The Soul of Judaism

Jews of African Descent in America

Bruce D. Haynes

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479800636
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

A glimpse into the diverse stories of Black Jews in the United States What makes a Jew? This book traces the history of Jews of African descent in America and the counter-narratives they have put forward as they stake their claims to Jewishness. The Soul of Judaism offers the first exploration of the full diversity of Black Jews, including bi-racial Jews of both matrilineal and patrilineal descent; adoptees; black converts to Judaism; and Black Hebrews and Israelites, who trace their Jewish roots to Africa and challenge the dominant western paradigm of Jews as white and of European descent. Blending historical analysis and oral history, Haynes showcases the lives of Black Jews within the Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstruction and Reform movements, as well as the religious approaches that push the boundaries of the common forms of Judaism we know today. He illuminates how in the quest to claim whiteness, American Jews of European descent gained the freedom to express their identity fluidly while African Americans have continued to be seen as a fixed racial group. This book demonstrates that racial ascription has been shaping Jewish selfhood for centuries. Pushing us to reassess the boundaries between race and ethnicity, it offers insight into how Black Jewish individuals strive to assert their dual identities and find acceptance within their respective communities. Putting to rest the simplistic notion that Jews are white and that Black Jews are therefore a contradiction, the volume argues that we can no longer pigeonhole Black Hebrews and Israelites as exotic, militant, and nationalistic sects outside the boundaries of mainstream Jewish thought and community life. The volume spurs us to consider the significance of the growing population of self-identified Black Jews and its implications for the future of American Jewry.

1

Jews, Blacks, and the Color Line

It’s so obvious for me. Some people, historians and even scientists, turn a blind eye to the truth. Once, to say Jews were a race was anti-Semitic, now to say they’re not a race is anti-Semitic. It’s crazy how history plays with us.

—Shlomo Sand, history professor at Tel Aviv University and author of The Invention of the Jewish People1

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

—W. I. Thomas, The Thomas Theorem2

During the late nineteenth century, just as concepts of race were being solidified by racial statistics (the quantification of perceived racial difference using objective methodologies), eastern European Jewish immigrants and Negro migrants from the South converged in Philadelphia, New York City, and other dense urban areas.3 Between 1900 and 1940, Jews and blacks frequently lived in overlapping neighborhoods (Zunz 2000; Diner 2006). Jews ultimately benefited from the solidification of the color line, which allowed for fluid, hyphenated identities—expressed as ethnicities—and helped to justify the distribution of resources along a white/black binary. On the other hand, all peoples of African descent, regardless of culture or ancestry, were collapsed into one fixed category. Black Jews thus represent the merging of two dichotomous categories—one fluid, the other fixed—within a bifurcated system. Indeed, their very presence forces us to reconcile two negating forces, the transcendent and the immutable, into a single new construct. Exploring the historical processes that shaped the formation of racial and ethnic categories in the United States allows us to see how these processes continue to shape the ways in which we perceive Jews of African descent and helps us understand the broader dynamics between race and ethnicity.

Racial Categories and the US Census

The system of white privilege in the United States relied on the formalization and maintenance of racial categories, adopted early by the US census, and the establishment of the one-drop rule, a uniquely American framework for understanding the meanings of particular ancestries and of our own imagined origins. The census helped to shape the formation of contemporary racial and ethnic boundaries; the segregated spaces that resulted from these envisioned boundaries in turn reinforced the census categories and were used as evidence of biological differences. Race made place, and place made race (Haynes 2006).

Between the end of Reconstruction and the 1920s, American society adopted the idea that a single drop of “African blood” was sufficient to warrant classifying someone as “Negro.” Called the hypodescent rule by anthropologists and the traceable amount rule by the US courts, the one-drop rule determined civic, social, political, educational, residential, labor, and cultural boundaries. It was policed by an array of government agencies, market practices, and social norms and was ultimately internalized by individuals of mixed European and African lineage (F. J. Davis 2001; Haynes 2006). Hypodescent treated blackness as a contaminant of whiteness. In contrast, the classification of Native Americans was more benign: the Bureau of Indian Affairs, along with the courts and the census, used the concept of blood quantum, which attempted to quantify the ratio of “Indian blood” to “white blood” within an individual (Snipp 1989). Having a little Indian blood made one a little bit Indian, but having a trace of African blood rendered a person all black.

