Abstract
Racial ideas which developed in the modern west were forged with reference to a Christian worldview and informed by the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Up until Darwin’s scientific reframing of the origins debate, European and American race scientists were fundamentally Christian in their orientation. This paper outlines how interpretations of the Hebrew Bible within this Christian Weltanschauung facilitated the development and articulation of racial theories which burgeoned in western intellectual discourse up to and during the 19th century. The book of Genesis was a particular seedbed for identity politics as the origin stories of the Hebrew Bible were plundered in service of articulating a racial hierarchy which justified both the place of Europeans at the pinnacle of divine creation and the denigration, bestialization, and enslavement of Africans as the worst of human filiation. That the racial ethos of the period dictated both the questions exegetes posed and the conclusions they derived from the text demonstrates that biblical interpretation within this climate was never an innocuous pursuit, but rather reflected the values and beliefs current in the social context of the exegete.
Highlights
IntroductionUnderstood as prejudice based on the premise of fundamental biological differences between human groups, is a phenomenon that developed only in the modern
Racism, understood as prejudice based on the premise of fundamental biological differences between human groups, is a phenomenon that developed only in the modernWest (Montagu 1997; Braude 2011)
The Scottish Anatomist Robert Knox epitomizes the significance that race had acquired in nineteenth century imagination when he confidently asserted: iations
Summary
Understood as prejudice based on the premise of fundamental biological differences between human groups, is a phenomenon that developed only in the modern. European imperial expansion and colonialization of foreign territories which began with Portugal and Spain in the latter half of fifteenth century were the most significant catalysts for the emergence of racial science (Mazzolini 2014; Horsman 1981). Both the imperial prowess of Europe as well as human physical diversity found explanatory power in the concept of race. Race, both as a popular and a scientific concept, had come to dominate European and American thought (Gould [1981] 1996; Kidd 2006). This hermeneutic, served a definitive purpose: to provide moral-theological, and even “scientific”, justification for the unequal treatment and enslavement of blacks in north-Atlantic societies
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