Hate propaganda masquerading as history: Louis Farrakhan's latest.

The Nation of Islam's The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, Volume 2--published more than two years ago--is an exercise in the dishonest use of historical sources, in the service of a vision of an ideology of antisemitism and racial separatism. African Americans and Jews need honest dialogue--not assaults on historical truth meant to demonize each other.

INTRODUCTION

Twenty years ago, Volume 1 argued that a relative handful of Jewish merchants were able to implement "the Black Holocaust": the forced transfer over 400 years from old world to new and enslavement of 10 to 12 million uprooted Africans (Farrakhan claims 100 million!). Despite numerous refutations, beginning with my Farrakhan 's Reign of Historical Error published by the Wiesenthal Center in 1992, the Nation of Islam's anonymous Historical Research Department has never retracted its bizarre claims.(1)

Now, we have Volume 2 of The Secret Relationship building on Volume 1's treacherous foundation a new superstructure of lies centering on the false claim that "Jews gained control of the Black economy" after the Civil War.

Farrakhan's historical crew throw into the mix new conspiracy theories that Rothschilds ran the American economy, Jewish merchants learned to exploit black sharecroppers from the Talmud, Jewish pimps monopolized organized prostitution, and the KKK and Freemasons were both fronts for the Jews! (2)

We will dissect here some of the core mendacities at the heart of this malevolent work.

THE ROTHSCHILDS DID NOT CONTROL THE JIM CROW SOUTH

Like most antisemitic polemics of the last century or so, Farrakhan's pseudo-historians insist on embedding their immediate concern--Black Jewish relations--in the "diabolic desire of the European Rothschild banking family to control the world of wealth." In the 1890s, the Rothschild obsession led both discontented farmers and declining aristocrats to sympathize with Democratic-Populist presidential nominee William Jennings Bryon who promised to prevent America from being "crucified on a Cross of Gold"; in the 1920s, it led industrialist Henry Ford to rail against 'Jewish international bankers." (3)

Niall Ferguson's exhaustive two-volume history of The House of Rothschild tells the real story beginning in the 1830s when the English House of Rothschild was convinced to buy cotton-backed securities by Nicholas Biddle's Bank of the United States. Stripped of its government charter by Andrew Jackson, Biddle's Bank soon suffered an ignominious bankruptcy. Losing millions on their investment, the Rothschilds remained for the remainder of the nineteenth century wary of investing in "that blasted country" America. In the 1850's when the Rothschilds took another risk, they chose Gold Rush California not the South's Cotton Kingdom, to make a strategic U.S. investment. During the American Civil War, their American representative August Belmont--a pro-Union Democrat--wisely convinced them to invest in U.S. government securities rather than Confederate bonds. In 1863, the English House of Rothschild shunned a massive Confederate bond offering floated by Lob Moses Erlanger. The head of the Frankfurt House of Rothschild gave an unprecedented interview to Harper's Weekly stating that his family joined all Germany "in condemning this act of lending money to establish a slaveholding government" by "an apostate Jew." (4)

JEWISH PEDDLERS AND STOREKEEPERS WERE NOT A DOMINATING, ALL-POWERFUL INFLUENCE IN THE REGION

The Farrakhanite historians are obsessed with the "swarm" or "invasion" of Jewish peddlers who allegedly descended on the South after the Civil War. Perhaps several thousand Jewish immigrants seeking a new beginning in America did see the postwar South as the land of opportunity. One question is how many? The Nation of Islam's book cites in its footnotes the exemplary study by economic historians Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch of "the economic consequences of emancipation," but fails to give the reader their statistical conclusion. In 1880, 11 percent of peddlers and shopkeepers--including non-Jews and Jews--in the South were "foreign born" which would mean that the "swarm" of Jewish immigrants in business in the rural South was far from a majority. (5)

The South's new Jewish businessmen were not numerous enough to be a majority of the merchant class, but were a visible enough minority--because of their accents, ethnicity, and the prevalent Judas and Shylock stereotypes--to be scapegoated. The Farrakhanites prefer to cite writers tinged with antisemitism who offered malicious accounts of Jews as the taskmasters of the post-bellum Southern economy.

