Egyptians sue Jewish people for stealing gold from them during Exodus

Egyptian Jurists to Sue 'The Jews' for Compensation for 'Trillions' of Tons of Gold Allegedly Stolen During Exodus from Egypt

The August 9, 2003 edition of the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi featured an interview with Dr. Nabil Hilmi, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Al-Zaqaziq who, together with a group of Egyptian expatriates in Switzerland, is preparing an enormous lawsuit against "all the Jews of the world." The following are excerpts from the interview: [1]

Dr. Hilmi: "? Since the Jews make various demands of the Arabs and the world, and claim rights that they base on historical and religious sources, a group of Egyptians in Switzerland has opened the case of the so-called 'great exodus of the Jews from Pharaonic Egypt.' At that time, they stole from the Pharaonic Egyptians gold, jewelry, cooking utensils, silver ornaments, clothing, and more, leaving Egypt in the middle of the night with all this wealth, which today is priceless."

Question: "What will the group of Egyptians in Switzerland do about this issue?"

Hilmi: "Dr. Gamil Yaken, vice president of the Egyptian community in Switzerland, came to Egypt to collect information. We set up a legal team to prepare the necessary legal confrontation aimed at restoring what the Jews stole a long time ago, to which the statute of limitations cannot possibly apply. Furthermore, [the theft] is based on their holy book, the same source on which they relied when they invaded other peoples?

"The Egyptian Pharaoh was surprised one day to discover thousands of Egyptian women crying under the palace balcony, asking for help and complaining that the Jews stole their clothing and jewels, in the greatest collective fraud history has ever known.

"The theft was not limited to gold alone. The thieves stole everything imaginable. They emptied the Egyptian homes of cooking utensils. One of the women approached Pharaoh, her eyes downcast, and said that her Jewish neighbor who lived in the house on the right of her house had come to her and asked to borrow her gold items, claiming she had been invited to a wedding? The Jewish neighbor took [the items] and promised to return them the next day. A few minutes later, the neighbor to the left knocked on the door and asked to borrow the cooking utensils, because she was having guests for dinner. Using this same deceitful system, they took possession of all the cooking utensils?"

Question: "It is clear why they stole the gold, but why the cooking utensils?"

Hilmi: "Taking posession of the gold was understandable. This is clear theft of a host country's resources and treasure, something that fits the morals and character of the Jews. Yet what was not clear to the Egyptian women were the reasons for stealing the cooking utensils, when other things may have been of greater value. However, one of the Egyptian priets said that this had been the Jews' twisted way throughout history; they seek to cause a minor problem connected with the needs of everyday life so as to occupy people with these matters and prevent them from pursuing them to get back the stolen gold...

"A police investigation revealed that Moses and Aaron, peace be upon them, understood that it was impossible to live in Egypt, despite its pleasures and even though the Egyptians included them in every activity, due to the Jews' perverse nature, to which the Egyptians had reconciled themselves, though with obvious unwillingness. Therefore, an order was issued by the Jewish rabbis to flee the country, and that the exodus should be secret and under cover of darkness and with the largest possible amount of loot. The code word was 'At midnight.' In addition, the Jewish women were told to steal the gold and cooking utensils of the Egyptian women, and that is what happened."

Question: "Did they leave individually or as a group?"

Hilmi: "They left in a convoy of 600,000, that is, about 120,000 families. There were a few wagons in the convoy, and a long line of donkeys loaded with the stolen goods? They crossed the desert in the heart of Sinai, in an attempt to confuse Pharaoh's army, which was on their trail? Later they rested and began to count the stolen gold, and discovered that it reached 300,000 kg of gold."

Question: "But the Jews can cast doubt on this story with their usual methods. What is the religious evidence you said is in the Torah?"

Hilmi:"Naturally, the Jews cast doubt on this story because that is in their interest. But the answer would be that the story is based on what is written in the Torah. It can be found in Exodus, [Chapter] 35, verses 12 through 36?"

Question: "So what arguments can be made in support of getting back our stolen gold?"

Hilmi: "There are two types of claims, one religious and the other legal. From a religious standpoint, all monotheistic religions have called not to steal? It is also in the Ten Commandments, which the Jews were ordered [to observe]. Therefore, they have a basic religious obligation to return what was stolen, if it exists.

"From a legal standpoint, fleeing with the Egyptians' goods could be for the purpose of borrowing or for the purpose of stealing. If it is for the purpose of borrowing, legally it has a temporary dimension, not a permanent dimension, and therefore they must return [the gold], with interest, to its owners.

"On the other hand, if the Jews took the goods from the Egyptians not for the purpose of borrowing it but to keep them for themselves, by legal norms this is theft, and therefore they must return the stolen goods to their owners, in addition to the interest for its use over the entire period of the theft."

Question: "What do you think is the value of the gold, silver, and clothing that was stolen, and how do you calculate their value today?"

Hilmi: "If we assume that the weight of what was stolen was one ton, [its worth] doubled every 20 years, even if the annual interest is only 5%. In one ton of gold is 700 kg of pure gold ? and we must remember that what was stolen was jewelry, that is, alloyed with copper. Hence, after 1,000 years, it would be worth 1,125,898,240 million tons, which equals 1,125,898 billion tons for 1,000 years. In other words, 1,125 trillion tons of gold, that is, a million multiplied by a million tons of gold. This is for one stolen ton. The stolen gold is estimated at 300 tons, and it was not stolen for 1,000 years, but for 5,758 years, by the Jewish reckoning. Therefore, the debt is very large?

