Hebrews to Negroes: What You Need to Know (2024)

• The 2018 film Hebrews to Negroes, based on director Ronald Dalton Jr.’s book series of the same name, is a three-plus-hour effort to “prove” the Black Hebrew Israelite (BHI) belief that certain people of color, including Black Americans, are the true descendants of the biblical Israelites.
• The film promotes beliefs commonly found among antisemitic and extremist factions of the BHI movement, including claims that modern Jews are imposters who stole the religious heritage of Black people and have engaged in a “cover-up” to prevent Black people from knowing their “true” identity.
• While much of the film deals with historical and genetic arguments about various racial and ethnic groups, it also includes extensive antisemitism, including claims of a global Jewish conspiracy to oppress and defraud Black people, allegations that Jews are in part responsible for the transatlantic slave trade and the claim that Jews falsified the history of the Holocaust in order to “conceal their nature and protect their status and power.”
• The film also amplifies longstanding antisemitic tropes about Jewish power, control and greed, including false claims that Jews control the media, and disputes the identity of modern Jews, claiming they are “religious converts” who descended from the Khazars and have no historical connection to the land of Israel.
• To support its claims, the film cites statements from prominent antisemites and notorious antisemitic texts as supposed evidence of the “true” nature and identity of Jewish people. For example, the film includes passages from Henry Ford’s “The International Jew” and two purported (though seemingly fabricated) quotations from Adolf Hitler.
• The film also advertises the book on which it is based, which features even more explicit antisemitism, including quotes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a longer passage of Holocaust denial, attacks on Zionism, conspiratorial claims about the Rothschilds and more.
• In October 2022, professional basketball player Kyrie Irving, a repeat NBA All-Star and member of the Brooklyn Nets, shared a link to the film with his 4.6 million Twitter followers. Irving eventually deleted the tweet three days later, after initially telling reporters that he was “not going to stand down.”Irving has since issued apublic apology and statementaddressing the problematic nature of the film and his role in promoting it.

Among the film’s claims:

• “Black people are now finding out they are the real lost children of Israel. In turn, they are realizing that the Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Mizrahi Jews in Israel are just religious converts with no biblical blood connection to the ancient Twelve Tribes of Israel.”

• “If the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews falsely claim they are from the Tribe of Judah, Benjamin, and Levi, why did they decide to steal the identity of the real Black Israelites that they sold into slavery?”
• “The children of Israel got their brown skin complexion, something we don’t see with the people who came to Israel in 1948 and call themselves Jews.”

• “The seed of Edom, the seed of Cain, the Synagogue of Satan, and Lucifer himself are the major confederate that has been against us for a very long time.”
• “In school we are never taught about…the Jewish slave shipsthat brought our West African negro Bantus ancestors to slave ports owned by the Jewish Newport world center of slave commerce off the east coast of North America.”
• “The Jews have established five major falsehoods which work to conceal their nature and protect their status and power,to wit: 1) The Jews are ‘Israelites’, and thus God’s Chosen People;2) Jesus Christ was a Jew;3) That 6 million Jews were killedin a holocaust during WWII;4) That all races are equal, or that all are brothers; and,5) That Jews are just another religious group.” [Quotation from a 1978 antisemitic text published by Walter White Jr. titled “The Hidden Tyranny”]

• “[The Americans]plan on movingthese false white Jews into a state of Israel. Because the white Jews know that the Negroes are the real children of Israeland to keep America’s secret, the Jews will blackmailAmerica. They will extort America, their plan for world dominationwon’twork if the Negroes know who they are.” [Fabricated “quotation” falsely attributed to Adolf Hitler]