They even give two pages to that "keen observer" of American Southern history, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who described Jews "leaping en masse" on "the exploited tribe" of black freedman. (6) Next comes novelist Mark Twain--ambivalent about Jews--who in an 1898 essay in Harper's Magazine insisted, without any evidence, that there were 25 million Jews in the U.S. (the actual figure was 250,000) including hundreds of thousands who had descended on the Mississippi Valley! (7)

Finally, there's the unfortunate case of W. E. B. Du Bois who, early in his brilliant career when he was still under the influence of the genteel antisemitism he absorbed at Harvard and German universities, wrote that the "shrewd and unscrupulous" Russian Jewish immigrant is "heir of the slave baron." Du Bois in the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Souls of Black Folk (1953) rewrote this passage--not only because he was shaken by the Holocaust--but because he admitted that the informants he relied on in 1903 were biased and unreliable. (8)

JEWISH MERCHANTS TYPICALLY TREATED THEIR BLACK CUSTOMERS BETTER THAN NONJEWISH MERCHANTS

There is general agreement that Jewish peddlers and storekeepers after the Civil War often won the business of newly freed African Americans by offering them a combination of courtesy and credit. This meant a smile and a handshake, the respectful appellation "Mr." and "Mrs.," and a willingness to sell consumer goods for the promise of future payment in cotton. No particular friend of the Jews, the Southern historian Bell Wiley recalled that in his hometown, the lone Jewish storekeeper "got most of the black trade because he treated Negroes as human beings and was kindly to them, taking time to joke, inquire about their families, and otherwise manifest interest in them." Farrakhan's historians, in contrast, characterize the behavior of pioneering Jewish merchants as a Jewish onslaught by "a new predatory capitalism focused entirely on the vulnerable Black ex-slave." (9)

A good example of how the Falrakhanites treat historical evidence is what they do with the story of Russian Jewish immigrant peddler and then merchant David Pearlman who arrived in Georgia around 1880. According to Louis Schmier who edited his reminiscences, Pearlman initially viewed the first Black people he had ever seen as dybbuks, but quickly overcame his flight and saw parallels between the plight of persecuted Jews and that of Black freedmen who deserved to be treated "like menschen." Though his older cousin Sam advised against too much familiarity with his Black customers, Pearlman broke a racial taboo by accepting an invitation to sleep under the roof of a Black family who taught him his first words of English. Then--with the encouragement of a white landowner who agreed to act as a guarantor--Pearlman began selling to his Black clientele of tenant farmers and sharecroppers everything from farm supplies to machine-made clothes to jewelry on credit. Things went smoothly until a white customer--angered that a Black customer was served first in the Jew's store--told Pearlman that he was a fool and a hypocrite because the credit he extended Blacks was being manipulated by the white landowner to drive them deeper into debt than Pearlman knew. The Jewish store owner did what he could to make amends to his Black customers from that point on by charging them less than whites for the same goods and by taking control of their credit accounts out of the white landowner's hands. (10)

The Farrakhanite book devotes three pages to this story--but emphasizes the racism or cynicism of Pearlman's cousin--not his own decency and tolerance. The book leaves out entirely his decision to charge Black customers less than whites, and to stop the landowner from exploiting their credit accounts. Pearlman was probably an exceptional man whose humane treatment of African Americans put him at one end of a spectrum that went all the way from good to bad treatment of Black customers by Jewish businessmen. (11)

Historians Steven Hertzberg and Arnold Shankman discern a relatively amicable relationship between Jewish merchants and their Black clientele. Occasionally, there were ugly episodes--from scuffling youngsters trading the epithets "nigger" and "Christ killer," to Black complaints about price gouging, to crimes committed against Jewish merchants including robbery and even murder True to form, the Farrakhanite book--while always willing to believe the worst about Jews--indignantly refuses to admit that African Americans ever committed crimes, whether or not motivated by prejudice, against Jews. (12)

Jewish merchants willing to extend credit were often the only option for Black tenant farmers or sharecroppers who wanted to stretch their purchasing power to buy, not only seed and tools to farm, but consumer goods ranging from wedding rings, to calico dresses, to a new pair of shoes. Jews were also notable in their willingness to hire Blacks on better terms than white landowners. We know this because, around 1890, white farmers in Louisiana and Mississippi--accusing Jews of displacing them by hiring Black tenants--launched a violent movement to drive out the Jews called "whitecapping." Over 400 African Americans signed resolutions in support of their Jewish employers. When public opinion polling finally came into its own in the 1960s, a third or more of Southern blacks registered a preference for working for, buying from, and renting from Jews--a much higher percentage than preferred non-Jewish whites. (13)

There is a longstanding component of ambivalence, especially among African American business people combining emulation with envy and admiration with antagonism. The Nation of Islam's book echoes wild accusations from over a hunched years ago that "Jewish moneylenders" held "the purse strings of the world" and were "fast getting control of Southern merchandising, farming, and banking interests." (14)

