WHEN VICTIMS RULE

A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America

All Pictures Added by Gnostic Liberation Front

Page III

8. Jews and Slavery [83 Kilobytes] [about 16 paper pages] Jewish religious concepts of slavery; Jewish domination of the slave traffic of Slavs, beginning in the 5th century; Prominent Jews in the early Ku Klux Klan, as defenders of slavery and the southern Confederacy; The Nation of Islam's controversial book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews; the Jewish role in the slave trading of Africans; Jewish apologetics and mainstream academic rejection of The Secret Relationship.

9. Jewish Crime [121 Kilobytes] [about 15 paper pages] Jewish crime, focusing here in the late 1800s and early to mid-1900s; Jewish criminal networks in New York City and other major cities; the central Jewish influence in the birth of "organized" crime; prominent Jewish fraudsters and scam artists; Meyer Lansky and "the Syndicate"; Jewish pre-eminence in Las Vegas (and other international "Sin Cities") and its criminal underworld; Jewish criminal contributions to the founding of modern Israel; modern Jewish myth of categorical historical innocence and nonviolence versus the facts of history; noteworthy Jewish criminals in more modern times.

10. Jews and "White Slavery" (the International Prostitution Trade at the Turn of the 20th Century) [54 Kilobytes] [about 12 paper pages] Jewish domination of the early 20th century prostitution trade, including the United States, Argentina, Poland, Germany, South Africa, Russia, Austria, Brazil and other countries; Jewish control of three-quarters of the prostitution trade in New York City and Chicago; modern Jewish dismissal of such historical facts as Nazi-type hate propaganda; modern Israel's importance in the international prostitution trade today.

11. The Jewish Cosmology of Victimhood (Part 1) [101 Kilobytes] [about 21 paper pages] The Jewish self-conception and enforcement of collective categorical innocence through history; Jewish martyrology mythology; Jewish legend versus historical fact; Cecil Roth's pre-Holocaust assessment of the collective Jewish innocence tradition; the post-Holocaust age of Jewish apologetics; political use of the Jewish "cult of the persecuted" for modern Israel.

12. The Jewish Cosmology of Victimhood (Part 2) [130 Kilobytes] [about 25 paper pages] The Talmud as an ethnocentric, ahistorical compilation; traditional Jewish disinterest in non-Jewish history; Jewish celebration of its continuously proclaimed historical martyrdom; secular Jewish historical revisionism to fit religious "chosen sufferer" models; Jewry's categorical and militant insistence upon its historical innocence; Jewish conviction that all non-Jews hate Jews; effects of the "persecution tradition" upon the psychology of Jewish children; Jewish insistence upon the martyrological role, even while functioning as economic oppressors.

13. The Jewish Dictates of History [153 Kilobytes] [about 32 paper pages] Continued growth of "Jewish Studies" and the Jewish academic's role in maintaining the martyrological legend; Gentile disdain for Jews across history, culture, language, and class; singular Jewish focus upon anti-Semitism as a "mystifying disease"; the ban on criticizing anything Jewish in western society; influence upon Jewish Studies programs by wealthy philanthropic propagandists; Jewish Studies centers as outposts for ethnocentrism and pro-Israel polemics; examples of Jewish historical revisionism and militant resistance to face the more unpleasant facts of Jewish history; Jewish narcissism; Jewish censorship of dissenting views; the growing intra-Jewish debate about alleged Jewish powerlessness through history.

14.Who/What Is a Jew? [60 Kilobytes] [about 13 paper pages] Paradoxical lack of Jewish consensus about who exactly is a Jew; traditional racial definitions of Jewish identity; the enduring racial undercurrent definition today; popular Jewish identity as being "History's Greatest Victims"; Jewish need for anti-Semitism as an identity anchor; Jewish self-conception of superior intelligence; Jewish arrogance; lack of Jewish humility as an anti-Gentile hostility; Jewish preoccupation with "materialism and superiority."

  

8

THE JEWS AND SLAVERY
 

      In our own time, as throughout history, Orthodox male Jews still must daily thank God for not being born Gentile, as well not being born a woman. Such ritual thanks branch out into other areas as well.

 

     "One specific mitzvah [religious commandment] required of traditional Jews each day," says Arthur Kurzweil, "is [a reminder] that we were slaves in Egypt. This mitzvah is not performed with a ritual object, nor is it an act that would cause some to think you looked religious. Merely reflecting in your mind and hearing that we were slaves is, in itself, considered a spiritual act of great significance." [KURZWEIL, p. xxii]  Jewish victimhood tradition ritually underscores their roles as slaves thousands of years ago. In Orthodox households, says Evelyn Kaye, "bitter herbs [are dipped] in salt water at Passover to remind [Jews] of the tears of the slaves in Egypt." [KAYE, p. 45]

 

      The traditional daily reminder of slavery and the supposed fact that thousands of years ago Jews were held in bondage is all the more peculiar when one tries to imagine what thoughts went through the minds of the many Jewish slave traders throughout history, merchants who were instrumental even in the slave trading of Europeans. These are the words of James Parkes, a respected philosemitic scholar, extremely sympathetic to Jews in his many volumes about their history:

 

                  "In the period from the fifth to eight centuries [Jews] gradually

                   took the place previously occupied by the Syrians as

                   'international' traders; and they continued, and perhaps,

                   developed, the trade in slaves." [PARKES, p. 17]

 

                   "While the Jews were... never... the only traders, it is possible

                   that the slave trade through north-eastern Europe to the Slav

                   countries and the land trades to the East were for practical

                   purposes Jewish monopolies. " [PARKES, p. 25]

 

                  "It would appear that Jews had little difficulty in obtaining slaves

                   in the eastern provinces of the empire and Poland, in spite of

                   the protection which acceptance of Christianity in those regions

                   should have given the inhabitants. References to this traffic in

                   Christian slaves are not infrequent. [PARKES, p. 45]

 

                    "The evidence is thus enough to show that the Church

                    possessed a genuine grievance against the section of the Jewish

                    population involved in the slave trade. But the misdeeds of

                    slave traders did not cease at the purchase of Christians in

                    eastern Europe. Agobard quotes cases -- and there is no reason

                    to refute his evidence -- of the theft of children in France for

                    sale to the Moors of Spain; and a chronicler of the middle of

                    the tenth century brings an even more unpleasant story of the

                    castration of boys in eastern France for their sale as eunuchs to

                    the Moorish harems, a trade which was, apparently, extremely

                    profitable." [PARKES, p. 46]

 

     "In the tenth century," notes Jewish (and Zionist) author Julius Brutzkus, "the Jews possessed salt mines near Nuremberg. They also traded in arms, and exploited the treasuries of the churches. But their great specialty ... was their trade in slaves." [LEON, p. 124] "The first Jews that Poles encountered," states the Encyclopedia Judaica, "must certainly have been traders, probably slave traders, of the type called in the 12th-century Jewish sources holekhei rusyah (travelers to Russia). [EN JUD, v. 13, p. 710]  "In the tenth century," notes Israel Abrahams, "the Spanish Jews often owed their wealth to their trade in slaves." [ABRAHAMS, p. 98]

 

      Jews, says Lewis Browne, "traveled everywhere from England to India, from Bohemia to Egypt. Their commonest merchandise in those days, beginning with the eighth century, was slaves. On every high road and on every great river and sea, these Jewish traders were to be found with their gangs of shackled prisoners in convoy." Such disturbing facts that impugn the Jewish myths of perpetual victimhood must of course be apologized away. "Slave trading," says Browne, a Jewish scholar, "seems irredeemably vile and hateful to us today, but we must remember here again the standards have changed ...And in light of the customs of those times, the slave-traffickers were actually doing almost a moral act. They alone were keeping the conquering armies from slaughtering every one of their defeated foes after each battle." [WILLIAMS, J., p. 230]

 

      Jewish apologists of course further argue that Jews were involved in the trade of European slaves (the English word "slave" is reputed to come from "Slav") because "they were forced into it" by others, they were only "doing the dirty work for Christians," it was a norm of the era, or that extensive Jewish slave trading was a "Christian ecclesiastical myth."  Another Jewish apologist justifies the Jewish slave trade of Europeans during the era of Pope Gregory this way:

 

            "Had the Jews been prevented from owning slaves it is likely that

             they would have given up the slave trade and had they done this

             the labor shortage that would have been created might have

             caused an inestimable loss of life through sheer starvation."

