But it would be a mistake to put down the anti-Semitic aspects of the story to chance, or to the impact of one or two individuals. For one thing, many other black extremists joined in the attack on Lefkowitz, often denouncing her quite as stridently as Martin did. For another, there was an ideology of sorts behind much of the abuse. For many centuries, it was alleged, Jews had been engaged in the wholesale exploitation of blacks. Above all, they had secretly funded the African slave trade — a case which was set forth most extensively, with a great show of pseudo-scholarship, in The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, an anonymous work published in 1991 by the Nation of Islam.

Needless to say the claim that Jews were a driving force behind the slave trade is another myth, and a vicious one. The notion of them as hardened exploiters may also seem to sit oddly with the fact that they played a conspicuous part in the struggle for civil rights, but Afrocentrists have an answer to that too. Lefkowitz quotes one writer who argues that what he calls — with a great deal of exaggeration — Jewish “dominance” of the civil rights movement could itself be regarded as a form of racism.

In a comparable spirit, Tony Martin shows less gratitude towards Martin Bernal than you might have thought he would. In The Jewish Onslaught he dismisses him as “the white Jewish king of Afrocentricland” (Bernal is of partly Jewish descent) and treats him as though he were one of Lefkowitz’s allies. For his part, Bernal is quick to pounce on any sign of anti-Semitism in traditional classical scholarship — it is one way of trying to discredit it — while with a none-too-subtle invocation of Nazism he refers to the Indo-European language system as “the Aryan hypothesis”. On the other hand, Lefkowitz describes a radio debate which she and her colleague Guy Rogers had with Bernal and the Afrocentrist historian John Henrik Clarke in 1996. Towards the end, she reports, Clarke “threw in a few comments about the malevolence of the Jews” but she didn’t hear Bernal make any objection to them.