Besides their important position in the sugar industry and in tax farming, they dominated the slave trade…. The buyers who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews, and because of this lack of competitors they could buy slaves at low prices…. If it happened that the date of such an auction fell on a Jewish holiday the auction had to be postponed.

The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 1: The Jewish Role in the Enslavement of Africans
The Nation of Islam

Once again, I am knee-deep in considering the Jews.

*          *          *          *

To the extent that any ethnographic study of the Jews is less than hagiographic, one can be sure that the long knives will be sharped and the attack on the critic of the Jews writ large will be ruined. In this, I am reminded of Gilad Atzmon’s trenchant observation in his pithy book, The Wandering Who, that, “it is not the idea of being unethical that torments [the Jews] but the idea of being ‘caught out’ as such.” If one keeps this maxim in mind—indeed, if one amplifies this maxim—it serves as a hermeneutic principle to understand why Jews react the way they do to any form of group criticism. Every cognizable group of human beings, no matter the basis of their association, is not beyond group criticism except the Jews—and if there were ever needed a demonstration of the incredible power that Jews possess in Western societies, it is their repeated ability to marginalize and destroy anyone who criticizes the Jews as a group concerning supporting Israel (an apartheid state), questioning the various narratives of Jewish victimology, or offering a counter-narrative of collective Jewish misconduct and abuse of power. This power is amplified since they, the Jews, excoriate other groups as a matter of sport—it is not “group” analysis per se that is the problem, it is a less-than-flattering portrait of the Jews that is objectionable. Conveniently the weapon of choice is prophylactically to brand such opposition, “antisemitism,” and, in this, I am again reminded of Atzmon who noted that, “[w]hile in the past an ‘anti-Semite’ was someone who hates Jews, nowadays it is the other way around, an anti-Semite is someone that the Jews hate.” And there is no one that Jews hate more than someone who dares to critique the Jews as a group.

This principle is integral to understanding that the Jews, fundamentally as a group, are congenitally illiberal people who, at least in the main, prostitute the liberal and modern academic tenants of self-criticism, self-reflection, and evidence-based scholarship to criticize and shame other groups. Even though the liberal academy is disproportionately populated by Jews who sanctimoniously make their living disparaging non-Jewish groups (and especially Christians and Europeans and their intertwined histories)—supposedly in concert with liberal principles—they close ranks when someone, really anyone, turns those liberal principles of a critical examination upon the Jews themselves. The blatant hypocrisy of Jewish “liberal” academicians knows no bounds.

Liberal historiography of any group matures from a juvenile self-favoritism and suspicion of the “other” into one that takes the perspective of the “other” and objectifies, at least in a sense, the motives of one’s group. This is fundamental to Western individualism and its universalist moral codes. So, for example, observant Catholics can—and do—take a moral inventory of their history and do not shirk from recognizing where they fell short of their ideals as a people historically. But the Jews have never reached this maturity—and indeed, if anything, they have regressed towards cruder historiographic fantasies in proportion with their power to project such historical lies. As such, there is something deeply unserious about the Jews—a lack of self-reflection that bespeaks an almost adolescent and constant defensive posture. Israel Shahak makes this point regarding the Jews in his incredible study of Jewish group psychology and history, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (1994, 22), when he writes about the totalitarian mindset of Jewish groups in which studies of Judaism are characterized by “deception, apologetics or hostile polemics, indifference or even active hostility to the pursuit of truth. … Modern totalitarian regimes rewrite history or punish historians. … When a whole society tries to return to totalitarianism, a totalitarian history is written, not because of compulsion from above but under pressure from below, which is much more effective. This is what happened in Jewish history.”

Again, understanding that the Jews are illiberal chauvinists infused with a totalitarian “groupthink” is necessary to reorient their projection of history as something designed, no more or no less, to empower the Jews and disempower the “other” whenever and wherever they find themselves. For the Jews, it would seem, life with the “other” is inevitably a zero-sum game in which the “other” can never be considered a neighbor. And when Jews do treat the non-Jew as a neighbor, it is always despite the dictates of Judaism and never because of it. It is for this reason that true community between Jews and non-Jews is, at least in my opinion, next to impossible to obtain.

