Ford's first chapter opens with a claim: that Jewish conversos helped pay for Columbus's discovery of America. Conversos were Jews who had converted to Christianity under pressure from the Spanish Inquisition but kept their Jewish identity and networks. Ford named Luis de Santangel (spelled Santagel or Santangel in different editions), the royal treasurer, who put up 17,000 ducats of his own money for Columbus's first voyage. He named Gabriel Sanchez, also a converso and the royal treasurer of Aragon, who co-signed the agreement. Ford wrote that Columbus himself may have had converso ancestry. As support he pointed to Columbus's use of Hebrew notation, his ties to Jewish mapmakers, and old accounts of how many conversos were in his crew.
Ford then moved to the colonial period and Peter Stuyvesant's run-in with the first openly Jewish settlers in North America. In September 1654, a ship called the St. Catarina reached New Amsterdam with 23 Jewish refugees. They had fled Recife, Brazil, after the Portuguese retook the Dutch colony there. Stuyvesant, the Director-General of New Netherland, asked the Dutch West India Company to expel them. He called Jews a 'deceitful race' whose religion was 'abominable.' The company refused. Ford claimed one reason was that Jewish shareholders in the company held big stakes and stepped in for the settlers. Ford used this to argue that Jewish trade and finance networks shaped Jewish immigration and settlement from the very start of American history.
Ford tracked the growth of the Jewish population in America, using census figures and immigration records. At the time of the Revolution, he put it at 2,000 to 3,000. By 1820, about 6,000. By 1880, about 250,000, mostly in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston. The great wave from Eastern Europe, mainly from the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, brought an estimated 2.3 million Jewish immigrants to the United States between 1880 and 1920. By 1920 Ford put the Jewish population at about 3.3 million, with over 1.6 million in New York City.
Ford then listed industries where he judged Jewish ownership or control to be larger than the Jewish share of the population. His list: the garment industry (Ford cited estimates that Jews owned about 70–80 percent of all garment manufacturers in New York City), scrap metal, tobacco, retail dry goods, motion pictures (which he covered in depth in a later chapter), wholesale liquor distribution, and a large share of real estate in major American cities. Ford did not blame discrimination or exclusion. He said this showed a 'racial instinct for trade' and a Jewish preference for commerce over farming or manufacturing.
Ford also claimed Jewish banks dominated American finance and investment. His main example was Kuhn, Loeb & Company — the investment bank founded by Abraham Kuhn and Solomon Loeb in 1867 and later led by Jacob Schiff. Kuhn, Loeb had funded the Union Pacific Railroad, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and other big rail projects. It had also funded Japan's government bonds during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Schiff was open about that deal. He said part of his reason was to weaken Tsarist Russia in payback for pogroms against Russian Jews. Ford used this to argue that Jewish financiers would use their money for Jewish national interests over American ones.
Ford spent a lot of the first chapter on Jewish ownership and control of American newspapers and news wire services. His main example was Adolph Ochs, who owned the New York Times (bought in 1896). He also said the Associated Press wire service, which fed news to papers across the country, had Jewish leadership, and that many big papers in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago had large Jewish ownership stakes. Ford argued this bunching of press ownership bent public debate. Stories that hurt Jewish interests got buried, and stories that helped them got pushed — not by plot, but by owners' natural urge to protect their community's name.