It’s easy to treat Kanye West’s and Kyrie Irving’s Farrakhan-esque vituperations as nothing more than the cretinous gobbledygook of two imbecilic celebrities. But considering the powerful megaphone they each have, it is worth debunking one of their central claims, namely, that Jews were disproportionately responsible for slavery in America.
This slanderous traducement has sadly been repeated by academics and cultural icons alike and features prominently in Black Israelite propaganda such as the “documentary” that Irving featured on his Instagram story.
Nowhere has this lie been amplified more than in The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a work of pseudo-scholarship from the Nation of Islam. The first volume, published in the early ’90s, claims that Jews had a stranglehold on the Atlantic slave trade. The book grossly misrepresents historical facts, in large part by cherry-picking quotes from otherwise reliable sources. Much like the Black Israelites, the Nation of Islam has a long history of Holocaust denial and antisemitism. The truth is that American Jewish merchants bought less than 2 percent of all the Africans sold into slavery and brought to the Americas, a far cry from the Nation of Islam’s assertion of Jewish “predominance” in this activity.
What’s most concerning about libelous books such as The Secret Relationship is the implicit belief that Jews are culpable for the supposed sins of their ancestors. If this is true, then Jews can never extricate themselves from the supposed misdeeds of yesteryear and will forever be deserving of opprobrium, or worse. This is the same racial antisemitism playbook the Nazis used.
Race relations between African Americans and Jews are not perfect, but if we ever want to transcend the legacy of the past, lies such as exaggerated Jewish involvement in the slave trade must be put to rest.