Recent comments by Candace Owens have reignited a long standing antisemitic myth that has been repeatedly rejected by serious historians. In a December 20, 2025 post on X, Owens urged Black Americans to “quarrel” with Jews, claiming that “Jewish people were in control of the slave trade.” She later doubled down on the accusation, circulating a list of Jewish slave owners as supposed proof.
The claim is not new, and it is not true.
The idea that Jews ran or controlled the trans Atlantic slave trade has been promoted for decades by extremist figures such as Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. In more recent years, variations of the narrative have been adopted by activists connected to the Black Lives Matter movement, including efforts to exclude Jews from protests. Owens’s claim closely mirrors those earlier accusations, despite her public opposition to the same groups that popularized them.
Historical evidence tells a very different story.
Across the Americas, Jews owned far fewer slaves than non Jews in every British colony. According to historian Saul S. Friedman and research cited by multiple academic reviews, American Jewish merchants accounted for less than 2 percent of all African slaves imported into the New World. In the domestic slave trade, all Jewish slave traders combined bought and sold fewer slaves than the single non Jewish firm of Franklin and Armfield.
The numbers in the American South further undermine the claim. In 1830, only 120 Jews were among the 45,000 slaveholders who owned 20 or more slaves. That same year, just 20 Jews were among the 12,000 slaveholders who owned 50 or more slaves. British Jews were likewise a minority among investors in slave trading ventures and were not primary owners of slave fleets. In Jamaica in 1774, Jews owned 310 slaves, about 4 percent of the island’s slave population.
Historians emphasize that Jewish involvement in slavery was limited and proportional to their small population. For every Jew involved in the Atlantic slave system, there were many Catholic and Protestant participants. Legal restrictions and expulsions targeting Jews across Europe severely limited their access to capital, ships, ports, and imperial monopolies, making any Jewish domination of the slave trade impossible. Even in the seventeenth century Dutch slave trade, Jewish participation was limited and subordinate.
The broader context of the slave trade is also often ignored by those pushing this myth. African elites and kingdoms were the primary sellers of enslaved Africans. Some African states, including Dahomey in present day Benin, actively urged Britain not to abolish the slave trade because it was so profitable for them.
One of the most frequently cited sources for the accusation of Jewish control is the 1991 Nation of Islam book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. Historians across the political and academic spectrum have rejected the book as propaganda. It misquotes reputable scholars and falsely identifies non Jewish slave owners as Jewish.
As historian David Brion Davis explained, “The participants in the Atlantic slave system included Arabs, Berbers, scores of African ethnic groups, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch, Jews, Germans, Swedes, French, English, Danes, white Americans, Native Americans, and even thousands of New World blacks who had been emancipated or were descended from freed slaves but who then became slaveholding farmers or planters themselves.”
Henry Louis Gates Jr. was even more blunt about the Nation of Islam text, writing that it “massively misrepresents the historical record, largely through a process of cunningly selective quotation of often reputable sources.”
The historical record is clear. Jews did not run or control the trans Atlantic slave trade. Their participation was limited and reflected their marginal status in the societies of the time. Claims to the contrary rely on distortion, selective evidence, and ideologically motivated falsehoods.
Owens’s assertion does not challenge power or expose hidden history. It simply repeats a debunked narrative long used by antisemitic movements, now repackaged for a new audience.
