The Curse of Ham. Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The Curse of Ham. Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. By David M. Goldenberg (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. xv +448 pp. $30.00).

The core of and impetus for Goldenberg's deeply and massively researched book is that strange (and, as it turned out, portentous) entry in the Book of Genesis (Gen 9: 18-25) which describes how Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, finally disembarked from the ark and were instructed to people the earth; how Noah raised grapes and made wine, and how he drank the wine and became drunk and passed out, how his three sons found him naked, but only Ham (the youngest son) peeked at the old man's nudity. When the patriarch learned of this he waxed wroth (not what the RSV says, incidentally)--and declared: "Cursed be Canaan, a slave of slaves shall he be to his brethren."

We immediately see some part of the exegetical problem: Ham commits the delict but it is his son (actually one of his sons), Canaan, who is cursed with the burden of servitude (what sort of primitive patriarchal prohibition declared that seeing a father's nakedness was punishable by this extreme--if indirect--penalty is not a topic Goldenberg takes up, though I suspect that there must be rabbinical comment on this situation of sexual taboo). Beyond the original biblical passage stretch millennia of commentary and interpretation, and this author's aim is specifically to trace the evolution of the idea--the perception--that the Curse of (or on) Ham was not simply servitude but, somehow, the blackness of Ham, so that slavery and a particular chromatism went together down the ages--extending directly to mid-19th century America, when pro-slavery advocates, armed with Scripture, could and did point to Genesis 9: 18-25 as the divine patent for black slavery, their righteous judgments formed just as biblical literalists' opinions are to this day: "God said it, I believe it, and that's an end to it."

Goldenberg plans his work on the history of a perception (or re-perception) along essentially uncomplicated lines: in four parts of the book he pursues (in Part One) the images of Blacks and Blackness in the sources describing biblical and postbiblical Judaism, with special attention to where Kush (possibly a black 'nation') was and who the Kushites may have been. Then (Part Two) "the Color of Skin" is examined through lenses such as the ideal color ascribed to female beauty, to ideal human health, or to the skin-color of a normative or 'proper' mankind; in all of these cases a 'median' chromatism is preferred. Part Three (only ten pages long--the book has some odd topical arrangements to leaven its, predictable organization) gives us what we know of the brief history of black slaves in ancient Israel. Part Four combines history and exegesis, taking up the imputation of blackness to Ham, the puzzle of Canaan, the Curse of Ham (once again), another Curse (directed, more predictably perhaps, against Cain as the first murderer), and finally the description of physiognomy (specifically the physiognomy of the African black) as it is superadded to his color so as to excuse, or to announce, his permanent and eternal fitness for slave status.

The picture Professor Goldenberg draws (and fills in with exceptionally dense detail) is one I think we now could recognize. The biblical accounts contained in Torah (where the land of Kush and its people is a fairly frequent reference--Moses himself supposedly was married to a Kushite woman, for one intriguing example) reveal no more "racism" (but the same "ethnocentrism") that we would find elsewhere in the Mediterranean (the author cites the work of Frank Snowden and Lloyd Thompson with approval); Kush and its inhabitants were made, early on, signifiers or images of "otherness" but not necessarily either identified as black-skinned or as particularly threatening; sometimes Kush indeed is confused with Canaan (itself a confused geographical and ethnic concept), and eventually, for more confusion, the Greek "Ethiopian" was added to the mix. There is another not atypical reaction: these faraway peoples might be seen as in fact superior or at least admirable, shown as brave and skilled warriors, untouched by the complicated sins of civilization, simple in their lives and truthful in their speech--noble savages, perhaps. (Simultaneously the peoples located far from the median or center--to the north or to the south--could be stigmatized as natural barbarians, crude, disfigured, different and dangerous).

