The Jewish Onslaught (A) - Prof. Tony Martin

Original Jews Were Africans Wellesley News March 3, 1993 I am responding to the articles and an editorial which appeared in the February 19, 1993 issue of the Wellesley News regarding the use of the book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and fews by Professor Tony Martin in his Africana Studies class.

The article and editorial question the scholarship of the book (written by the Nation of Islam) and calls the book and its use by Martin anti-Semitic. Firstly, those who insist upon saying that any African-American is anti-Semitic are not clear on the cultural lineage of Jewish people.

The first Jews were Africans - Ethiopians, some of whom set out across Europe thousands of years ago to convert others to their religion. If one were to look up the term "Semitic" in any dictionary, one would find that the term refers to the languages (and by extension the culture) of Afro-Asiatic peoples. Afro-means African - most Africans are black. Therefore, Semitic means black.

For an African-American to be anti-Semitic is for that person to be anti-Black. Secondly, as to the issue of scholarship. Supposedly, scholarship is based upon rigorous standards set by those who are supposed to be experts in a particular field, in this case Jewish Student Yokes 123 history and the slave trade. However, the standards of scholarship become limiting when applied to African-Americans recounting our own history because they are based upon narrow European perceptions of truth and knowledge - what Europeans deem true is often what is represented as historical and even factual.