191
Canada and the United States
Jews and the American Slave Trade.
New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction. 1998. Pp. xiv, 326.
$34.95.
SAUL S. FRIEDMAN.
This book is designed, as Saul S. Friedman states
clearly in his preface, to refute the charges detailed in
The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, which
the Nation of Islam published in 1991. According to
the leaders of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan
and Khalid Abdul Muhammad, Jews dominated the
African slave trade, were the prime exploiters of
African Americans in the United States during the era
of slavery, and have continued to exploit them ever
since. The accusations made in The Secret Relationship
sound like an updated and African-American version
of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; reputable
scholars such as David Brion Davis, Seymour Drescher, and Eli Faber have written about the book's
inaccuracies and unsubstantiated charges. One wonders, therefore, why such falsehoods have been published and why some people have accepted them
almost as the revealed word. Friedman, however, has
chosen to refute the statements, point by point, to
show that The Secret Relationship is "one part fact and
nine parts fable" (p. 63).
Friedman reviews the history of world slavery, indicates where and when it existed, and moves his analysis
from the ancient world through the American Civil
War. There are additional chapters on Afrocentrism
and the alleged black-Jewish alliance of the civil rights
era. Throughout his argument, Friedman is at pains to
demonstrate that other people were much more involved with slaves than were the Jews, that Jewish slave
traders were few, that Jewish slave owners were kind to
their chattels, and that whatever Jews may have done
was also done by non-Jews-and to a greater extent.
Although I agree with everything that Friedman
writes, there is no need to show that Jews were better
than, or not as bad as, others who trafficked in slaves
or that Jews were more active during the civil rights
movement of the 1960s than were members of other
white groups.
It would have been helpful to readers if Friedman
had placed his critique of The Secret Relationship in the
broader context of African-American misperceptions
and unthinking criticism of Jews since the nineteenth
century. One need only go through the articles and
editorials in African-American newspapers and the
writings and/or speeches of James Baldwin, Lenora E.
Berson, Horace Mann Bond, Ralph Bunche, Kenneth
Clark, Harold Cruse, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon
Johnson, Booker T. Washington, Lunabelle Wedlock,
and Richard Wright to note how frequently antiSemitic attitudes crop up. The Secret Relationship is the
most vicious and mean-spirited of the "analyses" and
differs in kind, as well as in degree, from the others
because it assumes a Jewish conspiracy to undermine
the world's black people. Although it purports to be a
scholarly evaluation, I think that most scholars would
reject that contention.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Historians might usefully probe original sources,
including extant manuscript collections of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) and other African-American organizations,
to discover why hostility toward Jews has resonated in
and served as a rallying cry for the black community
for more than a century. Is there some connection
between fundamentalist Christianity and anti-Semitism that transcends particular events or actions? Despite the fact that Farrakhan is Muslim, his speeches
often use phrases and images familiar to Christians.
For example, in his 1985 talk at Madison Square
Garden in New York City he asked, "Who were the
enemies of Jesus," to which the audience responded,
"Jews! Jews! Jews!" In that same talk, he also suggested comparisons for his audience: "Jesus had a
controversy with the Jews. Farrakhan has a controversy with the Jews. Jesus was hated by the Jews.
Farrakhan is hated by the Jews. Jesus was scourged by
Jews in their temple. Farrakhan is scourged by Jews in
their synagogues" (cited in Julius Lester, "The Times
Has Come," The New Republic 193 [October 23,1985]:
12, 14). Friedman was on solid ground when he
attacked Farrakhan and discussed the outrageousness
of, and the inaccuracies in, The Secret Relationship. I
wish, however, that he had expanded his focus. Showing that the information in this book is baseless will not
significantly influence those who are willing to follow
Farrakhan or change the views of individuals who have
already dismissed the work as not worthy of academic
attention. But putting his critique in the broader
context of more than a century's worth of AfricanAmerican prejudice toward Jews would certainly make
American historians rethink their own assessments of
black-Jewish relationships.
LEONARD DINNERSTEIN
University of Arizona
MAGGIE MONTESINOS SALE. The Slumbering Volcano:
American Slave Revolts and the Production ofRebellious
Masculinity. (New Americanists.) Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press. 1997. Pp. x, 264. Cloth $49.95, paper
$16.95.
In 1853, Frederick Douglass took up his pen to
compose his sole work of fiction, The Heroic Slave,
loosely based on the mutiny aboard the Creole. Although the novel is almost forgotten by historians
today, especially in comparison to Douglass's celebrated Narrative, Maggie Montesinos Sale reminds us
how often black activists and slave rebels-from the
Amistad Africans to Denmark Vesey-inspired penny
pamphlets, popular orations, and antislavery novels.
Slave conspiracies and seaboard mutinies have attracted a good deal of historical attention of late, as
scholars fight to include those black insurgents traditionally depicted as marginal or deviant in the mainstream of the American saga. But only Sale has
thought to investigate the way in which fictional depictions of slave rebelliousness helped to shape the
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1999