The Secret Relationship Between Alabama’s Blacks and Jews

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The Secret Relationship Between Alabama’s Blacks and Jews

By the mid-20th century Alabama had become the home of syphilis “studies” and

midnight riders of the KKK, of segregation enforcer Eugene “Bull” Connor with his fire hoses and attack dogs, of church bombings and unspeakable racial terrorism—and since the beginning of the SLAVE TRADE, Jews were a part of it all! Here are some interesting facts about Alabama that most Blacks and Jews do not know:

• In Mobile, Jewish auctioneer George Davis was the city’s first to have “a monopoly on the sale of animals and slaves.”

• Jews established the first cotton gin in

the state, which, by processing cotton many times faster than before, increased the demand for African slaves manifold.

• Rabbi Israel I. Jones, who was called “a man of mental and moral superiority” and an “outstanding philanthropist,” served as mayor of Mobile and sold Blacks in his spare time (see his advertisement, right, and hundreds more like it in the Nation of Islam book Jews Selling Blacks).

• When the nation broke apart over the question of slavery, Alabama’s Jews served in the pro-slavery Confederate Army.

• Jews had no peers in the Alabama slavery economy. Wm. Frohlichstein and B. Moog were city aldermen and directors of National Commercial Bank, while Isaac Goldsmith was president of Commercial Savings Co., L. Brisk was a

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director of the Deposit Savings Bank, and William H. Leinkauf and M. Forchheimer were directors of Mobile Savings Bank.

Read Jews Selling Blacks:

Slave Sale Advertising by American Jews

The  Largest  Collection  of  Jewish  Slave-­‐Sale  Ads  Ever  Published.  144  pages  reproduced  from  American  newspapers.  Jews  bought  and  sold  whole   plantations—slaves   and   all—and   they   marketed   enslaved  human  beings  ranging  from  infants  to  the  elderly.  There  were  Jewish  merchants  selling  Black  slaves  ON  LAYAWAY!  This  book  puts  an  end  to  the  mythology  that  Jews  succeeded  by  “hard  work”  &  had  no  role  in  the  slave  trade.  

•Adolph Proskauer was a director of the Mobile Cotton Exchange, which was established in 1871 “to keep the profits from Alabama’s lucrative cotton crop under local control.” In 1855—amidst the harshest conditions of Black slavery— Jews had more than 50 places of business just in Mobile. In 1831, one Jew sold 1359 acres of land—to his own brother! In 1828, Isaac Lazarus had 640 acres.

• Before the close of the 1800s, the Moseses of Montgomery developed the largest

real estate insurance and retail banking institution in the state. They built the tallest building in the state, and founded the city of Sheffield to boot. To get some idea about the rate of growth after the Civil War, one must look to Tuscumbia, Alabama, on May 8, 1884, when 75 acres of land were bought at auction for $50,000 by Mordecai Moses. Three days later the lot was sold for $350,000. • Meanwhile, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1906 that “[A] few days ago I stood on the land of a white Alabama land-owner who held 50 square miles and would not sell a single acre to a black man.”

•The Lehman Brothers, the founders of one of

the most respected investment banking businesses in the world (now defunct), were slave owners who got their start selling slave-picked cotton not a stone’s throw from Montgomery’s slave auction block.

• The Rothschild family interest in Alabama is

particularly intriguing because in 1863 the Examiner newspaper alleged that “Jews had bought up 2/3rds of Alabama’s cotton and monopolized the

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mercantile business throughout the South.” Coincidentally in 1864, Alabama’s governor appointed Jewish merchant Mayer Lehman as cotton agent for the state and appropriated $500,000 for the purchase of cotton. This put Lehman in charge of managing the state’s chief asset—a million-bale annual cotton crop cultivated by most of the state’s 435,000 enslaved Africans.

• The local Birmingham rabbi, Morris Newfield, set up and

financed the first juvenile court in the city to administer Southern Jim Crow “justice” to Black youth.

• In the heat of Jim Crow hatred, a Jew named William P. Engel

headed “one of the largest commercial real estate firms in the South,” developing two major hotels in downtown Birmingham, neither of which hired Blacks or permitted them as patrons.

