IT’S INTERESTING that many Jews passionately support — and provide a great deal of the funding for — Black Lives Matter.

It’s interesting because Jews never organized in this way to oppose the slavery of Africans in America. And in fact, many Jews — a much higher percentage than among white Christians — were in the business of selling slaves and owned slaves themselves. Gee, even comedian Larry David’s great-great grandfather, Henry Bernstein, was a slave owner. Winter Watch reports on his history as revealed in a 2017 PBS documentary.

Most of the abolitionists were professed Christians. Many Jews supported the Confederacy — and yet don’t hold your breath waiting for them to issue public apologies.

Rabbi David Einhorn was, according to WW, the sole rabbi who spoke out against slavery and he found little support from his Baltimore congregation in 1861:

Of the moral condition: There are enough churches, synagogues and temples, but there is very little religion, little morality … here [among the Jews]. Everything is empty, everything is glimmer … Here, too, rules the golden eagle rather than the … Here, too, all feelings of the heart and dreams are concentrated only on acquiring [things] … There is only one thought: to make as much as possible. [Fein, Baltimore Jews]

More from WW:

The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in their report of 1853 expressed their frustration. Excerpts from the report state:

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 [142] 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. [Louis Ruchames, “Abolitionists and the Jews,” PAJHS, vol. 42 (1952), pp. 153-54]

Even the Jewish scholars can find but a few sentences of Jewish protest over the plight of the Black slave. It is now clear, writes Dr. Marcus, “that most antebellum Jews, those in the North as well as in the South, cared little about the moral issues of human bondage.

“Jews not only accepted this doctrine, Dr. Korn admits, but “some of them helped to formulate and circulate it …

Those Jews who stood against the institution were scorned and rebuked — most harshly by their own brethren in the synagogue. Even the anti-slavery Jews, opposed the spread of slavery not out of sympathy for the condition of Blacks, but because it was a threat to their jobs. [Robert Korn, “Jews and Negro Slavery,” p .215]

More information about the Jewish role in the African slave trade is available in this lecture by the late Wellesley College Professor Tony Martin. The actual lecture starts at minute 10:00. It is a measured, dispassionate assessment of the Jewish role in the slave trade. Martin faced intense, unremitting persecution, mostly from Jews, for his academic research, persecution which he wrote about, and all his lectures are banned on Youtube. He is one of thousands of inquiring intellectuals whose lives have been upended, their careers sometimes permanently undermined or their liberty entirely lost in jail, by Jewish bullies. He died unexpectedly at the age of 70 in Trinidad, where he was born.

Historian Tony Martin

Please follow and like us: