41845358-Antisemitism

248 ANTISEMITISM
who were light-skinned. No curse of slavery was placed on the innocent black
descendants of Cush, Canaan’s brother, said to be the forebears of Ethiopians
and other blacks. For the rabbis there was no “curse of Ham” that linked slavery
with black people.
It is true that in their few references to black or dark-skinned peoples, the
rabbis expressed a preference for the light-skinned—their own coloring; this
preference is consistent with what social scientists call the “somatic norm preference,”
meaning that we favor what is peculiar to ourselves. But the rabbis
engaged in no systematic denigration of black people, and there are passages,
such as the following, that stress a common humanity of all people: “In the
messianic age, he who is light skinned will take hold of the hand of him who is
dark and arm in arm they will walk together.” 32
How did the Genesis text become a justification for racism in Western civilization?
Not from these scant and esoteric folk legends in the Talmud, which
led nowhere: Neither the rabbis who compiled the Talmud nor latter-day Jewish
thinkers constructed a systematic racial ideology that identified blackness
with slavery. The “curse” of Ham or “Hamitic” myth—that is, the fusion of the
curse of blackness with the curse of slavery—originated in an operational way
in the seventh century, when it was fashioned by Muslims to justify Islam’s
practice of conducting slave raids in Africa. One oft-used word in Arabic for
black is ahd, which means “slave.” Once European Christians engaged in the
slave trade starting in the fifteenth century, they adopted Islam’s theological
justification for slavery. “The curse of Ham is, indeed, an idea that has spawned
devastating consequences in history,” observes David M. Goldenberg. “It is
not, however, found in Judaism.” 33 And it will not do to pluck a few scattered
quotations out of context from ancient Jewish sources—most of them fables
and yarns, not philosophical-theological tracts—to blame modern racial prejudices
on Jews. The reductio ad absurdum of this process is the declaration of
Tony Martin, professor of African studies at Wellesley, that the Hamitic myth
was the concoction of “talmudic scholars” that “provided the moral pretext
upon which the entire [slave] trade grew and flourished; [it] killed many millions
more [Africans] than all the anti-Jewish pogroms and holocausts in Europe.”
34 This charge, responds David H. Aaron, is an example of one of those
“nefarious formulations in the ideologically charged marketplace of ideas, a
marketplace in which the loudest, most provocative voices often earn high dividends
on the basis of their aggression rather than their accuracy.”* 35
* The same observation about “ideologically charged” ideas applies to versions of
Afrocentrism that proclaim, among other things, that: Africa is the source of Western