             [ABEL, p. 197]

 

     "Slave traders were proverbially dishonest." [BARON, p. 193] And there were many legal hurdles that Jewish slave traders had to face, both from Christian authorities (who grew increasingly outraged by Jews owning Christian slaves), and their own rabbinical authorities when faced with the necessity of slaves' castration, for instance, to be eunuchs. Jewish religious texts forbade mutilation. This problem was easily resolved by resorting to a technicality; prospective Jewish slave owners merely hired non-Jews to do the operation before they formally bought them. [BARON, p. 191]  Jewish writers in Spain complained more frequently than other places about the ethics of having slave concubines in Jewish households. [BARON, p. 194]

 

     Jewish mythology claims a long history of moral superiority over others, and innocence. The original Ku Klux Klan (1865-1876), however, was not hostile to Jews and even had Jewish members, including Simon Baruch, the father of the Quarter-Master General of the Confederate Army. (The father of Bernard Baruch, the Chairman of the War Industries Board under President Woodrow Wilson in World War I, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan). [COIT, M., 1957, p. 12-13] The Secretary of State of the Confederacy (initially its Secretary of War) was also of Jewish birth, Judah P. Benjamin. [RUBINSTEIN, p. 20] After the war Benjamin fled to England. David de Leon was the first Surgeon General of the Confederacy. [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 172] Other prominent Confederate Jews included Edwin Moise, Speaker of the Louisiana House; Raphael Moses who "was influential in leading Georgia out of the Union;" Henry Hyans, the Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana leading up to the Civil War; and Edwin de Leon, "whom Benjamin sent to Paris to handle public relations and propaganda for the South." "The prominent role of Jews in the Confederacy," notes Nathaniel Weyl, "is generally either ignored or condensed into shamefaced footnotes by those historians of American Jewry whose opinions conform to the liberal-leftist stereotype." [WEYL, N., 1968, p. 54]

 

     "Not a single Jew," notes Stephen Isaacs, "has been identified among the abolitionists in Charleston, South Carolina, which had been home to the largest Jewish community in the United States at one time." [ISAACS, p. 180] "[The Jew] somehow feels that in the Great Democracy he is 'the other' Negro -- a white-skinned one," wrote Isaac Deutcher in 1968, "And how very often he gets his own back on the black Negro: in the Southern States more often than not it is the Jew who is one of the most fanatical upholders of white supremacy." [DEUTCHER, ., 1968, p. 43]

 

     Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a champion of liberal Reform Judaism and "the most active and renowned rabbi in the United States" in the nineteenth century [SACHAR, p. 196], actively supported the enslavement of Blacks, called Abraham Lincoln an "imbecile," and argued that Blacks were "beasts of burden." [LINDEMANN, p. 210] Other of his words were later engraved on a memorial tablet in the Memorial Hall of Temple Emanu-El, the great Reform Judaism synagogue in New York City:

 

      "American Judaism. A religion without mystics or miracles. Rational and

       self-evident, eminently human, universal, liberal and progressive. In

       perfect harmony with modern science, criticism, and philosophy and in

       full sympathy with universal liberty, justice and charity. There are no

       better American citizens than the Jews and no religion better befitting a

       free people than Judaism." [GOLDSTEIN, D. p. 68]

 

      Jonathan Kaufman notes the case of another very prominent New York Jewish rabbi in 1861:

 

     "Rabbi Morris Jacob Raphall ... brought the full force of Jewish

     learning to a defense of slavery, preaching a lengthy sermon that

     defended its biblical roots and noting that 'Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,

     Job -- the men with whom the Almighty conversed, with whose

     names he emphatically connects to his own most holy name ...

     all these men were slaveholders.' Raphall was no fringe figure. He

     was one of the most prominent rabbis of his day; the year before

     he had been chosen to be the first Jew to open a session of the

     House of Representatives with a prayer." [KAUFMAN, J., 1988,

     p. 22]

 

       Modern scholar Judah Rosenthal notes rabbi Raphall's effect on the slavery debate in America:

 

      "Rabbi [Morris] Raphall delivered a sermon entitled 'The Bible View

      of Slavery.' Raphall attempted to prove 'that according to the Talmud

      there is no difference between a lost ox, donkey, or slave, and that

      the Talmud recommends turning over a fugitive slave to its master.

      The discourse of Rabbi Raphall which appeared in print caused a

      public stir. It was reprinted many times in the pro-slavery press.

      It produced a sensational effect coming from a popular rabbi who

      had the reputation of being a biblical scholar ... Raphall was right

      in his Biblical exegesis." [ROSENTHAL, J., 78]

 

      In 1896 an editorial in the Jewish South of Richmond, Virginia, argued that "Negroes are intellectually, morally, and physically an inferior race -- a fact none can deny, " [LINDEMANN, p. 225] and with the death of a particularly racist Jewish senator from Maryland, Isador Rayner, a Black journalist wrote that Rayner "invoked upon his colored neighbors the terrors of (a pogrom)." [LINDEMANN, p. 233]

 

     In 1991 a book was published by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, described by one Jewish author as "a masterful piece of propaganda." [MAGIDA, p. 171]  This work, and some of the issues surrounding it, merit some special attention here. Aside from a handful of obscure, rarely read volumes that challenged the commonly accepted facts of the Holocaust, the Nation of Islam's new volume was the most controversial book about Jews published in decades and helped in securing a deeper rift between American Black and Jewish communities.  Available from a 1-800 telephone number, the book received relatively wide circulation in the African-American community. The volume, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, seeks to document Jewish historical involvement in the African slave trade and severely taints, by association, Jewish luster in the later American civil rights record. In a word, the book -- which is a direct assault upon the myths of Jewry's self-perception of a higher moral ground than other people -- must somehow be dismissed by the Jewish community to avoid considerable embarrassment.

 

      In fact, dismissal is quite easy. The Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan are in such serious disrepute in the Jewish, and other non-Black, communities that few people, other than those in the African-American world, have actually read the NOI book. Though most Jews have heard of it, it is automatically understood to be "hate literature," molded of entirely anti-Semitic nonsense and unworthy of anyone's serious attention. No Jew in his or her right mind would ever dare to purchase such a thing and add to anti-Semitic coffers.  (Reluctance to read the book, on principle, is deep. At the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, by late 1997 the 1994 edition on its library shelves -- the sole copy -- had never been checked out).  This situation has allowed Harold Brackman, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (one of the various Jewish "defense" agencies), to write a few versions of his rebuttal to Secret Relationship charges, counterclaims that serve completely as the relevant truths for Jews -- and sympathizers -- interested in the matter. Brackman and the Jewish community rely upon the fact that most (non-Black) people will probably only read his book about the controversial subject, if any.

 

     "Among [the arguments in support of the Secret Relationship]," says Ralph Austen (who read the book) in the Jewish journal Tikkun, "there is one which Jewish intellectuals need to take seriously: that few of the Jewish leaders who have attacked the book have actually read it." [AUSTEN, p. 66] And what is the essential impact one gets out of reading it? "There were not many Jews in America between 1492 and the 1860s," says Austen, "and quite a few had been involved in the slave trade." [AUSTEN, p. 68]

 

      The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews seeks to tell the story of Jewish involvement in the African slave trade, largely throughout the Americas. The book's strategy is to use nearly 1,300 (mostly) scholarly citations to present its argument. Seeking maximum credibility, the overwhelming majority of the excerpts from historical sources are indeed  "authoritative," i.e., the quotes are not only from respected academic volumes, but most authors are Jewish scholars in various fields of expertise.  As many African-Americans bitterly complain, a very large number of Jews are preeminent in the academic world, even in African-American studies, a situation that has for decades found Jews (and other non-Blacks) dictating to African-Americans the facts and parameters of their own history. Some citations in The Secret Relationship are from less academically pedigreed commentators, but most of these are also Jewish which, as the Nation of Islam intended, confers a dimension of legitimacy to the quote, even if it is only opinion.

