Black Jews in Africa and the Americas

Tudor Parfitt

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674071506
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas tells the fascinating story of how the Ashanti, Tutsi, Igbo, Zulu, Beta Israel, Maasai, and many other African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Pursuing medieval and modern European race narratives over a millennium in which not only were Jews cast as black but black Africans were cast as Jews, Tudor Parfitt reveals a complex history of the interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses.For centuries, colonialists, travelers, and missionaries, in an attempt to explain and understand the strange people they encountered on the colonial frontier, labeled an astonishing array of African tribes, languages, and cultures as Hebrew, Jewish, or Israelite. Africans themselves came to adopt these identities as their own, invoking their shared histories of oppression, imagined blood-lines, and common traditional practices as proof of a racial relationship to Jews.Beginning in the post-slavery era, contacts between black Jews in America and their counterparts in Africa created powerful and ever-growing networks of black Jews who struggled against racism and colonialism. A community whose claims are denied by many, black Jews have developed a strong sense of who they are as a unique people. In Parfitt's telling, forces of prejudice and the desire for new racial, redemptive identities converge, illuminating Jewish and black history alike in novel and unexplored ways.

1 / The Color of Jews

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who was burned at the stake in Rome in part for being one of the first to comprehend the infinite nature of the universe, and who was not, therefore, the least observant of men, suggested in 1591 that no one could possibly imagine that Jews and blacks have the same ancestry.1 According to him Jews could not be black, blacks could not be Jews. They came from different worlds.2 Bruno, who was from Nola, near Naples, knew something of Jews (although the last Jews were forced to leave Naples in 1541, and the city remained closed to Jews for almost two hundred years) and was famously critical of them.3 He must also have had familiarity with blacks, as in the late fifteenth century 83 percent of the large slave population in Naples were Africans.4 On the basis of what body of knowledge and interpretation did he assert that the differences between Jews and blacks were so significant that these two peoples could not derive from the same stock?5

Traditional Christian teaching had maintained that all of mankind derived ultimately from monogenesis—from the union of Adam and Eve. Although subjects like anthropology are not usually considered to have been organized as academic subjects before the nineteenth century, the notions upon which these disciplines eventually drew developed during the late Renaissance and the early years of the scientific revolution and were certainly known to Bruno. Some of the foundations were laid in his own time during the sixteenth century, following the contacts that had been made with unfamiliar peoples in Africa and the New World from the fifteenth century on, and through efforts to understand the differences between Europeans and other peoples.6 Indeed, Bruno contributed to this body of anthropological knowledge. In an attempt to articulate the various divisions of mankind, Bruno devised a universal human taxonomy based uniquely on color. Jews were not black, therefore for Bruno they could have nothing to do with blacks. Following the Swiss medical writer Paracelsus (1493–1541), he turned his back on the Christian idea of monogenesis and came to the heretical conclusion that either God created more than one Adam, or that alternatively Africans were the descendants of some pre-Adamite race. Thus his effort at a classification, which made a distinction between Jew and black, based on color, forced him toward the theory of polygenesis and was one of the first statements of racial theory, which came to dominate the world in the period after the Enlightenment, when the Bible finally began to lose its stranglehold on Western understanding of the world.7

Had Bruno known a little more about Judaism, he might have realized that any black could in theory convert to Judaism, thus making a color classification between Jew and black a nonsense. It is true that according to the Libro de las Leyes, later called the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X of Castile (1252–1284), Jews were forbidden to convert slaves to Judaism, even if the slave in question was a Moor. However, the fact that under this legislation any slave, having been so converted, would be freed would have acted as a powerful incentive for any slave to adopt the religion of his or her Jewish master if he or she were given half a chance.8 Bruno also might possibly have known that from the Jewish side, Jewish law—halakhah—specifically enjoins Jews to convert their slaves, black or white, to Judaism. And had he been better informed yet, he might have known that a contemporary of his, an Egyptian rabbi usually known by the acronym Radbaz—Rabbi David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra (1479–1573)—had declared that a black, Agau-speaking tribe, from the mountains of Ethiopia, known as the Beta Israel or Falasha, were indeed Jews. Black Jews.9

