The Image of the Black in Jewish Culture

A History of the Other

Abraham Melamed, Betti Sigler Rozen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135789824
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The evolving image of the Black in the history of Jewish culture is being traced here in the conceptual framework of recent post-modern theories of the 'other'. The study focuses on the mechanisms by which an ethno-religious minority group considered by the dominant majority to be the inferior 'other' identifies its own inferior other. While until recently most scholarly attention has been devoted to the attitudes towards the Jews as 'other', this is the first comprehensive discussion of the attitudes of the Jews to their own 'others'.

1
DREAM AND INTERPRETATION

‘Two blacks, hideous to see’

Book of the Seeker (Sefer ha-Mevakesh), written by Rabbi Shem Tov ibn Falaquera in the mid thirteenth century, describes the dream of a rich man who saw the purpose of his existence in satisfying his material needs, blatantly ignoring the spiritual goal of human existence. This is what the rich man dreamt:

and the man began to dream; he saw himself walking in a desolate wilderness, naked and barefoot, hungry and thirsty. And he was stricken with terror and fear; he moaned like a lyre. Darker than the night was his visage, his body defiled with filth and upon his shoulder lay a heavy, fatiguing burden. Then two Blacks (cushim), hideous to see, ran after him brandishing spears to run him through. Running desperately away from them, he reached a mountain whose crooked course was covered with snakes. Along the mountain ran a path so narrow that there was no room to turn either to right or to left (Nu. 22, 26). Exerting himself mightily, he ran, without stopping to rest, until he reached the peak of the mountain. Thence he fell into a death pit, seared by scorching blasts from an endless fire which was never extinguished. Thereupon the man trembled violently and fell from his bed to the ground, wailing loudly. At the sound of his cries, all his comrades and old friends rushed to his side, and beholding the contortion of his face and body, they asked him to tell which evil has befallen him, and how it had taken place. They trembled exceedingly as he related his dream, and when they arose in the morning, they assembled various interpreters of dreams, seeking some explanation. But, behold, none could interpret the dream satisfactorily.¹

The nightmare kept recurring, no interpreter of dreams could expound it and the man became deeply depressed. That is, no one could interpret it until there appeared ‘a blameless man, upright and pure in deeds’² and explained the dream. This prophetic dream is presented as a parable of Maimonides’s first type, in which every detail corresponds to one in the situation it illustrates:

This is the meaning of the dream. The episode wherein you beheld yourself walking about in the wilderness signifies that your doom is sealed, and you will be buried in a desolate wilderness. Your naked and barefoot state shows that you have no good deeds to protect you; your intense hunger and thirst can be attributed to your strong appetite for the accumulation of wealth and delightful pleasures. The blackness of your countenance can be understood to mean that your evil deeds will darken your face as you die. The defilement of your body with filth stands for the punishment that will be meted out to you for your sins. Your heavy burden represents your tremendous load of sins and iniquities. Moreover, the two black men who sought to kill you stand for your wicked actions and wicked thoughts which lead you to destruction. The mountain from which you fell symbolized your fall from your lofty position and descent into the pit of destruction and your deliverance into the hands of Tophet, whose fire is never extinguished. The narrow path indicates that one can only attain the world to come after great toil and exertion. Only he whose thoughts are pure, who has freed himself of bodily desires, may tread this path.³

The man repented, mended his ways and his dream changed accordingly:

Some few days later he had another dream. He beheld himself walking alone in a wilderness. Suddenly brooks and springs appeared, and gardens and orchards with all species and trees. Two men, bright as the sky above the firmament, their faces gleaming like the stars, walked before him to guide and inform him, one on his right hand and one on his left. Soon they led him to a place so completely bathed in light that it contained no darkness, not even a shadow. So glorious was the splendor and brilliance that the tongue cannot tell of it. … Then he asked the two who guided him, ‘What awesome place is this? Happy is the eye that beholds it.’⁴

The dreams represent opposing human situations. The bad dream depicts a state of material existence in which man longs for material pleasures, neglects his intellectual soul and is qualitatively no different from the beast. The good dream represents the heavenly, angelic situation in which man rises above material needs and attains perfect cognition.