"The value must be calculated precisely in accordance with the information collected, and afterward a lawsuit must be filed against all the Jews of the world, and against the Jews of Israel in particular, so they will repay the Egyptians the debt that appears in the Torah."

Question: "Is a compromise solution possible?"

Hilmi: "There may be a compromise solution. The debt can be rescheduled over 1,000 years, with the addition of the cumulative interest during that period."

Actually, lets see, how long were Jews slaves in Egypt? I think we are due reparations! I think Black people owe us a considerable amount of money for the slavery we experienced in Egypt.

Don't mean to bring up race, but perhaps this was White Flight some 10 thousand years ago. ;-)

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Actually, lets see, how long were Jews slaves in Egypt? I think we are due reparations! I think Black people owe us a considerable amount of money for the slavery we experienced in Egypt.

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If the Egyptians are crazy enough to bring up that theft of gold during the Exodus, then I totally agree that slave reperations are the perfect counter argument! Although, I don't know what "blacks" in general have to do with Egypt's enslavement of Hebrews!!

Suing Jews because they took Egyptian goods before they left Africa. That is funny!

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Originally posted by osirion:

Actually, lets see, how long were Jews slaves in Egypt? I think we are due reparations! I think Black people owe us a considerable amount of money for the slavery we experienced in Egypt.

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Did African American who helped build one of the richest country in the world without getting paid for over 200 years get reparation? no soo why should the Jews get reparation?

But the jews did get back the money that was stolen from them by the Nazis. Know an the Jews do the same thing and give back the gold they stole from the Egyptians even if it happens to be 1000's years too late.

I have a sense of humor.

Suing Jews because they took Egyptian goods before they left Africa. That is funny!

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Originally posted by osirion:

You are just too serious. Lets try not to be too political. Palestinians and Jews are brothers. We are closely related and as such we squabble over the leftovers that the Europeans left us. Crabs in a bucket.

As for Egyptian Gold, I wonder if the Jews were the Hyksos and we were enslaved but rebelled during a plague and escaped. We probably would have taken considerable amount of plunder. We certainly took weaponry. You know, King Solomon would have repaid such debt long ago. He married quite a few Egyptian princesses and had good relations with the Pharoah.

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What's funny is that most of the Palestinians who call themselves 'Arabs' aren't really Arabs but Jews who never left Palestine and instead converted to Islam.

Perhaps the only "original" Jews who never converted to Islam are the Samaritans and a few others who live in the desert. The vast majority of Jews in Israel are heavily European. I've have seen many Ashkenazi that look no different from the ideal "Aryan" whom Hitler described. On the other hand, what bothers me is that I heard the pure Middle-Eastern Jews are being discriminated against by their European counterparts!

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Originally posted by Serpent Wizdom:
We North Americans of African descent should sue the damned Jews for funding the African slave holocaust, and making up 75% of the slave holders in North America. Not to mention duhumanizing and bastardizing a whole group of African people.

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Actually, do you have any references regarding Jewish involvement in the slave trade? The slave trade was primarily of Portugese and English piracy from books I have read. If Jews financed any part of it, trust me, considering the Inquisitions, such financing was compulsory. That was a period of great persecution against Jews as well as against Blacks.

Jews in America married Blacks even the ones they had as slaves. It is ridiculous to think that Jews makeup 75% of the slave holders in America. Where are your references? Jews were still living in Ghettos, poor and discriminated against. How they hell did we enslave Blacks.

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Originally posted by neo*geo:
The Egyptians must first prove that the exodus happened and Jews were enslaved in Egypt. Good luck finding witnesses...

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"Benjamin was berated by Northern generals as well. When Benjamin Butler, who commanded the forces that conquered New Orleans, issued a statement about the city, he said "the most effective supporters of the Confederacy have been . . . mostly Jews . . . who all deserve at the hands of the government what is due the Jew Benjamin."
The anger against Benjamin came to a head after the fall of Roanoke Island in early February 1862. Benjamin had been under intense pressure from Gen. Henry A. Wise at Roanoke and Governor Henry T. Clark of North Carolina to send many more men and arms to the garrison there. He had resisted for reasons that would not be known until twenty-five years after the war, and he accepted the subsequent public condemnation in silence to protect his country. Roanoke was sacrificed because to have done otherwise would have revealed to the enemy just how desperate the South was.
At the dedication of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond in 1890, Col. Charles Marshall, an aide-de-camp on General Lees staff, read part of a letter from Benjamin, which revealed that President Davis had agreed to allow Benjamin to be publicly censured:

I consulted the President whether it was best for the country that I should submit to unmerited censure or reveal to a congressional Committee our poverty and my utter inability to supply the requisitions of General Wise, and thus run the risk that the fact should become known to some of the spies of the enemy, of whose activity we were well assured. It was thought best for the public service that I should suffer the blame in silence and a report of censure on me was accordingly made by the Committee of Congress.