*          *          *          *

Jews understand, or at least so it seems to me, that manipulation over the historical narrative operates to control the present and near-future. If groups are assigned historical gloss generally as negative group actors or positive group actors, that gloss itself operates to immunize or disable those same groups from acting in the present. That gloss also provides morale to the positive group actors while disheartening negative group actors. They are, at least in this regard, quite sophisticated in understanding how group dynamics play out. And because most people lack the sophistication, time, or inclination to study the alleged basis for this historical gloss, the gloss itself is reduced to a kind of group stereotype that is implicitly digested by the broader society without much thought. The Jews do everything that they can do to discredit any historian or intellectual who challenges the proffered stereotype of the Jews—the moral group historical gloss, as it were—that the Jews are a light to humanity who have always been unjustly persecuted everywhere. The virtually manic and automatic response of Jews instinctively to destroy any critical scholarship aimed at exploding this self-serving Jewish narrative (or offering a less panegyric narrative) in the most heavy-handed way itself indicates a deep-seated group psychosis. People, such as the Jews who are dominated by “groupthink,” take criticism of the group as always representing an existential threat.

Indeed, when we speak of “the Jews,” we are not necessarily speaking of a conspiracy, which is another way that Jews assert control over the historical narrative. “Conspiratorial” charges are a thin veneer to condemn those who critique the Jews: we are, or so they claim, “crazy” because they trot out the strawman that we assert—presumably wearing tinfoil hats—that the world’s Jews scheme their plot to “control” the world in some sort of group conference. Questioning Jewish power, which is obvious as the day is long, becomes tantamount to the thoughts of an unhinged insane person, which is the perfect example of what “gaslighting” is. The charge of “conspiracy” is yet another defense mechanism put forward by the Jews to make the critic of the Jews seem weird and ridiculous, and therefore not worthy of consideration based upon the lack of credibility of the critic himself (as opposed to the merits of the critique proffered). Like the charge of antisemitism, which is used to paint the critic of the Jews as a moral leper, labeling critics of the Jews as “crazy” is another way to ensure that critic’s marginalization. Either way (crazy or immoral), the Jews seek immunity from group criticism by viciously attacking and ostracizing the messenger. The critique of the Jews, however, does not require a conspiratorial predicate (or a mendacious heart)—it could be that they collectively have lousy ethics (they do); it could be that they collectively are inbred enough (they are) that they have developed certain psychological and genetic predilections to act collectively albeit unconsciously in the way that they do; and it could be that most Jews believe the propaganda foisted upon them by their leadership and respond accordingly. And it could be a conspiracy amongst the leadership of the Jews. Concerted action by a group does not necessarily require a conscious plan and the idea that criticism of the Jews requires it is a deflection by them to silence the criticism itself.

Contrary to the moral historical gloss that the Jews want to put forward, there is another one worth considering. The Jews, everywhere and always, have been terrible neighbors to the non-Jewish people with whom they have co-inhabited geographic space. They have treated their non-Jewish neighbors (the “goyim”), at least as a rule, as something less than human—and because of that, they have always and everywhere attempted (and often succeeded) in taking advantage of their non-Jewish neighbors in every conceivable way. Setting aside their collective psychological profile, they cheat, steal, and kill the goyim without the normal human sense of moral compunction—and they always have. The Talmud itself—the key religious source material for Judaism in the post-Second Temple era—is replete with examples condoning or encouraging exactly that type of behavior towards the goyim. We, the goyim, are objects to be fleeced. And this, as much as the goyim’s alleged “antisemitism,” explains why every non-Jewish nation in history has, at least on occasion, been forced to take punitive actions against the Jews living within their midst. Moreover, it also explains why anti-Jewish sentiment has percolated in so many for so long; it is not that goyim—that is, all of non-Jewish humanity—have had ingrained hard hearts towards the Jews, it is rather that some of the goyim see the Jews accurately for who they are and what they have done (and continue to do) and project back upon the Jews the same level of objectification that the Jews themselves project outward towards the goyim. None of this is said, especially as a Catholic, to justify any harm done to any Jews. After all, we have a different ethic concerning the humanity of the Jews than the Jews have concerning us. That differential ethic means necessarily that we play by different rules and judge our conduct differently than they judge their own. But what continues to amaze me is that the Jews never consider what it is about them that elicits such a universal sense of animosity: for a people allegedly so bright, that they never consider that it might just be them—and not the rest of humanity—is almost beyond credulity. Indeed, it is so far beyond credulity that I don’t believe it: the Jews know they are hypocrites as it relates to the goyim, but they do not care—their hypocrisy is simply another long con.

