“The segregationists and racists make no fine distinction between the Negro and the Jew,” said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Together, Jews and Blacks led the civil rights movement in America, co-founding organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League. In the 1960s, about half the lawyers representing Black interests in the South at the height of the civil rights campaign were Jewish, and the majority of activists who registered Southern Blacks to vote were Jewish.
Yet a 2002 survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League finds that Blacks are three to four times more likely than non-Blacks to be anti-Semitic.
The publication of the Nation of Islam’s book The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews in 1991 was crucial in rewriting the history between Jews and Blacks. In this work, the authors claim to reveal an alleged Jewish role in fostering the Atlantic slave trade. Supposedly, when the Jews emigrated from Europe, they became involved as slave auctioneers, plantations owners, and slave shippers and were important facilitators in the financial workings of the slave trade.
A recent letter written by Louis Farrakhan, national director for the Nation of Islam, demanded that Jews pay reparations for their role in Black slavery, showing an increasing acceptance of this modified history (as well as the adoption of more classical anti-Semitic stereotypes – Farrakhan mentions gentiles under the control of the Jews).
European Jews, especially from Portugal and Holland, were involved in the slave trade, but certainly didn’t have the leading role claimed by Farrakhan’s team of researchers. They simply were not more involved in the industry than any other social group.
“Jews went because they didn’t have other opportunities,” said Ralph A. Austen, professor emeritus of African History at the University of Chicago, to Fighthatred.com. “But then there is a history of Jews traditionally doing professions that weren’t as attractive.”
Professor Austen is also in favor of reparations for America’s Black community —in the form of educational scholarships for those in need-- but he believes it should be borne by the chief instigators and operators of the slave trade, including also Portugal and Holland. And since the slave trade was based on a supply of Africans enslaved and sold by other Africans, he suggests including the government of Nigeria in that list too.
There is already a tradition of Jewish philanthropy on behalf of Black education. A group of Jews helped establish the Tuskegee Institute for higher education, which would eventually be run by Booker T. Washington. Washington’s Jewish friend Julius Rosenwald later funded 5, 300 black elementary schools across the South.
Contrary to Farrakhan’s latest suggestion, Black anti-Semitism cannot be eradicated simply through a financial package—the money will never be enough. Instead, it will require promoting Black-Jewish relations.
There are, however, some within the Black and Jewish communities working to repair their relations. One organization involved in such an endeavor is the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, a group led by hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and the influential Rabbi Marc Schneier and supported by notable figures Jay-Z and Beyonce. The non-profit organization develops interethnic opportunities for professionals working on Capitol Hill and leadership programs for youths around the country.
"There was no segment of American society that provided as much and as consistent support to Dr. King and the African-American community as did the Jewish [people]," Schneier said on the Foundation’s website. "The history is there.”
The history is what binds these two minorities together, and that common history should be celebrated, not distorted.
“If one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy,” wrote James Baldwin in a 1967 New York Times piece. If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quite breathtaking claim for oneself... I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated.”
Watch the PBS Documentary “From Swastika to Jim Crow” here.
Check out the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding's public service announcements here.
Read some of Professor Ralph Austen's work here.
