March 2, 2000
Dr. Filomina Steady
Chair, Africana Studies Department
Wellesley College
106 Central Street
Wellesley, MA 02481
USA
Dear Dr. Steady:
Based on an audiotape of a lecture given yesterday
by Mr. Lenni Brenner sponsored by your department, which in part dealt with the issues
raised in our publication, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, we hereby
respectfully respond to the criticisms he advanced during the lecture.
The improper use of the word
"Secret" in the title:
Addressed later.
Theodore Wiener's role in the
abolitionist movement "is ignored":
It should be noted that none of the Jews who set up
trade in John Brown's neighborhood were "abolitionists" in the activist sense of
the term. Indeed most abolitionists cared little about African humanity but did
want to end a practice that depressed white wages. Undoubtedly, most, like Lincoln, would
have opted for the deportation of the African to anywhere outside of America and Europe.
The three Jews mentioned by Brenner, August Bondi, Theodore Wiener and Jacob Benjamin,
wanted nothing more than to sell their wares to whichever side of the dispute had ready
cash. They were not abolitionist ideologues by any reckoning. They became accidentally
involved in an on-going border war which pitted pro-slavery forces against abolitionists,
neither of whom welcomed Blacks as equals in mind, body or rights.
In his lecture, Mr. Brenner appears to be confusing
the revenge massacre on slave owners in Missouri by Brown's party, with the later and far
more notorious raid on Harper's Ferry in which Brown intended to lead Blacks in a
cataclysmic revolt which would end slavery forever. This event, and not the one Brenner
discussed, is the one that is generally recognized as one of several harbingers of
slavery's demise.
The Jews in question had, by this time, deserted
Brown and did not participate with him on that fateful day in October 1859. Prior to the
raid Bondi had fallen out of favor with Brown, who doubted Bondi's fidelity to the cause.
Bondi himself describes an incident in the fall of that year when Brown camped nearby with
eleven former slaves he was moving to Canada:
He would not let me know of his presence and
instructed all to whom he applied for supplies...to be closedmouthed and never inform
me...of his presence, as he well knew that we, Free State men, did not sanction an
increase in the colored population [in the north], and I suppose he never forgot my
opposition to his negro insurrection plans...
Brenner's apparent ignorance of these events and
sentiments are mystifying. We have posted a more comprehensive response to similar
distortions proffered by the Forward newspaper in association with the American
Jewish Historical Society at http://www.blacksandjews.com/bondi.html.
Christopher
Columbus' Jewishness:
The ethnicity, religion, class or "caste"
of Cristobol Colon has been in dispute for a long time. No less of a figure in Jewish
culture as Simon Wiesenthal ("Nazi hunter" cum Black scholar persecutor) has
written a whole book, Sails of Hope, in which he purports to "prove" that
Columbus was in fact a Jew. The point of the chapter in The Secret Relationship,
however, was to illuminate the much more interesting and indisputable fact that the
financing of the infamous slaving voyages of the Italian/Spanish/Jewish admiral was
provided by Jews.
Columbus received permission from Isabella and
Ferdinand and little else--the cash came from rich "court Jews" in the merchant
"caste," as Brenner, more or less accurately, would say. Columbus' letters of
his progress were addressed to his Jewish sponsors--not to the royals--and the 100 or so
Red slaves taken by Columbus from the "New World" were sold at auction by Jewish
merchants associated with his sponsors. Jewish traders often used gentile captains and
crew on the very risky trans-Atlantic ventures for obvious reasons. Columbus, whether a
Jew or not, is hardly more than a courageous functionary of a Jewish enterprise.
Alleged misuse of a quote by the
"anti-Semite" Fyodor Dostoevsky:
The quote in question, by Fyodor Dostoevsky,
on page 171 of The Secret Relationship, was written in 1877 concerning the
practices of Southern American Jews:
[They] have already leaped en masse upon the
millions of liberated Negroes, and have already taken a grip upon them in their, the Jew's
own way, by means of their sempiternal; "gold pursuit" and by taking advantage
of the inexperience and the vices of the exploited tribe...the Negroes have now been
liberated from the slave owners [but] they will not last because the Jews...will jump at
this new little victim.
This observation could be considered an
understatement. Dostoevsky describes a very real phenomenon by this "caste" of
Jews who dominated the petty economy in the American South. It is a matter of Black/Jewish
folklore that Jews "were the only ones who would do business with Blacks," the
practice being "beneath" every other ethnic group engaged in business in the
South. It is a matter of historical certainty that Blacks were viciously exploited at all
levels of the Southern economy.
