Publisher's Synopsis
This is the introduction to the book. I don't invite people to a banquet that I know are going to choke on the grub. This book is not suitable for Orthodox Jews. Nominal Christians should be okay except for Chapter 11. Skip that. There are few swipes along the way but nothing that might raise your hackles more than momentarily. If you take that religion seriously you should join in an ecumenical manner the Orthodox Jews as they file out the door. Otherwise, everyone else, welcome aboard. There are three types of people who might write on a subject as embodied in the title of this book, "Moses Was a Black African & The Jews Came Out Of India." The first are scholars. The second are religious believers. The third are crackpots. Then there is I: none of the above. I'll take the categories one at a time. The only way I could have gotten a passing mark in a course at the university level would have been to bribe someone. I'm not an atheist as was my grandfather. He set me off in the right direction. Then later I went my own way. His favorite saying was, "All religion is a racket. They are fooling the people." On the positive side I've matched his attendance record at synagogues in this century. I have not gone near one. He would have been proud. Some people regard me as a crackpot. This is my 44th book and not a few of the books are completely off the wall. I admit that. But the ranks of those who think I am a crackpot do not include anyone who has known me personally during my 74 years on this planet living in two countries, Canada and Israel. I don't jump to conclusions, one mark of a crackpot. I will revise a text if someone points out factual errors, no matter how big a hole it blows in my narrative. Crackpots don't do that. I am a journalist by trade. I take a subject and follow the bouncing ball wherever it leads. I don't stray from facts. I don't determine the outcome of the inquiry before I start. I walk to conclusions in small steps. The ball moves very slowly. It accommodates the velocity of your brain. But you can never know where it is going to bounce. And you can't turn away just because you have ended up in a crazy place. And I didn't invent the wheel on either subject. Cheik Anta Diop, an accomplished scholar from Senegal, wrote in 1974: "It seems almost certain that Moses was ... a Negro." As for India, what is a Sanskrit word doing smack dab in the middle of the "Shema Yisrael" declaration in the Torah, the oldest book of the Jews? That declaration is the last thing many Jews say when they are about to be killed. It is that significant. My purpose in writing? Providing food for thought. That is a statement, not a recommendation. As Hippocrates said, "One man's food is another man's poison." PART ONE Black Lives Matter/1 Slavery? Let Us Say Amen/2 Heroic Midwives/3 White-Faced, Black-Faced, Red-Faced/4 A Sirius Matter/5 PART TWO The Knight And The Princess/6 On Akkadians And Acadians/7 Them Old Cotton Fields Back Home/8 A Fake Curse And A Real Pox/9 Anath Here, Kali There/10 Krishna Comes To Israel/11 One Pays Dearly/12
