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Short answer
And now we’re supposed to believe Jews were the villains of Black history? This claim is just another recycled antisemitic myth.
The historical record is clear: Jews were never a collective slave trading group, and the transatlantic slave trade was overwhelmingly run by European Christian powers such as Portugal, Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands.
In colonial America and the antebellum South, slave ownership was dominated by white Christian planters. Most Jews arrived in America poor and fleeing persecution, not as plantation owners. When they achieved stability, they disproportionately supported abolition, funded schools for Black children, and stood alongside Black Americans in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Jewish law itself condemns human trafficking as a capital crime, forbids permanent enslavement, and treats freeing slaves as a moral good, which is the opposite of a slave trade conspiracy.
Long answer
Watching Candace Owens flirt with the claim that Jews were responsible for the slave trade would be absurd if it were not so dangerous. So let’s ground this in reality.
Jews arrived in America largely penniless. They had no ships, no plantations, and no sovereign power. Many were fleeing persecution themselves. When they gained stability, they did not build slave empires. Instead, they stood shoulder to shoulder with Black Americans in the fight against segregation. Few groups invested as deeply, relative to their size, as the Jewish community in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, when a strong Black Jewish alliance stood at the heart of the movement.
Judaism itself explicitly condemns slavery and human trafficking. Jewish law places strict moral limits on power over others. Kidnapping a human being for sale is punishable by death in the Hebrew Bible, permanent enslavement is forbidden, and freeing slaves is considered a moral good. Judaism treats human captivity as a grievous sin. One of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not steal,” is understood in Jewish law as a ban on kidnapping, the theft of people rather than property. The punishment is explicit in Exodus 21:16, which declares that one who steals and sells a person shall be put to death.
Even more obscene is how this fantasy accusation distracts from what is actually happening today. Real slavery exists right now in parts of Africa. In the Gulf, particularly in Qatar, migrant labor systems resembling modern slavery have been documented for years. Under the kafala system, workers are bound to employers, passports are confiscated, movement and job changes are restricted, and deaths, unpaid wages, and coercion are repeatedly reported.
Accusations that Jews as a group were slave traders are not historical analysis. They are conspiracy propaganda recycled from old antisemitic myths.
