Is The Secret Relationship “shoddy” scholarship?

All of the Jewish sources collected and quoted in the Nation of Islam’s 334-page The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 1, are there for all to see and evaluate. The book uses Jewish wills, rabbinical sermons, runaway slave and slave auction notices, slave sale advertisements, port records, court records, private correspondence, among its array of source materials. Even with this wide-ranging use of Jewish documentation, University of Chicago African Studies professor and Jew Ralph A. Austen has written—accurately—that “[t]he authors of The Secret Relationship underestimate the structural importance of the Jews in the early stages of the New World slave trade.”

The fact that Jews were essential participants in slavery’s/the slave trade’s formation, growth, maintenance, and profitability is no longer open to serious debate