When Benjamin resigned, Davis, as a reward for loyalty, promptly named him secretary of state.
On the subject of slavery, both Davis and Benjamin were "enlightened" Southerners whose attitudes were evolving. Most Jewish historians have understandably reacted with revulsion to the fact that Benjamin owned 140 slaves on a sugar plantation, and they have been unable to consider the question of his views on slavery with anything but embarrassed dismay. To comprehend Benjamin on this score, one must put him into context as a political figure against a backdrop of planter dogmatism and abolitionist fervor.
Such an exploration leads directly to an extraordinary episode of the war in which Benjamin played a central role: the effort to persuade Davis to issue a Confederate emancipation proclamation, which would promise slaves freedom in exchange for military service. That move, which began to take shape early in the war in the minds of military and political leaders but did not surface until 1864, is usually dismissed as a desperate gamble made at the end of the war to lure Britain into the fight. But as secretary of state, Benjamin's obsession all along had been to draw England into the war. Slavery, however, was a stumbling block because England had abolished slavery in 1833."
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Originally posted by theborg:
On the original subject about Egyptians wanting to sue the Jews...", I say, why not? Then the Nubians can sue the Egyptians for stealing their gold, religion, engineering techniques, and gods. And maybe they should bill the Egyptians for all the free Nile water the Nubians have permitted to flow north for, oh, let's say, 5-thousand years. I'm sure there's a good jewish lawyer somewhere willing to represent the Nubian cause.

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Excellent point, borg! During New Kingdom times, the Egyptians recieved daily tribute mostly in gold from Nubia. about 80% of Egypt's gold came from Nubian gold mines, so Sudan might as well sue Egypt!

Oh and speaking of reparations for blacks, there are many Asian Americans that should get reparations also, especially those in California, Arizona, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, since these people were the descendants of slaves as well!

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In 1978, I attended a faculty luncheon at the University of Chicago Hillel House, where the distinguished African-American historian, John Hope Franklin, was giving a talk on the Jewish community in the nineteenth-century Southern United States. After the formal presentation, a member of the audience asked a question about Southern Jewish participation in the debate on slavery. As I remember it, Franklin replied that he did not know too much about the subject. I recall very clearly one of the Hillel regulars remarking that since many of the early Southern Jews were Sephardim who had fled Spanish and Portuguese persecution, they must have been sympathetic to the plight of Black slaves.
I remember this statement because it was allowed to pass without comment, although John Hope Franklin and I (we discussed it afterwards) were both aware that Sephardi Jews in the New World had been heavily involved in the African slave trade. Why did two professional historians in a university setting hesitate to provide our colleagues with such an important piece of information? I cannot answer for Franklin but I, as a Jew sitting in a Jewish institution that was entertaining an African-American guest, felt that pointing out the role of Jews in the history of Black slavery would, in this context, have constituted something of a betrayal. I did not want to undermine the sense of solidarity between the two communities which had been reinforced by Franklin's very presence, as well as through his references to our common confrontation with white Gentile Southern bigots.

Franklin and I, in effect, were condoning a benign historical myth: that the shared liberal agenda of twentieth-century Blacks and Jews has a pedigree going back through the entire remembered past. Avodim hayinu! We, the Jews, had also experienced history on the side of the enslaved and always cried out in anguish against the oppression of the enslavers.

For better or worse, it is no longer possible to maintain that this myth has any but the most abstract bearing on the facts of our pre-emancipation relationship with Africans and their New World descendants. Jewish students of Jewish history have known it was untrue and, over several decades, have produced a significant body of scholarship detailing the involvement of our ancestors in the Atlantic slave trade and Pan-American slavery Until recently, this work remained buried in scholarly journals, read only by other specialists. It had never been synthesized in a publication for a non-scholarly audience. A book of this sort has now appeared, however, written not by Jews but by an anonymous group of African Americans associated with the Reverend Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

Since its publication in 1991, The Secret Relationship between Blacks an Jews has become the subject of considerable furor, although little serious analysis. It was cited by Professor Leonard Jeffries in his infamous speech in July 1991 at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival that led to his removal from the chairmanship of the Black Studies Department at the City University of New York. (He was subsequently reinstated as chairman and awarded damages in a suit he brought against the university.) The book was also the topic of an even more publicized and virulently anti-Semitic speech by Farrakhan's representative, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, at Kean College in New jersey in November 1993.

Early in 1993, a furor arose at Wellesley College when Tony Martin, a Black Studies professor, assigned the book in one of his African-American history courses, causing vociferous protest from Jewish groups. During a long, stormy discussion in Wellesley's Academic Council about the ethics of teaching such a text, Selwyn Cudjoe, the chair of the college's Africana Studies Department, denounced The Secret Relationship as anti-Semitic and deplored Martin's uncritical presentation of the text. Martin has subsequently chronicled and defended his and Jeffries's position in two broadside publications, Blacks and Jews at Wellesley News (a play on the name of the campus newspaper) and Blacks and Jews News (published by the Nation of Islam). Martin has now published a book of his own, The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront, which elicited a public denunciation by Wellesley's president. Martin has also announced the imminent publication of Volumes II and III of The Secret Relationship. Among Martin's arguments in support of The Secret Relationship, there is at least one which Jewish intellectuals need to take seriously: that few of the Jewish leaders who have attacked the book have actually read it. Martin is apparently unaware (as, it appears, are many Jewish critics) of a carefully researched, if somewhat polemical, report on the book by Harold Brackman published in 1992 under the auspices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, titled Farrakhan's Reign of Historical Error: the Truth Behind the Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews. Indeed, the fact that the present article is appearing more than two years after the publication of The Secret Relationship in a journal very much concerned with Black-Jewish relations itself requires some explanation.