*          *          *          *

My professional life has been dominated by interactions with the Jews. And, on a personal level, I have no animosity towards any of the Jews with whom I have interacted because they are Jews. Know thyself is a maxim that is crucial to personal growth, and, at least as it relates to the Jews, I know that my opinions about the Jews as a group have nothing to do with a personal animosity that I have towards Jews generally. If anything, my opinions are held despite my affection for so many Jews that have been a part of my professional life. And, to go one step further, I concede that many Jews have been good to me in my career and have even been friends. Candidly, I assume that a similar dynamic would be at play if I worked closely with Muslims or any other non-Catholic group—personal affection towards individuals is not inconsistent with evaluating the working out of group dynamics, for good or for bad. More to the point, there is no disability in racial or ethnic Judaism per se; if any Jew renounces Talmudic Judaism as a religion and as a series of unethical and dehumanizing principles, he can be as good as anyone else.

Perhaps one could accuse me of duplicity: obviously, I do not share my opinions on Jewish group dynamics with my Jewish colleagues. But I assume, for good reason, they have a public face to me, as a constituent of the goyim, and a private face as it relates to the goyim generally. I do not think that many of them see a contradiction in befriending me, as it were, yet still seeing the interactions generally between Jews and non-Jews as zero-sum. In any event, I was born into a Western society that is predominated by Jews in the professional classes—I am forced to navigate them if I too am to be a professional. For my part, I wish the Jews no harm, not at all.  I simply want for my people the same thing that they want:  a homeland in which our shared faith and culture predominates without foreign influence. I recognize that Europe once had that until the Enlightenment freed the Jews to wreak havoc. And I would like that back.

Virtually every Jew that I have ever encountered has a favorable opinion as it relates to the State of Israel. They doggedly support the preservation of that national experiment built upon the backs of the Palestinian people who lived there before the advent of Zionism. Thus, the vast majority of Jews unashamedly supports a homeland for Jews in which the Jewish identity, in all its various forms, is cultivated, respected, and perpetuated. That they could care less that that “homeland” necessarily involved the dispossession of another people ought to be a telltale sign of who they are. That others might feel the same affection about their people—religiously and ethnically—never appears to dawn on the Jews. Indeed, the Jews have a sense that any such aspiration by the goyim (and especially the Christian goyim) is “bad” for the Jews. Parenthetically, there is something so threadbare about Jewish ethics as such—it really can be reduced to evaluating whether something is good or bad by asking the simple question: is it good or bad for the Jews. And worse, my conclusion is therefore that the Jews, as a group, do everything that they can to thwart the same aspiration of identity and autonomy in others (especially the autonomy of Christians and Europeans who are, at least in Talmudic literature, associated with Israel’s eternal foe, Edom). Everywhere they predominate, which is everywhere in our Western societies, they sow discord and distort our history to squelch our aspirations to achieve what we would seek except for their gaslighting. Along with their utter lack of self-reflection, their hypocrisy is so galling.

To put a coda on this, at least personally, I do not hate the Jews—indeed, I am not allowed by my creed to hate them—but I recognize them collectively for what they are: civilizational adversaries, not friends or allies. And yet this is another difference between us and them: they know they are at war with us, and we do not.

But more than anything else, the Jews, at least as a group, are liars, and they are never to be trusted when it comes to their proffered analysis as it relates to group dynamics or their account of history. Everything they say, write, or think on the group level has one goal—to gaslight and convince themselves and the “other” of Jewish moral superiority and the “other’s” moral inferiority. If we keep that principle in mind, we should never trust their account of anything they claim relating to history (or anything else) because it is so often contrived. In that context, they have always possessed a revolutionary spirit of division that is as toxic as it is diabolical. Another way to understand their collective conduct is to realize that their identity as a group was forged by their rejection of Christ, which coincided with the destruction of the Second Temple. As such, they are a people of negation. They are the remnant of people who rejected the direct and personal invitation of the Logos, and they are, as a result, opposed to the Logos in a way that is different from all other groups. It is wrong to consider them to be a people cursed by God, but it is accurate to say that they bear the collective scars of being the people who rejected— and continue to reject—God intimately. Given that their subsequent history as a people after the Incarnation has been one marked by the continuing rejection of Logos, their very identity has been admixed with a special and unique hostility to European Christians. To be a serious Jew then is to harbor a special animosity towards Christian goyim and it follows therefrom that for Christians to entertain anything that Jews have to say about history seriously as beyond naïve. It is dangerous.

Finding and reading work critical of the Jews is no easy task. Not only is such work difficult to publish in the first place because of the social suicide it represents for the author, but it is also difficult to find because the Jews exert their influence to censor such books from commercial venues even after the author is willing to sacrifice himself to publish it. For example, Amazon regularly censors books that the Jews find objectionable. Moreover, websites that present such material are regularly hounded off the internet and often deprived of even the ability to accept electronic payment processing. Just google, “Kevin MacDonald” or “E. Michael Jones”—both bright and scholarly non-Jewish academics who have been reduced to crazy bigots for merely taking cognizance of the Jews with less than encomium. Or google, “Israel Shahak” or “Gilad Atzmon”—both Jews who are openly dismissed as Jewish traitors and Jewish anti-Semites for critiquing from within the malice of the Jews. But a few intrepid souls carry on, and, with a little diligence, the material can be found. And what makes finding it enthralling is how such material exposes the carefully constructed Jewish edifice for what it is: a diabolic structure built upon deceit. Eventually, the Truth is revealed—either now or in the next life—and the ruse of the Jews will not persist in perpetuity.

*          *          *          *

One unexpected book I recently heard about, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: The Jewish Role in the Enslavement of Africans, is an ethnographic study of the Jewish involvement in the African slave trade following the European discovery of the New World put out by the Nation of Islam headed by Minister Louis Farrakhan. Before delving into the work, I must make one more preliminary observation: there is no small irony in the Nation of “Islam” decrying African slavery when the greatest slaving religion known in human history is Islam. While there was something especially toxic about African chattel slavery in the New World, which we Christians sadly own as a part of our history, Muslims enslaved more people (by multiple factors) over a much longer period than anyone in history—all with express religious sanction from the Quran. That fact is glossed over by the Nation of Islam in its work—the most that The Secret Relationship is willing to concede is that the Jews and Europeans were abetted by “African race traitors” who helped procure their fellow Africans for bondage. What is not mentioned is that those “race traitors” were Muslim, and, further, at least as many Africans boarded slave ships during this period were bound for Muslim ports and Muslim slave markets. But what should be remembered is that the Nation of Islam, for good or bad, is not a Muslim sect as much as it is an African American separatist sect with a thin Muslim façade. In any event, as it relates to the slave trade, the Nation of Islam found the rampant Muslim involvement either too inconvenient or too troubling to flesh out.

The Secret Relationship, first published in 1991, is fascinating: it has an unnamed editor and does not indicate personal authorship. The title page declares that it was “Prepared by The Historical Research Department [of] The Nation of Islam.” And it is undoubtedly scholarly with a short bibliography and more than 1,200 footnotes. Its opening “Note on Sources” asserts that it “has been compiled primarily from Jewish historical literature.” The obvious strategy of the authors was to rely upon Jewish sources to document Jewish involvement in the slave trade. Nothing like hoisting your enemy upon his own petard. As a work of scholarship, what then can we say of The Secret Relationship? It is comprehensive and it is academic. It is not a work primarily interested in American slavery but in the entire arc of New World slavery. And the thesis is nothing less than assigning primary culpability for the slave trade to the Jews. In developing that thesis, which, I admit, came as a revelation to me, the compilers work very diligently and methodically to catalog the almost mind-numbing and outsized influence of the Jews in the slave trade.

