Diversity makes strange bedfellows — such as in the Netherlands — each June, Black immigrants from Suriname — a former Dutch colony where Jews oversaw the notoriously brutal plantations and slave trade — visit a Jewish cemetery just outside Amsterdam to commemorate the first Black slave brought from Portugal to Holland where he was buried next to his Jewish slavemasters:
Each year on the last Wednesday of June, dozens of people arrive by boat at the Jewish cemetery of this picturesque town near Amsterdam to commemorate their ancestors.
The visitors are almost all Black; none are Jewish.
At the cemetery, they play drums, dance, recite Christian prayers and observe rites of Winti, a traditional Afro-Surinamese faith that combines pagan and Catholic traditions. The rites involve blessing water and sprinkling it on the graves.
For the past decade they’ve been coming to Beth Haim, the oldest Jewish cemetery in the Netherlands, because of the discovery here in 2002 of Holland’s earliest known grave of a former slave. A man named Elieser, he died in 1629 and was brought here from Portugal by his Jewish masters, who are buried right alongside him.
Named “Elieser Day” in his memory, the new pilgrimage is centered around the former slave’s gravestone inside the 406-year-old Beth Haim cemetery, a 10-acre swath of swampy meadow. About 26,000 headstones and human remains lie submerged under the mud – an unfortunate result of how Sephardic headstones, which are traditionally placed horizontally, have fared over the centuries in the soft Dutch soil.
In a post-colonial society that is still burdened by its complicity both in the Holocaust and the slave trade, Elieser’s grave has emerged as a multifaceted symbol of emancipation and a unique meeting place for the kingdom’s oldest ethnic minorities.
In 2013, a statue for Elieser was erected outside the Jewish cemetery by Opo Kondreman, an organization that aims to preserve the heritage of Netherlanders from the former Dutch colony of Suriname in South America…
…Black and Jewish leaders disagreed over whether Elieser’s grave represents the horrors of slavery or the possibilities for tolerance.
To Sergio Berrenstein, an activist with Opo Kondreman, the grave is a substitute for the graves of ancestors who were forced into slavery and whose burial place is unknown…
For Lydia Hagoort, the historian who discovered the gravestone, Elieser’s life story also reflects his acceptance as an equal and integration into the Jewish Portuguese family that owned him.
Elieser came to the Netherlands in 1610 as a slave to the family of Paulo de Pina. He is buried alongside his owner, but also next to Jacob Israel Belmonte, once the community’s richest businessman. That means Elieser was converted to Judaism and widely accepted as Jewish, otherwise he would not have been buried inside the Jewish cemetery, Hagoort told the Reformatorisch Dagblad daily in 2012.
Moreover, de Pina’s family must have paid extra to have him buried alongside them in a prestigious plot.
“It’s revealing that the Belmonte family didn’t object to having Elieser buried alongside them,” Hagoort said.
Slavery never existed officially in the Netherlands, so Elieser’s legal status was somewhat vague: The authorities did not classify him as belonging to the de Pinas, as far as Hagoort could determine.
“He attended the funeral of the wife of his master, Sara de Pina, and contributed to that occasion six stuivers,” a Dutch coin of the era, she said. That act suggests that Elieser was on or near equal footing with the family that owned him back in Portugal….
The discovery [Elieser’s grave] embarrassed Dutch historians — they had declared that slavery never existed in the Netherlands. And it generated discomfort for some Dutch Jews, Hagoort said, because it was a reminder of the involvement of some of their ancestors in the slave trade. Exaggerating the role of Jews in the slave trade is a popular theme in anti-Semitic rhetoric, including by Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam.
In recent years, institutions and leaders of Dutch Jewry have openly debated for the first time the issue of Dutch Jewish complicity in slavery, including in the so-called Jewish Savannah.
An area of what used to be Dutch Guyana, the Jewish Savannah had 40 Jewish-owned plantations with at least 5,000 slaves and a Jewish community of several hundred that was destroyed in a slave uprising in 1832. Nearly all of those Jews immigrated to Holland, bringing their accumulated wealth with them.