The social category “Negro” first emerged during the early period of colonial slavery. It was used to homogenize a variety of West African cultural identities—Igbo, Ewe, Serer, Biafada, Arada, Bakongo, Wolof, Bambara, Ibibio, and Oyo Yoruba—through a system of labor exploitation, political domination, and social exclusion (Blassingame 1979). While neither “Negro” nor “black” appears in the US Constitution, African slaves were referred to as “other Persons” in the Three-Fifths Compromise and as such were formally excluded from the social contract (Mills 1999). In 1790, Congress limited naturalization to “free white persons,” and Negroes were barred from immigration until the Naturalization Act of 1870. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, signed into law by George Washington, further bolstered the institution of slavery.

The first census, taken in 1790, was limited to five social categories: free white males of sixteen years and upward; free white males under sixteen years; free white females; all other free persons (by sex and color); and slaves (Gauthie 2002). In the 1800 and 1810 censuses, the US Census Bureau tracked the number of all other free persons “except Indians not taxed” (Gauthie 2002). Between 1840 and 1860, the census added a “mulatto” category to distinguish among slaves. The designation was based purely on visible color differences. One noteworthy heading was entitled “Color” and instructed census takers to “insert in all cases when the slave is black, the letter B; when he or she is mulatto, insert M. The color of all slaves should be noted” (DeBow 1853; Nobles 2000).

In 1840, 1850, and 1860, the term “mulatto” was used but not defined for enumerators. But by 1870, “mulatto” had become imbued with biological import, defined as including “quadroons, octoroons, and all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood” (F. J. Davis 2001). By 1890, the term “race” was officially added to the color category, reflecting the new scientific discourse of the day, and census takers were instructed to assess the exact portion of African blood: “Be particularly careful to distinguish between blacks, mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons. The word ‘black’ should be used to describe those persons who have three-fourths or more black blood; ‘mulatto,’ those persons who have from three-eighths to five-eighths black blood; ‘quadroon,’ those persons who have one-fourth black blood; and ‘octoroon,’ those persons who have one-eight or any trace of black blood” (Beveridge 2001). That year, some 63 million Americans were designated as white, Negro, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, Chinese, or Japanese. The mulatto category was finally abandoned in 1900, only to return briefly in 1910. By the 1920s, the term “Negro” was applied to any person with any African ancestry (F. J. Davis 2001). The shifting boundaries that solidified the one-drop rule challenge the notion that clear-cut boundaries ever existed between whites and blacks in America. Census takers ascribed race based on their own assessments until the 1960s and 1970s, when mail-in questionnaires and the self-reporting of race replaced door-to-door interviews (Perez and Hirschman 2009).

The one-drop rule was enforced as recently as 1982, when the Louisiana Bureau of Vital Statistics refused to change the racial designation of Susie Guillory Phipps from “Negro” to “white,” ruling that one thirty-second of “Negro blood” made a person Negro (Omi and Winant 1994). Unlike European immigrants, who were deemed as possessing cultures, or even the Jews, who were seen as being imbued with biologies that could change over time, Africans were thus viewed through an immutable racial lens.

Segregated together in employment and housing, those with any visible “negroid” traits or known African ancestry were increasingly viewed, and viewed themselves, as one group (Haynes 2006). Both mixed and “pure” Negroes became one political category and social group, and the physiological, cultural, religious, and even class differences within the developing black community were overshadowed by the concept of a Negro race (Green and Wilson 1991; F. J. Davis 2001).

The census helped to solidify race difference by deploying narrow conceptions rooted in color and phenotype—that is, the biological, inheritable aspects of race—while redefining ideas about culture, religion, language, nation, and history as malleable, changeable constructs that only “ethnic” immigrants possessed (Hattam 2007).

Jews as Ethnic White Folks: The Evolution of an Idea

While the role of phenotype in marking the Negro/black social category has been well documented, less attention has been paid to the racialization of Jews. Well into the twentieth century, scholars of ethnology and social science employed new photographic technologies and anthropometrical measurements to establish whether Jews were a pure biological race. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social Darwinists considered Jewish difference to be manifested in the Jewish body, and Jewish physicality represented the antithesis of Christian civil society. The Jewish male’s circumcised penis, the “Jewish foot,” and the “Jewish nose” were all considered the physiological manifestations of Jewishness (Gilman 1991). The nose was considered the single most distinctive anthropological characteristic of the Jew, longer and narrower than that of any of the other people (Gilman 1991). It was just a few years following the defeat of the Nazi regime that the international scientific community finally concluded that, despite popular notions of Jewish physicality, Jews were not a biological race (Shapiro 1960). Sociologists have applied the concept of racialization most often to African Americans (Gotham 2000; Haynes 2006; Bridges 2011). Yet we can expand the concept to include the racialization of Jews in the sixteenth century. The nature of anti-Jewish prejudice has evolved from anti-Judaism—the belief that Jews were collectively responsible for the death of Jesus Christ—to anti-Semitism, which laid the basis for their racialization and the notion that the Jewish body was intrinsically evil (Fredrickson 2002). It is this shift, from Judaism as a source of social stigma to the Jewish body as a source of evil, that marked the new racial thinking of the early modern era.

The early modern era proved to be an especially important period because it developed the foundational logic that guides racial thinking in the modern world. It was during this period that the physical body first came to signify the permanent difference setting Jews apart from Christians—not religiously as Christ Killers but physically as possessing polluted bodies (Hutchison and Haynes 2008; Haynes and Hutchison 2012). Since antiquity, the Jewish body had been viewed as a “body of concealment,” and by the Renaissance, the rite of circumcision was widely considered a secret practice and representative of other secret and ignominious practices of a supposed sexual nature (Sennett 1996). This was the period that ushered in four hundred years of transatlantic slavery and produced ideas about moral worth, skin color, and physical characteristics that intertwined with images of Africans as blacks, Jews as Africans, and blacks as Jews in the consciousness of Westerners.

By 1262, a “Jewish district” was thriving in Prague, and Frankfurt-am-Main, the most famous of the German ghettos, was well established in the 1460s (R. C. Davis 2001). Yet it was in sixteenth-century Venice, which had become a dynamic and cosmopolitan commercial center, that the Jewish ghetto took on a distinctly racial character. Sociologist Richard Sennett details how the Venetian ghetto acted like a social and political condom to shield Venetians from the polluting qualities of the Jewish body (Sennett 1996). It fostered a very different “ethos of isolation” from that of Renaissance Rome, where the objective was to transform the culture of the Jews (Sennett 1996). In fact, the Venetian ghetto can be viewed as a manifestation of early Orientalist thinking, which viewed the Jewish body as sensual and alluring, as well as the beginning of racialization in the New World (Sennett 1996). Orientalism is said to have begun in the early thirteenth century, when a field of study emerged that framed the Orient in juxtaposition to the Occident (Said 1977). The Orient was characterized as premodern, primitive, and backwards, yet it was also viewed as exotic, foreign, mysterious, and profound (Said 1978). Thus, the West had both contempt for and fascination with the Orient (Said 1977).

In Venice, Jews were Orientalized as a type, and the Jewish body—at once seductive and defiling—contained the “lure of the Oriental” and became a signifier of a stigmatized master status, that is, the manifestation or outward appearance of an inner deficiency that results or would result in infamy and dishonor, from which everything else about a person is interpreted (Goffman 1986; Sennett 1996). As Sennett makes clear, Europeans believed that by cloistering Jews behind ghetto walls, they were “isolating a disease” in their midst: “Christians were afraid of touching Jews: Jewish bodies were thought to carry venereal diseases as well as to contain more mysterious polluting powers” (Sennett 1996).

Jews were viewed as a “pariah” people and were increasingly associated with the leper’s touch and filth; they were blamed for the spread of leprosy itself, which was often conflated with syphilis (Sennett 1996). By the time that Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (1596–1597) opened in England, even the most prominent English Jews were held in contempt and treated little better than animals (Sennett 1996).

The practice of confining Jews behind ghetto walls developed over the course of centuries. In 1179, the Church’s Third Council of the Lateran issued a vaguely defined decree that Christians should no longer live amongst Jews. Secular authorities throughout Christendom chose different interpretations of the papal policy (R. C. Davis 2001). And in 1215, Pope Innocent III hoped to prevent illicit sexual intercourse between Christians and Jews by imposing clothing distinctions on them. Already, artists had adopted the funnel-shaped hat sometimes worn by Jews to signify all Jews, and by 1220, the same hat was being used to depict Jews and heretics alike. By the 1260s, the pointed Judenhut was imposed by church authorities on all Jews of Germany and Bohemia (Vincent 1994; Malkiel 2001).

In Venice, by 1221, Jews were required by edict to wear distinguishing markers of material culture, while they were also forbidden from owning land within the ghetto and obligated to rent (at rates one-third above the norm) from absentee owners (Ravid 2001). Each morning they would don their yellow hats (men) and scarves (women) and leave the ghetto to work or shop among Christians (Calimani 1988). By 1424, the Venetian Republic had issued a decree banning marriage between Jewish men and Christian women. In 1443, relations between Christian men and Jewish women were prohibited, and all Jews were required to wear badges with yellow circles. The badge was replaced by a yellow beretta in 1496 (Ravid 2001; Horowitz 2006). In exchange for a special tax levied against them, Jews were allowed to direct the Università, a colonial-like structure of self-governance under the auspices of Venetian Republic (Calimani 1988; Malkiel 2001).