Every major settlement and colony—no matter its country or trading company founder—is cataloged and the impact of the Jews as it relates to slavery is recounted. The authors work through slavery in Colonial South America and the Caribbean, Brazil, Surinam, Essequibo, Guiana, Barbados, Curacao, Jamaica, Martinique, Nevis, Saint Dominique, Saint Eustatius, and Saint Thomas. The authors then follow the migration of the Jews from the south into Colonial America (New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Georgia, and the West). Historically, the book culminates in consideration of the antebellum United States and the Civil War, the role of the American Rabbinate leading up to and during the Civil War and the lack of an abolitionist movement with American Judaism, the double-dealing profit-making of the Jews during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the eventual exploitation of the freedman following the Civil War by the Jews. The book concludes with a study of census data, Jewish wills, slavery in Jewish law, and the rape of Black slaves by Jewish slaveholders.

Two related themes that play themselves out throughout the book are the almost complete lack of remorse or moral questioning of the slave trade or the degradation of Africans. The Jews, virtually to a person, never took part in the abolition movement in any conceivable way. Relatedly, the opinion of the Jews towards the Africans was one of an almost unrelenting dehumanization. Taken together, the authors paint a picture—again, derived almost entirely from Jewish historical sources, that the Jews of the slave trading and slaveholding era were not merely participants for it but were fanatical supporters of the practice, and in large measure they based their economic livelihood around slavery in one way or another. The Secret Relationship then is their comeuppance. And when the rabbis walked hand-in-hand with the Civil Rights leaders in the 1960s—and when Blacks could be manipulated and used by the Jews for their political purposes—the inconvenient history of Jewish leadership in the economy of the slavocracy had to be whitewashed.

As I said, the book is comprehensive, and every quotation and analysis cited comes from a Jewish scholar’s voice describing the topic (albeit an older voice not attuned to the modern horror at the concept of African slavery). It seems that earlier Jewish scholarship reflected the more positive defense of slavery that was, for the most, put forward by the Jews leading up to the American Civil War. To put it differently, and in a way that serves as an indirect verification of the thesis of the book, the Jews were so knee-deep in slaving and slave-trading for hundreds of years in the Americas without any moral compunction that it took multiple generations of Jews to turn on slaving and slavery. In other words, the first generations of Jewish scholars after the American Civil War carried within them a defense of it and the Jews’ role in it that took time to unwind. Stated still differently, the first instinct among Jews is to defend Jews, and the first generation of Jewish scholars was candid and relatively unapologetic in defending the outsized role in slaving and slavery. Contemporary Jewish scholars would like to silence these older Jewish voices and the Nation of Islam was no small irritant in providing them a venue to be heard again. The moral outrage of today’s academic Jews at slavery is ironic—they have no standing for indignation at others until they address the moral pox upon their own house.

As mentioned above, the book relies upon Jewish secondary sources of a distinct vintage to make the case that the Jews not only dominated the African slave trade but were instrumental in it. It recites statistics, censuses, correspondence, and charters to demonstrate that Jews were integral to founding settlements (particularly Dutch and Portuguese ones), shipping slaves, and creating the sugar plantation system that sprung up all over the Caribbean and Central/South America. As animosity grew between Jews and European Christians, The Secret Relationship shows how Jews would move from one colony to another, from one country to another, to continue their slaving economic practices—switching countries and trading companies without any compunction. The Jews, as has been long pointed out, never possessed patriotism to the various host countries in which they resided—even if they had lived in those countries for hundreds of years. This phenomenon continues to this day—and the only patriotism that contemporary Jews ever show is directed at their fanatical support of Israel.

Taken together, The Secret Relationship exposes a dark underbelly of Judaism, which is made even more nefarious by the constant liberal posturing by today’s Jewish liberals. The whitewashing of history—that is, the leading Jewish role in African slavery—is a vivid demonstration of Jewish gaslighting that is taking place in real-time. Perhaps that is the single biggest victory by the Nation of Islam’s publication of this book: yes, it brings to light the Jewish involvement in slavery in stark relief, but it does something much more. It shows what Jews are doing now is the historical airbrushing to preserve the Jewish cult of moral superiority.