Nevertheless, the preference among Southern Blacks for Jews as employers, merchants, and landlords is significant. Civil rights activist Aaron Henry, who grew up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, recalled that the Black community patronized Jewish merchants because "you would consider them the better of the white element that you had to deal with." (15)

JEWISH COTTON BROKERS DID NOT BETRAY BLACKS BY HELPING TO RESTORE THE SOUTH'S ECONOMY AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

The Farrakhanites' book focuses much attention on the "kosher cotton connection" or alleged conspiracy involving Jewish business families like the Lehmans and the Seligmans whose trajectory led from their start as peddlers and storekeepers ha the antebellum South to their ultimate success as merchant bankers in postwar New York. In fact, the Lehmans--who remained in the wartime South as supporters of the Confederacy--and the Seligmans--who left the region earlier and supported the wartime North--both helped to restore the Southern economy after 1865. The Lehmans did so directly as cotton brokers founding the New York Cotton Exchange in 1870. The Seligmans did so indirectly as commodity investors, buying and selling cotton futures. Elliott Ashkenazi in his history of the Jews of Louisiana traces the close ties between the New Orleans and New York business communities during critical periods like the 1870s when Jewish firms involved in the cotton trade averaged an annual profit of 15 percent--not exorbitant for involvement in a highly speculative business in which investors could be wiped out overnight by crop disease or a collapse of cotton prices. (16)

The sin of the Jewish cotton merchants, in the eyes of the Farrakhanites, is that "Jewish merchants brought capital investment--a reprieve, or veritable pardon--to their fellow racists.... [they] supplied a lifeline, the economic oxygen to keep alive a system so injurious to Blacks that the effects are still prominently felt to this day--a century and a half after emancipation." Except for the Jews, "Blacks could have entered a truly free environment and recreated the African communal systems that had sustained them for thousands of years before the arrival of the Europeans." This is a fantasy. The real tragedy of Reconstruction, first dissected by W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s, was the failure of the federal government to follow through on emancipating slaves by economically empowering them with the proverbial "forty acres and a mule." Jews were not responsible for this result. (17)

JEWS AND THE KU KLUX KLAN WERE NOT ALLIES IN OPPRESSING BLACK SOUTHERNERS

In the American South during the segregationist era, Jews occupied an anomalous position and walked a racial tightrope--benefitting from being white in a Jim Crow region, yet endangered by any show of sympathy for African Americans. The Farrakhanite historians argue that Southern Jews were hard-core racists as well as leeches on newly freed Blacks. Their strategy is to emphasize everything that a Southern Jewish newspaper editor or aspiring politician ever wrote in praise of the segregationist order while ignoring every statement and action to the contrary. (18)

The first KKK--organized after the Civil War--targeted free Blacks. The second--organized during the World War I era--gave more attention to Jews and Catholics. In March, 1922, Philip Rothblum, a Jewish immigrant, was blindfolded and taken out to the Dallas city dump where he was flogged and threatened with death if he did not leave town immediately. The ringleader--a member of the Dallas police who owed Rothblum money and also resented his friendship with Black customers--was tried but never punished. The upshot was Dallas electing a Klansman mayor, followed by the Ku Klux Klan Day held at the State Fair in October, 1923. Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans condemned Jews, Catholics and Blacks as "unblendable"--reserving his greatest scorn for the Jews about whom he asked the audience of 150,000: "Would you want your daughter to marry one?" (19)

Eric L. Goldstein in his book, The Price of Whiteness, collected all the evidence he could find of Southern Jews taking on the racist coloration of their region. Yet he concluded that the tendency "to shy away from the harshest forms of racism ... prevented them to fully identify with southern mores" and led them to "a greater intimacy and familiarity between Blacks and Jews than existed by white Southerners and Blacks." Goldstein recognizes the role Southern rabbis like Montgomery's Bernard Ehrenreich, Mobile's Alfred G. Moses, and New Orleans' Max Heller in taking the risk of speaking out against lynching. Their successors like Lazar Palnick of Litre Rock--who rebuked parents who sent their children to "lily white" private academies in order to circumvent court-ordered integration during the 1950s--risked violence like the fifty sticks of dynamite that in 1958 blew up Atlanta's oldest synagogue housing the congregation presided over by Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, a close friend of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (20)

After World War II, we have public opinion surveys showing that ordinary Southern Jews, who publicly avoided controversy, were privately more than twice as likely as other Southern whites to believe that the end of segregation was both inevitable and desirable, and were also only a third as likely to view Blacks as inferior. (21)

