Let's dead this entire red-herring......
To the Editor:
Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, stated in his Feb. 3 news conference that my unpublished 1977 dissertation for the University of California, Los Angeles, on the history of black-Jewish relations agreed "with everything we said" in "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews." That anonymous Nation of Islam book claims that the Atlantic slave trade was "dominated" by Jewish merchants (who, according to the authoritative Jacob Rader Marcus, accounted for "considerably less than 2 percent" of the traffic).
Mr. Farrakhan's is the age-old anti-Semitic technique of distorting the work of Jewish scholars (and Jewish religious literature) to defame Jews. His animus against me is for writing for the Simon Wiesenthal Center "Farrakhan's Reign of Historical Error," exposing "The Secret Relationship" as hate propaganda masquerading as history.
My doctoral thesis -- while unflinchingly documenting the involvement of Jews in the slave trade -- came to the same conclusion as every other reputable work of scholarship: that in the overall scheme of things it was extremely marginal.
A new charge made by Mr. Farrakhan is that my dissertation proves that the rabbis who compiled the Talmud "invented" racism by concocting the so-called "Ham myth." As best I could, based on English translations, I discussed racial attitudes during this period, not only in Jewish sources, but also in the writings of Hellenistic physicians and geographers, as well as the church fathers.
None of my conclusions correspond to this vicious libel. In recent years, Ephraim Isaac of the Institute of Semitic Studies at Princeton University (an Ethiopian-born Jew) and David B. Davis of Yale University have shown that the Talmudic sages never extended their negative speculations about Ham, Noah's son, and Canaan, Ham's son, to Cush, Ham's other son, identified as progenitor of the African peoples south of Egypt.
The fateful linkage between slave status and black skin as part of a divine curse was first made centuries later by Islamic writers. They used it to rationalize the Arab slave trade, which, according to the best estimates, carried more Africans in bondage north across the Sahara and east over the Red Sea (14.4 million between the years 650 and 1900) than were shipped west in European ships in the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade.
Mr. Farrakhan also claimed that "75 percent of the slaves owned in the South were owned by Jewish slaveholders." In 1860, there were about 15,000 Southern Jews and 4 million slaves. If 3 million (75 percent) were so owned, this would mean 200 slaves for every Jewish man, woman and child, or 1,000 slaves for every Jewish head of household. Jews owned only a fraction of 1 percent -- thousands, not millions -- of the enslaved population. HAROLD BRACKMAN San Diego, Feb. 4, 1994
were all gentlemen here let's keep this civil guys
