Black like us

Abstract

When, in 1724, the French monarchy promulgated its Code Noir for the parcel of the empire that was called Louisiana, the first article of the rules applying to “the state and condition of the slaves” referred not to slaves. Rather, it decrees that: “all Jews who may have established their religion there” should expect to be expelled within three months of the decree. 1 Though the Jews were never in fact evicted, this article signaled the start of a pattern. The fate of Jews and blacks in the New World was entwined, and perhaps the French crown could not be blamed for getting these two minorities confused. It could even be credited for being prescient. For these two groups have been so entangled that some twentieth-century Jews in the United States would imagine themselves black, and would blur the lines of race and ethnicity that bigotry had hoped to keep distinct. Two major structural differences have nevertheless divided blacks and Jews throughout the history of the United States. White racism has been far more pervasive and vicious than antisemitism has been. The hostility to African-Americans has been integral to the national experience in a way that makes bigotry against Jewish Americans seem inconsequential. Moreover, blacks have been economically disadvantaged in ways that Jews never were. Both of these signs of asymmetry go a long way toward vindicating the assertion of Nathan Zuckerman, in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, that the two minorities have been “the most unalike of America’s historic undesirables.” 2 The advantages accruing to Jewish immigrants and their progeny have rightly been underscored in recent scholarship, which has noted the contrast with those who were cursed by confinement on the wrong side of the color line. Perhaps the most influential such study has been the historian Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise (1996). In the first third of the twentieth century, the author argued, black culture was frequently plundered, imitated, and distorted—and Jews seemed to be in the forefront of those who inherited the The author wishes to thank Cheryl Lynn Greenberg for an astute critique of this essay, and Alan Cecil Petigny for organizing a panel at the 2007 conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, at which a brief version of this paper was presented.