The Nation of Islam the Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews Reviews

Jonathan Schorsch. Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xiii + 546 pp. $85.00 (fabric), ISBN 978-0-521-82021-9.

Reviewed by Alyssa Sepinwall (California State University-San Marcos)
Published on H-Atlantic (Dec, 2005)

A Undercover Relationship? Jews and Blacks in the Atlantic and Mediterranean

The late 1980s and mid-1990s witnessed an outbreak of tensions between blacks and Jews on American higher campuses. As the famed civil rights era alliances betwixt the groups declined, Nation of Islam (NOI) spokesmen like Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad began preaching that Jews were "bloodsuckers" who had dominated the Atlantic slave trade. Denounced by blackness leaders such as Jesse Jackson, the NOI was joined in these charges by Afrocentric professors such as Leonard Jeffries. The NOI also published a text entitled The Secret Relationship betwixt Blacks and Jews presenting these claims.[1] Leading historians of slavery such every bit David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher refuted the NOI'due south allegations, and they were joined by the American Historical Clan, which passed a resolution decrying the NOI'southward misuse of historical evidence.[2] While the controversy has abated, it has not dissipated completely. Today, a reader looking on Amazon.com for information on "blacks and Jews" will first encounter the NOI's Secret Relationship, along with a big number of reviews praising its "well-researched" handling of Jewish involvement in the slave merchandise.

Jonathan Schorsch's Jews and Blacks in the Early Modernistic World revisits this controversy. Schorsch, who was trained as a historian at Berkeley, is a faculty fellow member in the Department of Religion at Columbia Academy and an editor at Tikkun (a progressive and iconoclastic Jewish monthly based in San Francisco). His position in the debate is somewhat contrarian. On the one mitt, he decries the "specious and outrageously myopic charges" of the NOI's book (p. 1). He also aims, even so, to criticize existing Jewish scholarship on the slave trade, which he sees as overly apologetic and built on "experience-good polemics" (p. ane). Though Schorsch does not name the targets of his criticism, he makes clear that he does not hateful Davis, Drescher, or Eli Faber (whose works he praises), but rather scholars of Jewish history who have glossed over the subject of slavery.

Schorsch'due south book is supra-Atlantic in scope (roofing both the Atlantic and Mediterranean). He says that his theoretical methodology "is less that of Jewish studies than cultural studies," and that he hopes his research tin add together to the history of the African diaspora (p. iv). Nevertheless, the book's primary contributions and intended audience are in the field of Jewish history. Schorsch examines Jewish attitudes towards and interactions with blacks in the early modern period largely to understand Jewish acculturation. He focuses on Sephardic Jews since Ashkenazim were less numerous in both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

Jews and Blacks in the Early Mod Earth lacks a single overarching thesis. Indeed, the author declares himself to be using an "antinarrative" form, and insists that "I make no pretense of connecting the results of the text's microstudies into a linear entity--'Jewish Soapbox About Blacks' " (pp. 294, 295). The text is thus not an easy one to summarize. The introduction does, all the same, make articulate Schorsch's contention that the early mod period marked a "falling away of the ... axis of Hebrew-language and halakhic soapbox" for Atlantic world Jews equally they adopted the mores of their neighbors. Jews' treatment of their slaves consequently "closely resembled that of their host populations and was ... lacking in Jewish particularities" (pp. 7, 11).

One trajectory of the book examines what early on modern Jews believed about blacks. Schorsch criticizes black and Christian scholars who have claimed that Jews invented anti-black prejudices through the story of the curse of Ham. Several well-documented chapters refute these allegations. Chapter i, a instance study on the fifteenth-century writer Yitshak Abravanel, shows the complexities of early modernistic Jewish thinking about Africans. While Abravanel, similar other Jews, sometimes discussed Africans in a negative way, he also spoke positively of them, drawing on both Talmudic sources and on Renaissance humanism.[iii] Chapter six also deals with this issue. Schorsch argues that the portrayal of a "blind, stubborn anti-Black racism, stemming from the Jews" only reaffirms stereotypes near Jews' "theological incomprehension and stubbornness" (p. 138). He concludes that "the 'Jewish' source of the curse on Ham remains an invention of twentieth-century Christian polemicists" (p. 152).

Another topic covered by the book is Jewish interactions with blacks in both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Schorsch finds that Jewish slave owning and slave trading "remained minimal" in both places (pp. l, 53). When Jews did own slaves, it was often to serve as a marker of condition (p. 68). Chapter iii, one of the book'due south nigh engrossing, aims to reconstruct daily life for blacks in Mediterranean and European Jewish order using rabbinical responsa (answers to queries from believers about how Jewish law applied to daily situations). Schorsch notes, for instance, that slaves and ex-slaves who wished to practice Judaism were often well integrated into the community, at to the lowest degree in the early on function of the menstruation. Affiliate 9 seeks to reconstruct master-slave interactions among Jews in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and British Atlantic. The author cautions, however, that this task is difficult since relatively few responsa were produced in the Americas.

