The phenomenon of black anti-Semitism has for some years now been widely spoken of as “the problem” of blackJewish relations. That is a rhetorical diversion of the kind most commonly employed by liberals when they are referring to certain kinds of unpleasant behavior on the part of blacks in order to obscure the distinction between sinner and sinned against. And no liberals have been more practiced at the use of this particular diversion than Jewish liberals themselves.
Thus it was bound to happen that the first book-length apologia for the supreme black anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan published by a respectable firm would be by a Jew of the leftist persuasion. And it was just as inevitable that such an effort would be touted by its publisher as “independent, ” objective,” “fairminded,” and — how could we be spared? — “insightful.”
Prophet of Rage (BasicBooks, 264 pages, $ 25) opens with an account of how and why its author, at the time the senior editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times, first contacted Farrakhan. The year was 1993, and rumor had it, Arthur J. Magida tells us, that Farrakhan was hoping to mend his fences with the Jewish community. As a Jew, Magida says, he had been “appalled, sickened, frightened” by Farrakhan’s hateful rhetoric. But “as a liberal and a believer in what Judaism calls teshuvah — defining moments of ‘turning’ toward grace, forgiveness, and exemplary acts of redemption,” he was equally appalled by the downward trajectory of black-Jewish relations — some of it due, in his view, to Jewish feuding with Farrakhan. So Magida sent a fax to Nation of Islam headquarters suggesting that that an interview with Baltimore’s Anglo-Jewish paper would enable Farrakhan to send the good new word to tens of thousands of Jews “in one fell swoop.”
The interview went swimmingly for four hours. Farrakhan was cordial, as, it seems, was the phalanx of security men who keep him surrounded at all times. Indeed, the only tense moment came when the believer in teshuvah asked the head of the Nation of Islam if he would agree to apologize to the Jews for what “were widely perceived” as anti-Semitic remarks; Magida was answered with an angry tirade accusing the Jews of being arrogant and of wishing everyone to bow down before them. Farrakhan demanded to know why he should beg forgiveness from people “who helped to bring my people into slavery.”
Evidently Farrakhan was given no further offense by his peacemaking interlocutor, for the interview concluded in good spirit and was followed by more — in the course of which, we may assume, the author’s idea of writing a booklength “biography” took form.
There is a perfunctory account of Farrakhan’s life — growing up in Massachusetts, doing well enough in school to secure admission to the prestigious Boston Latin School, then becoming a calypso singer before finding his faith — but the only serious account here is a description of how Farrakhan managed to take over the Nation of Islam, supposedly the hereditary fiefdom of its founder, Elijah Muhammad.
This is a story of intramural chicanery and violence, and while Magida scants on many of the details, they are easily inferred. But the relation of the false “Islam” of the Black Muslims to the original, or to any other serious theological or intellectual tradition, is a subject Magida neither takes seriously nor holds Farrakhan accountable for.
Prophet of Rage tries to explain why it is that blacks — Farrakhanites and other separatists most ardently among them — have come to evince so violent a hatred of Jews. He describes in meticulous detail the Farrakhanitc litany: The success of the movement for desegregation, which Jews had been actively involved in, destroyed the once selfsufficient and thriving segregated black economy, you see. And that hugely benefited the Jews, who had always been far more advantaged than blacks by virtue of being white. Indeed, Jews were the founders of oppressive white civilization, and either themselves possessed or were in the position to manipulate all the power in this society.
Magida does not subscribe to such notions, to be sure, any more than he subscribes to Farrakhan’s claim to have been carried by a beam up into an unidentified flying object called the Mother Plane where the voice of the long-dead Elijah Muhammad announced that Reagan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were planning a vast and bloody war. These ideas are merely offered as explanation, to help us to achieve a proper understanding of why this ” prophet,” much as he really might from time to time wish to conciliate the Jews, just cannot swallow his rage in the end. Thus does Arthur J. Magida fulfill his publisher’s claim that he is independent and objective — or, as Peter Jennings so predictably remarks of him in a blurb on the book’s dust jacket, “has a very strong commitment to balance and fairness.”
The book closes with a description of the Farrakhan-inspired Million Man March last October. This event might be considered Farrakhan’s greatest show of power, for by calling for black men to converge on Washington and spend a day repenting their sins and failures, he was able to make himself a place among the country’s respectable black leadership. No one really knows how many men turned up on the Mall that day -Magida estimates hundreds of thousands — but however many there were, they clearly did achieve a momentary new sense of brotherhood. Having achieved all this, Farrakhan took to the podium and spent two and a half hours revealing, to his impatient audience as well as to the watching world, the full measure of the farrago of crackpottery that serves as his “theological” underpinning — from numerology to some kind of maundering “philosophy” to pure nutcake history.
Why he did this, rather than take advantage of such an unprecedented opportunity to display his considerable talent for stirring oratory, is a question that perhaps only his psychiatrist, if he had one, could answer. It is, however, a question that holds no interest for the everinsightful Arthur J. Magida, who explains to us that the man who stood before his vast audience on the Mall was not much different at heart from the boy who used to play his violin for hours in the locked bathroom of his mother’s house, watching in the mirror his own every gesture, every movement, every tilt of the head. Only now it is the world that is his mirror.
Farrakhan, he continues, has also become a mirror, “a reflection of the traumas and the hopes that plagued our nation’s soul and frayed its fabric. . . . “But to say that is a way of refusing to take him seriously, albeit in a high flown way.
For whatever grip Farrakhan has on the nervous systems of so many blacks in this country, it has nothing to do with mirrored hopes and everything to do with fear and the absence of necessary self-love. Farrakhan is not a cure for anything that may be troubling today’s blacks; he is a prime symptom of the disease. The Nation of Islam may be pretending to put a little moral starch into the underclass, but by telling its members and sympathizers the darkest lies both about themselves and about the nature of the world, it keeps them in chains. Thus to give a sympathetic account of Farrakhan and Co., no matter how “objective” one claims to be, is inescapably to buy into the idea of a congenital and irremediable black inequality. For what more can be expected of them, after all?
This is the idea — let us graciously deem it an unconscious one — that lies behind most liberal pieties about the black condition, and behind Arthur J. Magida’s willingness to offer us so heartfelt a portrait of a bad man, complete with a catch in the throat and a reminder that Louis Farrakhan was once a little boy in front of a mirror. The believer in teshuvah will supply all the “turning” and “forgiveness” he could ever want. And the ugly black anti-Semite will continue, undisturbed, to go his merry way.
Midge Decter has written three books and hundreds of essays.