Venice, a trading economy, was desperately in need of a source of credit (Sennett 1996). As in other Christian societies, the Jews of Venice were prohibited from becoming nobles or serfs and were cast into an intermediary role, serving as merchants, peddlers, and moneylenders. Moneylending, or usury, which typically charged interest rates of up to 20 percent, was considered corrupt and a “theft of time” by Christians (Sennett 1996). Over a period of some one hundred years, three distinct Jewish ghettos emerged in Venice: the Ghetto Nuovo (New Ghetto) in 1516, the Ghetto Vecchio (Old Ghetto) in 1541, and the Ghetto Nuovissimo (Very New Ghetto) in 1633.

These ghettos came on the heels of a century of rising anti-Semitism. As early as 1378, Archdeacon Ferrand Martinez vilified the Jews not only for the murder of Christ but also for their outmoded practices, which doomed them to eternity. Over the next thirteen years, his fiery sermons in Seville incited violence against Jews, which culminated with the ravaging of Seville’s Jewish quarter on June 6, 1391. Yet for the first time, a few Jews who agreed to be baptized were allowed to remain (Roth 1996, 21). The Spanish Inquisition was well under way before it was officially declared by papal bull in 1478. Christian leaders in Italy and Spain had already been spreading rumors that the Passover matzot were prepared with Christian blood and that Jews drank the blood of Christians to remove the stench associated with their diabolic nature (Baum 2008, 32). Even after they fled Spain (1492) and later Portugal (1540), Jews were treated as a permanently alien presence.

In Venice, the practice of usury and the outbreak of the bubonic plague (as well as syphilis) further stigmatized Jews and the Jewish body (Sennett 1996, 225) and prompted the building of the first Venetian ghetto. Unlike the Roman Ghetto (1555), which was built by Pope Paul IV to convert Jews to Christianity, the Venetian ghettos were created to contain Jews (Sennett 1996, 236). By 1589, they contained some 1,700 Jews, who were organized as an administrative unit governed first by a leader and later by a council of elders. By 1642, 2,414 individuals were housed in the three increasingly overcrowded spaces (Calabi 2001). Five synagogues were eventually established to accommodate Jews emigrating from France, Italy, Germany, the Levant, Spain, and Portugal (Ravid 2001). Despite the Jewish cultural renaissance that evolved with each successive wave of newcomers, Jews were unable to obtain formal citizenship rights and were collectively taxed as a corporate entity in return for sovereignty in matters of religion and justice (Malkiel 2001).

Jews as Black

Descriptions of Jewish and black physicality converge in the scholarship of the late nineteenth century. Consensus held that Jews were black or swarthy and that Jewish blackness “was not only a mark of racial inferiority but also an indicator of the diseased nature of the Jew” (Gilman 1991; Brodkin 1998). Indeed, this theme would later be exploited in the art propaganda of the German National Socialist Party. Entartete Kunst (Degenerative Art) opened in Munich in July 1937 (Barron 1991, 15). The exhibit, which singled out the Josephine Bakers, Bix Beiderbeckes, Duke Ellingtons, and Benny Goodmans of the Jazz Age, advanced a Nazi conception of racial degeneracy that linked blacks and Jews in “an Afro-Jewish plot to subvert Aryan culture.” Jews and blacks were framed as “degenerates” marked by abnormal bodily deformities, feebleness, and behavioral and sexual excesses (Barron 1991, 26). Between 1937 and 1941, an Entartete Kunst exhibit toured thirteen German cities and exposed more than two million visitors to the idea that avant-garde art was subversive and associated with Bolshevism, Americanism, and Jews (Barron 1991). In 1938, the Nazis staged an exhibition of degenerative music, called Entartete Musik.4 The poster created for the exhibit morphed blacks and Jews into a grotesque composite.

As their numbers increased in the 1880s, eastern European Jews in America were viewed as a potentially foreign element, along with other non-Protestant immigrant groups, such as the Irish and Italians. The eighteenth-century image of the Jew as backward and parasitic became countered by new images of modern Jews as a natural part of the urbanized, capitalist order of the civilized world (E. L. Goldstein 2006, 2). Between 1885 and 1913, ethnologists, sociologists and anthropologists deliberated over whether Jews were a preindustrial “race” (Hattam 2007). Lamarckian science competed with the social Darwinism of the nineteenth century. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a French z...