In the thinking of the time, the perceived typologies of Jews and blacks were not dissimilar. Blacks and Jews were fundamental “others” for Christian Europeans, were often mentioned in the same breath for that reason, and were regularly imagined to have shared ancestry. Linkages of different sorts between blacks and Jews in medieval Europe were common. Indeed, there was a general tendency on the part of medieval Christians to confuse or link Jews with all sorts of minorities, “with other Others,” as J. Schorsch puts it.10 The linkage of Jew, and Moor or Turk or blackamoor, as “others” is to be found throughout the texts, songs, and prayers of Christendom. The third Collect for Good Friday in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which is typical,11 discusses the categories of those who are heading for everlasting destruction: “O Merciful God who has made all men and hatest nothing that thou hast made … have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels and Hereticks and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart and contempt for thy word.” In this carefully argued prayer we see two religious “others” in the foreground—Jews and Turks—behind whom are lined up an indistinct mass of other unnamed heretics and infidels. In 1606 the Spanish Benedictine monk and historian Fray Prudencio de Sandoval (1553–1620), then bishop of Pamplona in northern Spain, made a connection between Jews and blacks through the indelible nature of their respective, essential characteristics. He wrote that “in the descendants of Jews remain and continue the bad inclinations of their ancient ingratitude and failed beliefs, as in blacks the inseparable accident of their negritude.… For if one thousand times they are with white women their children are born with the dark skin of their parents.”12 Writing polemically against the new Jewish converts to Christianity in about 1541, Francisco Machado linked Jews and blacks through their innate undesirability. He tried to imagine “Portugal … cleansed of heresies and of Jewish ceremonies, and of Moors and blacks.”13 Such linkages and connections fed into a discourse, which also proclaimed that a color distinction should be drawn between “white” Europeans and “dark” Jews.

A long European tradition maintained that the Jews, in general, were certainly “black” metaphorically, in the sense that they were diabolical and evil, as well as black literally. One Christian critic of the supposedly “Jewish” pope Anacletus II, elected in 1130, hinted that Jews were generally regarded as dark when he noted that the pope was “dark and pale, more like a Jew or an Arab than a Christian.” Sir William Brereton (1604–1661), the English parliamentarian, soldier, and writer, happened to visit a Sephardi synagogue in Amsterdam, where he commented that the Jews were very dark-skinned and lascivious—“they were most black … and insatiably given unto women.”14 In his New Voyage to Italy (1714), François Maximilian Misson (c. 1650–1722), the French writer and traveler, confirms that the general supposition was that Jews were black when he noted that all Jews were black, although only Portuguese Jews started off black: “Tis also a vulgar error,” he wrote, “that the Jews are all black; for this is only true of the Portuguese, who, marrying always among one another, beget Children like themselves, and consequently the Swarthiness of their complexion is entail’d upon their whole Race, even in the Northern Regions.”15

Jews had absorbed something of these attitudes and perceived themselves as being significantly darker than their neighbors and accepted the argument that, as part of the divine plan, and as a kind of retribution for their sins, they had been gradually darkened, by the intervention of the Almighty, until they were almost black.16 This was the position of Isaac ben Judah Abrabanel (1437–1508), the Portuguese Jewish statesman, exegete, and financier, who observed that once long ago the Jews had been light skinned, as the Mishnah maintains, but that they had grown dark as part of the punishment of exile.17 The thirteenth-century polemical text of R. Yosef ben Nathan Ofitsial sought to rebut Christian charges that Jews were dark and unattractive. “Why,” the text reads, “are the majority of gentiles white and attractive, while the majority of Jews are black and ugly?” The writer explained this through an analogy of ripening fruit. Plums and sloes, he argued, are white at the start and become dark when they are ripe, whereas fruits like apples or apricots, which are red to start with, finish up white and shriveled. This is seen as meaning that Jews who have no contact with the red of menstrual blood at the moment of their conception, as Jews refrain from sexual intercourse during the menstrual period, will finish up black, whereas Christians, who do not avoid the red of menstrual blood during sexual intercourse, will finish up white, like apples. The same thought is expressed in the contemporary Sefer Yosef ha-Mekanneh, which boasts that “we Jews are from a clean and white seed, therefore our faces are black, but you from the red seed of menstruation, therefore your visages are pale and reddened.”18

