The Image of the Black in Jewish Culture

Abstract

A theory not uncommonly heard in and out of the academic world is that anti-Black racism originated with the ancient The Talmud and Midrash, it is claimed, first expressed that sentiment which led eventually to the horrors of racism in western civilization. These claims are not of recent vintage. Seventy five years ago, Raoul Allier, Dean of the Faculte Libre de Theologie Protestante of Paris, urged Christian missionaries to protest what he saw anti-Black talmudic passages, born in the ghetto, of the feverish and sadistic imagination of some rabbis. 1 In this country, the claim made its first appearance about forty years ago in academic circles and was quickly repeated in works of all sorts, in history, sociology, psychology, religious studies, and theology.2 A professor at the University of Pennsylvania not long ago summed up the view: In its depth of anti-Blackness, rabbinic Judaism suggests how repugnant blacks were to the chosen people, and how the Jews viewed Blacks as the people devoid of ultimate worth and redeeming social human value.3 It wasn't long before this assault spread beyond the university campus to the African American community. Black biblical scholars and theologians repeated the claims and, at times, drew explicit connections to recent history. Charles Copher, a minister in the United Methodist Church and formerly Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Old Testament at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, wrote: Racial myths [were] created and employed by the first interpreters of the so-called Old Testament, the ancient Jewish They then continue through the use of myths inherited