A book by the Nation of Islam presents disturbing evidence of American Jewish participation in the Black African slave trade. JEWS SELLING BLACKS confirms that Jewish merchants from all over the world participated in the inhumane trade in Black human beings, often dominating some of the most important slave-trading markets. Even before the publication of the groundbreaking and controversial book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews in 1991, Jewish scholars were privately admitting that the Jewish role in the African Holocaust was far greater than is widely believed.



Rabbi Dr. Marc Lee Raphael, the longtime editor of the most prestigious Jewish historical journal, wrote in two paragraphs one of the more definitive statements on Jewish involvement in the Black Holocaust:

“… 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 …”

Whereas any similar statement from a Black man or woman would be roundly condemned, Jewish scholars and rabbis are unassailed. As Rabbi Dr. Raphael stated, Jews were particularly active in Brazil and the Caribbean, and much of their slave-dealing activity occurred outside the eventual boundaries of the United States, long before it was established as a nation in 1776.

Census Deception

Some Jewish scholars have used U.S. census records, which show “modest” Jewish slaveholding, to diminish the role of Jews as major “owners” of Black human beings. This, however, is highly misleading. Jews were twice as likely as the general population of American whites to “own” Africans.

Moreover, many Jewish merchants were simultaneously retailing dozens, even hundreds, of Africans through their business enterprises. The 1830 census shows that all the Jews of Charleston, South Carolina, claimed to “own” a total of 104 Black human beings. But a single Jew, Jacob Cohen, on a single day in 1857, offered for sale “125 rice negroes.” That same year, the same Mr. Cohen, a prominent member of his synagogue, teamed with a Gentile and advertised almost twice that number—210—in a single day.

Jewish slave traders, by economic necessity, tried to “turn over” their Black human merchandise as quickly as possible, and this brief “ownership” of Africans by many Jewish merchants is not reflected in the census records. Nevertheless, in marketing the products of slave labor and supplying plantations with items of commerce—even buying and selling whole plantations along with the slaves—Jewish merchants helped make slavery profitable in America.

The reader will note the extraordinary amount of slave trading carried on by South Carolina Jews. In fact, long before the American Jewish population became concentrated in New York, the center of the Jewish community in the slavery era was Charleston. The city had the largest population of Jews in the country and was considered the western hemisphere’s very center of Jewish wealth and culture. The origin of Reform Judaism (the branch of Judaism practiced today by the vast majority of American Jews) began in Charleston in 1825. And when the Jewish reformers in that city announced their new Judaism to the general public, they appealed to “all who are influenced by tolerant and unprejudiced feeling.” They explained that their actions would extol the “force and beauty of the moral law” and eschew those practices that “partake strongly in bigotry”—all “in Honor of Almighty God.” Yet this very same appeal was signed by several Jewish slave-owners and printed on the very same page of the City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser (September 11, 1826) wherein Jewish merchant Abraham Tobias offered for sale, and warranted the character of, “a prime young negro fellow.”

These advertisements—now available in the largest collection of Jewish slave-sale ads ever published—represent irrefutable proof of substantial Jewish involvement in the greatest criminal endeavor in the history of the world: the Black Holocaust.

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HIGHLIGHTS AND KEY POINTS OF THE SECRET RELATIONSHIP