One can understand the hesitation of Jews to buy The Secret Relationship and thus put $19.95 (plus $3 for shipping and handling) into the coffers of an organization notorious for its anti-Semitic pronouncements (I bought my copy in a Black bookstore in Chicago which also sells such classic antiSemitic tracts as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford's The International Jew). The Secret RelationshipÕs association with the rantings of Leonard Jeffries, and its denunciation in a New York Times open piece on Black anti-Semitism by the very prominent and widely respected African-American scholar Henrv Louis Gates, Jr., have made it easier for Jewish critics to dispense with examining the book themselves.

But none of these facts really excuses Jews from the obligation of opening up this notorious tome and seeing what is actually inside it. We might even be somewhat comforted if we never go past the prefatory "Editor's Note":

This study is structured as a presentation of historical evidence regarding the relationship of one people with another. The facts, as established by highly respected scholars of the Jewish community [emphasis added] are here established and linked by as sparse a narrative as is journalistically permitted for review by those interested in the subject... Those who would use this material as a basis for the violation of the human rights of another are abusing the knowledge herein. The wise will benefit to see this as an opportunity to develop a more equitable relationship between the families of man.

The text which follows remains faithful to at least one of the goals set out here. It relies for its information almost entirely upon Jewish scholarship most, but not all, of it quite respectable and extremely little falling into the category which a "Note on Sources" proscribes as "anti-Semitic and/or anti-Jewish." (Brackman, in his study of The Secret Relationship, notes a number of references to three authors hostile to Jews-Frederick Law Olmsted, Werner Sombart, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky-but these play a very minor role in a book with 1,275 footnotes.) The easy accessibility of such material of course contradicts the assertion of the book's title, that Jewish participation in the slave trade was hitherto a secret. Nonetheless the contents of this book will come as a surprise to many-perhaps most readers for reasons already discussed.

The anti-Semitic character of The Secret Relationship emerges not from its substantive content-which seems fairly accurate-or even the aura of conspiracy conveyed by its title. It comes out rather in the tone of the narrative, which binds together the sources and fosters, without any evidence, a stereotype of Jews as a uniquely greedy and untrustworthy population. Brackman treats the content of the book as a series of "Big Lies" but, as the details of his well-documented critique indicate, distortions are produced almost entirely by selective citation rather than explicit falsehood. Sometimes the attack is simply appended to the story of the slave trade by the authors/editors, as in the opening paragraph, which links "the blanket expulsion of Jews from so many places around the world" to charges of "economic exploitation of Gentile communities."

More frequently, there are innuendoes imbedded in the accounts of Jewish involvement in the slave trade which "incited the moral indignation of Europe's Gentile population." Jews in the slave-trading Dutch West India Company "remained internationalists without the patriotic fervor of their Gentile countrymen." In the British West Indies, Jews who owned no plantations and relatively few slaves and were excluded from public office are presented (through local government pleas to place a special tax upon them) as enjoying "civic advantages Here as elsewhere the text revels in citations of anti-Jewish charges from historical documents but then, when discussing the failure of Jews to play a significant role in the United States abolitionist movement (a truth which very directly undermines the "benign myth"), insists that fear of persecution could have nothing to do with this reticence since Jews were, even before 1860, better off in America than they had ever been in any Diaspora situation.

Along with African enslavement, Jews are given special blame here (again with little extidence or logic) for many other crimes of European expansion, beginning with the voyages of Columbus (the authors manage to cover their insinuations with some acknowledgment of scholarly doubts by heading a sub-chapter "Columbus the Slave-dealing Jew?"), the selling of poisoned blankets to North American Indians by a British general, loyalist opposition to the American Revolution, the opium trade to China, the operations of the New Orleans pirate Jean Lafitte, and even the conversion of slaves in colonial Georgia to Christianity "to pacify and subdue the Black African."

Unpleasant as this book is to read (although occasionally long quotes from the Jewish sources are used to offset the authors' own voices) it does raise a serious historical question: How significant were the Jews in the slave trade? The authors' primary method, for which they have been attacked by Gates and Brackman, is the crude use of statistics. Thus Jews are said to have "used kidnapped Black Africans disproportionately more than any other ethnic or religious group in New World history." This may possibly be true, since there were not very many Jews in the Americas between 1492 and the 1860s, and quite a few had been involved in the slave trade. The authors do not undertake any systematic count or comparison with other groups (e.g., Portuguese, Scots, Huguenots), however, and in any case such a statistic does not have much meaning. The vast majority of New World slaves were captured, bought, traded, and forced into labor by non-Jews. Nor is there much analytic (as opposed to polemical) sense in the book's various counts of slaves owned by Jews and the alphabetical list, occupying the last 100 pages, of various Jews or Jewish families known to have been associated with slavery.