 

       The quotes, facts, and figures by legitimate and well-respected Jewish academics (who usually address the subject of Jews and slaves peripherally in the course of  their own other interests) do not depict, in any way, a morally superior people. They underscore the Jewish role in the African slave trade and they are collected in the Nation of Islam volume by the hundreds. Take, for example, the following excerpts:

 

       "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. [LOUIS EPSTEIN, Sex Laws and Customs

       in Judaism, in SEC.LIFE, p. 196]  

 

       "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." [SEYMOUR

       LIEBMAN, New World Jewry, SEC LIFE, p. 55]        

                                                                              

       "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 ... [LIEBMAN, in SEC.

        LIFE, p. 55] ... [The Jews] 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."

        [SEYMOUR LIEBMAN, New World Jewry, 1493-1825 , in MARTIN,

        p. 113]

 

       "The West India Company, which monopolized imports of slaves from

        Africa, sold slaves at public auctions against cash payments. It happens

        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 was also no competition in the selling of the slaves to the

        plantation owners and other buyers ... Profits up to 300 per cent 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." [Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial

        Brazil, in SEC. LIFE, p. 29]

 

       "Just as a disproportionately large number of Jews were slave

       owners, a disproportionately large number of Jewish merchants sold

       slaves as they would any other goods. Several of these merchants

       were prominent in their communities: an acting rabbi, the president

       of a congregation." [ROBERTA FEUERLICHT, in SEC LIFE, p. 179]

 

        The Nation of Islam's own racist reputation, Jewish lobbying power (and the fear of it), and the obvious fact that few -- if any -- pedigreed historians have bothered to read the Secret Relationship can only explain the following  resolution by the American Historical Association about the controversial book:

 

     "The AHA deplores any misuse of history that distorts the historical

     record to demonize a particular racial, ethnic, or cultural group. The

     Association therefore condemns as false any statement alleging that

     Jews played a disproportionate role in the exploitation of slave labor

     in the Atlantic slave trade." [RESPONSE, p. 9, SPRING, 1995]

 

     But Jews did, it would seem irrefutably, have (at the very least) a "disproportionate role" in the slave trade even in the southern United States, where they were not -- as the NOI book shows -- as involved as in other places in the Americas. According to one survey noted by Jewish scholars Lee Soltow and Ira Rosenwaike, 75% of Jewish households surveyed in the American South owned slaves, more than double the average 36% for all southern households. [ROSENWAIKE, in SEC. LIFE, p. 180]  And Jews, as we will continue to witness, have always been "disproportionately" represented in virtually any field where there is serious money to be made. (In Port Royal, Jamaica, in 1680, about 16% of Jewish households had no slaves; in the non-Jewish community, this figure was over 47%. Likewise 73.7 % of Jewish households had between one and four slaves; in the non-Jewish community the figure was 41.8 %.) [SCHORSCH, J., 2000] 

 

     Ultimately, the much-maligned NOI volume does not assert that Jews ran the whole slave trade from a back street in Amsterdam, but rather that they held indeed a disproportionately significant role, a factor that should be considered in modern Jewish-Black relations, the way it is an important factor in Black-White relations. The book's fundamental charge is so stated: "The most prominent of Jewish pilgrim fathers used kidnapped Black Africans disproportionately more than any other ethnic or religious group in New World history and participated in every aspect of the international slave trade." [SEC. LIFE, p. vii]  Behind Jewish resistance to take responsibility (whatever its dimensions) for the more distasteful parts of Jewish history is the fact that such concessions imperil the mythos of modern Jewish identity itself:  i.e., that Jews are morally superior to all others, for which they are humanity's consummate (and innocent) Victims.

 

     Albert Lindemann notes the typical case of prominent Jewish historian Oscar Handlin's volume Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life in America:  "[Handlin] ignored the issue [of slavery in his volume] ... even while mentioning by name the 'great Jewish merchants' who made their fortunes in the slave trade." [LINDEMANN, p. xx]

 

       It is clear that the issue of Jewish influence in the African-slave trade in many parts of the world was significant. And this is the value of the NOI book (along with, perhaps, the idea that Jews are not, as so often depicted in the popular media, necessarily the "best friend" of the Black man). How much significant the slave trade was Jewish-inspired can only be a matter of endless disputation. Considerably less than one percent of North America's population were Jews and it's hard to imagine that, by numbers alone, 18th and early 19th century Jewry could have possibly controlled the huge slave market in this area. (As late as 1817, there were only 3,000 Jews in all of America. [ROSENWAIKE, p. 13] ) Nonetheless, in considering the evidence -- Jewish and otherwise, it is clear that Jews were very much disproportionately involved in, and important to, the trade in human chattel.  In some colonial posts they were no doubt preeminent in the business. The largest Jewish exploitation of slaves seems to have been in Barbados, Brazil "In the first half of the seventeenth century," notes Abram Leon, "all the great sugar plantations in Brazil were in the hands of Jews." [LEON, p. 176], Curacao, Jamaica, and Surinam (Dutch Guinea). Jewish historian Arnold Wiznitzer adds that "Jews dominated the slave trade" in Dutch Brazil. [SCHORSCH, J., 2000]

 

     Historian David Brion Davis notes that in the Jewish-founded town of Joden Savanne in Surinam, they "extracted labor from African slaves in one of the most deadly and oppressive environments in the New World." [MAGIDA, p. 184]

 

    Jewish scholar Harold Bloom also noted that, in the early 1700s,

 

    "Colonists [in Surinam] were troubled by attacks of 'Bush

    Negroes,' former slaves who had escaped inland and refused

    to return to their owners. They declared themselves independent

    and set fire to many plantations ... [BLOOM, H., p. 121] ... Slave

    trade was one of the most important Jewish activities here as

    elsewhere in the colonies." [BLOOM, H., p. 123]

 

     And as scholar Jacob Marcus, also Jewish, observes:

 

     "Some writers of the eighteenth century, in attempting to account for

     repeated flights by Negro slaves, accused Jewish owners of mistreating

     their charges, and indictment the [Jewish] authors of the Historical

     Essay [on the Colony of Surinam (1788] ascribed to anti-Jewish

     prejudices and vigorously denied. It is a fact, however, that the wars

     against the French and the Bush Negroes called into being among the

     Jewish planter class a specific type of individual: the aggressive, brutal

     fighter, politically ambitious and resentful of every limitation and

     infringement of their personal liberty." [SCHORSCH, J., 2000]

 

     Whatever its faults, the Secret Relationship is legitimate in laying out the  historical role between Blacks and Jews in the New World on the table for scrutiny. While this relationship has not really been "secret" in the literal sense (the information is freely available to anyone who cares to tediously find it) it certainly has never before been fore grounded nor popularly addressed; rather, it has been buried from public discourse in the obscure pages of esoteric academe. It has taken the growth of African-American scholarship (whether others like its accentuations or not) to frame discourse about the slave trade to their own -- not Jewish -- perspective. As one can see in this book, existing Jewish scholarship on Black history -- originally framed to Jewish interests and concerns -- is voluminous.

 

     The Nation of Islam's intention in their volume was to quote from expressly Jewish sources as much as possible and overlooked those many non-Jewish sources that would instantly fall prey to discredit by the omnipresent charge of anti-Semitism. Citations from Jews would presumably render the NOI's arguments all more authoritative, resistant to the inevitable charge that the book was unfairly biased against Jews.