That Dostoevsky was an anti-Semite is probably as
correct as the fact that many of the Jewish writers that are quoted in The Secret
Relationship are racists in their historical treatment of Black African slaves as
chattel and Jewish dealings in Black slavery as merely business ventures. Having stated
that, it is also true that we would not have used the quote had it not been used by a
prominent Jewish scholar and Brandeis professor, Stephen J. Whitfield, in an article
published by the American Jewish Historical Society.
In his criticism, Brenner does not seem willing to
address the larger issue raised by the Dostoevsky quote. Stephen Whitfield did
address the issue, however, in at least two of his published works, including his book Voices
of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life & Thought (Archon Books, 1984); and
his article "Commercial Passions: The Southern Jew as Businessman," American
Jewish Historical Society, vol. 71, no. 3 (March 1982). Please allow us to quote from
page 344 of the latter:
Most of the immigrant peddlers came from the
German-speaking parts of Europe, where the word Judentum was virtually synonymous
with Handel (commerce), an association compounded by General Grant's Order Number
11 [see description in The Secret Relationship, pp. 165-68], which briefly in 1862
sought to eliminate financial speculation by banning "the Jews, as a class" from
the Department of the Tennessee. Many of the peddlers who criss-crossed the region settled
down, opening stores in order to supply other peddlers who needed to replenish their
supplies. The establishments that were created and the retailing that resulted often
made their owners the nuclei of the communities formed in the interstices of the
plantations and farms that dominated the Southern economy. [emphasis ours] [1]
When W.E.B. DuBois made his famous statement in The
Souls of Black Folk: "The Jew is the heir to the slave baron," he was
referring to this dominant economic Jewish presence, and by inference, to the depressed
and exploited condition of the post-slavery Blacks.[2]
It also should be noted that Wiesenthal Center
hireling Harold Brackman, who teamed with Wellesley College professor Mary Lefkowitz, to
"attack" The Secret Relationship and Prof. Tony Martin, similarly charges
The Secret Relationship with using an "anti-Semitic" quote which
addresses the very same economic phenomenon referred to by Dostoevsky. But in his 1977
dissertation, "The Ebb and Flow of Conflict," Brackman uses the very same quote
as is presented in The Secret Relationship. On page 273 he quotes Frederick Law
Olmstead's A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856):
...a swarm of Jews, within the last ten years, has
settled in nearly every southern town, many of them men with no character, opening cheap
clothing and trinket shops; ruining or driving out of business, many of the old retailers,
and engaging in an unlawful trade with the simple negroes, which is found very profitable.
The pervasive Jewish involvement in the
underdevelopment of the post-slavery Black economy is only hinted at by these two quotes,
and the subject has not yet been adequately addressed within the context of the
Black/Jewish relationship. [The Secret Relationship presents what scholarship is
available on the subject on pages169-176.]
The Secret Relationship should not
have pointed out Jewish marijuana growers:
Mr. Brenner seemed to get quite a bit of enjoyment
out of our mention that some Jews were growers of hemp or marijuana. He states
emphatically that hemp was used for making rope and he discounts the possibility that it
might have been used as a drug. He surmises that The Secret Relationship has
succumbed to the "puritanical" propensities of the Nation of Islam in pointing
out this fact. As the organizer of the Coalition for Narcotic Law Reform Brenner may be
more sensitive to these issues of drug use and abuse than most. By pointing out that the
growing of marijuana was widespread in early America, Brenner raises another issue that is
of critical import to the Black/Jewish relationship. The use of cocaine by plantation
owners to stimulate and compel unpaid labor among Black slaves has been widely reported.
By the turn of the 19th century the New York Times, then [and now] owned by Jews,
credited "Jew peddlers" with being marketers of the drug. It has been long known
that liquor has been pushed on enslaved Africans to keep them in a state of mental
debilitation during periods of work furlough, most commonly after the autumn harvest. Its
role in the demise of the Red nation is well documented, as is the role of opium in the
far east. The mind-altering and calming properties of marijuana could not have escaped the
notice of white slave holders, who were forever seeking ways to control their
"ferocious" Africans. We could more accurately say that Americans, including
Jews, were growing marijuana to make the rope to lynch the Africans and for the dope to
keep them high.