None of this data is placed in any context which ,,would indicate its statistical, not to say broader historical, significance. As the authors correctly note, the role in the slave trade of Gentile Europeans, Muslims, and even African "tribal traitors" has been studied more extensively than that of the Jews. But the team responsible for The Secret Relationship does not seem to have examined much of this vast literature and misreads some of that which they do use (on pp. 177-78, they inaccurately cite historian Philip Curtin's statistics on the trade and ignore entirely the debate on this issue among various American, European, and African scholars).

In fact, because of their poor grasp of the historical economy of slavery, the authors underestimate the structural, as opposed to statistical, importance of the Jews in the early stages of the New World slave trade. Rather than toying with the rumors of Columbus's Òsecret" identity, the book might better have focused on the coincidence of the Jewish expulsion from Spain with the establishment of triangular links between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. As a result of this situation, the Sephardim found themselves dispersed over the critical nodes of the new system, especially Amsterdam and Brazil. It was not the material wealth of the Jews that made them so crucial to this emerging South Atlantic economy but rather (as with other ethnic-commercial diasporas such as the Huguenots, the Quakers, the overseas Chinese, Muslims in Africa) their ability to transfer assets and information among themselves across the entire economic network.

As even this book notes, Jews owned a small minority of shares in the Dutch West India Company (an unsuccessful commercial enterprise in any case). Their value to the Dutch lay instead in the fact that many of them, seeking to escape the Iberian Inquisition, had migrated to Brazil where they helped found the first major New World sugar plantations. When the Dutch first conquered northern Brazil from Portugal and were in turn driven out by a Portuguese reconquest, most local Jews left with them to disseminate the sugar production system to the Dutch and later British Islands. The only places where Jews really came close to dominating a New World plantation system were the Dutch colonies of Curacao and Surinam (the language of the escaped slave communities in the Surinam interior still refers to prohibited foods as "mi trefu").

But the Dutch territories were small, and their importance was shortlived. By the time the slave trade and European sugar-growing reached its peak in the 1700s, Jewish participation was dwarfed by the enterprise of British and French planters who did not allow Jews among their number. During the nineteenth century, Jews owned some cotton plantations in the southern United States but not in any meaningful numbers. (The Secret Relationship, to its credit, is not the basis for Farrakhan's recent statement that three-quarters of all southern slaves belonged to Jews.) Jews of Portuguese Brazilian origin did play a significant (but by no means dominant) role in the eighteenth-century slave trade of Rhode Island, but this sector accounted for only a very tiny portion of the total human exports from Africa.

For all its shortcomings, The Secret Relationship does force us to confront the history which John Hope Franklin and I avoided discussing publicly in 1978. The fact that our forefathers were generally, and at times quite significantly, on the side of the slavers in the cruel world of the Atlantic economy may also help call into question the whole image of Diaspora Jews as "victims" in medieval-to-modern world history. Indeed, some of the very terms associated with this status, such as "Diaspore," "ghetto," and, in several chapter headings of The Secret Relationship, "Holocaust," have been appropriated by African Americans to define a trajectory of suffering which ultimately has placed them in a far more disadvantaged position than that of Jews.

One response to such a new understanding of our history is to take the path of neoconservatism, identifying with the white Gentile establishment and perceiving all proponents of "Third Worldism" (including militant African Americans) as our enemies. The rhetoric of The Secret Relationship along with the use made of it by Professors Jeffries and Martin certainly encourages such a move on the part of Jews. The book-to say nothing of Khalid Abdul Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan's gratuitous fantasies about Jewish crimes against Blacks-may indeed have been intended, despite its opening disclaimers, to push African Americans into the same kind of polarization. Looking at the examples of the former Yugoslavia and extremist groups on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict, one might easily conclude that the memorialization of past sufferings must inevitably stoke the fires of contemporary hate. Even a historian is thus tempted to prefer forgetfulness or the comfort of benign myths.

We Jews, however, even liberal ones, who justifiably insist that the history of the Nazi Holocaust not be denied, can hardly urge African Americans to suppress the record of the slave trade and the involvement of our own ancestors in it. It also does not help to accompany all discussions of Jewish slave trading with indictments of Christians and Arab Muslims as the true villains of the African slave trade. (Brackman, for example, provides a somewhat lurid catalogue of 'Arab slave raids" using, among other sources, my own research. In fact, the Muslim or Oriental slave trade out of Africa involved mainly Berber, Swahili, and other Black African raiders and merchants rather than Arabs.) Thus while we should not ignore the anti-Semitism of The Secret Relationship (limited at least to accusations of avarice rather than blood libels or plots to rule the world), we must recognize the legitimacy of the stated aim of examining fully and directly even the most uncomfortable elements in our common past, There are certainly better ways than those of this book, from both a scholarly and moral perspective, to carry out such an examination. But carried out it must be', not to apportion or remove guilt but rather to learn who we are through what we were and to incorporate this knowledge into the struggle to become something better.

Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael is the Nathan and Sophia Gumenick Professor of Judaic Studies, Professor of Religion, and Chair, Department of Religion, The College of William and Mary, and a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University. He has been the editor of the quarterly journal, American Jewish History, for 19 years, and a visiting professor at Brown University, the University of Pittsburgh, HUC-JIR, UCLA, and Case Western Reserve University. He came to The College of William and Mary in 1989 after 20 years at Ohio State University. He is the author of many books on Jews and Judaism in America, and his most recent publication (with his wife Linda Schermer Raphael) is When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories (Rutgers University Press, 1999). He is now writing Judaism in America for the Contemporary American Series of Columbia University Press. Visit him at the website of his synagoge, Bet Aviv, in Columbia, Maryland.

The following passages are from Dr. Raphael's book Jews and Judaism in the United States a Documentary History (New York: Behrman House, Inc., Pub, 1983), pp. 14, 23-25.

"Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.

"This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's and early 1770's dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent."

Dr. Raphael discusses the central role of the Jews in the New World commerce and the African slave trade (pp. 23-25):

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

JEWISH INTERISLAND TRADE: CURACAO, 1656

During the sixteenth century, exiled from their Spanish homeland and hard-pressed to escape the clutches of the Inquisition, Spanish and Portuguese Jews fled to the Netherlands; the Dutch enthusiastically welcomed these talented, skilled husinessmen. While thriving in Amsterdam-where they became the hub of a unique urban Jewish universe and attained status that anticipated Jewish emancipation in the West by over a century-they began in the 1500's and 1600's to establish themselves in the Dutch and English colonies in the New World. These included Curacao, Surinam, Recife, and New Amsterdam (Dutch) as well as Barbados, Jamaica, Newport, and Savannah (English). In these European outposts the Jews, with their years of mercantile experience and networks of friends and family providing market reports of great use, played a significant role in the merchant capitalism, commercial revolution, and territorial expansion that developed the New World and established the colonial economies. The Jewish-Caribbean nexus provided Jews with the opportunity to claim a disproportionate influence in seventeenth and eighteenth century New World commerce, and enabled West Indian Jewry-far outnumbering its coreligionists further north-to enjoy a centrality which North American Jewry would not achieve for a long time to come.

Groups of Jews began to arrive in Surinam in the middle of the seven-teenth century, after the Portuguese regained control of northern Brazil. By 1694, twenty-seven years after the British had surrendered Surinam to the Dutch, there were about 100 Jewish families and fifty single Jews there, or about 570 persons. They possessed more than forty estates and 9,000 slaves, contributed 25,905 pounds of sugar as a gift for the building of a hospital, and carried on an active trade with Newport and other colonial ports. By 1730, Jews owned 115 plantations and were a large part of a sugar export business which sent out 21,680,000 pounds of sugar to European and New World markets in 1730 alone.

Slave trading was a major feature of Jewish economic life in Surinam which as a major stopping-off point in the triangular trade. Both North American and Caribbean Jews played a key role in this commerce: records of a slave sale in 1707 reveal that the ten largest Jewish purchasers (10,400 guilders) spent more than 25 percent of the total funds (38,605 guilders) exchanged.

Jewish economic life in the Dutch West Indies, as in the North American colonies, consisted primarily of mercantile communities, with large inequities in the distribution of wealth. Most Jews were shopkeepers, middlemen, or petty merchants who received encouragement and support from Dutch authorities. In Curacao, for example, Jewish communal life began after the Portuguese victory in 1654. In 1656 the community founded a congregation, and in the early 1670's brought its first rabbi to the island. Curacao, with its large natural harbor, was the steppng-stone to the other Caribbean islands and thus ideally suited geographically for commerce. The Jews were the recipients of favorable charters containing generous economic privileges granted by the Dutch West Indies Company in Amsterdam. The economic life of the Jewish community of Curacao revolved around ownership of sugar plantations and marketing of sugar, the importing of manufactured goods, and a heavy involvement in the slave trade, within a decade of their arrival, Jews owned 80 percent of the Curacao plantations. The strength of the Jewish trade lay in connections in Western Europe as well as ownership of the ships used in commerce. While Jews carried on an active trade with French and English colonies in the Caribbean, their principal market was the Spanish Main (today Venezuela and Colombia).

Extant tax lists give us a glimpse of their dominance. Of the eighteen wealthiest Jews in the 1702 and 1707 tax lists, nine either owned a ship or had at least a share in a vessel. By 1721 a letter to the Amsterdam Jewish community claimed that "nearly all the navigation...was in the hands of the Jews."' Yet another indication of the economic success of Curacao's Jews is the fact that in 1707 the island's 377 residents were assessed by the Governor and his Council a total of 4,002 pesos; 104 Jews, or 27.6 percent of the taxpayers, contributed 1,380 pesos, or 34.5 percent of the entire amount assessed.

In the British West Indies, two 1680 tax lists survive, both from Barbados; they, too, provide useful information about Jewish economic life. In Bridgetown itself, out of a total of 404 households, 54 households or 300 persons were Jewish, 240 of them living in "ye Towne of S. Michael ye Bridge Town." Contrary to most impressions, "many, indeed, most of them, were very poor." There were only a few planters, and most Jews were not naturalized or endenizened (and thus could not import goods or pursue debtors in court). But for merchants holding letters of endenization, opportunities were not lacking. Barbados sugar-and its by-products rum and molasses-were in great demand, and in addition to playing a role in its export, Jewish merchants were active in the import trade. Forty-five Jewish households were taxed in Barbados in 1680, and more than half of them contributed only 11.7 percent of the total sum raised. While the richest five gave almost half the Jewish total, they were but 11.1 percent of the taxable population. The tax list of 1679-80 shows a similar picture; of fifty-one householders, nineteen (37.2 percent) gave less than one-tenth of the total, while the four richest merchants gave almost one-third of the total.