*          *          *          *

The Secret Relationship’s publication was like a broadside against Jewish academics who use the Atlantic African slave trade as a cudgel against European Christians. In one fell swoop, The Secret Relationship deprived the Jews of their customary and favored role as a perpetual victim by casting them as the chief villains in the slave trade and driving a wedge between the relationship between Blacks and Jews that had been carefully constructed by Jews to encourage Black hatred towards Whites. In response to The Secret Relationship, multiple Jewish academics took up the challenge to show that it was wrong, and they published book after book allegedly debunking The Secret Relationship. Interestingly enough, Amazon censors The Secret Relationship but oddly offers myriad rebuttals for sale. For my copy, I had to order it directly from the Nation of Islam. The problem for the Jewish academic rebuttals was that they were forced to have this historical battle on terrain not of their choosing. And the best that they could muster is, and I paraphrase thousands of pages of their rebuttal scholarship by multiple authors, is essentially, “yeah, Jews were involved in the slave trade like everyone else … so what?”

So much for moral superiority. And now, some thirty years later, even a cursory review of the fallout from The Secret Relationship and its rebuttal scholarship is that The Secret Relationship has been allegedly “discredited”—and one only must peruse the Wikipedia entry on The Secret Relationship to see how strident and over-the-top the response to it has been.

The whole thing stinks of “[t]he lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

There is, however, something certainly lurking in the background of the criticism of The Secret Relationship. Why focus on the Jews? The angst is perhaps best summarized by a Jewish historian from Columbia University:

Jonathan Schorsch of Columbia University, has also written about the slave trade—most recently in his 2009 book Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World and in an article published in the journal Jewish Social Studies. Schorsch sees even the facts surrounding Jewish involvement as being contentious. “There seem to have been a handful of Jewish firms, proportionate to their population. A lot of things that don’t make anyone feel good.” About The Secret Relationship, Schorsch said, “The claim in the narrow sense is just. Why are they harsher toward Jews? Is it because they are afraid to antagonize Christians? Jews did their share of persecuting and discriminating, of being persecuted and discriminated. Neither Blacks nor Jews are as perfect as one would wish. Did Black Nationalists want to puncture Jewish pride? There are real stakes here—government funding and so forth. Then there’s the victim game—who’s the biggest victim? It makes some Jews very uncomfortable.”

Here, we get down to brass tacks—yes, why the Jews? It must be that the Jews have been so self-deceived that they cannot comprehend the role that they have played in the world. To read that they have always been engaged in the slave trade, usury, double-dealing, and smuggling—among so many other anti-social and destructive practices as it relates to the goyim—punctures the carefully constructed myth of Jewish moral superiority that most Jews, like Professor Schorsch, have evidently and wholeheartedly swallowed. Thus, Professor Schorsch’s anguished question, “why are they harsher towards the Jews” bespeaks an almost plaintive cry of pain—and it ignores that the Nation of Islam was “harsher towards the Jews” because, notwithstanding the Jews’ self-deception, the Jews merit it. And it is no small irony that this book is about the slave trade, which is something the Jews have trafficked in since time immemorial. Indeed, the Jews did not simply happen into the Atlantic African slave trade after the New World was discovered—they had been long involved with slaving when they sold countless European Christians into slavery in Muslim slave markets for hundreds of years before Columbus.

So, why does the Nation of Islam target the Jews for special recognition? Because the Jews were better at the slave business than their contemporary European Christian competitors—they had been doing it for much, much longer. Only now, when human trafficking and slavery have taken on a special odium do Jews run from their history. “Why us?” Why you? Because you deserve the opprobrium that accompanies the special role you played in, among things, slaving—not just in the Americas but everywhere. That is why.

