The Jewish Labour Movement and its Political Lynching of Jackie Walker

Meeting at Brighton on Monday where Jackie Walker was speaking - John McDonnell is on far left

The Jewish Labour Movement's Liar-in-Chief, Jeremy Newmark

 Open Letter to John McDonnell 
Avoid the Race Baiting Jewish Labour Movement

No sooner was it announced that the Jewish Labour Movement (formerly Poalei Zion – Workers of Zion) were holding a fringe meeting, officially entitled Rally Against ‘Anti-Semitism’ than the thieves began falling out.  The real purpose of the meeting is to isolate anti-Zionism and support for the Palestinians in the Labour Party,

Jeremy Newmark believes John McDonnell 'must explain' himself for speaking alongside Jackie Walker

A host of speakers have been listed to speak including the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, Shami Chakrabarti, Clive Lewis MP and Rhea Wolfson.  It also includes a host of unreconstructed right-wingers including MPs who were sacked or resigned in the attempted coup, such as Michael Dugher, Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth.  Other include Naz Shah MP, who was falsely accused of anti-Semitism but unfortunately accepted, like a Stalin purge victim, that she was guilty and Baroness Jan Royall, who produced probably the most dismal and tawdry political report into ‘anti-Semitism’ at Oxford University Club that the Labour Party has ever seen.

The JLM sets the tone, refusing to accept Jackie Walker is not anti-Semitic and then lays the ground for racist Zionist trolls

A selection of vile, racist Zionist tweets directed at Jackie Walker

Another vile Zionist compares Jackie Walker to Goebbels and Torquemada - of course the Zionists complain when we make far more justified comparison between them and the Nazis

John McDonnell, despite being put under pressure by Zionists and Progress, spoke at a Labour Representation Committee fringe meeting at the TUC Conference in Brighton last Monday, alongside Jackie Walker, Vice-Chair of Momentum.  Jackie was suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’ earlier this year when a private Facebook conversation she was having with a Zionist friend, was broken into by the Israel Advocacy Movement.  Jackie was explaining her own Black and Jewish background and discussed the holocaust, not only of Jews but Black people in the Slave Trade.  An estimated 14 million Black people were murdered in the course of the slave trade, both on the Middle Passage between Africa and the West Indies and on the Plantations.  This is of course of no account to the Zionists for whom there is only one holocaust.

Part of the Zionist campaign to deny Jackie Walker is Jewish - because  Black and Jewish are incompatible to many Zionists

Jackie was reinstated after an investigation but the Zionists have refused to accept her acquittal and have waged a campaign of villification against her ever since.

The discussion she was having was about the role of Jews in the financing of this trade.  It is a matter of fact that some Jews had a prominent role in the Brazilian, Surinam and Dutch slave trade.  In Labour’s Thought Police claims another victim - Black Jewish activist Jackie Walker I quoted from an article in the Jewish Journal, the largest Jewish weekly newspaper in the United States outside of New York City, on Jewish involvement in slavery in The Netherlands. ’ The article How culpable were Dutch Jews in the slave trade? Describes how, in October 2013, Lody van de Kamp, an unconventional Orthodox Dutch rabbi, wrote a scathing critique about the involvement of Dutch Jewry in the slave trade.  He wrote that:

“The portrayal of ‘Peter the slave’ dates back to a period when we as citizens did not meet the social criteria that bind us today,”

“I wrote the book and I got involved in the Black Pete debate because of what I learned from my Dutch predecessors on what it means to be a rabbi — namely, to speak about social issues, not only give instructions on how to cook on Shabbat,” van de Kamp told JTA.

John McDonnell addresses LRC meeting - Jackie Walker is out of camera on right

“Money was earned by Jewish communities in South America, partly through slavery, and went to Holland, where Jewish bankers handled it,” he said. “Non-Jews were also complicit, but so were we. I feel partly complicit.”

The article described how, although van de Kamp 65 holds no official position in the Dutch Jewish community, he is among the best-known Orthodox rabbis in the Netherlands, a status earned through his several books on Dutch Jewry and frequent media appearances.