An interesting record of interisland trade involving a Jewish merchant and the islands of Barbados and Curacao comes from correspondence of 1656. It reminds us that sometimes the commercial trips were not well planned and that Jewish captains-who frequently acted as commercial agents as well-would decide where to sell their cargo, at what price, and what goods to bring back on the return trip.

End of excerpt.

When assessing the relationship between Blacks and Jews, one need not resort to vicious name-calling or opprobrious epithets. One need only to present the facts. World Jewry apologizes to no one when they cite historical precedent as a guide for their future relationships with any people. The historical record is clearer than the muddled pronouncements of a reactionary and controlled media. None of the critics of The Secret Relationship have been able to re-write the history showing a history of "friendship" between Blacks and Jews. They are forced to succumb to the tragic reality that nearly every one of their colonial fathers hated Black people and participated in the robbing of their humanity. Those who have felt that there was some "special" relationship which carried with it a "special" right to criticize and control Black leadership can no longer make such a claim.
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Black Slavery
Marc Lee Raphael

"Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.

"This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's and early 1770's dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent."

SOURCE: Jews and Judaism in the United States a Documentary History (New York: Behrman House, Inc., Pub, 1983), p. 14.

Dr. Lee Raphael is the editor of American Jewish History, the journal of the American Jewish Historical Society at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

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Ira Rosenwaike

"In Charleston, Richmond and Savannah the large majority (over three-fourths) of the Jewish households contained one or more slaves; in Baltimore, only one out of three households were slaveholding; in New York, one out of eighteen....Among the slaveholding households the median number of slaves owned ranged from five in Savannah to one in New York."

SOURCE: "The Jewish Population in 1820," in Abraham J. Karp, ed., The Jewish Experience in America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (Waltham, Massachusetts, 1969, 3 volumes), volume 2, pp. 2, 17, 19.

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Cecil Roth
"The Jews of the Joden Savanne [Surinam] were also foremost in the suppression of the successive negro revolts, from 1690 to 1722: these as a matter of fact were largely directed against them, as being the greatest slave-holders of the region." History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932), p. 292.

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Jacob Rader Marcus
"All through the eighteenth century, into the early nineteenth, Jews in the North were to own black servants; in the South, the few plantations owned by Jews were tilled with slave labor. In 1820, over 75 percent of all Jewish families in Charleston, Richmond, and Savannah owned slaves, employed as domestic servants; almost 40 percent of all Jewish householders in the United States owned one slave or more. There were no protests against slavery as such by Jews in the South, where they were always outnumbered at least 100 to 1....But very few Jews anywhere in the United States protested against chattel slavery on moral grounds."

United States Jewry, 1776-1985 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), p. 586.

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The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Report of 1853
"The Jews of the United States have never taken any steps whatever with regard to the slavery question. As citizens, they deem it their policy to have every one choose which ever side he may deem best to promote his own interests and the welfare of his country. They have no organization of an ecclesiastical body to represent their general views; no General Assembly, or its equivalent. The American Jews have two newspapers, but they do not interfere in any discussion which is not material to their religion. It cannot be said that the Jews have formed any denominational opinion on the subject of American slavery....The objects of so much mean prejudice and unrighteous oppression as the Jews have been for ages, surely they, it would seem, more than any other denomination, ought to be the enemies of caste, and friends of universal freedom."

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Rabbi Bertram W. Korn
"It would seem to be realistic to conclude that any Jew who could afford to own slaves and had need for their services would do so....Jews participated in every aspect and process of the exploitation of the defenseless blacks."

SOURCE: "Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789-1865," in Abraham J. Karp, The Jewish Experience in America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (Waltham, Massachusetts, 1969), pp. 184, 189. [Dr. Korn is a rabbi, historian; A.B., Cincinnati, 1939; Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ordination M.H.L. 1949; Sr. rabbi, Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1949-; Chaplain, USNR, 1944-; Visiting professor, American Jewish History, Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, 1962-; Honorary Overseer Gratz College of Pennsylvania; visiting professor, American Jewish History, Dropsie University of Pennsylvania; 1970-; Recipient Merit Award, American Association for State & Local History, 1969.]

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Louis Epstein, author of Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism:
"The female slave was a sex tool beneath the level of moral considerations. She was an economic good, useful, in addition to her menial labor, for breeding more slaves. To attain that purpose, the master mated her promiscuously according to his breeding plans. The master himself and his sons and other members of his household took turns with her for the increase of the family wealth, as well as for satisfaction of their extra-marital sex desires. Guests and neighbors too were invited to that luxury."

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Seymour B. Liebman
"They came with ships carrying African blacks to be sold as slaves. The traffic in slaves was a royal monopoly, and the Jews were often appointed as agents for the Crown in their sale....[They] were the largest ship chandlers in the entire Caribbean region, where the shipping business was mainly a Jewish enterprise....The ships were not only owned by Jews, but were manned by Jewish crews and sailed under the command of Jewish captains."

