Did Jews control or run the Atlantic slave trade?

“Jews controlled the Atlantic slave trade.”

The claim comes from one place: The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a 1991 book published by the Nation of Islam, and historians of slavery reject it flatly. The Atlantic trade was a vast enterprise of European crowns and companies, Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, supplied by African kingdoms; Jews, a tiny, often persecuted minority in those empires, owned a marginal fraction of the ships, voyages and plantations. David Brion Davis, the era’s leading historian of slavery, put the Jewish share at a minute fraction of the whole; Henry Louis Gates Jr. called the book “the bible of the new antisemitism” and its method pseudo-scholarship, the deliberate inflation of scattered examples into mastery. The libel simply relocates the oldest conspiracy template, the hidden Jewish hand behind the world’s evil, into American history.

Where the claim comes from

The book has one origin point. In 1991, the Nation of Islam’s Historical Research Department published Volume 1 of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews under Louis Farrakhan’s ministry, a work with no named academic author, no peer review, and no standing in any university slavery-studies program. It argues that Jewish merchants and ship owners initiated and dominated the transatlantic trade, financed it disproportionately, and profited from it more than any other group. A second volume followed in 2010, “How Jews Gained Control of the Black American Economy,” extending the same method into the 20th century, and a companion pamphlet, “Jews Selling Blacks,” compiled isolated newspaper ads as supposed proof. None of the three has ever been published by an academic press; all three remain Nation of Islam self-publications.

The claim’s strongest form, and where it breaks

The strongest version of the argument, the one worth taking seriously before it is refuted, notes correctly that Jewish merchants did participate in New World slavery. Sephardic Jewish traders were present in Dutch Suriname, in colonial Curaçao, and in some Caribbean and Brazilian ports; a number of Jewish families in Charleston, Newport, and the Caribbean owned slaves as domestic servants or, less often, as plantation labor, exactly as their gentile neighbors did. If the claim stopped there, it would be unremarkable history. It does not stop there: the book converts a documented minority presence within one trading system into command of the entire four-century, multi-continent enterprise, a claim no primary shipping record supports.

The documented record

The transatlantic trade ran from roughly 1501 to 1867, carried an estimated 12.5 million captive Africans across some 36,000 recorded voyages, and was organized overwhelmingly by chartered state monopolies: Portugal’s crown trade into Brazil, Britain’s Royal African Company and later free traders out of Liverpool and Bristol, the Dutch West India Company, France’s Compagnie du Sénégal, and Spain’s asiento system. These were Christian state enterprises licensed by kings, insured by London and Amsterdam underwriters, and crewed and financed almost entirely outside any Jewish community. Jews were barred by law from most trading companies, guilds, and colonial office in Catholic Iberia, in France before 1791, and in England before Jewish emancipation, precisely the exclusion a “controlling” minority could not have operated under.

The American Historical Association took the rare step, in a policy resolution its Council passed on 5 January 1995 and published in Perspectives that March, of formally condemning “as false any statement alleging that Jews played a disproportionate role in the exploitation of slave labor or in the Atlantic slave trade.” The resolution followed a joint statement from David Brion Davis of Yale and Seymour Drescher of Pittsburgh, the two scholars most associated with the modern historiography of slavery, laying out the documentary case that Jewish participation was marginal, scattered, and dwarfed at every stage by the state-chartered European trade. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard historian of the Black Atlantic, reviewed the book in the New York Times in July 1992 and called it “the bible of the new antisemitism,” describing its footnoting as a method of quoting real historians selectively while omitting the sentences that contradict its thesis.

Who pushes it today

The claim has stayed almost entirely inside one organization. Louis Farrakhan, who has led the Nation of Islam since 1978, has continued to promote both volumes of the book from the pulpit and in the group’s newspaper, The Final Call, and his rhetoric since roughly 2009 has folded the slave-trade claim into a broader set of conspiracy theories about Jewish control of banking, entertainment, and government. The Anti-Defamation League tracks the book and its sequels as core Nation of Islam antisemitic material, still promoted at NOI events and online decades after its first printing. Outside the Nation of Islam’s orbit the claim has essentially no scholarly constituency; it surfaces on social media and in some Afrocentrist circles that draw on Farrakhan’s material, but no historian of slavery who has examined the shipping and ownership records has endorsed it.

The word doing the lying is “control”

Individual Jews, like members of every mercantile population of the era, took part in and profited from slavery, and honest history says so plainly. The lie is the word “control”: converting a marginal share into secret ownership of a continent-spanning crime, so that a specific people can be handed the guilt of empires. That is also why the claim functions the way older blood-libel and Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style conspiracies function: it does not ask “did some Jews do wrong,” a question honest history answers case by case, but “were Jews secretly behind it,” a question designed to have only one, unfalsifiable answer.