 

      What the NOI apparently didn't recognize, of course, is that Jewish convention asserts that many Jews themselves are tainted by the dreaded virus of anti-Semitism. Thus, at the bottom line, it only slightly matters whether the NOI had quoted Adolf Hitler's view about the Jews (which they did not) or critical Jewish authors of Israel and Jewish life like Roberta Feuerlicht and Lenni Brenner (which they did). Jews or not, such people are not -- to the standards of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Harold Brackman, "respected authorities." "The truth of the matter," writes Brackman, "is that The Secret Relationship validates Feurlicht and Brenner as 'authoritative' for precisely the same reasons that the Nazis exploited the writings of selected Jews in that earlier era." [BRACKMAN, p. 57]

 

     This, then, is the tone of debate -- not uncommon in the Jewish community -- over the book: the inevitable dragging of even Brenner's and Feuerlicht's criticism of Jewry into an association with Hitler and the very thought of an investigation into the facts of Jewish influence in the slave trade as opening doors to another Holocaust.

 

       As The Secret Relationship was disseminated among segments of the African-American community, the Jewish community ignored it as much as possible, sometimes attacking it generally, categorically, as merely an anti-Semitic tome. "The book is a remarkable work of hate," says Jewish author Richard Bernstein in his own volume about the "multiculturalist" political wars of today's society .... I myself saw copies of it for sale at an Afro-centric conference I attended in Atlanta." [BERNSTEIN, p. 117] But silence by the Jewish community was perceived by many in the Black community as an admission of  guilt, and Brackman eventually came forward to "point-by-point" discard the allegations posed in the controversial volume.

 

     Harold Brackman's credentials include the facts that he has taught -- like so many Jewish scholars -- African-American history at three major American universities. One of his book rebuttals to the Secret Relationship outshines even the NOI's reputed capacity for hyperbole, entitled:  Ministry of Lies, The Truth Behind the Nation of Islam's The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. The Nation's 1300 citations cannot be reasonably addressed in a digestible volume, so Brackman goes for what he considers to be the "anti-Semitic" volume's weakest links.

 

     Unfortunately, for the Jewish argument, upon close examination, the very foundation of Brackman's scholarship is shaky from the start, as evidenced in the very methodology of his attack to deconstruct the Secret Relationship as "lies." Brackman begins a chapter entitled "Methods ( ... of Deceit and Distortions to Falsify History)" by stating that

 

      "the Secret Relationship is an anonymous production. 'The Historical

      Research Department ' [the formal author of the NOI book] identifies

      no individual members, nor does it indicate their academic credentials.

      In other words, those responsible themselves remain secret -- choosing

      to hide rather than stand behind their scholarship."

      [BRACKMAN, p. 45]

 

      Curiously, such impugning based on anonymity can likewise be made about the magazine Response, the journal of Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Los Angeles Holocaust-oriented "education center"  that sponsored Brackman's own work. While a Response "staff" is noted at the end of the magazine -- an Editor in Chief, and Editor/Supervisor, Senior Researcher, et al, the text of the magazine itself is never credited with an attributable author (except a brief editor's column). Even the Wiesenthal Center's educational resources kit for teachers, The Holocaust, 1933-1945, does not provide authorship for most of its pages of factual assertions.

 

     Brackman continues:

 

     "The reader is asked to proceed on blind faith supported only by the

      assurance that: ‘The facts, we believe, speak for themselves.’"

 

       The purported facts, of course, are excerpts from mostly Jewish authors, most of them credible scholars. Brackman pushes foreword, now on a rhetorical soapbox:

 

     "No thoughtful person should accept this statement at face value.

     Historical facts and historical truth are not identical. The indispensable

     link between them is the historian's commitment to the honest evaluation

     and presentation of evidence. Two thousand years ago, the Roman orator

     Cicero enunciated what might be called 'The Historian's code of Ethics':

 

              "The first law for the historian is that he shall never utter an

               untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is

               true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality, or

               malice."  [BRACKMAN, p. 45]

 

     Brackman's championing of Cicero as a paragon of moral virtue and truth-finding is a bizarrely unsupportive selection for the foundation of his own arguments. Certainly Cicero was a virtuous figure, committed to telling the truth with no malice, et al.  But as Brackman should have known, in the common Jewish rush to condemn nearly every important thinker in history as somehow anti-Jewish, Cicero is often cited in books about anti-Semitism as a seminal "anti-Semite" himself; he is to be found in such titles as History and Hate, Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, A Short History of Antisemitism, and others.

 

     Jewish professor Peter Schafer in his Judeophobia. Attitudes Towards the Jews in the Ancient World, even writes that, in Rome, "the first voice to be heard, and one regarded as the first evidence of Roman 'anti-Semitism' is that of the great orator of the late Republic, Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.) in his famous speech Pro Flacco ... It is the Jews as a pressure group, influential in public assemblies, who are attacked by Cicero." [SCHAFER, 1997, p. 180]

 

      Taking careful account of Cicero's aforementioned reluctance to "utter and untruth," the ancient sage says this about Jews:

 

        "How numerous they are, their clannishness, their influence in the

         assemblies." [FLANNERY, p. 15]

 

     These are charges that are among the foundations of "anti-Semitic" arguments to our own day.  And of course they remain, after all these centuries, "true," as we shall soon see. Cicero also called Judaism barbara superstisios  (a barbarous superstition) [MORAIS, p. 40] and his teacher, Apollonius Molon of Rhodes (presumably one of Cicero's seminal inspirations for the truthful approach to history) "was the first to compose an entire work against the Jews, thus launching the endless chain of adversus Judaeos [criticism of Jews] that reaches us to the present day." [FLANNERY, p. 12]

 

     So begins Professor Brackman's defense of Jewry against the anti-Semitic "lies" of the Secret Relationship.

 

      Obviously, anyone interested in the relationship between Jews and the slave trade should read both books, the NOI's and Brackman's. Rather than go through a tedious point by point refutation of a range of Brackman's own refutations of the Secret Relationship, suffice it to note that in his little 100 page book, Brackman often manages to stray considerably off the subject of Jews and the slave trade, rhapsodizing about Jewish altruism in the Civil Rights movement, chronicling the deteriorating Black-Jewish relations since 1991, arguing that calling the Black slavery experience a "Holocaust" (as the NOI book does) is inappropriate, and that African slavery deaths are often exaggerated. Most significantly, Brackman renders the Nation of Islam book to be merely "a hateful fantasy ... originally concocted by white anti-Semites ... who throughout history have demonstrated that they have no more true regard for Blacks than Jews." [BRACKMAN, p. 91]  This standard Jewish tact of shirking responsibility and passing it all along elsewhere upon someone else’s' head is a historically Jewish as the Talmud. And drawing a connection, as Brackman does, between automobile baron Henry Ford's belief in a world Jewish conspiracy and the NOI's examination of Jewish involvement in slavery is to find, in Jewish minds, the very equivalent obsession with "conspiracy" theories as those they condemn in "anti-Semites."

 

     In 1993 a tenured Black professor, Tony Martin, of Wellesley College (the alma mater of Hilary Clinton) made national attention by committing the crime of using the Secret Relationship (as one of seven other course books) as a reading assignment in an African-American studies class. Martin found himself in a struggle for academic freedom against a massive -- and unified -- campaign by national Jewish agencies to censor and defame him, attempting to get him fired as an academically incompetent anti-Semite. The Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Community Relations Council and others joined to charge Martin with "clear-cut anti-Semitic prejudice in his classroom and on the Wellesley campus and demanded his firing." [MARTIN, p. 8-9] Martin and the book were soon attacked in four articles in the Boston Globe, on National Public Radio, the New York Times, the Associated Press, ABC's This Week With David Brinkley, the Today Show, and others. [MARTIN, p. 13-14]

 

     In an attack on professor Martin, a Jewish fellow faculty member at Wellesley College, Jerold Auerbach, wrote that "Anti-Semitism ... is quietly diverted into the channel of academic freedom ... Professor Martin and his ilk are free to emulate [Nazi ideologue] Joseph Goebbels ... It is sufficient, perhaps, to note that anyone who teaches The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews as serious history has entered the realm of academic charlatanism." [AUERBAC H., p. 1]

 