His book, a historical novel entitled “The Jewish Slave,” followed an 18th-century Jewish merchant and his black slave as they investigate Dutch-owned plantations north of Brazil in the hope of persuading Jews to divest from the slave trade. In researching the book, van de Kamp discovered data that shocked him.

Jackie Walker addresses LRC meeting in Brighton

In one area of what used to be Dutch Guyana, 40 Jewish-owned plantations were home to a total population of at least 5,000 slaves, he says. Known as the Jodensavanne, or Jewish Savannah, the area had a Jewish community of several hundred before its destruction in a slave uprising in 1832. 

Nearly all of them immigrated to Holland, bringing their accumulated wealth with them.

Some of that wealth was on display in 2012 in the cellar of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue, part of an exhibition celebrating the riches of the synagogue’s immigrant founders. Van de Kamp says the exhibition sparked his interest in the Dutch Jewish role in slavery, which was robust.

On the Caribbean island of Curacao, Dutch Jews may have accounted for the resale of at least 15,000 slaves landed by Dutch transatlantic traders, according to Seymour Drescher, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh. At one point, Jews controlled about 17 percent of the Caribbean trade in Dutch colonies, Drescher said.

The suggestion that it is anti-Semitic to engage in such a historical debate is nonsense.  John McDonnell is to be congratulated for withstanding the pressure to ostracise Jackie Walker and for speaking on the same platform as her.

The JLM is using the fake anti-Semitism issue to limit debate on Palestine and Zionism

The Jewish Labour Movement on the other hand has run a disgraceful, race baiting campaign against Jackie.  It has been part and parcel of a Zionist attack on her which has questioned her Jewish ancestry on the basis that she is Black.  A large section of the Zionist movement refuses to accept that Black people, for example the Black Hebrews, can also be Jewish. 

Jackie Walker speaking with John McDonnell on far-left

Unsurprisingly a major dispute has blown up this week concerning the invitation to Jackie Walker.  A number of Zionists have objected to the invitation to John McDonnell because he has shared a platform with Jackie Walker, whom they deem ‘anti-Semitic’ as part of an ongoing racist campaign of villification.  Far from defending McDonnell, JLM's Jeremy Newmark, a man branded a liar and perjurer by the Fraser v University College Union Employment Tribunal when he tried to portray UCU as ‘anti-Semitic’, attacked his invitee.

What the Employment Tribunal in Fraser v UCU had to say about Newmarks' truthfulness

Newmark is quoted as saying that John McDonnell ‘must explain his defence of Walker which is inconsistent with his call for zero tolerance. This raises serious questions. Our members expect him to explain himself.’  John McDonnell has no need to explain anything.  Jackie Walker is a long standing anti-racist and anti-fascist activist, unlike the luminaries of the Jewish Labour Movement. 

I have issue an Open Letter to JM asking that he reconsider his invitation from the poisonous and racist JLM.  I sincerely hope that he reconsiders the invitation and keeps a wide berth from those whose primary purpose is to seek the destruction of the Jeremy Corbyn leadership and uphold the apartheid State of Israel. 

In their ballot to see who they should nominate for Labour leadership, the JLM voted by 92-4% to support Owen Smith.  I am still staggered that 4% of the JLM voted to support Jeremy Corbyn.  If I was Owen Smith I would demand a recount.

Tony Greenstein

To:       John McDonnell MP,

            Shadow Chancellor

            mcdonnellj@parliament.uk

Dear John,

As a Jewish member of the Labour Party who has been suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’, I am writing to you to express my disappointment that you should have agreed to speak on September 25^th at the Conference fringe meeting of the Jewish Labour Movement [JLM].  I would seriously ask you to reconsider your decision.

As you will know from the current witch hunt of Jeremy’s supporters, ‘anti-Semitism’ is a weapon that has been wielded against anyone who speaks up in support of the Palestinians or against Zionism, the settler colonial movement which created the Israeli state.

The JLM is the British affiliate of the Israeli Labour Party/Zionist Union [ILP].  Far from supporting a just solution in Palestine, the ILP supports segregation and a Palestinian Bantustan.   Its leader Isaac Herzog recently explained that:

‘I want to separate from the Palestinians. I want to keep a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s Knesset. I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel.’ 

If someone said they didn’t want a Jewish Prime Minister in Britain I am sure you would be the first to denounce this as racist and anti-Semitic. [Who needs the Right when we have Isaac Herzog?] 

In an ILP election video Herzog was described as ‘someone who “understands the Arab mentality” and “has seen Arabs in all kinds of situations,” including “in the crosshairs.”  Why did we forget about Herzog's anti-Arab campaign? If someone in the Labour Party spoke about the ‘Jewish mentality’ they would rightly be called anti-Semitic, yet this is standard talk for Israeli Labour politicians.

The Israeli Labour Party is the original party of Zionist colonisation.  It was the party which was responsible for perpetrating the Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) in 1948 when three-quarters of a million Palestinians were expelled in order to create a Jewish state.  This was ‘necessary’ because, even in the 56% of Palestine that was allotted by the UN to the proposed Jewish state, half of the population were Arabs.

The JLM is also affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation [WZO] which openly funds and supports illegal settlement in the West Bank and the Golan Heights.  At the present time it is implementing the destruction of Bedouin villages such as Al Arakeibh in Israel’s Negev and afforestation of the area as part of the official programme of ‘Judaisation’ (as per the Prawer Plan).

The WZO’s Jerusalem Programme, speaks of ‘the centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem, its capital, in the life of the [Jewish] nation’.  This assertion, that the real homeland of Jews, including British Jews, is Israel rather than the countries where they live, is itself anti-Semitic.  It has long been an anti-Semitic rallying cry that Jews do not belong in the countries where they live.

From its inception the Labour Zionist movement was a racist movement.  As David HaCohen, Managing Director of Solel Boneh, the Histadrut owned building company exclaimed:

I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my Trade Union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they should not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there... to pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash Arab eggs they had bought… to do all that was not easy. [David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, p.185, Faber, 2003 citing Ha’aretz 15.11.69].

Because the JLM is an openly Zionist organisation, its membership is not open to Jewish members of the Labour Party who are opposed to Zionism. 

The JLM purports to support a two state solution in Israel/Palestine but there is no known example of where it has opposed any aspect of military rule in the West Bank such as the detention and torture of Palestinian children as young as 12 or the separate legal systems for Jews and Palestinians.  The JLM has never opposed the theft and seizure of Palestinian land for Jewish-only settlements, the building of Jewish only roads or the network of checkpoints in the West Bank, with separate entrances for Jewish settlers and Palestinians.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu and leaders of the ANC rightly described Israel as worse than Apartheid in South Africa. [Desmond Tutu: Israel guilty of apartheid in treatment of Palestinians]

It is dispiriting that you will be speaking on the platform of an organisation that has engineered and orchestrated the ‘anti-Semitic’ witch hunt in the Labour Party.  The JLM has consistently confused anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.  It is led by Jeremy Newmark, who was branded a perjurer by the Employment Tribunal Fraser v University College Union when he tried to portray UCU as ‘anti-Semitic’.

The JLM represents a minority of Jews, the most right-wing Jews, in the Labour Party.  It was no surprise that in its ballot, the JLM voted for Owen Smith by 92-4%. 

What is particularly offensive though is the race-baiting campaign that has been carried out by the JLM against Jackie Walker, the Vice-Chair of Momentum.  They have repeatedly lied and misrepresented what she said, in a private conversation, about Jewish involvement in the financing of the slave trade.  They have refused to accept the fact that she was reinstated very soon after her suspension.  Jackie is being subject to a political lynching.

Zionists and JLM supporters have openly stated that being Black, Jackie cannot be Jewish.  This is a widespread view in Zionist and Israeli circles.  Just this week Jeremy Newmark stated [Anger as Jeremy Corbyn supporters invited to speak at Jewish Labour event] that

"The Shadow Chancellor was invited a while ago before his apparent defence of Jackie Walker and in light of his call for zero tolerance on antisemitism and support for our rule change proposals.  He must explain his defence of Walker which is inconsistent with his call for zero tolerance. This raises serious questions. Our members expect him to explain himself.’

Jackie Walker is someone of Black and Jewish parentage.  Far from being an anti-Semite she is a long-standing anti-racist and anti-fascist activist.  John, are you really willing to speak on the platform of this anti-Palestinian, race-baiting organisation?  I appeal to you to reconsider your decision to speak at this event.  Whatever this rally is about it is not about fighting anti-Semitism.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein –

Brighton & Hove DLP

Labour’s Thought Police claims another victim - Black Jewish activist Jackie Walker

Labour’s McCarthyist purge is led by the British representatives of the Zionist & racist Israeli Labour Party 

Black Jewish Momentum activist suspended after being targeted by racists & Zionists

Jackie Walker is Vice Chair of both Momentum and Thanet Labour Party.  She is Black and of Jewish descent.  She has just been suspended as part of Labour’s racist witch hunt.  As a Black and Jewish anti-racist she was perhaps an inevitable target.  Most of the victims so far have been Muslims or Black people, with a couple of Jewish anti-racists thrown in for good measure.  She has been suspended at the instigation of the Israel Advocacy Movement.

It is essential that Momentum now finds its voice and opposes this witch hunt and the suspension of Jackie Walker or else the Right will walk all over it.  It looks as if the Right's campaign over 'anti-semitism' has already been responsible for a poor showing by Labour in the Council elections.  

Either Jon Lansman as Chair of Momentum gives a lead in this and breaks off his cosy chats with those in Labour Friends of Israel/JLM who are spearheading the witch hunt or he should be removed as soon as possible.

It is also essential that Jeremy Corbyn now remembers his roots, his work in the past for the Palestinians and begins to grow a backbone once again

The IAM is an organisation that proclaims that its mission is to 'successfully repel the libellous accusations Israel's detractors frequently hurl.' 

The Israeli Labour Party that the Labour Zionists are in a World Union with were close friends of the White Supremacist Apartheid state in South Africa

It is an organisation which denies that there was a Nakba (Catastrophe) when 3//4 million Arabs were expelled from Palestine.  It is a Nakba denial movement and operates according to the same principles of Holocaust denial.  A refusal to accept the evidence of those who lived through what happened and even the archives of those who did the expelling.  It takes issue with the Zionist historian Benny Morris who, in the 1980's, use recently opened Hagannah (Labour's terrorist militia) archives to show,  without a doubt that the Palestinian refugees were expelled.  Morris does not condemn Israel for doing so, on the contrary he believes they should have expelled all the refugees and not 85% of them.

John Vorster, South Africa's Apartheid Prime Minister was a member of the Broederbond and interned for supporting the Nazis in the war

The IAM summarises Morris' argument as follows:

'The refugee problem was caused by attacks by Jewish forces on Arab villages and towns and by the inhabitants’ fear of such attacks, compounded by expulsions, atrocities, and rumors of atrocities — and by the crucial Israeli Cabinet decision in June 1948 to bar a refugee return.'

This is born out my the archives, witnesses who participated in these events and by e.g. Menachem Begin, former Likud Prime Minister, who boasts that the massacre at Deir Yassin village near Jerusalem, provoked the flight of the Arabs.  

According to the Israeli Advocacy Movement

As many of the Arabs were recent migrants or the children/grandchildren of recent migrants, they simply returned to the neighbouring countries they’d originally came from when they fled.

Many Arab villages were systematically depopulated by the Arab Liberation Army (an army of volunteer soldiers from Arab countries sponsored by the Arab League) and local gangs loyal to the Arab Higher Committee (the de facto Palestinian government headed by the Grand Mufti). The empty villages were then transformed into military positions for anti-Jewish attacks.

These are the Zionist equivalent of holocaust deniers.  But these racists and revisionists are the ones who are driving the witch hunt.  What we need is an investigation into racism in the Compliance Unit of the Labour Party and the suspension of its head, John Stolliday pending such an investigation.

Jacqueline’s real crime is that she is also an anti-Zionist.  This is intolerable to Stolliday and Iain McNicol, Labour’s General Secretary.  

