On
February 26, 2019, Amazon.com banned The
Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews and
removed the entire book series from its pages. The crime? The
Nation of Islam scholars documented the role of Jewish merchants
in the cotton trade in the American South. Now comes a Jewish
scholar Dr. Michael R. Cohen to confirm and expand upon that
core theme with a new book titled Cotton
Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the
Reconstruction Era(New York:
New York Univ. Press, 2017). He wrote that
“Jews clustered in the cotton industry, and as a staggering
number of Jews operated dry goods and general stores, Jews
became deeply enmeshed in the nation’s—and perhaps the
world’s—most important industry.”
Jews are now ready to admit their control over cotton, even
claiming that Jewish cotton merchants were the “life blood of
the Southern economy.” The role of Jews in cotton is so
significant that The
Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan lectured
powerfully on the subject in 2010:
Even in reviewing Cohen’s book Jewish scholars are now
regurgitating the Nation of Islam thesis published a decade ago.
Keep in mind that just a few minutes ago Jews were denying they
had any presence in the South at all, where slavery and Jim Crow
forced millions of Black onto the very cotton plantations now
credited with being the foundation of Jewish wealth:
TheJewish
Chronicletouts how their “tribal
links with northern financiers…modernized business in the
South….Jews played a key role in building the cotton economy
of the South…”
Brandeis professorJonathan
D. Sarnawrote that “This model study
exposes the previously unknown Jewish ethnic network that
filled a critical niche in the southern cotton trade…”
Harvard professorSven
Beckertwrites that “Jewish Americans
played a key role in the southern cotton economy,
infusing European and New York capital into the fields of a
region still devastated by war, while organizing the trade
in a crop central to the nation.” He calls the book “an
important contribution to American economic history.”
Columbia University professorRebecca
Kobrinwrites “This eloquent study
reminds us that we cannot fully understand the South’s
economic revival in the age of reconstruction without
looking at the critical role played by immigrant Jewish
merchants.”
Here are a few short excerpts fromCotton
Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the
Reconstruction Era:
“Jewish merchants cultivated an economic niche in the
Reconstruction-era cotton economy that catapulted them into the
forefront of the American economy and global capitalism. With
conditions ripe for success, they drew upon ethnic networks of
trust that enabled their businesses to survive during market
downturns by ensuring access to credit.Jews
clustered in the cotton industry, and as a staggering number of
Jews operated dry goods and general stores, Jews became deeply
enmeshed in the nation’s—and perhaps the world’s—most important
industry.
“That immersion proved significant.Jewish
success in the cotton trade fostered a golden era for Southern
Jews during the roughly two decades following the Civil War.It
redrew the American Jewish map, as scores of Jewish merchants
settled in market towns located in regions of high cotton
production and marketing.Jews also
concentrated in towns that sat along river or rail lines
offering easy transportation access for cotton shipments. The
internal dynamics of Jewish communities also changed
significantly, as Jews transitioned from a wandering,
peddling-based lifestyle to one that featured more stable Jewish
communities with burial grounds, synagogues, and social
organizations.Success
in the cotton trade redefined the terms of Jewish integration in
the cities and towns in which Jews lived, and Jews reshaped the
growth and development of the towns themselves.“
“All of these factors meant that on the eve of the
Civil War,Jews
stood fortuitously positioned in an economic sector poised to
shape global capitalism.”
“Smuggling
and blockade-running became particularly lucrative, and
a dearth of goods in the South made clandestine trade all the
more attractive; profit margins proved immense at both ends of
the transaction. The demand for goods also made legal trade
within the South extraordinarily lucrative.”
“As the factorage system collapsed, interior general and dry
goods stores, which Jews had begun to operate in the antebellum
years,filled
the void and became the economy’s lifeblood.
Additionally, emancipation provided a new potential customer
base. It made good business sense for Jews to welcome freedmen
as customers, and that is what they did.”
“If structural factors created the necessary conditions for
Jewish merchants to function within Southern capitalism, Jewish
merchants still could not have actually succeeded in the absence
of ethnic networks. Networks supplied the trust upon which
economic transactions relied. …. This trust was cultivated
laregly through ties of family, kinship, or ethnicity that
operated within businesses and between businesses. Shared
ethnicity fostered the networks of trust that provided Jews with
credit, and this provided them with a clear competitive
advantage.”
“Once
Lehman Brothers acquired this global investment, they would send
that investment to the South—again through relationships of
trust that were often predicated on ethnicity.”
“The
experience of Jewish merchants in the cotton industry accounts
for American Jewry’s golden age during the Reconstruction era.
It also demonstrates the importance of economics in dictating
the ways in which Jews shaped, and were shaped by, the milieu in
which they lived. …. Taken together, the experience of Jewish
merchants in the cotton industry reveals the ways in which
ethnicity mattered in the development of global capitalism.”
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