     One wonders how an ideologue like Auerbach musters the gall to smear Martin as a veritable Nazi when Auerbach's own ideological allegiance and attention to "serious history" is so morally questionable. In 1984 professor Auerbach sported an article in the Zionist journal, Midstream, in defense of twenty-two members of the messianic fascist Gush Emunim organization who faced court trials for a variety of crimes in Israel. "Accused of murdering Arabs at the Islamic College in Hebron, and of attempts to assassinate Arab mayors, bomb Arab buses, and destroy the Dome of the Rock," Auerbach sees such charges as "inflamed rhetoric [that] obscures principles of Jewish religious nationalism .... To describe these defendants as 'West Bank terrorists' prejudges their guilt and distorts their identity ... A lunatic fringe can easily be dismissed, but Gush Emunim draws too heavily upon Judaism and Zionism for such cavalier treatment. The credo of Gush Emunim ... may ... be enchantingly simple. But it can also be urgently compelling for in Judea and Samaria [these are the right-wing land expansion terms Auerbach chooses in reference to what is more commonly known as the "occupied territories"] Jews are struggling to explore and express intimate relationships -- between a people, its God, and its promised land -- that have defined Judaism since the 'Exodus.'" [AUERBACH, 10-84]

 

     The group Auerbach fawns over -- Gush Emunim,  its messianic world view, and its hostility to all non-Jews, we have run across before and will visit again in this volume. Its credo is messianic land expansion and Nazi-like attitudes towards non-Jews based on the worst tradition of talmudic interpretation. "Gush Emunim leaders," says Israel Shahak, "have quoted religious precepts which enjoin Jews to oppress Gentiles." [SHAHAK, p. 96]  Israeli Uri Huppert notes that Miriam Levinger, wife of prominent Gush Emunim leader Rabbi Moshe Levinger, "expressed the extremist attitude now prevalent in the Orthodox, religious-nationalist camp in her well-known remark that 'democracy' is not a Jewish value." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 18] Ideologues of Gush Emunim-style teachings who have risen to fame in recent years include Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Baruch Goldstein, mass murderer of 29 Arabs in a Hebron mosque as they prayed. More about Gush Emunim later.

 

     Among the most prominent (of the few) African-Americans attacking Martin's "anti-Semitism" was Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard professor, who was afforded space on the subject in the Op Ed section of the New York Times. (Gates, notes the African-American Los Angeles Sentinel, is seen by "many African-Americans ... as a pawn of Jewish leadership who never misses an opportunity to attack Black scholars and Afro-centrism, while ignoring rampant Jewish racism." [LEWIS, p. A7] Gates wrote that:

 

      "The Bible of the new anti-Semitism is the Secret Relationship Between

       Blacks and Jews, an official publication of the Nation of Islam that

       boasts 1,275 footnotes in the course of 334 pages. Sober and scholarly

       looking, it may well be one of the most influential books published in the

       Black community in the last twelve months ... To be sure, the book

       massively represents the historical record, largely through a process of

       cunningly selected quotations from often reputable sources. [GATES,

       p. 219] ... The authors of the Secret Relationship Between Blacks and

       Jews boast that they're hanging the Jews by their own words!" [GATES,

       p. 225; original emphasis]

 

     And what of Gates' authoritative reference to categorically refute the 1,275 "misrepresenting" citations in the Secret Relationship? Harold Brackman. Gates' rebuttal to the Secret Relationship, proudly proclaimed in the Simon Wiesenthal Center's magazine, Response, "drew of Brackman's scholarship." Hence, Gates' foundation as an African-American scholar attacking the NOI book is not largely -- if at all -- his own research, but that from a polemical Jewish scholar working for the Wiesenthal Center [See later chapter for a discussion about its role as a pro-Israel, Judeo-centric propaganda center].  In a thank you letter to Brackman (published in the Wiesenthal's journal), Gates wrote:

 

     "I want to say how appreciative I am for the ground-clearing work you

     performed in your paper on 'The Secret Relationship.' It's a subject I had

     been addressing for a while, addressing the book's insidiousness in fairly

     general terms but I think anyone interested in truly thrashing through the

     issues has to be immediately grateful, as I am, for your splendidly detailed

     and meticulous work of reason and analysis."

     [RESPONSE, p. 11, FALL 1992, v. 12, no. 6]
 

9
JEWISH CRIME

 

     "Of all the areas of Jewish enterprise," notes Gerald Krafetz, "none has been so overlooked as the field of crime. And it isn't because of a lack of Jewish criminality. For an introspective people, this oversight is significant. It is as if Jewish crime did not exist, an unsavory skeleton is best left in the family closet ... The sociopathology of Jews is not an acceptable notion since it runs counter to both religious precepts and preconceived ideas that Jews have of themselves." [KREFETZ, p. 112] "Jews were ... involved in many of the most visible and spectacular frauds of the post-Civil War period," notes Benjamin Ginsberg, "as well as in economic dislocations and financial manipulations that characterize the era." [GINSBERG, p. 75] In one much publicized scandal for instance, the Jewish governor of South Carolina, Franklin Moses, oversaw the issue and selling of $6 million in fraudulent state securities, as well as funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds into his own pocket. [GINSBERG, p. 75]

 

     In a broader financial sphere, very visibly at the top of the socio-economic pyramid, Jewish businessman Joseph Seligman's nefarious activities in the late 1800s helped to create the infamous "Black Friday" stock market crash.  Benjamin Ginsberg notes that the crash

 

     "ruined thousands of investors, implicated President Grant, and led to a

     Congressional investigation of [Jay] Gould and Seligman ... Similarly, in

     the early 1890s, Jacob Schiff collaborated with E. H. Harriman in the

     latter's attempts to wrest control of the Northern Pacific Railroad from J.

     P. Morgan and James Hill ... When the price of the Northern Pacific

     Stock collapsed, the entire market crashed in the notorious 'Black

     Thursday' panic that led to a nationwide economic depression."

     [GINZBURG, p. 73]

 

     In 1885 the French-based project to build the Panama Canal collapsed, resulting in financial scandal that led, in part, to Seligman again. "Both the United States Congress and the French Parliament had inquiries," says Ginsberg, "In both countries major Jewish financiers were implicated: Baron Jacques de Reinach in Paris and Joseph Seligman in the United States. Many shareholders lost everything, but Seligman lost nothing. In contemporary parlance, the Seligmans engaged in influence peddling, insider trading, and corporate asset stripping and looting -- all at the expense of credulous investors." [GINZBURG, p. 74] The French end of the Panama Canal scandals, notes Albert Lindemann, "involved large amounts of French capital and threatened national prestige -- and Jewish agents were deeply involved. The intermediaries between the Panama company and parliament were almost exclusively Jews with German names and backgrounds, some of whom tried to blackmail one another." [LINDEMANN, p. 87]

 

     The Jewish component of (Gentile) Huey Long's corrupt political machine in early 20th century Louisiana included Leon Weiss, an architect, who "was implicated in the financial scandals surrounding the administration and served prison time." [KIRKUS, 10-1-97] Herbert Stempel was willing participant in the 1950s television quiz show scandals until a Gentile, Charles Van Doren, usurped him in deceit. Jewish TV producer Lew Cowan, denying guilt, was one of the most prominent executives who lost his job in the wake of the scandals. Even at the heart of the World Zionist Organization, after founder Theodore Herzl's death, his wife Julie ("an extravagant and unstable woman") "threatened the Zionist leaders with scandals and lawsuits if they didn't meet her extravagant financial needs." [STERNBERGER, I., 8-15, 1995]

 