Chapter 7, "Inventing Jewish Whiteness: The Seventeenth-Century Western Sephardic Diaspora, Part one," and chapter 8, "Inventing Jewish Whiteness: The Seventeenth-Century Western Sephardic Diaspora, Part ii," are specially illuminating. Schorsch argues that the concept of whiteness allowed Jews to "include themselves in the dominant civilization ... in a manner they could not as non-Christians" (p. 167). He points out that early modern codes of racial exclusion were unstable, and that Jews were sometimes described as "black and ugly" (pp. 169, 179). He further suggests that information technology was "equations of Jews and Blackness that inspired some Jews to argue their own Whiteness" (p. 186). Growing anxiety about whiteness led to increased distancing from not-white servants and slaves, particularly among Amsterdam's Jews. Where once young men of mixed race had been able to report in yeshiva, and "circumcised Negro Jews" could be called to the Torah, these practices concluded afterward the mid-seventeenth century, as did race-bullheaded burials (pp. 195-197). Schorsch observes, however, that these exclusions were non uniquely Jewish, but emulations of Christian racial practices.

Chapter 10 looks at black-Jewish interactions in the long eighteenth century. Schorsch finds some Jewish abolitionists, just deems information technology unsurprising that in that location were not more than, given the relatively express extent of abolitionism amongst Gentiles earlier 1800. Moreover, he notes, "Jews were barely tolerated outsiders.... To weigh in against the host bulk on a central and contentious event similar slavery held footling appeal for [them]" (p. 291). In the conclusion, Schorsch adds that Jews spoke less often almost blacks than Christians did, and certainly not with whatever greater hostility. He notes that "not one time have I come beyond a statement by a Black in the Americas pointing out Jews equally slave owners or slave traders, much less owners harsher than Christians"; any contemporary blackness enmity against Jews relating to the slave trade is thus anachronistic (p. 299).

Schorsch's book is extremely valuable for anyone interested in black-Jewish interactions. Information technology is also extraordinarily learned, as Schorsch draws with equal ease on Hayden White, David Brion Davis, and Talmudic exegetes. Even as the book is more an analysis of previous microstudies and of printed primary sources than a presentation of new archival material, the range of Schorsch's reading--beyond Castilian, Portuguese, Dutch, German language, Italian, Hebrew, Ladino, and English--is remarkable. There is much of involvement here for scholars of early modern Atlantic, Jewish, and African diaspora history. Schorsch's accent on the in-betweenness of Jews in the Atlantic earth, on their uneven integration and demand to affirm their whiteness, is especially meaning.

Some aspects of the work may, however, limit its usefulness to Atlantic world scholars and their students. The offset is the book's writing fashion and structure. In addition to its "antinarrative" course, Schorsch concedes that ane of his study's early reviewers criticized its "Bizarre" writing style. Rather than revising it, Schorsch responded that the book'southward hard writing was essential to his goals; for him, Bizarre is "a term I will wield as a laurel and a program" and "preemptive exhaustiveness" was necessary because of the controversial nature of his topic (pp. 12, xiii). While the amount of documentation may serve his purposes, it is less clear that the prose manner does. Readers may detect themselves struggling with sentences such as "Presenting the contentious quality of the original material every bit such serves as a manner of coping with--I practice non say harmonizing--the necessity of grasping its conflicting and conflicted interpretation. The riot of particularity on paper does greater justice, to my mind, to the irreducibility of historical events" (p. 13).

Some other proviso which Atlantic scholars should deport in listen relates to the volume's scope. The title suggests that the study covers blackness-Jewish interactions throughout the early on modernistic globe, and information technology is indeed impressive that the author was able to treat both the Atlantic and Mediterranean in his kickoff book. At the same fourth dimension, it is worth noting that the work really focuses on Protestant and Muslim areas, and deals to a much lesser extent with the Catholic empires. Moreover, the study contains occasional errors on the history of the latter, such equally the author'southward reliance on some other scholar's exclamation that France abolished slavery in 1818, instead of 1848 (p. xi).