Jackie Walker's comments on Jewish involvement in the slave trade - certain subjects are verboten

Jackie's partner, Graham Bash, who is a life long Jewish activist in the Labour Party, has issued an open letter to those who have suspended Jackie Walker:

Anti-Semitism and the Labour Party

As a Jew (all my life) and Labour Party member (48 years) I am outraged at  the way allegations of anti-Semitism  have been used to silence legitimate  criticism of Israel and undermine  Jeremy Corbyn as my party’s leader. 

I know what anti-Semitism is. I was  brought up to learn how the Jewish  East End fought with the dockers  against Mosley’s fascists at Cable  Street. I was told at school how it was  a pity that Hitler didn’t finish off the job  of murdering all Jews. And very quickly  I learned what it was like to be made to  feel an outsider. It was hardly  surprising that I started going on anti-  fascist demos in my late teens and  very soon afterwards joined the Labour  Party, which I remain a member of to  this day. 

I know what anti-Semitism is. Apart  from socialist, anti-racist politics, my  other love is football. How many times  as a West Ham fan have I had to  endure my own team’s fans singing “I  never felt more like gassing the Jews”?  Or being attacked by my team’s own fans  for daring to put up a ‘West Ham fans  United Against Racism’ banner at  Upton Park. 

I know what anti-Semitism is - I have a  sensitive ear for anti-Semitic  comments - and, without doubt, the  place I have encountered it least is  within the Labour Party. In 48 years, I  have encountered anti-Semitism once,  perhaps twice, compared to countless  episodes outside. 

Of course I have encountered deep  antipathy to Israel, and its murderous  actions to deny justice for Palestinians,  but that is what I would expect from a  democratic anti-racist party – and  these are views shared by me and  many other peace loving socialist  Jews. 

Throughout most of my years in the  party, I have worked closely with  Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.  They have always been the first to  fight injustice and inequality and from  them there has never been a hint of  anti-Semitism. 

What is happening in the party today is an attempt to cynically use rare  examples, and usually false  allegations, of anti-Semitism as part of  a McCarthyite witchhunt against  supporters of Jeremy. As if to prove  the point, the latest victim is my own  partner and anti-racist campaigner,  Jackie Walker, of mixed heritage (Afro-  Caribbean and Jewish), outrageously  suspended from the Labour Party,  simply for telling the truth that her  Jewish ancestors were involved in  financing the Slave Trade, that the  African holocaust was even worse  than the Jewish holocaust, and that  anti-Semitism is not a major problem in  Corbyn’s Labour Party. 

I am proud of the heritage and family  traditions that helped my development  on the road to being an anti-racist,  international socialist. This current  witchhunt will not deflect me, and  countless thousands like me, from the  struggle for justice worldwide and for a  socialist Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn. 

Graham Bash 

The Israeli Labour Party, when it was in power, established the closest of relations with the Apartheid Government in South Africa.  It partnered a joint arms and steel company in South Africa, Iskandoor (an offshoot of Histadrut’s Koor Industries conglomerate – Histadrut being both Israel’s trade union federation and the 2^nd largest employer at the time).  Israeli Labour shared nuclear technology with South Africa in return for financing its own nuclear weapons projects.

Israeli Labour is a party that was responsible for the expulsion of ¾ million Palestinians, the massacre of thousands of them and a refusal to readmit any refugees for fear of endangering the Jewish demographic majority in Israel.  It is because of this fear that Arabs might outnumber Jews that it sponsored the Koenig Plan of Judaisation in the Galilee and similar programmes in the Negve.  If you want a comparison try the DeJewification programs of the Nazis and you’ll get the flavour.  Same mentality even if expulsion rather than extermination was the method.

Israeli Labour is a party that kept Israel’s Palestinians under military rule for 18 years, confiscated their land, refused to recognise ½ their villages and detained political radicals without trial indefinitely.  An Israeli Labour Party whose leader talks about it not being an ‘Arab loving’ party.

I only met Jackie Walker last month when she came to chair the Brighton and Hove Momentum meeting.  Ironically the subject of my suspension came up when the meeting voted, with only 1 against, to oppose the suspension.  Jackie spoke briefly of the fact that there seemed to be more and more suspensions locally, never dreaming that she might fall victim.

What was Jackie’s offence?  She wrote ‘many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade which is of course why there were so many early synagogues in the Carribean.’

This is a statement of fact that can be demonstrated in many an academic journal.  When taking an MA in imperial history at London University I studied the slave trade and came across Jewish involvement quite often.  It is a fact.  Jews weren’t the only people involved in the trade, nor did they play a predominant role but nor were they absent.  It is quite proper to point out that Jews have not only been oppressed in history but have also been persecutors.  Just as today, Jews are primarily oppressors in their role as Zionists whereas anti-Semitism is at a historic low. 

What we are seeing today is that the Zionist movement is using the marginal existence of anti-Semitism, it is more a prejudice than a form of state racism, and redefining it in order to fool the more gullible and guilt tripped left, like Owen Jones, Jon Lansman and now John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn.

Of course fascists and anti-Semitic site the fact of Jewish involvement to say that it was the Jews who were responsible for the slave trade.  But since when do we take our cue from fascists and anti-Semites?  Are we to restrict what we say in case they misuse it?  They will anyway.  Christians too played their full part.  There is for example the notorious example of the Church of England Codrington plantation in Barbados.  The CoE resisted the abolition of slavery till the end.  The Quakers too were heavily involved in both slavery and ironically opposition to slavery.  I’m not aware of any major Jewish participation in the anti-slavery movement though I have no doubt that given that Manchester was one of the main centres of the British anti-slavery movement that there would have been many individual Jews involved, since Manchester had the second largest Jewish community in Britain after London.  One anti-slavery activist who was well known was a Rabbi G. Gottheil.

Below is an article from the Jewish Journal on Jewish involvement in slavery in The Netherlands.  The Jewish Journal according to its website is the largest Jewish weekly newspaper in the United States outside of New York City.’ 

There is also an excellent review of the Nation of Islam’s The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: Volume One by Winthrop D Jordan September 1995  Jordan points out that the main Jewish involvement was in the Brazil and Suriname trade and it was mainly Dutch Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal who were involved.  Jewish involvement in the British and French slave trade was thought to be minimal though there were considerable numbers in the southern American states.

The Nation of Islam has a reputation for anti-Semitism being a Black separatist group.  In reality it apes and mimicks white anti-Semitism as an oppressed group and it is also a reaction to Jewish racism. It has been particularly attacked by racist Zionist groups like the Anti-Defamation League which lauded Ronald Reagan and awarded him its Torch of Liberty award and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which in 1988, awarded Reagan, supporter of the Argentinian Junta and the Nicaraguan Contras, with the “Humanitarian of the Year” award despite his speech at Bitburg cemetery in Germany where he said that the SS were “victims of the Nazis just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”   The ADL has a reputation for hypocrisy (it has also supported John Hagee President of Christians United 4 Israel when he described Hitler as god’s hunter sent to drive Jews to Israel).

The suspension of Jackie Walker for daring to raise the topic of Jewish involvement in the slave trade, as if its anti-Semitic to even discuss these matters, is outrageous.  We now have a list of forbidden topics laid down by our McCarthyist masters.

We should demand the closing down of the Compliance Unit and the dismissal of both Stolliday and McNicol.

Tony Greenstein

How culpable were Dutch Jews in the slave trade?

Cnaan Liphshiz and Iris Tzur, JTA

Posted on Dec. 26, 2013 at 1:33 pm

Amsterdam musicians dressing up as Black Pete, the slave of the Dutch Santa Claus, Sinterklaas. (Cnaan Liphshiz/JTA)

On a busy street near the Dutch Parliament, three white musicians in blackface regale passersby with holiday tunes about the Dutch Santa Claus, Sinterklaas, and his slave, Black Pete.

Many native Dutchmen view dressing up as Black Pete in December as a venerable tradition, but others consider it a racist affront to victims of slavery. With Holland marking the 150th anniversary of abolition this year, the controversy over Black Pete has reached new heights. Hundreds demonstrated against the custom in Amsterdam last month, and more than 2 million signed a petition supporting it.