One of the problems inherent in any pursuit of ancient "racism" (to use the anachronism) is that some sort of imputation of threat, inferiority and even evil to "darkness," that is to say the absence of light, is an idea both ancient and widespread, nearly an omnicosmic pattern. At a particular point in the history of the Middle East, however, a concatenation of notions and perceptions seems to have appeared that steadily worked toward the denigration (an evocative word in itself) of particular peoples, depicting them as intrinsically inferior, as "naturally" unnatural and so condignly subject to low, servile status--and increasingly, in the postbiblical rabbinical comment and exegesis, and in the early Christian patristic writings that also rested on a biblical-scriptural base, the Curse of Ham was made to act, or created to act as, the prime rationale for black inferiority, rejection from civilization, and so as an understandable, even obligatory subjection to slave status. Clearly that chapter of Genesis has a lot to answer for--and yet, to be fair, the distortion of the text does not lie in the text, but in the minds of those who would try to use it, and who succeeded in using it, for other purposes.

To get at this heart of darkness Goldenberg musters up an astounding volume of statement, exegesis and analysis: I cannot recall ever encountering a full-sized scholarly monograph where the number of text pages (here about two hundred) is matched and indeed overmatched by the number of pages of apparatus, mainly footnotes. Obviously this author has done his homework, and I cannot see how his efforts could be improved upon in terms of this specific topic: the identification and citation of biblical text and rabbinical commentary on 'blackness' and its significance in Judaism. That job has been done, and very well done, by Professor Goldenberg. On the other hand, the added segments on and citations of early Christian (patristic) and Islamic views, though they certainly show the extent of the author's scholarly reach, are essentially by the way, so to that degree the book's title is more than a little misleading: this is a book on a Judaic subject.

I have to say that the flood of citations can become repetitive, as the same questions are gnawed over once more from a slightly different angle, and occasionally Goldenberg ventures into questionable areas: I instance his not-terribly-convincing suggestion of an equation to be made between the thoughtworlds of the Hebrew prophet Amos and the Greek poet Homer (p. 21) and what seems to be a sort of Lamarckian view on the author's part on the inheritance of acquired characteristics (p. 91). Rather more important to the principal thrust of the book is the unanswered question of just why, at a more or less clearly indicated point in time (occurring somewhere between the 2nd century BCE and the 2nd century CE) the rabbinical and then the patristic writers began to firmly attach blackness to the slave state. Goldenberg has no response: the new orientation simply came into being. For myself, I think that the recent work of a scholar such as Daniel Dubuisson might be brought to bear here (see his The Western Construction of Religion), for Dubuisson points to the infiltration of a pronounced neo-Platonist world view into early Christianity (and we certainly see this point of view in the Jewish neo-Platonist Philo of Alexandria). A binary division of all created existence into the oppositions of spirit/flesh, dark/light, truth/untruth and so on ad infinitum, a view that eventually produced various gnosticisms and other dualistic phenomena, could easily lead to the conjugation of color, "race," and servile status adduced for "alien" blacks, and specifically for black Africans.

However, I must insist that Goldenberg can be sincerely congratulated for a scholarly feat of no mean importance; in a lively but usually unobtrusive style, and with formidable learning, he has laid out an ancient puzzle, wherein the inevitable and unfortunate human propensity for justifying what we in our age certainly call a terrible, deadly injustice (though we in the West have taken this enlightened position for only about a century and a half) is assigned to a misapprehended or even invented divine patent--briefly "God (or God's word) made me do it." In the historical record we have seen that a scattered or exiled Judaism was more or less removed from the temptations of slave-holding, while Muslim societies constructed a variable and nuanced view of blackness and the slave--for example extending the faith into Black Africa, while continuing the enslavement of non-Muslim blacks. "Western" Christianity's centers of power mostly pulled away from the Mediterranean (except for such incidental incursions as the Crusades) and so were removed from contact with African blacks, until the European overseas expansion of the 15th and later centuries corresponded, fatally, with the beginning of the West African slave trade. At that point the strangely distorted reading of Genesis 9: 18-25 reemerged, to again condemn an entire "race" to a non-human status.

Dean A. Miller

Emeritus, The University of Rochester