After the first World War, Jews again took an
active role in the drug trade in the inner cities of America. Perhaps Brenner is not aware
of the work of Robert A. Rockaway, who is a senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish
History at Tel Aviv University. He is a critic of the Nation of Islam and The Secret
Relationship, and yet he makes a remarkable claim about Jewish drug dealers in
America's inner cities:
After the first World War, Jewish gangsters became
major figures in the American underworld and played prominent roles in the creation and
extension of organized crime in the United States. During Prohibition fifty percent of the
leading bootleggers were Jews, and Jewish criminals financed and directed much of the
nation's narcotics traffic. Jews also dominated illicit activities in a number of
America's largest cities, including Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York, and
Philadelphia. [3]
The article, published by the American Jewish
Historical Society, goes on to explain the role of these gangsters in the financing of the
Jewish war against the Palestinians. Rockaway dismisses the Black victims of this assault
by these Jewish gangsters with the perverse quip, "But he was good to his
mother." We would encourage further research into the role of ingestible substances
like cocaine, liquor, tobacco, marijuana in the demise of the Red Indian and the Black
African and the extent of its connection to Jewish peddlers, merchants and gangsters.
The Secret Relationship avoids
discussing the Jewish role in the Arab slave trade in order to avoid admitting Muslim
involvement:
As with nearly all of the dozens of books and
hundreds of articles written on the subject of Blacks and Jews, The Secret Relationship
geographically focuses on the "New World." The primarily Black and American
audience for this subject has a primary interest in the circumstances of their own
enslavement, which we now know places Jews at the center. The Secret Relationship
follows the canonical boundaries for the subject it addresses. Of the thousands of books
written on the general subject of slavery, it might also be noted, nearly all avoid
discussion of the Jewish role, even as Brenner himself showed their role to be variously,
"dominant," "central," and/or "important."
Brenner might have made the same complaint about
the fact that the book does not address the extensive Jewish involvement in the White
Slave Trade either. The Secret Relationship failed to quote Jewish sources such as
Edward J. Bristow, from the first page of his Prostitution and Prejudice (New York:
Schocken Books, 1983), where he wrote that
Between 1880 and 1939 Jews played a conspicuous
role in "white slavery," as the commercial prostitution of that era was
dramatically called. Not only was this Jewish participation conspicuous, it was
historically unprecedented, geographically widespread, and fraught with collective
political dangers.
Given this history, the fact that Israel today is a
major center of White Slavery [New York Times, January 11, 1998] should surprise no
one.
We would heartily encourage a detailed examination
of the Jewish role in the Arab slave trade, as Brenner suggests, especially because those
books published on the subject ignore the Jewish complicity. Any work on that subject, or
on the allegations of "slavery" in Sudan today, would have to include such
salient comments as those by Harold Brackman, again, from "The Ebb and Flow of
Conflict," p. 96:
Jewish merchants also participated in the
trans-Saharan trade with the Negro states of the Central and Western Sudan. Black slaves
formed one of the commodities (though not the most important one) that the medieval Sudan
exported to Moslem North Africa; for this reason, they very likely also formed one of the
items of commerce dealt in by these camel-riding, merchant Jews. Actually, the involvement
of Jews in the traffic with the Sudan seems to have antedated the rise of Islam by many
centuries, having its beginnings in the era when their fellow Semites, the Phoenicians and
the Carthaginians, established the North African trading communities which were the first
to cultivate commercial relations with the Blacks to the south.
In his lecture Mr. Lenni Brenner has stated the
obvious: that Jews were "central" to the slave trade in some areas,
"dominant" in still others, "important" in yet others. The first two
thirds of his Wellesley College lecture was drawn almost entirely from the many Jewish
sources quoted in The Secret Relationship itself, though, predictably, the
historical and cultural nuances so important to Black readers were ignored. As a Jew, it
is refreshing that Brenner irrefutably endorsed the central thesis of The Secret
Relationship, as well as confirmed the fact that the administration of Wellesley
College is well-deserving of its international reputation as an intellectual lynchmob,
having targeted Professor Tony Martin for being Black while stating openly what is now
widely known.
But Brenner's opinion is of use only in its
novelty. He is one of only a few Jews who will publicly admit to at least a part of what
is now known about Jewish slave dealing. For his efforts, however, we would give him a C-,
mostly because, despite his performance, quite a bit of the relationship between Blacks
and Jews still remains SECRET to him.