On Curacao, a Caribbean island, Dutch Jews were behind the sale of some 15,000 slaves, according to Seymour Drescher, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh. According to Drescher, Jews controlled about 17% of the Caribbean trade in Dutch colonies. Slave auctions were deliberately not scheduled on Jewish holidays there, according to Marc Lee Raphael, a historian at the College of William & Mary.
These facts and others were on display in a 2015 exhibition on the subject by the Jewish Cultural Quarter of Amsterdam, and served as the basis for a 2014 book by Lody van de Kamp, a well-known Orthodox Dutch rabbi.
Elieser’s owners did not come from South America but straight from Portugal, from where they and thousands of other Jews fled in the 16th century to escape the Inquisition for the more tolerant Netherlands.
The discovery of Elieser’s grave also made headlines and reached Perez Jong Loy, Berrenstein’s brother, who decided to start a pilgrimage….
The pilgrimage required some adjustments on all sides, the caretaker Beek said.
“In principle it’s not allowed to say prayers that are not Jewish inside the cemetery, and it’s also not allowed to play music,” she told JTA. But an exception was made during Elieser Day…
In 2012, Jacques Coronel, the late leader of the Dutch Portuguese Jewish community, focused on the shared heritage of Blacks and Jews in the Netherlands during a speech that he delivered on Elieser Day.
Citing Elieser’s integration into the community, Coronel said his grave “is also a sign of freedom.” He said the very existence of a Jewish cemetery in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel owed to the refusal of authorities in 17th-century Amsterdam to allow Jews to bury their dead within the city limits. Coronel added that many in the small town also resisted the plan for Beth Haim.
“We were both victims of the slave trade,” Coronel said. ”We have been, and still are, discriminated against.” He also spoke about the Jews’ liberation from slavery in Exodus.
But this attempt to highlight kinship provoked a rebuke from Nana Abrewa, a Winti priestess who often focuses in sermons and poems on the Jews’ perceived complicity in the slave trade.
“Moses freed the Jewish slaves, but then the Jews were the cruelest slave owners in Suriname. We’ve learned to forgive, but Susanna du Plessis cut off both breasts of the prettiest woman there, Alida. We can never forget this but we’ve learned to forgive,” Abrewa told Coronel in front of reporters. (Du Plessis, a notoriously cruel 18th century slave owner, was not Jewish but of French Huguenot ancestry…)
Does Elieser’s grave symbolize anything for Beth Haim?
“Well, actually, no,” Beek, the Beth Haim caretaker told JTA.
Her institution understands that his grave is an important site for the Black community and facilitates their commemorations there, she said. “But as far as Beth Haim is concerned, Elieser is just another Jewish person who’s buried here.”
In reality, there is absolutely no proof that Elieser ever converted to Judaism — or was on equal status of his Jewish masters — that’s all politically-correct speculation to sugar-coat the Jewish role in this embarrassing story.
Jews ran the slave trade because they didn’t see Blacks as the equals — they saw them as chattel — that’s what their “holy” book — The Talmud — teaches about all non-Jews, Black or White.
Elieser was most likely buried in the Jewish cemetery next to his Jewish slave masters not because he was an “equal” — but rather because none of the Christian cemeteries would have allowed a Black slave — Jewish or otherwise — to be buried there.
And the fact that Elieser’s owners were Jews from Portugal is significant — the Jews of Portugal ran a robust slave trade and brought many of their Black slaves back to Portugal — where they were later freed and absorbed into the general population.
But Portuguese Jews ran the massive slave trade in Brazil — much larger than the trade in the United States.
Perhaps Elieser’s Jewish owners were among the Amsterdam Jews who financed Oliver Cromwell’s “English” Revolution which resulted in the Jews being allowed back into England after being expelled for 300 years.
Either way, it’s amusing to read here how the Jews — when they get caught red-handed as slave traders — immediately try to portray themselves as victims on equal victim status as the slaves they abused.
Remember — no one is allowed to challenge the Jewish status as the World’s Ultimate Victims™.
LOl, but Jews still claim that they really didn’t have a significant involvement in the Slave-Trade…. they constantly blame Christians, and churn out story after article to deny their involvement but they never talk about their slave-capitals Amsterdam-New York and the profitable slave plantations in Suriname, they hypocrites….; thttps://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jews-and-the-african-slave-trade/
I have a copy in my files, but the link to the 2009 Financial Times article on the Rothschilds and Freshfields involvement in the slave trade are now removed. The link below tells some about it – from differing comments.
“British companies express regret for slavery connections”
“The documents detailed in the FT showed N. M. Rothschild, the founder of the banking dynasty, had benefited from slavery by mortgaging 88 slaves in Antigua. When the debtor – who had put up the slaves as collateral – defaulted, N.M. Rothschild sought to recoup the £3,000 he was owed through a compensation scheme the government had set up to bail out slave owners after the abolition of slavery in the 1830s.”
———>
[The name of the Harvard University Professor who signed this letter below shows inside the link].
Sir, Your article “Rothschild and Freshfields founders linked to slavery” (June 27) stated that Nathan Rothschild “benefited financially from slavery” by “using slaves as collateral in banking dealings with a slave owner”. The reality is that the Rothschilds benefited a great deal more from the abolition of slavery.
By 1830, the date of the loan in question, the Rothschilds were the dominant financial force not only in the City of London but also in Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna and Naples. Their multinational partnership was a truly global operation. Among its many activities was the financing of Europe’s trade with the American South and at least some Caribbean Islands, notably Cuba. It would have been remarkable if they had not been involved in some way with slavery, since it was the dominant form of labour organisation in the production of sugar, tobacco and cotton at that time. But if this loan was the extent of their involvement, it was small indeed.
For one thing, the sum was trivial by Rothschild standards: £3,000 in a year when the combined capital of the five Rothschild houses exceeded £4m. The recipient, Lord James O’Bryen, was no ordinary slave owner: he was the brother of the Marquis of Ormond, a rear-admiral in the Royal Navy and a Lord of the King’s Bedchamber; in short, a significant figure in Britain’s aristocratic society. Private banking was in fact a very minor part of the Rothschild’s business – a loan like this was more in the nature of a favour to a well-connected nobleman – and the Rothschilds may not have looked very closely at the collateral until O’Bryen defaulted and then tried to get his hands on government compensation for his former slaves under the abolition legislation of 1834. It seems unlikely that Nathan Rothschild made “personal gains” from his counter-claim, since the compensation paid was equivalent to between 42 to 55 per cent of the slaves’ money value.
On the other hand, the Rothschilds organised the government loan that was necessary to fund the slave owners’ compensation scheme, without which abolition would not have been approved by parliament. The £15m gilts issue will have been a great deal more profitable than the loan to O’Bryen. In the same way, Nathan’s personal friendship with Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, the leader of the Anti-Slavery Society, was a much more important “link” than the one to slavery suggested in your headline.”
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A3=ind0907&L=BASA&E=quoted-printable&P=253794&B=–_4cbd5f05-ec27-4735-aede-5254297ad7e4_&T=text%2Fhtml;%20charset=Windows-1252
I almost walked away from “christianity” spending my entire adult life trying to understand “judeo-christianity.”
What brought me back into the Fold was the “Jewish Question”. And Christendom’s failure to properly address it.
It can only be Supernatural — in that the Jewish Question is so big …. it is so pervasive …. it is hard to ignore. But that’s just it! The whole world is deceived.
It still boggles my feeble, fragile mind. Something so obvious, is completely ignored by the entire world.
I have a video on my phone that I took watching Michael Douglas being interviewed at an America’s Cup race where he proudly says that his family were Jewish Pirates.
But yet if I, as a substitute teacher for K-12 were to tell my students that the Jews were Pirates of the Caribbean, I would lose my job.
Let that sink in.
Only the Jew can tell us their History. When we try, we are bigots, haters, and evil notsees.
Praise our Father He chose to open my eyes!!! Amen.
Jesus said here he was telling the truth, not calling them names, nor using figures of speech, the truth. Genesis 6 is the key as most so called Jews are the canaanites of old.
Jesus speaking to the Pharisee Jews – Bible book of John 8:44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
45 And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.
And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.
46 Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?
47 He that is of God heareth God’s words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.
48 Then answered the Jews
Then answered the Jews
Then answered the Jews
Then answered the Jews
pretty obvious who Jesus called of their father the DEVIL.
Bob, today’s Jews are not the same Jews of Jesus’ day. That should be very obvious by now. Today’s Jews bristle at the idea that they, or their ancestors, killed Christ, and technically they are correct. Today’s Jews are imposters, a race mixed band of racial nomads who converted to Judaism, and who likely descended from the Hittites.
The Jews whom Christ rebuked were, unfortunately, largely the Israelite remnant in Judea. Perhaps there were some racial mamzers in that population, and the majority of those who rejected Christ were indeed real Israelites who are indeed capable of serious wickness. If you need a reminder of the wickedness of Judah, read the OT again.
Yes, J. Polk, I am in agreement with you. The jews of Christ’s time, unfortunately, were predominantly Israelites like us.
What set me on to this line of thinking, having been a strong Dual Seedliner, was, believe it or not, reading about Vincent Montana Jr being known as “the father of disco music”! How could Montana have disco kids?
When I then read John Chapter Eight in light of the reasoning that a “Father of…” is NOT a litteral blood relative… it started to make sense: a “Father of…” to me means an originator of an idea that produces followers. The big difference is, and what the jews that Christ chastises couldn’t understand coz their ears were blocked, is that God IS our actual literal Father!
Alfred Hitchcock is the father of suspense cinema. Karl Marx is the father of commies. James Brown is the father of soul music. Etc.
That’s what I reckon atm anyway.
Enjoyed your comment. Feds are jews and torries in America. Hands down. Mostly freemsons with a few left in the dark for plausible deniability. Secret usurious jewish bankers and their private torry/federal freemasonic armies (judeah) run the world.
Secrety Usury+Secrety Nepotism+Time=Control
In urban America , the traditional jewish reproach of white mittel class is “racist.” But maybe the black community is perceiving the exploitation of this insulting and monotonous indoctrination.
Bill Cosby was not prosecuted for predation of white women, a hollywood jew past time. But he taught blacks to assimilate to white, middle class ways. And dared to compete with his masters in media independence.
A black preacher from Harlem , who once a jewish protector now must be censored for his own zeal for his people and their obvious tormentors are not white. Other black people no longer react to “kill whitey” when no whitey is here.
Only nice jewish people who dress themselves in ridiculous, ostentatious costume and preach non discrimination and equality, while they extort the last penny from black people unwilling to sell their home or apartment in the urban area where real estate is only that which must be stolen.
Are blacks waking? Education only serves the oppressor. Cynthia McKinney revolted from their slavery and her ruin was her good fortune. Surely some will. But organization will be contravened by the same who now steal or tax the very breath that they had inculcated.
Will the jew solution be the black jew, sharing their raceless ideology with their indignant slave?
Many President Trump supporters were black and now share with their white compatriots the same zeal for shared quality of life and acknowledge jew government betrayal. Is there hope in recombining against the common enemy ?
Bill Cosby advised all blacks to be more like the muslims, and praised muslim culture.
So I question the “Conservative, Inc” narrative that Bill Cosby was persecuted because he was a good guy who tried to get blacks to “Act White”.
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2013/06/10/cosby-all-should-be-muslims/
“Ah Dindu Nuffin! Ah’s a gud boi!”…Now tell me how that sounds so familiar hhmm, who just loves to parrot his massah To This Day?