The Jews have a playbook for disciplining White Christians who critique them, and they likewise have a strategy to marginalize individual Jews who publicly air the Jews’ dirty laundry. However, the Nation of Islam presented them with a more difficult task because it represented a not-insignificant Black voice that the Jews supposedly support. In any event, the damage from The Secret Relationship was potentially too detrimental for them to ignore—they struck hard against Farrakhan and have largely succeeded in characterizing the work as “pseudo-scholarship,” which it is anything but. What is sad, and this too can be googled, is how many African Americans have jumped to the defense of their Jewish friends in Hollywood against Farrakhan. Add Louis Farrakhan to the long list of non-Jews that have been tarred by the Jews for daring to critique the Jews—had he limited his vociferousness to merely condemning European Christians, I have little doubt that he would have received a generous subsidy from the Jews, and they would have passionately defended his attack on European Christians.

One of the most telling critiques of The Secret Relationship is not that it is not scholarly but that it relies upon “old” scholarship. Consider the following analysis by Professor Winthrop D. Jordan published in The Atlantic in 1995:

Footnotes matter because verifiability depends on them. In the Karp-Korn instance we are nearly home, though we do not yet know when the article was published—and, of course, the date matters greatly. We can determine it only by consulting actual copies of the article, which turns out to be “Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789–1865,” which originated as an address by the president of the American Jewish Historical Society and was first published in 1961. The date [1961], it turns out, falls within a period when Jewish scholarship about the history of Jews in the United States was moving away from predominantly filiopietistic studies of ancestry and achievement and toward a more sophisticated assessment of the role of Jews in American culture. Korn’s article contains a great deal of specific information to which The Secret Relationship has been thoroughly faithful. … Dating such historical writing is critical, given the shifting state of historical scholarship over time. Many of the works cited in The Secret Relationship are so old that it would be generous to call them outdated. Of the first sixty-odd, nearly a third date from before 1950 and eight from the 1890s. In contrast, a recent pamphlet on the Atlantic slave trade that was published by the American Historical Association as an aid to scholars and teachers cites four sources that date from 1949 through the late 1960s and twenty-eight published since 1970.

In other words, The Secret Relationship may be scholarly, but it relies upon “old” scholarship that was produced during a less contemporary era in which Jewish scholars took no pains to hide the involvement in—and domination of—the Atlantic African slave trade. When convenient, the Jews cannot hide their pride in dominating anything, and this included a time when the Jews could not hide their pride in dominating the Atlantic African slave trade. So, we get an apologist for modern Jewish scholarship’s revision of the Jewish involvement in the slave trade by claiming, in nearly incomprehensible language, that we should minimize scholarship that was created during a brief but less “filiopietistic” era. What the author failed to understand is that every era that Jews write about is written in “filiopietistic” terms. The only thing that changes is what is considered historically acceptable. The Jewish scholars from the 1890s through the early 1960s were being “filiopietistic” in trumpeting the domination of the slave trade by the Jews—only later, when the slave trade became a toxic liability did later “filiopietistic” Jewish academics decide that airbrushing the Jewish role was the better course.

More to the point, the fact that later scholarship minimized the Jewish role is proof positive of a collective Jewish agenda to protect Jewish identity and Jewish victimology. Now Jews care about what Blacks think—and indeed the Jews are doing the best to instrumentalize Blacks against Whites (parenthetically, it is no accident that “Blacks Lives Matter” is largely underwritten by Jewish money)—so celebrating a past commercial achievement of Jewish cleverness in the Atlantic slave trade and defending earlier Jewish conduct within it takes a distinct backseat to contemporary Jewish needs. At least, the author acknowledges the danger:

YET surely the compilers of The Secret Relationship will feel that such disparities merely confirm their case—that by avoiding these older historical writings, the history establishment has been hiding the facts about the important role played by Jews in the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the New World. The [American Historical Association’s] pamphlet does not, in fact, even mention Jews. The compilers will no doubt take this omission as further confirmation that the participation of Jews has been kept a secret.