SOURCE: New World Jewry 1493-1825: Requiem for the Forgotten (KTAV, New York, 1982), pp. 170, 183. [Liebman is an attorney; LL.B., St. Lawrence University, 1929; M.A. (Latin American history), Mexico City College, 1963; Florida chapter American Jewish Historical Society, 1956-58; Friends of Hebrew University, 1958-59; American Historical Society Contributor to scholarly journals on Jewish history.

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Herbert I. Bloom
"The Christian inhabitants [of Brazil] were envious because the Jews owned some of the best plantations in the river valley of Pernambuco and were among the leading slave-holders and slave traders in the colony.(1)

Slave trade [sic] was one of the most important Jewish activities here [in Surinam] as elsewhere in the colonies."2

SOURCE: 1. , "A Study of Brazilian Jewish History 1623-1654, Based Chiefly Upon the Findings of the Late Samuel Oppenheim," Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, vol. 33 (1934), p. 63. 2. The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Port Washington, New York/London: Kennikat Press, 1937), p. 159.

[Bloom is a rabbi; B.A., Columbia University, 1923, Ph.D., 1937; M.H.L., Jewish Institute of Religion, 1928, D.D., 1955; rabbi, Temple Albert, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1928-31. President Kingston Ministerial Association, 1945-46, and 1959-60; B'nai B'rith; Zionist Organization of America; vice-president, National Prison Chaplain Board, since 1962; Social Action Committee of Central Conference of American Rabbis, since 1947; Author: The Jews of Dutch Brazil, 1936; The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam, 1937.]

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Arnold Wiznitzer
"The West India Company, which monopolized imports of slaves from Africa, sold slaves at public auctions against cash payment. It happened that cash was mostly in the hands of Jews. 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. On the other hand, there also was no competition in the selling of the slaves to the plantation owners and other buyers, and most of them purchased on credit payable at the next harvest in sugar. Profits up to 300 percent of the purchase value were often realized with high interest rates....If it happened that the date of such an auction fell on a Jewish holiday the auction had to be postponed. This occurred on Friday, October 21, 1644."

SOURCE: Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 72-3; [Note: Wiznitzer, Arnold Aharon, educator; Born in Austria, December 20, 1899; Ph.D., University of Vienna, 1920; Doctor of Hebrew Literature, Jewish Theological Seminary of America; Emeritus research professor, University of Judaism, Los Angeles; Contributor to historical journals in the United States and Brazil including the Journal of Jewish Social Studies and the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Former president, Brazilian-Jewish Institute of Historical Research.]

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Rabbi Morris Raphall
"[I]t remains a fact which cannot be gain said that in his own native home, and generally throughout the world, the unfortunate negro is indeed the meanest of slaves. Much had been said respecting the inferiority of his intellectual powers, and that no man of his race has ever inscribed his name on the Parthenon of human excellence, either mental or moral."

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Jews in the South
W.E.B. DuBois,
"The Jew is the heir of the slave-baron in Dougherty [Georgia]; and as we ride westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land of Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for money getting, born in the swift days of Reconstruction­'improvement' companies, wine companies, mills and factories; nearly all failed, and the Jew fell heir."

SOURCE: The Souls of Black Folk (1903) note: When DuBois tried to republish the book in 1953, he succumbed to pressure to replace the word "Jew" with "foreigner."

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TO LEARN MORE ABOUT JEWS AND SLAVERY
READ THE BOOK: THE SECRET RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BLACKS AND JEWS

HERE IS SOME MORE INTERESTING INFORMATION ABOUT JEWS.

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Jewish Racism

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Moses Maimonides
The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion refers to Moses Maimonides as "the symbol of the pure and orthodox faith." His Guide to the Perplexed is considered the greatest work of Jewish religious philosophy, but his view of Blacks was Hitlerian:

"[T]he Negroes found in the remote South, and those who resemble them from among them that are with us in these climes. The status of those is like that of irrational animals. To my mind they do not have the rank of men, but have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher than the rank of apes. For they have the external shape and lineaments of a man and a faculty of discernment that is superior to that of the apes."

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Major Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785-1851)
He was considered the most distinguished Jewish layman in his time. He was such a prolific proponent of slavery, that the first Black American periodical, The Freedom's Journal, was launched in response to Noah's racist propaganda. He actually defended slavery by calling it liberty:

"There is liberty under the name of slavery. A field negro has his cottage, his wife, and children, his easy task, his little patch of corn and potatoes, his garden and fruit, which are his revenue and property. The house servant has handsome clothing, his luxurious meals, his admitted privacy, a kind master, and an indulgent and frequently fond mistress."

He argued that "the bonds of society must be kept as they now are" and that "To emancipate the slaves would be to jeopardize the safety of the whole country." The Freedom's Journal called Noah the Black man's "bitterest enemy" and William Lloyd Garrison, the leading White abolitionist, called him the "lineal descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross."

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About Civil Rights
A Rabbi, 1956

"What our friends in the North do not fully appreciate is the fact that there is no difference between most of the Jews and their Christian neighbors in their attitudes toward the Negro. This is not a by-product of antisemitism, but an honest conviction. For these Jews desegregation presents not merely a school problem, but also a problem of the mixing of races."

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Lester D. Friedman
Author of Hollywood's Image of the Jew