Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

8 // JACK SALZMAN
In any case, what brought West and me together was the conviction that we
did not know all the history—that as we talked about the relationship between
African Americans and American Jews we agreed that there was too much that
was unknown, too many stories that were untold, too much that remained part of
history's contested realm. We were less concerned with pondering, "What went
wrong?" 12 —perhaps nothing did, after all—than discerning what had happened.
The rhetoric of race was becoming more and more inflammatory, and the past was
becoming anyone's story to tell. We wanted, at the very least, to undercut the
rhetoric by trying to determine what might in fact have happened between Blacks
and Jews during the slave trade, in Hollywood, and in the struggle for civil
rights. As slippery as history may be, indeed because it is so elusive, we wanted
to produce a volume that would provide the reader with a historical framework
for a relationship that is most often defined by ideological passion.
II
Struggles in the Promised Land begins with two essays that precede the coming to
America of either Blacks or Jews. In "The Curse of Ham: A Case of Rabbinic
Racism," David M. Goldenberg offers a pointed refutation of the contention that
ancient and medieval rabbinic literature reflect an invidious racism against
Blacks. Goldenberg challenges the writings of such Black authors as St. Clair
Drake and Tony Martin, as well as such white scholars as Thomas Gossett and
Winthrop Jordan, whose lack of knowledge of rabbinic literature or ancient
Jewish history has allowed them to erroneously argue that the source of anti-Black
prejudice in Western civilization is to be found in rabbinic literature. William
Jordan focuses his attention on "The Medieval Background" to show how both
Blacks and Jews were demonized in the medieval world, how Jews and Blackness
became represented as "allegorical evocations of the Devil and their moral interpretation
as signs of evil." Although few Blacks in the Middle Ages had to endure
the racist environment that was the lot of Jews, once the power and authority of
Western European norms expanded around the globe, "people of color" began to
feel the weight of a symbolic system that derided Blackness and Black people as
much as it did Jews and Judaism.
The issue of Jewish involvement in both the slave trade and slavery itself is
addressed by David Brion Davis and Jason Silverman. Both essays grow out of the
unfortunate need to respond to the charges that "Jews" were heavily invested in
and were major benefactors of slavery. That some people who were Jewish were
involved in the slave trade and that more owned slaves in the South is not to be
disputed. What is at issue is why that fact has become an issue. Relatively speaking,
very few Jews engaged in the slave trade compared to people who were
Protestant, Catholic, or Muslim; indeed, many more Africans took part than did
Jews. But numbers aren't exactly the point. What is unsettling is the obvious: a
Black man commits a crime and all Blacks are criminals; a Jew owns slaves and,