The illustration is daring, almost provocative: a Jewish man – felt hat, curls – and a black woman kissing languidly. However, as this History of Jewish-Black Relations (Albin Michel), relations between the two minorities have not always been idyllic. Complex links unraveled by Edith Bruder, researcher at the CNRS and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, in a remarkable synthesis of nuance and erudition. Interview.
L’Express: How does the Old Testament represent blacks?
Edith Bruder: In the biblical writings, the term “Kushi”, which designates the inhabitants of Africa, is purely descriptive and does not carry any judgment. The most stubborn prejudices against blacks in Africa will arise from an episode of Genesis called “the curse of Ham”. One day Ham sees his father Noah drunk and naked, and informs his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who cover his nakedness and denounce Ham to their father. In a totally enigmatic way, Noah then curses Canaan, the son of Ham, in place of his father, and condemns him to eternal slavery. Over time, through a series of epistemological and semantic shifts, the figure of Cham will come to associate blackness of skin and slavery. The term “Kushi” designates the Black, then the slave.
Precisely, did the Jews have black slaves?
They had them in Europe and in particular in the Iberian Peninsula, in the Ottoman Empire, in the Caribbean… We know that in the 16th century, a large contingent of converted African and mestizo slaves was integrated into the Jewish society of Amsterdam. Perhaps the most interesting example is that of Suriname, where Jewish settlers took a certain freedom from rabbinic laws. According to the records, slaves or servants participated in the Jewish life of their masters, and we know that many African slaves were converted to Judaism. Unions between Jewish settlers and African women resulted. Eminent families were thus mixed, and formed a Euro-Jewish-African descent which itself gave birth to a very specific Creole culture. However, the level of integration of converted slaves or their descendants has been uneven over time. The documentary sources indicate more or less restrictive measures concerning in particular their place in the synagogue and the modalities of their funerals.
What role did the Jews play in the slave trade?
An undeniable role, but marginal compared to that of other whites. In Bordeaux, for example, where they represent 20 to 25% of local merchants, direct participation in the slave trade from 1685 to 1826 is quite limited: 20 expeditions out of a total of 460.
Identification, admiration, mistrust… Your book also shows the complexity of relations between Jews and Blacks in the United States.
Several phases must be distinguished. From 1900 to 1930, a spontaneous alliance was formed between Jews and blacks. The “Jewish model” then occupied a significant role in strategies concerning the future of black people. It was around the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1910s that the social and political concerns of Jews and blacks converged for greater equality. From the 1920s, black activist movements emerged. African-Americans became aware of the dignity of their culture and distanced themselves from the Jews, often accused of paternalism. From 1930 to 1960, Jews and Blacks formed an alliance in the fight against discrimination and fought together for civil rights. Cooperation between Jewish and Afro-American organizations peaked in the post-war period, to the point that this period constitutes a “golden age” of Jewish-African-American relations.
The rift between the two communities took place in the 1990s, when the Nation of Islam movement accused Jews of being the instigators and beneficiaries of the slave trade. From the second half of the 20th century, the radicalism of blacks came to be opposed by the neoconservatism of Jews taking for granted an old political relationship. In the United States as elsewhere, the relationship between Jews and Blacks associates identification and rejection, love and hatred, within the framework of domination by a white power.
How to explain this enthusiasm for Judaism in Africa and among African-Americans? Does it have ancient roots?
In the 1980s and 1990s, Israel’s recognition of the Beta Israel of Ethiopia as Jews led to other African communities proclaiming their affiliation with Judaism.
Since its translations into African languages, reading the Old Testament has been a source of fascination and hope for Africans, who find themselves in the history of the Hebrew people, enslaved and exiled then liberated. The missionaries, by forcibly evangelizing them, forced them to renounce their traditions. Recognizing Old Testament correspondences with their own African traditions, they identified with the Lost Tribes of Israel. [NDLR : 10 des 12 tribus d’Israël, qui furent déportées en Assyrie autour de 720 av. J.-C.]which led to the affiliation to Judaism of many communities in sub-Saharan Africa.
Should we see in the anti-Semitic provocations of the humorist Dieudonné a “black anti-Semitism”?
At the origin of this kind of statement, there is real suffering, based on economic inequalities and “ordinary” discrimination suffered by French people of African origin. The memory of slavery, long buried in the collective memory in France, the West Indies and elsewhere, resurfaced in the 2000s and curiously fueled an anti-Semitic discourse. Dieudonné’s popularity and the widespread coverage of his anti-Semitic discourse by the media brought high visibility to anti-Semitic “militantism” in black popular culture. He endowed a motley black minority with a radical anti-Jewish discourse.
But the “memory competition” also has a positive side, insofar as the institutionalization of the memory of the Shoah could serve as a model for the descendants of slaves and the public authorities to have the memory of slavery recognized. It kind of served as a spur.
Has the Black Lives Matter movement created, or revealed, a divide between Jews and Blacks in the United States? We think of rapper Kanye West praising Hitler, basketball player Kyrie Irving posting the poster of an anti-Semitic film on his social networks…
Kanye West and Kyrie Irving are representative of black American anti-Semitism, but we cannot generalize. Take the example of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, raised in a Jewish neighborhood, who lit candles on Shabbat and was always an ardent philo-Semite…
More recently and as part of Black Lives Matter, some African Americans have blamed Jews for being key players in African slavery. They denounced the colonialism of the State of Israel and its (past) sympathies for South Africa. There were anti-Semitic remarks. Among the many Jewish movements, some have reacted calmly, pointing out how Black Lives Matter is a powerful inspiration for issues of racial justice and discrimination against Black people, Jews and American diversity as a whole. I would even say that this movement opened a new era of dialogue between the black and Jewish communities, which is reminiscent of the golden days of their partnership.
Isn’t this vision irenic?
Of course, this is not easy, if we keep in mind that the integration of Ethiopian Jews in Israel has aroused reluctance. But the phenomenon of black Judaism in Africa and the United States, in its scope, is truly staggering. We must take into account the new Jewish communities that are forming in sub-Saharan Africa, the fervor in the synagogues of New York and Chicago. This is what leads me to evoke a “cultural and religious symbiosis” between Blacks and Jews…
History of relations between Jewish and Black relations. From the Bible to Black Lives Matter, by Edith Bruder. Albin Michel, 299 pages, €22.90.