THE KKKAND JEWS DID NOT FORM "A MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY"

Particularly shameful is the treatment by Farrakhan's pseudo-scholars of the Jews who paid the ultimate price for their advocacy of Black rights. They claim that--for Southern Jews--the Klan was only "a vague annoyance." The annoyance was fatal for S. A. Bierfeld, the young Tennessee storekeeper who in 1868 became one of the first whites murdered by the Klan. He was blamed for selling guns to Black freedmen to defend themselves, but his real crimes may have been hiring a Black freedman, Lawrence Bowman, who was also killed, and fraternizing with his Black customers whom he encouraged to assert their political rights. Bierfeld was not the only Jew paying a high price for his color-blind convictions. (22)

The Nation of Islam historians devote a convoluted page arguing that their being Jewish had nothing to do with the murder of these Jewish friends of Black rights. The argument is reminiscent of the claim that Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, murdered alongside Black Mississippian James Chaney in 1964, should not be considered Jewish because they were given a religious education and did not attend synagogue. Who made Farrakhan the arbiter of Jewish identity? (23)

The lynching in 1915 of Atlanta businessman Leo Frank, who moved South to open a pencil factory, is often treated as an aberration. Instead, it was the culmination of a generation or more of violent Southern antisemitism. The treatment of the case by the Farrakhanites is revealing. The prosecution initially arrested Black janitor, Jim Conley, but ultimately decided to try Frank using Conley's testimony against him. Frank was pardoned by Governor John M. Slaton--but then lynched by an elite mob of 26 Georgians, many of whom belonged to "Knights of Mary Fagan." Within months, the same white Knights congregated on Stone Mountain, Georgia, to found the second Ku Klux Klan and burn a cross. In other words, the creation of the second KKK was a direct outgrowth of Frank's murder--a fact hard to square with the Farrakhanites' claim that the KKK and the Jews were allies. (24)

CONCLUSION

Volume 2 of The Secret Relationship is a malignant attempt to destroy the Black-Jewish alliance that has contributed so much to civil rights progress.

NOTES:

(1.) Seymour Drescher, "The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade," in Maurianne Adams and John Bracey, eds., Strangers and Neighbors: Relations between Blacks and Jews in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 105-15; Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998); Eli Faber, Jews and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Harold Brackman's Farrakhan's Reign of Historical Error (Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1992) is now available under the title Ministry of Lies: The Truth Behind The Nation of Islam's "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994).

(2.) Louis Farrakhan, Letter to Abe Foxman, June 24, 2010, <http://www.noi.org/statements/hmlf_June_24_2010.pdf>; Nation of Islam, Historical Research Department, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 2: How Jews Gained Control of the Black Economy (Chicago: Larimer Associates, 2010), pp. 148, 278-81, 365-70, 416. (Vol. 2 of The Secret Relationship hereinafter cited as SRV2.)

(3.) Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); "Henry Ford Invents a Jewish Conspiracy," Jewish Virtual Library, <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/antisemitism/ford1.html>.

(4.) Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets, 1798-1848 (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 282-84, 374, 386, 466; Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: The World's Bankeer, 1849-1999 (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 64-69, 115-19, 270, 456.

(5.) SRV2, pp. 14849, 154n, 178; Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 120. The only other statistical estimate we have is Jonathan L. Wiener's solely for Alabama in 1870 that 23 percent of the merchant class was made up of the foreign born. See his Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), pp. 121-24.

(6.) SRV2, pp. 229-30.

(7.) SRV2, pp. 55, 137, 257; Mark Twain, "Concerning the Jews," Harper's Magazine (March, 1898), Modern History Sourcebook, <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1898twainzjews.html>.

(8.) SRV2, p. 135;W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams (Boston 1997), 112-5, 136-7, 157, 209-10 note 20; Herbert Aptheker, The Literary Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois (White Plains, N.Y., 1989), 78-81; Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 317 note 27; Adam Zachary Newton, Facing Black and Jew: Literature as Public Space in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge 1999), 17-8; Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 461-63; Jonathan M. Wiener, "Planter-Merchant Conflict in Reconstruction Alabama," Past and Present, Vol. 63 (1975), pp. 73-94.

(9.) Harry Golden, Forgotten Pioneer (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1963), p. 33; Clive Webb, "Jewish Merchants and Black Customers in the Age of Jim Crow," Southern Jewish History, Vol. 2 (1999), p. 62; SRV2, p. 228; John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (3rd ed., New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1949), pp. 128-29.

