Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The conspiracy pseudo-theory of Jewish domination of the African slave trade and Jews as a major slaver element in the Americas, such as the 1991 Nation of Islam two-volume publication “The Secret Relationship of Jews and Blacks,” is part of the larger anti-Jewish mythology of economic control. In Western Europe and Britain, Catholics and Protestants were the drivers of the transatlantic slave trade and made up the overwhelming majority of slavers. Some Jews were slavers and some were involved in the slave trade, but most who were involved in the slave economy, which was the basis of the US economy, were, like the Lehmans, merchant suppliers of goods.