      At the other end of the socio-economic world, "the scant attention [popular author Irving Howe] paid to Jewish crime in World of Our Fathers, his magisterial study of the [Manhattan Jewish] Lower East side," notes Charles Silberman, "is a good example of the amnesia American Jews show about this part of their history." [SILBERMAN, p. 128] In researching the level of Jewish crime during the early decades of this century in the Lower East Side, Albert Fried notes that "I discovered that an enormously complex, richly endowed culture of vice and criminality, made up mainly of young people, thrived on the Lower East Side, that most outsiders regarded it as Tammany's bastion of power [Tammany Hall, the corrupt New York city government of the era] that the Jews themselves eventually came to look upon it as an insufferable burden of shame and embarrassment." [FRIED, p. xiv] Such embarrassment included Jewish "fagins" (bands of pickpockets), thieves, pimps, prostitutes, opium dealers, gamblers, brothel-owners, racketeers, murderers, robbers, and others of virtually any persuasion. Arson for building insurance and horse-poisoning in extortion rackets were "two offenses associated almost exclusively with Jews." [JOSELIT, p. 36] "In the area of only one square mile [in the Jewish Lower East Side]," notes Jenna Weissman Joselit, "authorities estimated there were approximately two hundred disorderly [prostitution] houses, three hundred and thirty-six gang 'hang-outs,' and over two hundred pool halls-cum-betting establishments; dance halls, a rendezvous of pimps and procurers, were found every two and one-half blocks." [JOSELIT, p. 24]

 

       Abe "the General" Greenthal, "was one of America's premier pickpockets ... Abe's home and base of operation was in New York City, but his gang traveled all over the United States picking pockets." Michael Kurtz (born in 1850) "was one of America's most celebrated burglars." Joseph 'Yoski Nigger' Toblinsky "led a gang that specialized in stealing and poisoning horses."  Benjamin (Dopey) Fein "was the first gangster to make labor racketeering a full-time and profitable business. He institutionalized the practice of furnishing gangs of hoodlums to unions in their wars against employers." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 88, 91, 94, 95]

 

     "In 1908," notes the Jerusalem Post, "Jews were 25 percent of the four million residents in New York City but 50% of the prison population." [HENRY, M., 10-4-01] That same year, the police commissioner of New York City, Theodore A. Bingham, publicly noted that half of all the criminals in his city were Jewish. "Jewish leaders," notes Robert Rockaway, "worried that Jewish gangsters provided ammunition for Jew-haters. Consequently, they steadfastly refused to acknowledge the problem in public." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 51] As stories of Jewish crime in New York City became increasingly publicized in the mainstream mass media, initially the "Yiddish press challenged the veracity of the evidence," [GOREN, p. 141] but "beginning in 1909 and reaching a climax in 1912," says Arthur Goren, "widely publicized disclosures of vice and crime among Jews created dismay and then alarm in Jewish circles. Protests of innocence were now impossible." [GOREN, p. 135]

 

     The murder of a well-known Jewish gambler, Herman Rosenthal, was particularly horrifying for the Jewish community in that it opened up a Pandora's Box of trials and testimonies profoundly unflattering to local Jewry. Goren notes that

 

        "The appalling fact was that the underworld segment which the trials

        and the indefatigable press had so thoroughly laid bare consisted almost

        entirely of Jewish gangsters and gamblers. No longer could Jewish

        apologists find comfort in viewing the phenomena as a rare deviation

        from the norm. In the accounts, the criminals appeared as

        commonplace East Side figures. Sons of hard-working parents, most

        had been exposed as children to religious training and had led average

        family lives. Even considering the hired gangsters apart, one could point

        to exceptional and touching instances of family loyalty, pride in one's

        ethnic group, and knowledge of an affection for Jewish religious

        tradition." [GOREN, p. 154]

 

     "Jewish criminals," wrote Moses Rischin, "regularly made newspaper headlines. The appearance of an ungovernable youth after the turn of the century was undeniable and excited apprehension." [FRIED, p. xvi] In April 1911, for instance, 400 Jewish shopkeepers flooded a criminal court building to complain and testify before a grand jury about robberies and gangs in their neighborhoods. [FRIED, p. 26] In 1909 alone, 3,000 Jewish "youngsters" appeared before an area juvenile court. [FRIED, p. 41] Gangster Monk Eastman alone "bossed a Jewish street gang that could field as many as 1,200 men on short notice." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 97] While many criminals were rooted in poverty, some prominent Jewish gangsters -- like Arnold Rothstein and Big Jack Zelig -- came from comfortable backgrounds. [FRIED, p. 40] The king of Jewish crime in the era, Arthur Rothstein, "was a rich man's son." [COHEN, R., p. 46] Monk Eastman's father "was solidly middle class, a restaurant owner." [COHEN, R., p. 45] Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway discounts the usual apologetics for Jewish gangsters, saying:

 

     "More likely, these men selected careers in crime because they wanted

     money, power, recognition and status; and they wanted it fast. Crime

     offered them a quick way to realize their dreams." [ROCKAWAY, R.,

     1993, p. 52]

 

      "It was the Jews, by and large," says Norman Cantor, "not the Italians, who created what was later called the Mafia. In the 1920s the Italians began to replace the Jews in the New York organized crime industry, but as late as 1940 if you wanted a spectacular hit you were looking for a representative of the Lepke Buchalter Gang, also known as Murder Inc. Jews were also prominent in the gambling trade and developed Las Vegas in the 1940s. It was a Jewish gambler who fixed the 1919 baseball World Series -- what became known as the Black Sox scandal." [CANTOR, p. 389] The perpetrator of the scandal was Arnold Rothstein, notes Charles Silberman, "the inventor of organized crime." [SILBERMAN, p. 128]

 

     "It was with some astonishment," notes Jewish critic Marvin Kitman,

 

        "that I discovered what an integral part of American Jewish life crime

        was. Our forefathers made names for themselves, such as they are,

        as gangsters, murderers, musclemen, hit men, acid throwers, arm

        breakers, bombers and all the other professions open to nice Jewish

        boys. Prostitution, vice, alcohol, gambling, racketeering, extortion,

        and all the other things that fill the newspaper today and that I gladly

        have been attributing as character flaws in other groups of founding

        fathers: Those were our things ... I was shocked at how deep our

        roots are in all the sinks of depravity and corruption ... The Jews

        were the first ones to realize the link between organized crime and

        organized politics. They led the way in corrupting the police and city

        hall. They first realized the value of gang/syndicate cartels in business

        to reduce the killing of each other. They were monopolists of the

        highest order ... We wrote the book, so to speak, on crime, but it's all

        forgotten." [KITMAN, p. 9]

 

      "Some disgruntled Jewish immigrants," says Jonathan Sarna, "chose crime as their vehicle of upward mobility. Through robbery and fencing operations, they created a parasitic counter-industry that lived off the garment trade, skimming its profits for personal benefit. Others made their living by exploiting Jewish religious practices (the standard history of the kosher-meat industry in New York is aptly entitled Fraud, Corruption, and Holiness)." [SARNA, Jewish, p. 53]

 

      Kosher meat is food that is prepared according to traditional Orthodox religious standards; it presumably entails extra time and energy to prepare which escalates prices to be higher than non-kosher food. An investigation in New York City sponsored by a Jewish community organization in 1915 discovered that 60% of the meat sold as kosher was fraudulent: most rabbis who supervised kosher sanctions were under slaughterhouse employ and abandoned strict religious adherence. [GOREN, p. 79] Among 6,000 New York area butchers who allegedly only sold kosher meat to fellow Jews, there were "few who did not, at some point, deal in unkosher meat."[GASTWIRT, p. 113] The Jewish slaughterhouse system was also involved in price-fixing, extortion, racketeering, fist fights in the synagogue, and even murder. "The intense rivalry and competition in the kosher poultry business," notes Harold Gastwirt, "made it prey to racketeering and violence." [GASTWIRT, p. 46]

 

      Jewish gangsters were also violently active in support of Jewish unions or employers, depending upon who paid them. "Some of the so-called Jewish unions," remarked a veteran of Jewish labor activities, "... fell early in their careers upon evil days: underworld characters, gangsters, got a foothold in the organization ... Unfortunately, the element engaged to help would refuse to clear out when their services were no longer wanted." [GOREN, p. 304] Rita Simon notes another of the political dimensions of underworld [and New York City governmental] corruption:

 

      "In exchange for police protection of his gang, [gang leader] Monk

      [Easton] employed 'repeaters' (repeat voters) at the polls in favor of

      Tammany Hall, the local Democratic machine." [SIMON, p. 139]