What interests us is the metaphoric system, relating to skin colour, with which the author represents the two opposite conditions of human existence. Our working assumption is that the conscious or subconscious use of certain metaphors represents a world view in which the author expresses a value system accepted in his time. Even if he was not always fully aware of their significance, one may assume that these metaphors expressed well the normative positions and mentality of the cultural surroundings in which the author who chose them created his work. This is especially true when the representations appear in a dream which, at least according to Freudian theory, expresses subconscious attitudes. Falaquera’s metaphors and their significance will be the point of departure in our investigation of the image of the black as presented in Jewish thought and in general contexts. Comparisons are made with attitudes of the cultures that impinged on Judaism in those times – Hellenistic, Muslim and Christian.

The detailed referents that the author gives for the bad dream enable us to understand those of the good dream. One is the obverse of the other, though for the bad dream we have the full analogy and referents while the good dream refers only to its main components (Table 1.1).

The main components that interest us are those that present skin colour as a metaphor, although as we shall see, other motifs relate to them. Two depictions of skin colour appear. One relates to that of the dreamer, whose skin became black because of his evil deeds. The other relates to his two black pursuers who represent evil deeds in general. The very fact that in both cases evil deeds are represented by the colour black speaks for itself. In the first case, blackness is temporary. The fair skin that was damaged can regain its lightness if its owner repents of his evil deeds and does good. The dreamer, shown as one walking in the desolate wilderness, provides an explanation of why his skin grew dark: if he abandons the state of desolation and returns to the settled land, his sunburnt skin will grow light again. Later we shall relate to the metaphorical significance of the geographical spaces in which the narratives of the good dream and the nightmare took place. Not by chance is the man whose fair skin grew dark described as not simply dirty, but defiled in the most bestial way: ‘Darker than night was his visage, his body defiled with filth.’ Bodily filth itself contributes to blackening the skin, and a clean body becomes lighter. Cleansing the body of its filth represents cleansing the soul of material desires, and its purification. Skin colour and cleanliness, then, are associated metaphors. Dark skin colour is linked associatively with a desert existence and filth, while a light skin is identified with the return to civilization, with cleanliness and with purity. Here is the attitude of the civilizer, a clearly anti-primitivist position that prefers the ‘cultured’ and organized human condition to the natural state, which here signifies that which is negative, bestial, desolate, dirty – and black. Hence in the Midrash on the Song of Songs (1: 5) on the allegorical representation of ‘I am black, but comely’, there is a description of ‘the tents of Kedar’, in the desert, naturally, with the addition: ‘they appear from the outside to be ugly, black, and tattered’.⁵ Dark skin and bodily defilement represent evil, while fair skin and a clean body represent purification from evil and the attainment of good. In parallel fashion, one represents the bestial, ‘primitive’ aspect of human existence, while the other the ‘civilized’ condition. In the same place we find a Midrash which depicts this very process:

Table 1.1

We [the Israelites] shall say to you [the gentiles] to what we are to be compared: ‘It is to a prince who went forth to the wilderness around the town, and the sun beat on his head so that his face was darkened. He came back to the town, and with a bit of water and a bit of bathing in the bath houses, his body turned white and regained its beauty, just as before. So it is with me [the Israelites continue]. If the worship of idols has scorched us, truly you are scorched from your mother’s womb! While you are yet in your mother’s womb you served idols.⁶

Latin literature too contains such parallels. Lucianus coined the phrase ‘to wash the black man and [change him] to white’ as a metaphor for the futility of trying to change the unchangeable. Aesop gives the example of the black man who washed and scrubbed his skin to make it white, with no hope of success.⁷ Later Hebrew literature paraphrases this as: ‘One who threshes water in a mortar, washes a black man [in order to make him white] and sows water will toil to no avail’.⁸ The very use of the washing image assumes the link between black skin and filth, because one washes only what one thinks is dirty. Today too, one instinctively identifies white with cleanliness and black with dirt: hence the expression ‘shining white’, to which we return later. Moreover, the attempt, even the vain attempt, to change a prevailing condition makes that condition negative. One seeks to change only what is perceived as not good, although in the white man’s case filth is perceived as temporary and changeable, while for the black man, it is lasting and permanent. Jeremiah (13: 23) relates to the second case when he asks rhetorically, ‘Can the Black man change his skin?’: evil deeds always remain evil.

The two black men in the dream conform to the stereotypes of the black in western culture – Islamic, Christian and Jewish alike – in that period and afterwards. A black complexion is instinctively associated with an ugly body, with great, violent physical strength: ‘Then two Blacks, hideous to see, ran after him brandishing spears to run him through.’ The dreamer is ‘running desperately away from them’. The escape motif is an excellent representation of the fear aroused by the black’s otherness, and the threatening stereotypic qualities associated with it. Showing this as natural, qualitative and unchangeable reinforces otherness and the fears it arouses. The good dream, by contrast, describes ‘two men, bright as the sky above the firmament’, angels representing what is good, and identified with ultimate lightness. While the two blacks are shown to behave with menacing violence that points to disaster, the two bright ones are presented as supportive, helpful and leading the dreamer on the right path. The blacks are depicted as subhuman, the bright and shining pair as above humanity. The dichotomy black/white = evil/good = bestial/angelic appears, then, in its entirety.

The contrasting geographical spheres in which the dreams take place again express the dichotomy. The nightmare featuring the pair of blacks takes place in a dangerous, desolate wilderness that threatens human existence. By contrast, the good dream with the two men ‘bright as the sky above the firmament’ takes place in a paradise with ‘brooks and springs, gardens and orchards’, the perfect situation for a completely human existence. While in the good dream the wilderness itself becomes rich and fertile, the two blacks do not change into good angels: they are shown as those whose bestial nature is innate and unalterable. The man whose fair skin grew black under the hot desert sun, by contrast, can get his fair complexion back to the extent that he changes his place – a metaphor for his spiritual state. The dichotomy between the two places contrasted with one another by the mythic geography of western culture – wilderness as against blooming country – is a close parallel to the black/white dichotomy. The bad place is identified with man’s bestial nature, the good place with man the divine.⁹ Each develops in contasting geoclimatic surroundings that dictate the individual’s nature and characteristics. As we later explain, the anthropology of medieval time placed the black man’s territory at the outer edges of the settled world, in the hot south as a place unsuited to human habitation, which therefore produces inferior human beings. The mythic geography of the premodern period indeed tended to relegate subhuman creatures like devils and ghosts to the desert,¹⁰ and, by the same token, the blacks.

H. Levin in his classic work The Power of Blackness, on the metaphorical world of nineteenth-century American authors, quotes from Edgar Allen Poe’s letters the story of M. Lewis, who chose to represent the villains in one of his plays as blacks, although there were no blacks in the region where the drama took place. Lewis’s enlightening explanation was that marking the villains as black would impress the audience more than showing them as ordinary white people. Combining the black man and the villain was undoubtedly intended to reinforce the spectator’s dread. As Levin so justly remarks, Lewis knew why this would happen but did not, or perhaps did not want to, relate to the matter specifically. Lewis even added that if he thought that giving them blue skin would impress the audience more, he wo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Translated Quotations
• Introduction
• 1: Dream and Interpretation
• 2: Sources of the Symbol
• 3: In the Bible
• 4: In the Literature of the Sages
• 5: In the Cultural World of Islam
• 6: In the Latin–Christian Cultural World
• 7: In the Wake of Exploration
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography