The Lemba - ‘angel-stars’, ngoma lungundu and ancestors

Hendel (2004) states that “the remembered past is the material with which biblical Israel constructed its identity as a people, a religion, and a culture. It is a mixture of history, collective memory, folklore, and literary brilliance. In Israel’s formative years, these memories circulated orally in the context of family and tribe. Over time they came to be crystallized [mainly] in various written texts” (my insertion). The experiential dimension of religion of ancient Israel and that of the Lemba (the so-called ‘Black “Jews” of Southern Africa’ and other African tribes) is expressed orally and textually, but also in art. It is in no small part also created by them, as they formulate new or altered conceptions of the sacred past. Guidance by stars, the ancestors and the ngoma lungundu (sacred drum of the ancestors) play a major role in the expression of Lemba and early Israelite religion, culture and art.

The Black/Jew

Sander Gilman argued that the consensus of nineteenth century ethnography was that the Jews “were ‘black’ or, at least, ‘swarthy.’ ” In fact, there was no such consensus. Monogenist ethnographers had to show that European Jews were white in order to be able to show that black Jews had changed from white as a result of climate determinism. The increased racialization of Jews and blacks around the time of the American Civil War was accompanied by a renewal of the idea that the Jews and blacks had much in common, including color. Robert Knox was one of the first anthropologists to argue that the Jews were negroid. He was followed by many others, most of them polygenists. Other conflations of Jews and blacks included features such as smell, ears, eyes, hair, sexuality, etc. Jews were constructed as negroes, and at the same time blacks were constructed as Jews. They were both considered to be uniquely ugly. The ugliest Africans were the so-called Hottentots, who themselves had been deemed to be of Jewish origin. African tribes throughout the continent were constructed as Jews. The founder of political antisemitism, Wilhelm Marr, came to his hatred of Jews through a hatred of blacks in America. He thought Jews had negroid features and antecedents. From the time of the German Enlightenment Jews were inserted into the category of black slaves. For the influential racial theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, black blood flowed in the veins of Jews. The same goes for the important theorist Friedrich Ratzel. In the Americas, out-and-out anti-black racists were often equally anti-Jewish.

Rassenwahn

German science in early twentieth century was sophisticated, and Nazi theorists had to pay it lip service as they constructed their racial empire. Definitions of key terms like blood or race were never arrived at. Who or what was a Jew? Hans F. K. Günther and other Nazi race theorists were poorly trained and vague. The same was true of Alfred Rosenberg, one of the most influential race ideologues of the Nazi Party. Their works were taken seriously by Nazi bureaucracy. Throughout the Reich, race theorists helped the bureaucracy. George-Alexis Montandon, the Swiss-born, naturalized French physician and polygenist anthropologist, selected Jews in France for deportation using utterly dubious criteria. Exhibitions on race and centers of study were set up to promote Nazi race policies. Relatively little new physical anthropological research was conducted on Jews because it would have undermined the basis of racial laws. Attempts were made to see if Jewish blood was different. Non-somatic research into Jewish difference was carried out by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. Nazi Jewish studies had to engage with the black Jews who had troubled polygenists.

The Loango Turn

In 1777 it was revealed that there were not only white negroes and other weird and wonderful hybrids in Loango, there were also black Jews with some striking customs. This was revealed in a book by Christian George Andreas Oldendorp. The scientists of the Enlightenment were as fascinated by these black Jews as they had been by the white negroes and other hybrids. Some, such as Theophil Ehrmann, were dubious about Oldendorp’s revelation. But leading Enlightenment figures such as Anton Büsching, Conrad Malte-Brun, Johann David Michaelis, Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann, Kurt Sprengel, and others debated their importance from a racial and historical standpoint. Other black Jews were invoked by Paul Jakob Bruns. The Ethiopian Jews had been introduced to Enlightenment thinkers by James Bruce. Jews, who were anxious to be seen as white, were not much interested in black Jews. An exception was Ludwig Markus, who wrote about Loango Jews and others, including the Falashas of Ethiopia. Black Indian Jews were brought into the conversation and became an important object of Enlightenment speculation about race and color determinism. The idea of a color spectrum for Jews was born.

Hybrid Hate

The study of Western racism has tended to concentrate on either the hatred and murder of Jews or the hatred and enslavement of black people. As chief objects of racism Jews and blacks have been linked together for centuries, peoples apart from the general run of humanity. In medieval Europe Jews were often perceived as blacks, and the conflation of Jews and blacks continued throughout the period of the Enlightenment. With the discovery of a community of black Jews in Loango in west Africa in 1777, and later of black Jews in India, the Middle East, and other parts of Africa, the figure of the hybrid black Jew was thrust into the maelstrom of evolving theories about race hierarchies and taxonomies. The new hybrid played a particular role in the great battle between monogenists and polygenists as they sought to establish the unitary or disparate origins of humankind. From the mid-nineteenth century to the period of the Third Reich, Jews and blacks were increasingly conflated in a racist discourse that combined the two fundamental racial hatreds of the West. While Hitler considered Jews “Negroid parasites,” in Nazi Germany as in Fascist Italy, through texts, laws, and cartoons, Jews and blacks were combined in the figure of the black/Jew, the mortal foe of the Aryan race.

Polygenists, Black Jews, and the Proofs for the Disunity of Man

Charles White set the scene for the insertion of Jews, blacks, and black Jews into the great origin debate from a polygenist perspective. The polygenist “American School” of race theorists tried to destroy the monogenist argument based on the existence of a color change among Jews by arguing that all black Jews were racially not Jews at all. The immutability of race became a key feature of polygenist thinking. One of the proofs for immutability was perceived in the images found in ancient Egyptian and Assyrian art. Nott’s Types of Mankind analyzed not only black but also Jewish racial specificity. The Jews had a mark on them, and blacks were marked by the “mark of Cain”—their color. The heresy of the black Jew was attacked time and again by the polygenists. Agassiz agreed that Jews and blacks were marked out and distinguished from other races. In France Joseph Arthur, “Comte” de Gobineau combatted the idea that black Jews proved the impact of climate on racial groups, and the single origin of humankind. Gradually the polygenist argument started to suggest that purity of race among Jews could be shown by the fact that all Jews were of a dark, dusky coloring. Beddoe developed an index of nigrescence, on which the Jews scored 100 percent. Russell, co-creator with Darwin of the concept of natural selection, took issue with the concept of multicolored Jews and so, more ambiguously, did Richard Burton. Burton thought that the Jews were racially unique, like blacks.