent two centuries' import of 3 million slaves...

...Abolition was primarily a Protestant movement, from which the Jewish absence is no more telling or shameful than that of the Belgians or Iroquois...

...In the New World, slavery was practiced by the Incas, Aztecs, and tribal societies northward to Alaska...

...All that can be said of the Jewish role in the transatlantic slave trade and New World slave societies is that the attitudes and actions of Jewish merchants were apparently the same as their gentile counterparts, although their numbers were demonstrably quite small...

...Much has been written recently on the subject of relations between blacks and Jews...

...The luminaries of the movement were passionate and Protestant, genuine radicals who discomfited even their supporters with their ferocious intensity...

...Each one is a prominent historical figure and most are highly regarded and respected by Jews themselves," write the authors, whose information is culled largely from the work of Jewish historians...

...the island simply wasn't the largest settlement of its kind, as might be inferred from the fact that only a few merchants set up branch offices there...

...It was anticipated that I, a Bronx-born Irish-Catholic from a line of cops, might exude a whiff of the exotic, or worse, in the suburban, Jewish milieu of my hosts...

...Opinion polls have found higher rates of anti-Semitism among blacks than whites...

...The first three sentences of the first chapter are fairly representative of the book's style and strategy: Throughout the history of the practice, Jews have been involved in the purchase and sale of human beings...

...Rebecca Baruh lived alone with one slave in seventeenth-century Barbados...

...that the Jews killed Nat Turner and Martin Luther King, Jr...

...It is a catalogue of more than 350 Jews who lived from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries and are "confirmed to have participated in the Black African slave trade...

...He was not in any way "typically Jewish," however...

...This view represents one of the most disturbing aspects of the tract: the selective embrace of the same bigotry that was in large part responsible for the explosive growth and entrenched persistence of African slavery...

...A rebuttal of the false claims in Secret Relationship is both necessary and necessarily inadequate...

...The vicious circularity of several separatist precepts—that Western Civilization is fundamentally corrupt but truly African in origin...

...The book is a poor crib sheet of history, a shoddy and misguided attempt to put on paper a delirium of rage born of centuries of brutality...

...While its influence thus far can only be seen as minor but malicious vandalism, there remains the remote but ominous prospect that historical farce will be repeated as tragedy...

...What is most striking, however, and less obvious, is how demeaning the book is to black people, the enslaved Africans and their descendants, whether in bondage or various degrees of liberty...

...I Incidentally, "Jew" comes straightforwardly from the name for the ancient Hebrew kingdom, rendered in English as Judah, while "jewel" is a roundabout derivative of the Latin jocus, or joke, by way of the Old French joel, meaning plaything or trinket...

...The peculiar epithet of an abolitionist senator from Ohio—that Benjamin was an "Israelite with the morals of an Egyptian"—is quoted without elaboration, though the wit must fall somewhat flat for the modern Afrocentric reader...

...the latter also encouraged the manumission of slaves after a period of six years, while the former was silent on the subject...

...T his vision of history should be sufficiently soft, broad, and sweeping to allow most Jewish actions or persons to be seen as agencies of oppression, but so strenuously do the authors attempt to stuff the book with the direst sounding details that the narrative never attains either the coherence or dramatic impetus of myth...

...it is thus necessary only to establish a Jewish presence to demonstrate Jewish crime...

...individuals among them were among the institution's most vigorous apologists...

...For Marxism to be felt as a historical (i.e...

...Solomon Moses, Jr...

...Jews were forbidden to purchase Christian slaves by the Theodosian Code in 384, and again by edict of Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century...

...but we made of them what we could...

...Silence" hardly pertains when race-baiters are greeted with warmth and enthusiasm at campuses all over the country (though many in these audiences are not college students themselves...

...The American Spectator April 1995 39 Selling people into slavery has a dreadful sound, but in those days it was not such a dreadful thing, not even so avoidable a one, as it would be in these...

...that 100 million black Africans were killed in the course of the Atlantic slave trade...

...The conception of expulsions and pogroms as spasmodic expressions of liberal principle is too absurd to address in its entirety...

...black nationalists and separatists such as the Nation of Islam, who denounce Jews in the media and the marketplace as malign forces arrayed against them...