B'chasdei Hashem, over the past almost 20 years, Beis Mevakesh Lev has produced over 13,300 audio shiurim and over 31,000 written posts, unmatched by any one-person website - all completely free of charge. There are no paywalls or anything else. Now we are turning to you for help so we can continue - any amount will help. Even 99 cents! Thank you to my sweetest and most beloved friends!!!:-)!!
alchehrm@gmail.com
----
In a recent YouTube broadcast, Mendacity Owens addressed Black Americans directly: “Wake up and learn the true history of slavery because that wasn’t exactly a white men sport. Okay? Jewish people were the ones that were trading us. Jewish people were in control of the slave trade. They’ve buried a lot of it, but it’s there, and you can find it. Yo Negroes - get wit de program.” [OK - the last sentence she didn't actually say - she just thought it:-)].
It’s a claim designed to redirect black frustration away from white American institutions and toward a different target. It sounds like hidden knowledge finally being spoken aloud. There’s just one small, minor problem:
It’s not true.
Where This Claim Actually Comes From
Owens didn’t invent this accusation. She’s repeating a narrative that originated (at least prominently) in a 1991 book called “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” published anonymously by the Nation of Islam’s “Historical Research Department.”
The book, with its 1,275 footnotes and scholarly veneer, claims that Jews were “key operatives” in the slave trade and played an “inordinate” and “disproportionate” role in the kidnapping and sale of African people. Minister Louis "Adolph" Farrakhan has promoted the book for decades, holding it up at rallies and declaring, “This is a scholarly work, not put together by nincompoops!”
The reality is that the book works through a process historians (and everyone else) would call “cherry-picking:” selectively quoting legitimate scholars out of context to construct a narrative that those same scholars explicitly reject.
Here’s how it works: the anonymous authors would find a passage in a reputable history book mentioning that a Jewish merchant in, say, Newport, Rhode Island, owned a slave ship. They’d cite that fact with a proper footnote. What they wouldn’t include is the following paragraph, where the same historian explains that this merchant represented a tiny fraction of the trade, or that Protestant shipowners dwarfed Jewish involvement in that port, or that the overall numbers were statistically negligible.
It’s the academic equivalent of quoting someone saying, “I never said he was a good person,” and cutting it to “he was a good person.” Technically accurate citation. Fundamentally dishonest argument.
To be clear: Jewish involvement in the slave trade was not zero. In the Dutch colonies, particularly Suriname, Curaçao, and Dutch Brazil, Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal found relative religious freedom and became significant participants in the colonial economy. In Dutch Brazil, where the Dutch ruled from 1630 to 1654, Jews flourished in the sugar industry and the slave trade, often purchasing enslaved Africans and reselling them at profit.
By 1645, the Dutch Jewish population had peaked at approximately 1,500, about half the European population there. In Suriname, Jews established their own semi-autonomous settlement called Jodensavanne, “Jewish Savannah,” where they owned sugar plantations and the enslaved Africans who worked them. At certain points, Jews controlled as much as 17 percent of the Dutch Caribbean trade, according to historian Seymour Drescher. In Curaçao, Jewish merchants may have been involved in the resale of at least 15,000 enslaved people. In colonial America, Jewish traders in places like Newport, Rhode Island, and Charleston, South Carolina, participated in slavetrading and slaveholding alongside their Christian neighbors.
These are not trivial numbers. They represent real human suffering, and Jewish historians have documented this participation openly for decades. The question has never been whether some Jews participated. The question is whether Jews “controlled” the entire Atlantic slave trade, as Owens claims. And here, the distinction between regional participation and global dominance matters enormously. The Dutch trade itself represented only 5 to 7 percent of the total transatlantic slave trade. Jewish involvement within that fraction, while morally damning for those who participated, does not remotely constitute “control” of the broader system.
Eli Faber, a professor of history at CUNY who has assigned portions of the book to graduate students specifically to teach them about antisemitic propaganda, notes that students initially find it “very convincing.” The footnotes, the citations, the sources. “If it’s science, it must be good,” they think. The academic framework confers legitimacy. But when students actually hunt down the sources, they discover something striking: the very historians being cited to prove Jewish dominance of the slave trade explicitly argue the opposite.
For instance, the book might cite a historian noting that Jews in Jamaica owned 310 slaves in 1774. Horrific, yes. But what the book omits is that this represented only 4% of Jamaica’s total slave population. A total of 12 Jews owned plantations on the entire island. From this, the Nation of Islam concludes that Jews “dominated” the Jamaican slave economy. But most readers never check.
