Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

92 // HASIA R. DINER
spoke volumes about the complicated ways in which Blacks in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries saw Jews. Encoded in it lay a vast range of images
that Blacks projected about the "Jew" of these years: a combination of admiration,
envy, and fear.
Jews assumed mythic proportion in the Black press and religious community.
Talking about Jews became a way for Blacks to talk about themselves, to express
their fears and aspirations, their anxieties and concerns. Jews did not, in short,
simply constitute another group of whites. As a writer for the Negro World noted
in 1924, "Who has housed and is still housing, the colored community...? Who
forms the greater part of the faculties of the schools and colleges that educated the
Negro? With whom do the Negroes enter into business communication? To
whom can the Negro who wants to launch out on a business.. .go for a loan at any
time? None else but the Jew."
No doubt the African American religious tradition can explain in part the
broad uses of the Jews in Black rhetoric in this period. For a people suspended
between slavery and freedom, the stories of Moses the liberator, the rigors of slavery,
the yearning for freedom, and the glory of the Exodus offered powerful religious
and political symbolism. While Black religious rhetoric associated Jews
with the crucifixion of Jesus, it constantly promoted the heroic images of the suffering
slaves transformed into the triumphant women and men who left Egypt. 15
The music and imaginative literature of Black Americans characterized Jews on
some level as the living embodiment of the Exodus story. As Howard University
professor Kelly Miller wrote in 1935 for the Richmond Planet, the stories of struggle
and deliverance, of Noah, Daniel, Jonah, "are absorbed and relished [by the
Negro] as if they were an indigenous part of Negro folklore." 16
Jews were also represented in Black discourse as the heirs of centuries of
oppression. Black writers and lecturers repeatedly emphasized that Jews had suffered
harshly, and despite—or perhaps because of—that experience, had emerged
successful. In 1876 the Reconstructionist governor of Mississippi, Pinckney B.S.
Pinchback, exhorted an audience to ponder the fate of the Jews. "Like you," he
reminded his listeners, a decade out of bondage, "they were once slaves and after
they were emancipated they met with persecution." With hard work, he continued,
they became "leaders of education and princes of the commercial
world....What an example for you, my people, whose advantages are so great." 17
Booker Washington in 1912 echoed this sentiment, claiming that despite the
"wear and tear of centuries of persecution," the Jews have risen "up to a position
of power and preeminence." 18
Jewish success, according to the range of Black commentary, grew out of
Jewish business acumen. Commerce catapulted Jews out of oppression and into
the upper realms of influence and achievement. 19 The New York Age went so far as
to claim in 1906 that the Jews' "influence on Wall Street, through their European
connections, is almost predominant." 20
Black writers, educators, clergymen, and intellectuals offered a variety of spec-