To this observation, no rebuttal is offered. Professor Jordan’s critique of The Secret Relationship simply—and almost autonomically—moves on to yet more criticism of the book. Yes, someone has been hiding this seeming big historical fact—the Jews played a leadership role in the Atlantic slave trade—and this is a story unto itself. Credit Professor Jordan for recognizing this point but his failure to rebut this charge of “hiding” is quite telling. Ultimately, after conceding that the Jews did, in fact, play an outsized role in the slave trade—albeit mostly in the early years of European settlement, Professor Jordan offers a strange defense of the Jewish role in the African slave trade:

The reasons for the important role of Jews in the early years of the slave trade are not hard to find. To put the matter in summary [apologetic] terms, Jews in medieval Europe had effectively been pushed by the Western branch of the Christian Church away from land ownership and into commerce and financial dealings. During those early years of western overseas expansion many Jews continued to find opportunities for drawing wealth from commerce and finance. Under heavy threat in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Portuguese and Spanish Jews found refuge in the Netherlands, a quasi-nation that by that time had a widely reputed tolerance for religious diversity. Jewish citizens of the Netherlands were able to participate in domestic and foreign trade, including the slave trade on the coast of West Africa and in the Americas. These Jews, along with many Christian Dutch traders, supplied slaves not only to the Dutch colonial enterprises in Brazil and Surinam but also to Curaçao and other islands in the Antilles for transhipment to the New World colonies of other European nations. Ironically, Jews were therefore able to make major investments in landed enterprises—which in tropical America meant slave plantations—in Brazil and then Surinam. This brutal trade in human beings was carried on by various African peoples and sociopolitical entities in West and West Central Africa. The participation of these groups also waxed and waned over the 500-year period. Internal developments in Africa played an important part in determining how the trade varied from place to place and from time to time … . One aspect of the present issue, however, is utterly clear: by focusing on the importance of the activities of one internationally distributed religious group of Europeans, the Jews, this book ignores diversities in Africa.

In other words, it is … the Catholic Church’s fault. And the Africans? And the Jewish role in the slave trade in Roman times and for centuries in the Muslim world? The extensive discussions of slavery and lack of disapproval of slavery in Jewish religious writing dating from the ancient world? Hmmm. Meanwhile, nary a word of disapproval of the Jews. It is hard to believe that Professor Jordan had any self-respect left intact after he published this drivel

*          *          *          *

The Secret Relationship is a difficult and disturbing read. Notwithstanding that the focus is upon the Jews and their disproportionate role in the African slave trade, the general dehumanization of Africans is appalling. The business of chattel slavery is a black mark indeed for every participant—Christian and Jew alike. Turning human beings into objects—taking away their natural liberty, subjecting their women to outrages and forced concubinage, and separating families—is horrible. Something is galling about the Jewish liberals who cast aspersions profusely at the European Christians who engaged in chattel slavery. They, like us, bear an ignominy regarding it. Yet they are cagey to the point of dishonesty concerning their substantial part.

The Nation of Islam has ironically done the world a great favor in publishing this remarkable work. Even though it has been “discredited,” its very existence has forced the Jews to account for their role in the slave trade. As a coda to this work, one of the critics mentioned above, Professor Jordan, made a broad criticism of The Secret Relationship that is noteworthy for the irony lost on the critic:

Far from asking any question at all, [The Secret Relationship] begins with an answer—that Jews were especially important in exploiting Africans. It is able to demonstrate, at least ostensibly, that they were. This is the central difficulty: the book sets out to prove a thesis and pays little attention to evidence that might modify or contradict it. If one were to inquire more neutrally into what role Jews played in the Atlantic slave trade, one would find that it was a considerable one during the formative years of the trade, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a very small one when the trade reached much greater volume, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Here, Professor Jordan admits that the Jews played a “considerable” role during the formative years of the slave trade but criticizes the work for beginning the work with an “answer” and then, according to the critic, “ostensibly” supporting that same answer. What? What is the criticism—that the compilers should have consulted other sources to nuance the answer? As a professional historian, one might assume that an appreciation might be given to the Nation of Islam for pointing out how the Jews’ “considerable” role in the slave trade had been obliterated by contemporary historians to the point that no one knows of that role at all.

Where is the apology demanded of the Jews for that “considerable” role?  Instead, all we get is prevaricating and dissembling. The entire episode—both the work and the furious Jewish response—is a microcosm of Jewish malfeasance and Jewish gaslighting.

Saint Peter Claver, Pray for Us.