“During the Jewish Passover festival each year, the head of the household reminds his family, reading from the famous passage in the Haggada, ‘We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt’, and even the youngest child knows this story. The Jewish people is a slave people who learned a hard lesson of freedom in the desert.
(…) in Europe at a time when Blacks were rare and Jews were more numerous, Nazis still organised several massacres of African soldiers. In 1964, in Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan killed three anti-segregation activists: James Chaney, a Black, and two Jews, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Many of Martin Luther King’s earliest supporters were Jews, like the highly respected Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Years have gone by, and some people say that this particular relationship between Jews and Blacks has disappeared. I hope and I believe that this is not true. Unfortunately, people like Farrakhan in the United States have developed an anti White and anti-Semitic line. They have circulated an absurd rumour that the Jews hold a particular responsibility in the slave trade and some professional maniacs in France have propagated this rumour.
(…) Slavery of one group of people or another is probably the oldest of crimes against humanity. It is good and right that it should be called such, whatever the detractors of these memorial laws may say. We need to ask ourselves why there has been such little space given to it in education programmes until today.
(…) We know too that we need to assume the history of slavery and its trade; it is not so much a question of repentance – many, many peoples would then need to repent – as of a permanent questioning about the capacity individuals have for silence and indifference, as well as a need to pay a distant tribute to the suffering of so many men and women down through history who have been considered mere tools and not brothers, by many, many others.”
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