Jews Have Been Stirring Blacks Up Against Us for Centuries

Diversity Macht Frei
December 28, 2017

Once you begin to take a real, hard look at Jews, and to study their history, one of the funniest things is when you come across some historical episode you hadn’t known anything about before, maybe even outwith the broad contours of history that you’re familiar with, and you find Jews acting exactly as you would expect them to act based on the prejudices that you’ve now conceived against them.

Here we have an example of this from our old friend Simon Schama.

Short version: In the late 16th/early 17th century some Jews set up in west Africa, where they traded weapons to negroes in return for slaves. The weapons they traded gave one bunch of negroes an advantage over their neighbours. These newly empowered negroes would attack other tribes, enslave them, then hand over the slaves to the Jews in return for more weapons. The perfect Jewish system, you might think. But no. Christians appeared on the scene, threatening the Jewish “swords-for-slaves” racket. (Note the Jews were running slaves in Africa before Europeans had even appeared.) So the Jews, pretending to be one with the Africans (“My fellow Africans”) stirred up the brown man against Whitey, and Muslim “(My fellow brothers in Moses”) against Christian. Then, having brought ruin upon the Africans after pretending to be African, the Jews departed for Amsterdam, where they would soon betray the Dutch (to the English) after pretending to be Dutch.

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In the first two decades of the seventeenth century, a small but thriving colony of openly professing Portuguese Jews and reverting New Christiansestablished itself on the West African coast of Senegal. Though Portuguese power (now part of the Spanish monarchy) established on the island archipelagos of Cape Verde and São Tomé loomed large, it stopped short of outright conquest on the African mainland, not least because the Wolof kings of Senegambia would have made formidable adversaries. The Jews moved into the interstices between these two powers and prospered by selling the sword and dagger blades the Senegambian warrior kingdoms needed to maintain their own dominance, especially in captive raids upriver. In exchange, the Jews took hides, beeswax, ivory and slaves. The ivory and wax went home to Amsterdam; the slaves to the Caribbean and Brazil.

As in India and China, the relationship with the Wolofs was close enough for some of the men to take African concubine-servants and even wives who were then converted, and the mulatto children accepted as full Jews. Patrilineal rules of descent again applied in defining who was Jewish and who was not. A mixed-race generation of Eurafrican Jews, the males all circumcised, then grew up with strong connections to their native origins. The result was that when the Portuguese pressed the kings to get rid of these undesirable competitors they ran into unexpectedly stiff resistance. In West Africa, knowing the Portuguese would bring them trouble, the Jews went on a pre-emptive counter-attack against the Christians.

When the Portuguese targeted a group of Jews based in the town of Joal on the ‘Petite Côte’, they fought back (in an area where some of the rulers were Muslim) by describing the Catholics as pagans. Ruefully one of the Portuguese reported that the Jews represented them as ‘people who worship sticks and stones and who seek to harm them [the Jews] because they followed the way of Musa, Moses in the language of the Blacks and further they presented themselves to the King [of Joal] as initiates circumcised like the King himself and the other Black people’. The Jews on the Petite Côte also knew how to appeal to the tribal kings’ indignation at Portuguese pretensions to rule inland as well as the island dominions and coastal forts. When they got another comeuppance, a New Christian (many of whom reverted to Judaism in Africa and remained Jewish when they went back to Amsterdam) made no attempt to disguise his pleasure at the African king’s refusal to go along with Portuguese presumptions.

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Source: Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492–1900 by Simon Schama