Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

The Curse of Ham \\ 29
beard became singed, since he turned his face around; and since he did not
cover {his father's} nakedness, he went naked and his foreskin was extended.
(Noah, section 13)
Is this an anti-Black statement? Does it speak of Blacks at all? What is it saying?
The text is a difficult one which presents several problems (e.g., in the Bible
it was precisely Ham who did not turn his head around), but let us focus only on
"crooked lips" and "extended foreskin," literal translations of the original Hebrew
sefatayim 'aqumotl'aqushot and nimshekhah 'orlato. What do these two terms mean?
Elsewhere in rabbinic literature they bear the specific meanings of "movement of
the lips" and "uncircumcised penis" (or, a penis on which an operation has been
performed to rebuild a foreskin). Unfortunately, that does not make the passage
any clearer. The text is admittedly an enigmatic one, whose precise meaning
escapes philological investigation.
Nevertheless comparison with non-Jewish literature may provide some interpretive
clues, for medieval Christian and Islamic sources commonly portray the
black African with red eyes. 28 If the Jewish Tanhuma text is describing the
African, it would certainly not be unique in including red eyes in its description.
The same can be said for Tanhuma'?, "extended foreskin," which Graves and
Patai assume to be a reference to penis size. If they are right, such a depiction of
the African should be cause for no more surprise than the reference to red eyes. As
early as Galen in the second century CE, we find a large penis said to be charac-
teristic of Blacks. "The black with an oversize phallus was a traditional theme" in
Greco-Roman art. 29
But are Graves and Patai right? The fact is that, as stated, the Hebrew term
in Tanhuma has a quite specific meaning, and it has nothing to do with penis size.
Similarly, the words translated by Graves and Patai as "swollen lips" cannot under
any circumstances have that meaning.
We are back, then, to where we started: an enigmatic text. Some elements in
the passage (red eyes, and singed/curly hair too) were commonly used—across cultures
and times—to describe Blacks, while other elements (crooked lips, extended
foreskin) remain unexplained.
It may be that Tanhuma is not depicting any known people at all, but is rather
engaging in imaginative fantasy. History has preserved a wide range of descriptions
of distant and presumed wild and strange peoples, found from antiquity
onward among pagan, Christian, Islamic, and Jewish writers. Beyond the limits
of the known world, particularly in mysterious Africa, lived the fabulous races.
"India and parts of Ethiopia especially teem with marvels," reported Pliny, who
goes on to talk about the monstrous animals and humans existing in the extreme
reaches of Africa. 30 During the Middle Ages, such accounts of the fabulous races
of Africa were disseminated by means of John Mandeville's popular Travels (circa
1360). 31 Jean Devisse described the medieval Christian European view of Africa
as "a land of geographic, physiological, and intellectual abnormality.. ..Africa