A controversial Wellesley College professor spoke at a Black Students Association (BSA) event yesterday, drawing a letter of protest from Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel.

Wellesley Africana Studies professor Anthony Martin spoke on "The Bell Curve and Other Issues of Racism." Martin is the author of The Jewish Onslaught, a book that alleges a pattern of Jewish racism against Blacks.

Hillel Steering Committee co-chairs distributed copies of a one-page letter to students entering the speech at Boylston Hall.

"We are profoundly offended by Professor Martin's viciously anti-Semitic book, The Jewish Onslaught," the letter reads. "We are shocked and saddened by the choice of this divisive and hurtful speaker."

But BSA President Kristen M. Clarke '97 stood firmly behind Martin and his address.

"Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact," Clarke said last night.

Hillel Coordinating Council Chair Elie G. Kaunfer '95 said that despite Hillel's objections to Martin, relations between the BSA and the Jewish student organization remain open.

"We have planned dialogues with the BSA despite the choice of this speaker," said Kaunfer.

In response to the Hillel letter, Martin said that he is not anti-Semitic.

"I totally resent this letter and those who put it together," Martin said. He also condemned those who believe "that anybody who criticizes a Jew is ipso facto anti-Semitic."

Martin's hour-long address sought to place The Bell Curve, the controversial book by former Harvard Professor Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles A. Murray '65, in historical context.

The book has sparked controversy for the links it draws between race and intelligence.

"This book represents another feature in the long history of European pseudo-scientific racism," Martin said.

Dismissing The Bell Curve as rife with "internal contradictions," Martin devoted much of his speech to documenting the Jewish "tradition" of racism.

"There was a Jewish monopoly over Blacks being cursed," Martin said in reference to allegedly racist passages he cited from the book of Genesis and quotations from Jewish philosopher Maimonides.

Kaunfer, who is also senior editor of The Crimson, said Jewish texts are not a source of racism.

"Professor Martin spent some time delineating a racist theory present in the Talmud," he said. "When Jews study the Talmud today they are not taught [such] theories."

In his speech, Martin used quotes from figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Anthony Trollope, David Hume and George Hegel to illustrate what he called the prevalence of racism.

"As long as Black people are lacking in power we will always be subject to the Herrnsteins, the Murrays, the Jeffersons," he said.

Martin was tenured at Wellesley College in 1975 and assumed a full professorship in 1979.

Martin's decision to include Leonard Jeffries' controversial book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews in his history class reading, as well as the publication of his own book, drew criticism from students and faculty at Wellesley College

The Wellesley history department also refused to grant history credit for Martin's course, which was offered in the Africans department.

Martin released The Jewish Onslaught in 1993 in his own defense, he said.

"The press release against me, I now realize, is a classic textbook case study of organized Jewish intimidation," he wrote in the book.

After its release, Martin's book drew criticism from the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish leaders and several prominent academics, including DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The book jacket describes the volume as "a historian's analysis of the escalating Jewish onslaught against Black people.