 

       Jewish crime was widespread in a number of the largest urban areas of America, some of it eventually "syndicated" throughout the country, at times even in cooperation with the Italian mafia. In Chicago the Westside Jewish underworld ward was known as the "Bloody Twentieth." A 1906 description of the area claimed that "murderers, robbers, and thieves of the worst kind are born, reared, and grow to maturity in numbers that far exceed the record of any similar district on the face of the globe." [FRIED, p. 90]  (Even Al Capone's accountant, who later rose to further notoriety, was Jewish, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik.) [LACEY, p. 18] In Cleveland, the Jewish community had its "noisome and brutal Woodland section"; in Detroit it was the eastside, most prominently ruled by the Purple Gang; in Boston it was the Chelsea quarter; Newark had its "fierce third ward"; and in Philadelphia Jewish crime, featuring boss Harry Stromberg, was largely located in the southeast area. These cities, with New York, says Albert Fried, "held the worst, that is the most criminalized, of the Jewish neighborhoods in America." [FRIED, p. 90]  In London, England, notes Daniel Levy, "the Jews were involved in assorted criminal activities. They committed petty thievery, forgery, and illegal distilling of booze. Some sailed to eastern Europe and convinced young girls that jobs and bachelors awaited them in England, only to ship them off to Indian or Argentinean white slave markets." [LEVY, D, p. 20] Earlier forms of blackmail by non-Jewish British gangs were "developed by Jewish gangs (formed after the great immigration of the 1880s) into extortion from legitimate shopkeepers. Much as Jewish gangsters liked to portray themselves as honourable knights defending their co-religionists against anti-Semitic thugs, they were just as likely to live as predators upon their fellow Jews. A gang of extortionists known as the 'Bessarabians' were headed by a professional boxer who called himself Max Moses in private life and 'Kid McCoy' in the ring." [FIDO, M., 2000, p. 17]

 

    Poland? In the early twentieth century, future Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion was jailed in Warsaw, Poland, for suspected radical political activism. "That was the first time," he said later,

 

     "that I ever came into contact with the dregs of society. I was shaken

     to the core at the language and behavior. I never had the slightest notion

     that such people ever existed ... The thing that shook me most was that

     these criminals were Jews." [Daniel Kurzon suggests that these included

     members of a rival Jewish political group which Ben-Gurion considered

     "more dangerous criminals" than the "brothel keepers." [KURZMAN, D.,

     1983, p. 67]

 

     Prominent Jews in Chicago's criminal underworld included Louis 'Diamond Louie' Cowan, Hymie 'the Loud Mouth' Levine, Sam 'Sammy the Greener' Jacobson, Maxie Eisen, Murray 'the Camel' Humphreys, and (non-Jewish) Al Capone's money man, Jake Guzik. [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 43]  In 1924, "Chicago Jewish leader" S. M. Melamed warned about the "great number of Jews in the underworld." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 49]

 

     "Bootlegging in Boston," notes Robert Rockaway,

 

     "was controlled by Charles 'King' Solomon ... He headed one of the

     largest liquor, vice, and narcotics smuggling syndicates in New

     England ... In the 1920s, Solomon ran the Boston underworld."

     [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 34]

 

      But even smaller cities, like Minneapolis and adjacent St. Paul, had serious problems with Jewish crime. In November 1927 the Minneapolis Saturday Press ran an article that enflamed local public opinion, quoting the remarks of a non-Jewish gangster:

 

      "90% of the crimes committed against society in this city are committed

      by Jew gangsters ... It is Jew, Jew, Jew, as long as one cares to comb

      over the records. I am launching no attack against the Jewish people as a

      RACE. I am merely calling attention to a FACT." [FRIED, p. 113]

 

     Originally from Sioux Falls, Iowa, prominent Jewish gangsters in Minneapolis included "Kid" Cann (Isador Blumenfeld), Yiddie Bloom, and the Berman brothers (Davie and Chickie). [LACEY, p. 66] Cann is believed to have been responsible for the murder of Walter Ligget, publisher of Midwest America, for a series of articles the paper printed about the Minneapolis criminal underworld. Ligget was gunned down in front of his family while Christmas shopping. "Much of [Minneapolis'] illicit business," notes Robert Rockaway,

 

     "was managed by Isadore 'Kid Cann' ... Blumenfeld and his all-Jewish

     syndicate ... In 1942, the FBI identified Kid Cann as 'the overlord

     of the Minneapolis, Minnesota underworld." [ROCKAWAY, R.,

     1993, p. 48]

 

     Cleveland mob leaders included Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, Sam Tucker, and Lou Rothkopf. After prohibition, "the Cleveland mob joined with Lansky and his confederates ... and formed the core of the most sophisticated national crime syndicate in America." [BLOCK, A., p. 165] Shondor Birns (Szandor Birnstein) was another prominent Cleveland mobster, lasting in the criminal underworld for decades til 1975, when he was assassinated by a car bomb. In early years, he was part of the Maxie Diamond (also Jewish) gang. Among Birns' crime partners was Mervin Gold who "was accused of defrauding banks and the Small Business Administration by using stolen Canadian bonds as collateral for loans. He fled to Israel," but eventually returned. Birns, noted by the Cleveland Plain Dealer for his reputation as a "charming killer," was suspected of Gold's eventual murder. [MCGUANGLE, F., 7-11-99, p. 5H]

 

     Reading, Pennsylvania? As non-Jewish mobster Patsy Lepera recounted in his autobiography:

 

     "Reading at that time, in the thirties and forties, was run by the Minkers --

     Abe and his brother Izzy. They had a nephew named Alex Fudeman

     who fronted for them ... Even though my father was connected right

     to Sicily, he had to do what the Jews wanted done in Reading, because

     that was their town. They eliminated the Italians. At one time it was

     a two-mob town ... One thing I learn as I go through life is if you come

     up against a Jew or an Italian, you check him out. You don't do nothing

     against him -- you check him out careful. Jews don't belong to the [Italian]

     mob, but they're connected strong. An awful lot of Jews are connected

     strong." [LEPERA, P., 1974, p. 7-8]

 

 

    Missouri? Charlie Birger (born Sachna Itzik Berger), prominent bootlegger, was hung in 1928 for the murder of the mayor of West City, Missouri. He is believed to have been "responsible directly or indirectly for the murders of at least a dozen people, many of whom had been his loyal followers." One of the killed who was not a follower was a local Ku Klux Klan leader. [DE NEAL, G., 1998, p. xviii]

 

     To what lengths Jewish fraud and crime could go might be measured in the chutzpah of Bernie Barton (originally Blaustein) who even set up a fake church with a junkie as preacher as a "front for fencing stolen goods." [DEUTSCH, G., p. 7]

 

      A number of modern respectable Jewish fortunes were founded on links to the underworld in the Prohibition era. Most noteworthy, the Seagram's alcohol fortune (the Canadian Bronfman family) grew to power by getting their alcohol into criminal hands who smuggled it into the United States. Bronfman, who bristled when anyone called him a bootlegger, had a distribution deal for his booze with Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky. [BIRMINGHAM, p. 159] Detroit's largely Jewish Purple Gang was also extremely active in running illegal booze from Windsor across the river border. The Purple Gang's activities also included "gambling, prostitution, extortion, loan sharking, and rackets of every kind." [FRIED, p. 102] So much smuggling was going on between Canada and the United States across Lake Erie that it was known as "the Jewish Lake." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 37]  During prohibition too, "[Federal] officials labeled sacramental wine [for religious purposes] one of the chief sources of illegal liquor in the nation," notes Jenna Weissman Joselit, "Furthermore, calling the record level of usage a 'national scandal,' they saw the problem as largely a Jewish one." [JOSELIT]

    Here's what Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway says about Detroit's Purple Gang, and Jewish gangs generally:

     "During Prohibition (1920-1933), Jewish gangsters became major operatives
      in the American underworld and played prominent roles in the creation of
      organized crime in the United States. At the time, Jewish gangs dominated illicit
      activiites in a number of America's largest cities, including Cleveland, Detroit,       
      Minneapolis, Newark, New York, and Philadelphia. The gang dealt in bootlegging,       
      gambling, extortion, drugs, and murder, and developed a reputation for being
      more ruthless than Al Capone's mob in Chicago. The Purple's decade-long reign
      of terror ended when most of the gang's members either went to prison or were       
      murdered by rivals ... During the Prohibition era (1919-1933) 50 percent of the
      country's leading bootleggers were Jews, and Jewish criminals financed and
      directed much of the nation's narcotics traffic ... While Jews predominated in
      their quarter [in Purple Gang-era Detroit], other immigrants and ethnic groups
      lived there as well. One former resident of the old neighborhood joked that it was
      of the old neighborhood joked that i was easy to distinguish the Jewish dwelling
      from those occupied by non-Jews. 'The non-Jews grew flowers in front of their
      houses,' he said. 'The Jews grew dirt.'" [ROCKAWAY, R., 2001, p. 113-]

 

 

     Elsewhere, "bootlegging in Prohibition-era Philadelphia was directed by Max 'Boo Boo' Huff ... Huff's successor as Philadelphia's dominant Jewish mobster was Harry Stromberg, alias Nig Rosen ... He also led what was called the '69th Street  Gang' that dealt in prostitution, extortion and labor racketeering. His influence extended as far as Washington, Baltimore, and Atlantic City ... When Stromberg left Philadelphia, he was superseded by his driver and bodyguard, Willie Weisberg, a long-time member of the city's Jewish underworld." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 32, 34]

 

      Another modern Jewish fortune similarly constructed is that of the Annenbergs, which was founded upon Moses Annenberg's horse racing news monopoly that he arranged with the criminal underworld. "That Annenberg and the Prohibition and gambling mobs had interests in common is indisputable," says Albert Fried, "An information monopoly, nominally independent, gave the mobs the wherewithal to police the complex, sprawling kingdom of the Book [i.e., gambling and bookies]; it was an instrument of their sovereignty. In return Annenberg was allowed to reap inordinate profits and become one of the richest men in the land, the founder of one of its singular dynasties." [FRIED, p. 118]

 

     Another of the most prominent Jewish American family fortunes, the "fabulously rich Pritzker family from Chicago," had links, however indirectly, to organized crime even in more recent history. They were involved, as "clients of the [Bruce] Kanter firm," who ran a variety of shady Caribbean companies. Kanter, who "had direct ties to organized crime," [BLOCK, A., p. 162] served on the Hyatt hotel company's Board of Directors (Hyatt is one of many companies owned by the Pritzkers). [BLOCK, A., p. 191] Also, notes Allen Block,

   

     "A little digging into their background produced troubling questions.

      It was discovered that the source of some Pritzker money comes from

      the racket-ridden Teamsters Pension Fund ... Investigators probing the

      Pritzker empire were intrigued by its connection to the Pension Fund.

      This was especially so when it discovered that both [mob-linked] Jimmy

      Hoffa and Allen Dorfman personally worked on Pritzker loans."

      [BLOCK, A., p. 192]

 

     In 1997, major publishers afforded two legendary Jewish conmen of international (dis)repute respective biographies. Adam Worth started out re-joining and re-deserting various Civil War regiments (both Union and Confederate) for enlistment bonuses and later expanded his exploits into forgery, larceny, robbery, burglary, and other criminal mainstays. In England, Sir Robert Anderson, head of Criminal Investigations at Scotland Yard, observed in 1907 that "Adam Worth was the Napoleon of crime. None other could hold a candle to him." The Pinkerton security agency noted that "in the death of Adam Worth there probably departed the most inventive and daring criminal in modern times ... Among all the men Pinkertons have known in a life time, this man was the most remarkable criminal of them all." [MCINTYRE, p. 287] Novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used Worth as his model for Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes' arch-nemesis. An important associate in Worth's earlier years was "Mother" Mandelbaum, described in her era as "the great crime promoter of modern times," the "most successful fence in the history of New York" and the woman who "first put crime in America on a syndicated basis." Starting in 1862, over the next two decades she was reputed to have "handled between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000 worth of stolen property." [MCINTYRE, B., 1997, p. 29, 30]

      A few years later another real-life rogue (and Jewish) notable, Morris Cohen (the subject of the second biography), rose from a life as a western Canadian circus barker and pickpocket to an adventurous life as an arms dealer, bodyguard, and general to Chinese leader Sun Yat-Sen. [LEVY,  D.] Later he served under Chiang Kai-Shek. He also functioned as a liaison for Zionist influences to Chinese leadership. [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 99]

A similar Jewish con-man was Elias Abraham Rosenberg, a "rascal" who arrived in Hawaii in 1887. There, he

     "ingratiated himself with King David Kalakaua by his chanting and so-called
     occult powers. He soon became the King's soothsayer and astrologer, acquiring
     such power over the monarch that the Hawaiian press bitterly denounced him
     as a 'Holy Moses.' Rosenberg taught the King some Hebrew and was persuaded
     to appoint him appraiser of customs. He was given quarters in the Iolani Palace,
     where he practiced magic, read the stars, and chanted Bible stories in Hebrew."
     [KOPPMAN/POSTAL, 1978, p. 229-230]

 

    In 1998, Jewish fraudster Trebitsch Lincoln was also afforded a biography. Lincoln, noted a reviewer, was "the king of dupers" and "a thwarted megalomaniac who was also a champion con man." Born in Hungary in 1879, he immigrated to England and converted to Christianity. He became a member of Parliament, and later tried to become a British, and then a German, spy. He turned up as a supporter of the right-wing Kapp Putsch in Berlin in 1920, became an abbot of a Buddhist temple in Shanghai, fleeced his devotees, welcomed invading Japanese, became a Nazi apologist/propagandist and on and on in the life of a human chameleon. [BERRY, N., 5-8-98, p. 28]

 

      In 1999, the (London) Daily Mail highlighted the Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, "of Jewish and Romany stock." Both were imprisoned in the 1960s. Only Reggie survives, "the best-known gangster in Britain ... By 1963, through their networks of thugs and thieves, Ronnie and Reggie were lording it over London's underworld and became figures in London society."

 

     Decades after the likes of Worth and Cohen, famous Jewish underworld figures like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky made the American scene. Siegel was instrumental in creating the legalized crime-laden playground of Las Vegas, starting things off at the Flamingo Hotel. Joseph Sacher headed the nearby Sands Hotel; Sacher "was second only to Lansky in the [crime] Syndicate. Years ... [later] he fled the U.S. and went into exile in Israel." [KELLEY, K., p. 219]  Allen Friedman notes another early Jewish criminal influence in Sin City:  "The real potential of Las Vegas was not understood until Moe Sedway arrival in 1941." [FRIEDMAN, A., p. 82]

 

      Meyer Lansky eventually "retired" from a successful life of crime with some $150-300 million after corrupt escapades that included Florida's "Gold Coast," the Bahamas, and a gambling resort in pre-Castro Cuba. "At the height of his notoriety," says Robert Lacey, "Meyer Lansky was reckoned to be, and was targeted by the U.S. Justice Department as, the biggest gangster in the United States -- a dangerous lawbreaker of extraordinary power. He was identified as the Mafia's banker, the boss of the National Crime Syndicate, the head of the Combination -- the Chairman of the Board." [LACEY, R., p. 10-11]

 

      Las Vegas has long been a hotbed of underworld influence and a worldwide attraction for gambling and prostitution. The Italian Mafia has also, from the conception of Las Vegas as a leisure Mecca, held great sway in the city, but its most famous underworld personages have always been Jewish mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.  The great scope of Jewish contribution to the creation, and dubious ethics, of Las Vegas may be measured by the words of professor Allen Balboni. Here he discusses the development of the desert city as a gambling resort area:

 

     "Most of the [Las Vegas] hotel builders were Jewish Americans.

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