Finally, the volume'southward theoretical arroyo departs in some crucial means from that of Atlantic historiography. Like many Atlantic world historians, Schorsch is interested in intercultural interactions and he uses religion as a site for examining these exchanges. His operating question, though, appears to exist to what extent did Jews brand their slaves and ex-slaves experience welcome in practicing Judaism. The writer takes the participation of non-whites in Jewish rituals every bit a positive sign and their exclusion as a negative 1, which today's Jews must acknowledge and seek to avoid repeating.[four]

This kind of approach, fatigued from Jewish historiography's focus on acculturation and identity, is at odds with the mode Atlantic historians care for master-slave relations. They ofttimes report violence, resistance, and the agency of slaves; they read slaves' non-participation in their masters' religion as an effort to concur onto the civilisation of their ancestors.[v] Schorsch, in contrast, is more concerned with the tolerance/intolerance of masters. Furthermore, while he criticizes other Jewish studies scholars for focusing on instances of amore between masters and slaves, he sometimes does the aforementioned himself. He stresses intimacy between principal and slave without much discussion of violence: "Slaves necessarily got caught up in their owners' family unit affairs, daily happenings, arguments, romances" (p. 263); "masters became caught up in the lives, culture, and characters of their underlings" (p. 264). This analysis may reflect the biases of his sources, only "reading against the grain" might accept helped him to paint a more complex picture of principal-slave interactions amid Jews.

Nonetheless these bug, Schorsch has fulfilled his main objectives admirably, further disproving the NOI's claims almost Jews and slavery, while also making visible the complexity of Jewish interactions with Africans. Both of these accomplishments are welcome ones, and one can look forrard to Schorsch's future scholarship in this field.

Notes

[ane]. Meet Nation of Islam Historical Research Department, The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (Chicago: Nation of Islam, 1991). Also see, for example, David Bird, "Church and Ceremonious Rights Groups Assail New Remark past Farrakhan," New York Times (June 28, 1984): p. A22; and "Khalid Muhammad Dies at 53," Washington Post (Feb. 18, 2001): p. C6. For excerpts from Farrakhan's and Muhammad'due south remarks on Jews and Judaism, see (http://www.adl.org/special reports/farrakhan own words2/farrakhan own words.asp) and (http://www.adl.org/special reports/khalid own words/khalid own words.asp).

[2]. See "AHA Council Bug Policy Resolution about Jews and the Slave Trade," AHA Perspectives (March 1995), at: (http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/1995/9503/9503AHA.CFM); David Brion Davis, "Jews in the Slave Trade," Culturefront 1, no. two (1992): pp. 42-45; idem, "The Slave Trade and the Jews," New York Review of Books (December 22, 1994): pp. xiv-16; "Jews Were Never Dominant in Slave Merchandise, Pitt Historian Says" at: (http://www.pitt.edu/utimes/bug/27/3295/nineteen.html); and Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Merchandise: Setting the Record Straight (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Co-ordinate to Seymour Drescher, "It is unlikely that more than than a fraction of ane percentage of the twelve million enslaved and relayed Africans were purchased or sold by Jewish merchants even in one case.... At no indicate along the continuum of the slave trade were Jews numerous enough, rich plenty, and powerful enough to affect significantly the construction and flow of the slave trade or to diminish the suffering of its African victims." Seymour Drescher, "Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade," in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800, ed. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), p. 455.

[3]. Schorsch notes that he chose to transliterate the original Hebrew names of biblical figures instead of using their more familiar English equivalents. He says that he did this "not out of fawning literalism or religious fundamentalism, but in social club to produce an issue of Verfremdung (estrangement) that will hopefully inoculate readers against lazy assumptions about 'Judeo-Christian' homogeneity.... Information technology is non articulate to me that Ham [Cham] and Ham, for example, intend the same figure or produce the same set of connotations" (p. 16).

[4]. The post-obit comments are illustrative: "Yet their generosity in manumitting slaves went alongside an almost total exclusion of their colored slaves and their slaves' children from participation in the religious life of the customs" (p. 232); and "A low level of familiarity with Jewish practices seems to take been attained by at to the lowest degree some slaves. On some levels colored Jews in Surinam were allowed to join the community.... But ultimately ... they were denied equality every bit community members, equally people" (p. 253).

[5]. Classic studies of agency and resistance in New World slave religion include, Eugene D. Genovese, Curl, Hashemite kingdom of jordan, Roll: The Earth the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); John West. Blassingame, The Slave Customs: Plantation Life in the Antebellum S (New York: Oxford University Printing, 1979), esp. pp. 130-148; and Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford Academy Press, 1987), esp. pp. 33-60.

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Citation: Alyssa Sepinwall. Review of Schorsch, Jonathan, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World. H-Atlantic, H-Cyberspace Reviews. December, 2005.
URL: http://world wide web.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11036

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