Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

60 // WILLIAM CHESTER JORDAN
ought to shine above the works of others. But were they to be black, and
were his face to be blackened—may God avert this—men might be right
to be fearful about the imminence of judgement and condemnation. For
the sun will be darkened and turned to blackness when judgement is
imminent. 31
Conclusion
The interpretative parallels between medieval Christians' conceptions of Jews and
Judaism, on the one hand, and Black people and Blackness, on the other, were
precise despite the fact that Jews did not have to remain Jews in the Middle Ages
whereas Black people and their Blackness could never be sundered. We have seen
that suspicion about the large numbers of converts to Christianity from Judaism
in the very late Middle Ages and the early modern period laid the foundation for
an equally invidious "biologicization" of anti-Jewish attitudes. 32 We might imagine
a Quodlibet as to whether a Jew could "really" cease to be a Jew, and we could
imagine, in turn, an even greater link between the interpretative discourse on
Jews and Blacks as a result.
In fact, it is not necessary to imagine such convergence. Any number of
texts—especially, pictorial—link Jews and Blacks in the Middle Ages. Although
the color primarily associated with Jews by medieval Christians was yellow, 33
Jewish tormentors of Christ at the cross, as we have already noticed, do at times
appear Black. Blacks appear in the crowd of scornful onlookers at the arrest in
the Garden of Gethsemane and elsewhere as well. "How many generations of
Christians," one scholar writes, "have been conditioned by looking at a grimacing
black man torturing Christ or his saints." 3/1
Moreover, the Quodlibets cited earlier in this essay are found in a manuscript
that speculates on the biological nature of Jews. Christian debaters wondered
"whether Jews suffered a flux" (widely attributed to them in popular culture)
specifically because they were Jews. Medieval scholars were bothered by the fact
that Jews and Christians had similar color ("because Christians and some Jews are
of the same complexion"); it would have been easier to link a "humoral" distinction
about the nature of bile and fluxes of bile to gross somatic difference. But
northern European churchmen knew from experience that Jews were not black,
no matter how much they permitted themselves occasionally to indulge symbolic
(allegorical, moral, mystical) conflations of the two. Peter Biller, who has edited
the entire Quodlibet and sets it into the wider context of medical and theological
speculation on the relative importance of nature and nurture on the Jewish
body, views these speculations as a kind of early intermediate stage to the full
scale pseudoscientific racism of the modern period. In its own time it was never
uncontested, however, because scholars—all of whom were churchmen—took the
radically transforming potential of baptism so seriously. 35