A review essay on Jonathan Schorsch's Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, weighed against the Nation of Islam pamphlet whose charges about Jewish domination of the slave trade it answers. Sepinwall reports Schorsch's findings that Jewish slave owning and trading in the Atlantic and Mediterranean stayed small, that the curse of Ham entered anti-Black argument through twentieth-century Christian polemic, and that Sephardic communities in Amsterdam and Surinam progressively barred people of colour from ritual life as they claimed whiteness for themselves. Sepinwall treats that last argument, on the unstable racial position of Jews and their consequent need to assert whiteness, as the book's most valuable contribution. Her reservations concern the deliberately baroque prose, the thin coverage of the Catholic empires, and a framework drawn from acculturation studies that measures masters by their hospitality and has little to say about violence or the agency of the enslaved.