04-23-2007, 07:30 AM
<b>The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam. </b>By David Goldenberg. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. xv + 448 pp. $24.95 paper.
Much ink has been spilled in the last few decades over claims and counterclaims associating the so-called "curse of Ham" with an ideology of racism. The ideology in question is based on what has come to be known as the "Hamitic Myth," according to which a rationalizing divine authority for the enslavement of black Africans may be found in racist interpretations of the biblical Curse of Canaan. The textual root of the discussion lies in the short but enigmatic narrative found in Genesis 9:18-27.
Four issues stand out in the text: Ham's guilt for seeing his father's nakedness (though it is not clear exactly what "seeing nakedness" means); the repeated observation that Ham is the father of Canaan; the fact that Canaan rather than Ham is cursed, seemingly for the guilt of his father; and the statement, made three times in three verses, that Canaan will become a slave. A considerable amount of exegesis from ancient times to the present has been devoted to these issues, and particularly in the 1990s, both scholarly and popular articles of varying quality have been written with the goal of determining the possible impact of the biblical story on racism in medieval and modern times.
In the 1990s the subject evolved into a public debate around early Jewish interpretations of the text. The claim was made that Jewish interpretations associated blackness or African physical features with slavery in order to legitimate the enslavement and oppression of people of African origin ("Ham/Canaan, Cursing of," in The Oxford Companion to the Hebrew Bible, 1993, [268]). Thus it was Jewish exegesis, according to the claim, that became the core ideology from which racist doctrines were constructed claiming divine authority for the enslavement of black Africans by white Europeans (Edith Sanders, "The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origins and Functions in Time Perspective," Journal of African History 10:4 [1969]: 521-32; J. R. Willis, "The Ideology of Enslavement in Islam," in Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, ed. F. R. Willis [London: Frank Cass, 1985]; The Nation of Islam (no author), The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews [Boston, 1991]; Tony Martin, The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront [Dover, Mass.: Majority, 1993]; David Brion Davis, "The Slave Trade and the Jews," New York Review of Books 41:21 [1994]: 14-16).
This book, divided into four sections and encompassing a total of fourteen chapters, sets out to put the presumed Jewish origin of the "Hamitic Myth" to rest. Goldenberg begins by examining the image of dark or black-skinned peoples in antiquity. One of Ham's sons is named Kush, which is often (but not always) associated in the Hebrew Bible with black people or Africans. Kush is also associated in the Bible with black skin color, and the permanent darkness of Kush is differentiated from temporary darkness acquired from the sun or from dirt. But according to Goldenberg, the biblical texts imply no value judgment about the nature of skin color (Exod. 12:1, for example, mentions that a wife of Moses was a "Kushite woman"). Sometimes, black African peoples are described biblically in quite positive terms, as militarily powerful, fleet of foot, and as tall and good-looking.
In the postbiblical Jewish world, as in the Bible (and in parallel with Greek and Roman sources in late antiquity), Kush is used to designate the farthest southern reach of the earth. Representing humanity far from the center of human civilization, Kush conveys two contradictory images in these literatures: of piety far from the corruption of civilization and of barbarism unenlightened by civilization. It is only in the postbiblical world that black skin color is defined negatively, and as in the other aspects mentioned above, the negative association is found in Jewish as well as Greco-Roman sources and also in patristic literature (such as Origen). It is not at all clear, however, that the association of dark with negativity reflects anything more than a common and virtually universal metaphor of "blackness-as-evil." There is no evidence that the metaphor reflects actual antipathy toward black Africans in any of these literatures. In fact, rabbinic understandings of Kushite in relation to Moses' Kushite wife, included beauty (perhaps, according to Goldenberg, influenced by the similar and known Arabic root, kuwayyis, meaning "good"). In short, "apparently Kushite ancestry did not matter one way or the other" (75).
In part 2, Goldenberg engages in a broad examination of the meanings of skin color across wide periods of time and a broad sample of populations. On the one hand, there tends to be a somatic preference for the skin color of the ethnos. In the region of western Asia (the Middle East), whether among Jews, Christians, Muslims or others, the somatic norm (that is, the beautiful) was located somewhere between the dark of the Kushite and the light of the north European. On the other hand, he observes a general transcultural preference for lighter-skinned women among many cultures and places, and notes that upper-class or urban women tend to be characterized by light skin, while the lower (or peasant) class tends to be visualized darker. These preferences may affect general perceptions of darker-skinned peoples in a variety of cultures.
Part 3 is the shortest section, consisting of one chapter, and addresses the evidence for black slaves among Jews in the biblical and rabbinic periods. Because the sources are meager and because Israelites/Jews were less able politically and militarily than neighboring peoples to possess significant numbers of slaves, Goldenberg contextualizes the Jewish sources and extrapolates, particularly in relation to the Greco-Roman and Arab worlds. He concludes that black Africans were a minority among the slave populations in the Near East of antiquity in general. But because most nonindigenous peoples were slaves and because of the black African's noticeable somatic distinction, they were readily identified as slaves. He extrapolates in his conclusion, therefore, that blacks among Israelites, but no more so than among Greco-Romans and Arabs, were commonly identified as slaves.
The most interesting section is the last, in which Goldenberg focuses on historical contextualization in interpretation. The question is, despite the lack of such obvious association from the Bible and its early interpretation, how did the belief develop that Ham was the ancestor of black Africans, that Ham was cursed by God, and therefore that blacks have been eternally and divinely doomed to enslavement? When and how did these myths enter the canon of Western religion and folklore?
The answer, to Goldenberg, is the transition to European dominance in the early modern period. It was at this time that Europeans unselfconsciously appropriated certain biblical earlier interpretations that could be understood to justify European enslavement of Africans--with the help of Arabs. Put somewhat differently, this was a case of Christian and Muslim collusion in the enslavement of black Africans. To Europeans during this period, the human difference of blackness changes from a natural and virtually universal disregard for the "other" to one of racist domination. It was only in the modern period that race became a social mechanism to justify domination by Europeans over the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
Goldenberg believes that true racism requires domination and exploitation. Because the Jews of the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds did not politically dominate physically distinct people, they never used categories of human differentiation as a social mechanism for domination. Only in the modern period, when Jews began to integrate more fully the values of the larger cultures within which they lived, did they naturally begin to exhibit the antiblack sentiment of the surrounding culture. But the sequence is exactly the opposite of what is claimed by those who accuse Jews as the source of European racism.
The end of the story reflects something of a different kind of racism, one that was directed against Jews, who are considered by some to epitomize the evils of humanity and the originators of so much that is wrong in the world today. Goldenberg wrote his book in response to the accusation of the Jewish origin of Western racism. His work will be seen by some as fine scholarship, by others as grand apologetic. Whatever one's assessment, his documentation is encyclopedic and his writing absorbing.
Reuven Firestone