Through it all, Dutch Jews — some of whom celebrate their own version of the Black Pete custom, called “Hanukklaas” — have largely remained silent.

But that changed in October, when Lody van de Kamp, an unconventional Orthodox rabbi, wrote a scathing critique about it on Republiek Allochtonie, a Dutch news-and-opinion website. “The portrayal of ‘Peter the slave’ dates back to a period when we as citizens did not meet the social criteria that bind us today,” Van de Kamp wrote.

Speaking out against Black Pete is part of what van de Kamp calls his social mission, an effort that extends to reminding Dutch Jews of their ancestors’ deep involvement in the slave trade. In April, he is set to publish a book about Dutch Jewish complicity in the slave trade, an effort he hopes will sensitize Jews to slavery in general and to the Black Pete issue in particular.

“I wrote the book and I got involved in the Black Pete debate because of what I learned from my Dutch predecessors on what it means to be a rabbi — namely, to speak about social issues, not only give instructions on how to cook on Shabbat,” van de Kamp told JTA.

“Money was earned by Jewish communities in South America, partly through slavery, and went to Holland, where Jewish bankers handled it,” he said. “Non-Jews were also complicit, but so were we. I feel partly complicit.”

Though he holds no official position in the Dutch Jewish community, van de Kamp, 65, is among the best-known Orthodox rabbis in the Netherlands, a status earned through his several books on Dutch Jewry and frequent media appearances.

His forthcoming book, a historical novel entitled “The Jewish Slave,” follows an 18th-century Jewish merchant and his black slave as they investigate Dutch-owned plantations north of Brazil in the hope of persuading Jews to divest from the slave trade. In researching the book, van de Kamp discovered data that shocked him.

In one area of what used to be Dutch Guyana, 40 Jewish-owned plantations were home to a total population of at least 5,000 slaves, he says. Known as the Jodensavanne, or Jewish Savannah, the area had a Jewish community of several hundred before its destruction in a slave uprising in 1832. 

Nearly all of them immigrated to Holland, bringing their accumulated wealth with them.

Some of that wealth was on display last year in the cellar of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue, part of an exhibition celebrating the riches of the synagogue’s immigrant founders. Van de Kamp says the exhibition sparked his interest in the Dutch Jewish role in slavery, which was robust.

On the Caribbean island of Curacao, Dutch Jews may have accounted for the resale of at least 15,000 slaves landed by Dutch transatlantic traders, according to Seymour Drescher, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh. At one point, Jews controlled about 17 percent of the Caribbean trade in Dutch colonies, Drescher said.

Jews were so influential in those colonies that slave auctions scheduled to take place on Jewish  holidays often were postponed, according to Marc Lee Raphael, a professor of Judaic studies at the College of William & Mary.

In the United States, the Jewish role in the slave trade has been a matter of scholarly debate for nearly two decades, prompted in part by efforts to refute the Nation of Islam’s claim that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade. But in Holland, the issue of Jewish complicity is rarely discussed.

“This is because we in the Netherlands only profited from slavery but have not seen it in our own eyes,” van de Kamp said. “The American experience is different.”

The slavery issue is not van de Kamp’s first foray into controversial territory. In Jewish circles, he has a reputation as a contrarian with a penchant for voicing anti-establishment views.

That image was reinforced last year when he spoke out against a compromise the Dutch Jewish community had reached with the government over kosher slaughter. Designed to avert a total ban, the compromise placed some restrictions on kosher slaughter that Holland’s chief rabbis said did not violate Jewish law. Van de Kamp denounced the deal as an unacceptable infringement on religious freedom.

More recently, he angered Dutch activists by suggesting that vilifying Dutch Muslims helped generate anti-Semitism. He also advocated dialogue with professed Muslim anti-Semites at a time when Jewish groups were calling for their prosecution.

But his reputation as a maverick rabbi in a consensus–oriented community has also endeared van de Kamp to some supporters.

“He is in a league of his own,” says Bart Wallet, an Amsterdam University historian and expert on Jewish history. “From the sideline, he is free to criticize and does not have to conform to anything.”