COMMENTS PIRATED FROM AN ANTISEMITIC SOURCE
The ravings of Jacqueline Walker ( JC, May 6) about Jews and the horrors of the slave trade are as vile as they are antisemitic, racist and ignorant, and truly in the vein of her Labour Party friend Ken Livingstone — despite her own Jewish roots.
Jews were in the Caribbean because they were fleeing the Inquisition in Europe from about 1600 onwards. Many books detail this, one of the best being Edward Kritzler’s ‘‘Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean’’.
Indeed, he points out that many Jews themselves — men, women and children — were enslaved by the Christians and suffered the same fate as many Africans. The tiny number of Jews involved in slavery were model masters — as far as anyone could be in that crime —and many freed their slaves, who often converted to Judaism.
Furthermore, she would do well to remember that rival African tribes were themselves cashing in selling fellow Africans for great profit to the real culprits in all this — the Arab Muslim slave dealers and middle men who gathered the slaves and sold them on. Indeed, still to this day Arabs remain behind most modern slavery in Africa and Arabia. So why does she not point all this out, too?
A thorough study of the alleged involvement of Jews in the slave trade in any significant numbers — it was less than two per cent — was debunked long ago in a scholarly book, Jews and the Slave trade: setting the record straight by Eli Farber,
The words of Walker are merely lifted from the ravings of the black antisemite Louis Farrakhan, who tried to blame the Jews for all the ills of black people from the 1960s onwards, with no basis in fact at all — as many black people themselves have testified.
Finally, the Africans did not suffer a Holocaust; while Jews were condemned to death and extermination, Africans were — generally speaking and excepting the horrors of the transport ships and cruelty — kept alive as a valuable commodity to feed the wealth of the estate owners of the Christian world. Millions and millions survived; only five per cent of European Jewry were alive in 1945. Martin Sugarman London, NW4