So what do the actual numbers show when examined honestly?
The Numbers (and History) Tell a Different Story
Let’s examine the claim systematically.
On structural control: The Atlantic slave trade was not a corner business any individual or minority group could dominate. It was an industrial, state-sponsored monopoly operated by European monarchs and massive joint-stock corporations. The Royal African Company, chartered by the British Crown, transported more enslaved people than any other institution in history. Jewish participation in such state-sanctioned monopolies was legally and politically impossible in most of Europe at the time.
On ship ownership: Historian Eli Faber’s research with British Naval Office records found that in 18th-century Britain, the dominant force in the slave trade, Jewish merchants owned near 0% of slave ships. In the American colonies, they accounted for less than 2% of all slave arrivals. Antisemitic narratives focus obsessively on a single port like Newport, Rhode Island, while ignoring the massive ports of Liverpool, London, and Nantes, where ship ownership was almost entirely in non-Jewish hands.
On financing: The capital required for the slave trade came from European national treasuries and broad joint-stock markets. In Portugal and Spain, which together accounted for the majority of the trade, Jews were structurally excluded from the core financing of the Atlantic system by the Inquisition itself. As historian Seymour Drescher documented, you cannot dominate an industry that literally barred your existence.
On slave ownership: In the 1830 U.S. Census, Jewish slaveholders accounted for only 1.25% of all slaveholders in the American South. Jewish populations in the New World were overwhelmingly urban shopkeepers, not plantation owners. Whatever horrors they participated in, they did not “control” the massive labor forces that defined the plantation economy.
Historian Wim Klooster put it plainly: “In no period did Jews play a leading role as financiers, shipowners, or factors in the Transatlantic or Caribbean slave trades. They possessed far fewer slaves than non-Jews in every British and Spanish territory in North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Even when Jews in a handful of places owned slaves in proportions slightly above their representation among a town's families, such cases do not come close to corroborating the assertions of The Secret Relationship.”
The Irony Owens Won’t Discuss
Here’s what makes Owens’ claim particularly rich: she identifies as a devout Catholic. The Catholic Church was not a marginal player in the Atlantic slave trade. It was a central institution.
Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull “Dum Diversas” in 1452, explicitly authorizing the Portuguese king to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever” and to reduce them to “perpetual slavery.” This was official Church doctrine providing theological justification for the entire enterprise.
The Jesuits owned plantations throughout the Americas. The Church baptized enslaved Africans not to free them but to make their bondage spiritually legitimate. When Owens points her finger at “Jewish control,” she might consider looking at the institution whose communion she takes every Sunday.
Why This Lie Persists
Henry Louis Gates Jr., writing in The New York Times in 1992, identified precisely what makes “The Secret Relationship” and its claims so dangerous. The book assumes “that culpability is heritable,” that the racial evil of a people is “merely manifest (rather than constituted) by their historical misdeeds.” In other words: Jews are essentially evil, and history simply provides the evidence. This is the same logic the Nazis used.
The claim serves a strategic purpose. As Gates noted, demagogues promote antisemitism not despite the historic Black-Jewish alliance in the civil rights movement, but because of it. “For precisely such trans-ethnic, trans-racial cooperation, epitomized by the historic partnership between blacks and Jews, is what poses the greatest threat to the isolationist movement.”
Owens knows this. Her entire project right now is coalition-breaking. She’s redirecting the frustration many Americans feel about Gaza, about media manipulation, about censorship, toward an ancient conspiracy theory that exonerates the actual architects of American slavery: the white Christian plantation class, the European colonial powers, the churches that blessed the ships.
The Real History
Did Jewish merchants participate in the slave trade? Yes. The question has never been whether any Jewish individuals were involved. The question is whether Jews “controlled” or “dominated” the trade.
And they did not.
-----
Sources:
Faber, Eli. Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight. New York University Press, 1998.
Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam. The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One. Chicago: Nation of Islam, 1991.
Gates Jr., Henry Louis. “Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars.” The New York Times, July 20, 1992.
"Brazil Virtual Jewish History Tour." Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise.
Drescher, Seymour. “Jews and the Slave Trade.” Historically Speaking 6, no. 2 (2004).
Ungar-Sargon, Batya. “Is Jewish Control Over the Slave Trade a Nation of Islam Lie or Scholarly Truth?” Tablet Magazine, August 5, 2013.
Davis, David Brion. “The Slave Trade and the Jews.” The New York Review of Books, December 22, 1994.
Klooster, Wim. “Jews in Suriname and Curaçao.” In The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800, edited by Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering. Berghahn Books, 2001.