The idea that the Jews were black persisted into the nineteenth century. Robert Knox (1791–1862), the controversial surgeon and anatomist and conservator of the College Museum, Edinburgh, in the mid-nineteenth century, commented on “the African character of the Jew, his muzzle-shaped mouth and face removing him from other races.”19 The general “look” of the Jew was considered to be like that of the black: “The contour is convex; the eyes long and fine, the outer angles running towards the temples; the brow and nose apt to form a single convex line … and the whole physiognomy, when swarthy, as it often is, has an African look.”20 Nineteenth-century physical anthropologists in general assumed that Jews had a close racial—that is “blood”—connection with blacks. The “general consensus of the ethnological literature of the late nineteenth century was that the Jews were ‘black’ or, at least, ‘swarthy.’ ” One such explained the “predominant mouth of some Jews being the result of the presence of black blood” and that “brown skin, thick lips and prognathism” were typical of Jews.21 One of the key physical indicators of race was the nose: for the Encyclopedists, all “deviant noses” were put together—“the blacks, the Hottentots and various peoples of Asia, such as the Jews.”22 In a sense the appearance of Jews and blacks was constructed in a similar way simply because both Jews and blacks were pariahs and outsiders, and in the racialized mind of Europe this shared status implied that Jews and blacks had a shared “look” and a shared black color.23 In some cases Jews were considered black because they were of mixed African-Judaic race. On occasion the blackness or darkness of the skin of the African, like the Jew, was perceived as being not only due to inheritance but also to the effect of diseases such as syphilis.24 The “negritude” or darkness of the Jew was thus not only a mark of racial inferiority, or of shared blood with Africans, but also a clear indicator of the unhealthy nature of the Jew. The Bavarian writer Johann Pezzl (1756–1823),25 who visited Vienna in the 1780s, described the Jewishness of the Viennese Jew as a particularly nasty physical affliction:

There are about five hundred Jews in Vienna. Their sole and only occupation is to counterfeit, salvage trade in coins, and cheat Christians, Turks, heathens, indeed themselves.… This is the beggarly filth of Canaan which can only be exceeded in filth, uncleanliness, stench, disgust, poverty, dishonesty, pushiness and other things by the trash of the twelve tribes from Galicia. Excluding the Indian fakirs, there is no category of supposed human beings which come closer to the Orang-Utang than does a Polish Jew.… Covered from foot to head in filth, dirt and rags, covered in a type of black sack … their necks exposed the color of a black, their faces covered up to the eyes with a beard, which would have given the High Priest in the Temple chills, the hair turned and knotted as if they all suffered from the plica polonica.

The Viennese Jew’s disease was stamped on his skin. The Jewish physician of the Enlightenment Elcan Isaac Wolf26 also saw this “black-yellow” skin color as a pathological mark of the sickly Jew.27 In 1808, the English physician and ethnographer James Cowles Pritchard (1786–1848) made a connection between the national character and psychology of Jews and their color: he wrote about “the choleric and melancholic constitution of the Jews, such that they usually have a skin color somewhat darker than the English people.” Some of the theories advanced to explain the color of Jews, going back to the time of Bruno, were similar to those advanced in the United States to explain the color of blacks. One explanation was that blackness or darkness of the skin, as in the case of Jews, was a sickness. Benjamin Rush (1746–1813), one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, claimed in a paper before the American Philosophical Society that Africans’ black skin had been caused by a disease something like leprosy that had become hereditary but which could be “cured,” and he suggested some ways in which this could be done.28

All races, according to the ethnology of the period, were described as “ugly” or “beautiful.” In Europe, for hundreds of years, being black, Jewish, sickly, and ugly became almost coterminous. Black Africans, and particularly the Hottentots (as the famous and appalling case of Sarah Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, shows), became the paradigm of the extreme “other” and the “ugly race”—a sort of missing link between true humanity and the orangutan. It is certainly not without significance that from the eighteenth century on Hottentots were also regarded by some as having Jewish roots—to be biological descendants of Jews.29

Such notions about Jews were supported by the racial ideas of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), according to whom the Jews were a mongrel race that had hybridized with surrounding peoples in very ancient times but who had later interbred with black Africans in Egypt. “The first point is thus settled,” wrote Chamberlain:

The Israelite people is descended from the crossing of different human types.… Now these figures give the following results with regard to the Jews of former times, and today, in east and west; 50...