(10.) Louis Schmier, "For Him the 'Schwartzers' Couldn't Do Enough: A Jewish Peddler and His Black Customers Look at Each Other," in Strangers and Neighbors, pp. 223-37; Wiener, "Planter-Merchant Conflict," pp. 73-94.

(11.) Hasia Diner, "Entering the Mainstream of Modern Jewish History Peddlers and the American Jewish South," Southern Jewish History, Vol. 8 (2005), pp. 1-30; SRV2, pp. 234-36; Webb, "Jewish Merchants and Black Customers," p. 55.

(12.) SRV2, pp. 371,407; Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood (New York: Perennial, 1966 [1945]), pp. 70-71; Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind." Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred AJ Knopf, 1998), pp. 21-22; Patrick Q. Mason, "Anti-Jewish Violence in the New South," Southern Jewish History, Vol. 8 (2005), p. 90; Arnold M. Shankman, Ambivalent Friends: Afro-American View the Immigrant (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1982) p. 138; Rudolf Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana (New York: KTAV Publishing Homme, 1970), p. 114; Steven Hertzberg, Strangers within the Gate City: The Jews of Atlanta, 1845-1915 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1978), p. 188; David J. Hellwig, "Black Images of Jews: From Reconstruction to Depression," in Strangers and Neighbors, pp. 300-315.

(13.) SRV2, p. 241; Ivan H. Light, Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare Among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 33; William F. Holmes, "Whitecapping: Antisemitism in the Populist Era," American Jewish Historical Quarterly (1974), pp. 246-61; Shankman, Ambivalent Friends, p. 128; Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment." A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 306; Gary T. Marx, Protest and Prejudice: A Study of Belief in the Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 137; Dinnerstein, Antisemitism, p. 205.

(14.) Harold Brackman, "Black-Jewish Relations in the Nineteenth Century," in Stephen H. Norwood and Eunice G. Pollack, eds., Encyclopedia of American Jewish History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008), Vol. 2, p. 423; Litwack, Trouble in Mind, p. 357.

(15.) Dinnerstein, Antisemitism, pp. 22527; Webb, "Jewish Merchants and Black Customers," p. 71; Louis R. Harlan, "Booker T. Washington's Discovery of the Jews," in Strangers and Neighbors, pp. 287-95.

(16.) SRV2, pp. 192-217; Allan Nevins, Herbert Lehman and His Era (New York: Scribner, 1963), pp. 4-10; Elliott Ashkenazi, The Business of the Jews in Louisiana, 1840-1875 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), pp. 13, 85-91, 99-100, 131-33; Ashkenazi, "Jewish Commercial Interests Between North and South: The Case of the Lehmans and Seligman," in Mark K. Banman, ed., Dixie Diaspora: An Anthology of Southern Jewish History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), pp. 195-208; Barry E. Supple, "A Business Elite: German-Jewish Financiers in Nineteenth-Century New York," Business History Review, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 143-178; Stephen Birmingham, "Our Crowd": The Great Jewish Families of New York (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 50-55, 92-93;Jacob Rader Marcus, Memoirs of American Jews, 1775-1865 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1955), Vol. 1, pp. 34548; Eugene R. Dattel, Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009), p. 308.

(17.) SRV2, p. 302. The great Southern C. Van Woodward warned against demonizing the cotton merchants for the South's postwar economic problems. See his Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), p. 184.

(18.) SRV2, pp. 355424.

(19.) Rosalind Benjet, "The Ku Klux Klan and the Jewish Community of Dallas, 1921-1923," Southern Jewish History, Vol. 6 (2003), pp. pp. 157-58.

(20.) Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 58-59; Mark L. Bauman and Berkley Kalin, eds., Silent Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997); Melissa Fay Greene, The Temple Bombing (New York: Fawcett Publishing, 1996).

(21.) Seth Forman, Blacks in the Jewish Mind (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 36; Leon Harris, Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), pp. 112-34; Clive Webb, Fight Against Fear." Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), pp. 28-29.

(22.) Morris U. Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654-1875 (3rd ed., New York: Citadel Press, 1971), pp. 515-17, 717-18; Daniel R. Weinfeld, "Samuel Fleishman: Tragedy in Reconstruction-Era Florida," Southern Jewish History, Vol. 8 (2005), pp. 32-75.

(23.) SRV, p. 371; Clayborne Carson, "Black-Jewish Universalism in the Era of Identity Politics," in Jack Salzman and Cornel West, eds., Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 182.

(24.) Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 149-50.

HAROLD BRACKMAN is a Consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance. He is a frequent contributor to Midstream.