• According to Harvard research, Birmingham’s Rabbi Milton Grafman (right) said in 1963 in the midst of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s demonstrations: “The lives of one thousand Negroes are not worth a hair on the head of a single Jew.”

• Rev. King criticized Rabbi Grafman in his famous Letter From a Birmingham Jail. He was in jail because he was protesting the segregationist practices of the major downtown retailers, including Parisian’s, Pizitz’s, Blach’s, and Loveman’s—all Jewish, and ALL with apartheid fountains, lunch counters, bathrooms, and all-white sales clerks.

• According to a Jewish scholar, “Harmony was the hallmark of relations

between the Ku Klux Klan and Birmingham’s Jews. Members of both groups stood alongside each other in the local wing of the American Legion, which organized a series of public sporting events in the city every year….There was open communication between the representatives of the Klan and the Jewish Community, primarily through Mr. Joe Denaburg who…supplied Klansmen with pistols and sheets…”

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• When the Jewish-owned Moses Brothers Bank of Montgomery, Alabama,

failed, the savings of “hundreds of negro depositors” amounting to as much as half a million dollars were simply “swept away.” Blacks were left “gazing wistfully” at the locked doors, with no legal recourse.

• “Shortly after the Supreme Court rendered the 1954 Brown decision, a member of Birmingham’s Temple Beth-El Board of Directors moved that the Board endorse the desegregation ruling. The motion was voted down by a margin of nineteen to one…”

An important synagogue trustee was a high official in the Montgomery White Citizens Council. When Rabbi Goldstein of the local synagogue Agudath Israel gave a sermon condemning the conviction of the Scottsboro Boys, he was given 24 hours to get out of town—by his own congregation! When he would not leave, they threatened him, saying he can

remain in Montgomery as long as he joins the White Citizens Council. They told him, “We want you to disassociate yourself from the Negroes completely while you are the rabbi here.”

Of the 27 trustees, the rabbi had only one supporter. According to a scholar, “they literally turned their backs as he passed them in the synagogue or on the street. No one visited his home; he felt himself completely alone. Four years earlier he had brought a refugee from Poland and

installed him as the shochet [a person specially trained to slaughter animals and birds in accordance with Jewish laws], and now even the refugee severed all personal relations; he, too, thought that the trustees were right.”

“Montgomery Jews want to bury their heads,”

asserted the Rev. Martin Luther King, “and repeat that it is not a Jewish problem. I want to go on record, and agree that it is not a Jewish problem, but it is a fight between the forces of justice and injustice. I want them to join with us on the side of justice.” King wrote to one Jewish activist: “I think we all have to admit, that there are Jews in the South who have gone out of their way to consort with the perpetrators of the status quo. I saw this in both Montgomery, Alabama and Albany, Georgia.”

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., conferring with The Hon. Elijah Muhammad

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Jewish Segregationists in Alabama

In staunchly segregationist Alabama, Jews were close with such legendary race haters as Governor George Wallace. The Jewish Rubin Hanan was on his staff and shared Wallace’s anti-Black views. Hanan visited Israel on behalf of the governor and announced that Wallace “had done much for the African American population, and that there was a certain social order that had existed and could not be changed so easily.” It was Wallace’s attorney John P. Kohn who wrote Wallace’s infamous line “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever. ”

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Ku Klux Klansman Eugene “Bull” Connor (right) was a Hitler to Black people. He became Birmingham’s public safety commissioner and, according to a Harvard study, “Jews felt safe [under his] care.” He turned fire hoses on Black women and children, an act he was proud to have memorialized on film. Nonetheless, “much of Connor’s support [came] from the business community which included Mervyn Sterne, William Engel, and the Jewish retailers. Connor had personal relationships with a number of his Jewish backers…” In reality, the Harvard study concludes, Jews were in no rush to end Jim Crow hatred: “...Jim Crow had provided a relatively hospitable environment for Jewish life. Jews feared that if segregation was dismantled, their religious differences from mainstream society might become more significant than their racial commonality.”

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