Jewish Ham

Many scholars have considered how the curse of Ham in Genesis serves as a justification for the enslavement of Africans. However, in seeking for the origin of Ham’s purported blackness, they overlook his association with Jewish hereditary inferiority. Originating in patristic exegesis, this idea circulates widely in medieval visual arts and popular discourses. While medieval Christian commentaries on Genesis that link Ham to Africa do not mention Noah’s curse, the idea of Jewish cursed servitude appears adjacent to these considerations, thus paving the way for a transfer of hereditary inferiority from one group to the other. The association of Jews with Ham continues into the Reformation, but subsides as the imperative to subordinate Jews gives way to intra-Christian enmity. The figure of Ham as representing a curse of Jewish perpetual slavery is eclipsed by a more profitable, opportunistic application to Africans that justifies their enslavement.

Introduction

This intellectual history focuses on racism: discriminatory concepts and practices that produce, accompany, or follow the (fictive) idea of race. The author identifies inferiority as a primary category of analysis, arguing that the creation of a hierarchy in which one group represents itself as superior to another constitutes a necessary element of racism. Attending to the tropes of subordinating differentiation helps trace racism’s history in drawing a line from medieval forms to contemporary white supremacism. The figural concept of cursed Jewish slavery developed in medieval Christian theology serves to construct racial inferiority. The introduction stresses the importance of theology in the history of race: the many studies of medieval discourses that articulate racial identities for Jews and Muslims do not focus on the theological texts from which these constructions emerge. Medieval Christian theology creates a status of hereditary inferiority, a concept that continues to shape modern racism.

Coda

In focusing on a medieval theological discourse of figural slavery, this book demonstrates the racist force of the construction of inferior identities for Jews, Muslims, and Africans. Although these groups occupy complexly different positions in contemporary Western society, the medieval linkages between them nevertheless help us understand the recent rise in nationalism and white supremacism both in the United States and Europe. White supremacists and the alt-right have expressly drawn on medieval tropes and phrases to fabricate a notion of originary medieval Christian whiteness that they aspire to recreate in the contemporary moment. While no apparent rationale organizes white supremacists’ animus against blacks, Muslims, and Jews, the history of the ideology of white supremacy can be traced back to medieval Western Europe, when the concept of Christian superiority, often coded as white, opposed itself to an imagined infidel inferiority that correlated Jews, Muslims, and Africans.

Servitus Judaeorum

This chapter focuses on a status of hereditary inferiority that emerges out of typological interpretations of Jews as slaves to Christians. Paul’s reading of the servility of Esau and Hagar as figuring a lesser spiritual status shapes Augustine’s formulation, which adds Cain and Ham, to identify these types as Jews punished with enslavement to Christians for the (alleged) crucifixion of Jesus. This curse continues to affect contemporary Jews in their subjection to the Christian Roman Empire. Medieval exegetes draw on Matthew 27:25 to reformulate the servitus Judaeorum into perpetual slavery. In emphasizing the generational consequences of this condition, these texts develop a racial idea of hereditary inferiority. The figures of Cain and Hagar/Ishmael also enter into canon law directives to justify the legal subordination of Jews. The racist status of perpetual enslavement defines Jews as ontologically inferior to Christians and facilitates the realization of their degradation in discriminatory laws.

Cain, Ham, and Ishmael

This chapter tracks how figures of Jewish hereditary inferiority translate to Muslims and Africans. The canon law formulation of Jews as enemies of Christendom, punished with enslavement, influences attitudes toward other infidels. The figure of Ishmael facilitates this connection, since he represents both Jews and Muslims. Anachronistically, popes and canonists begin describing Muslims as cursed with perpetual servitude for the crime of deicide, thus subjecting them to the same rationale that secured Jewish subordination to Christians. Crusader logic provides the legal justification for the European expansion into Africa, which begins in North African territory frequently associated with Islam. The language of papal bulls transfers the figural concept of hereditary inferiority through the inclusion of the term “perpetual servitude” in edicts that not only authorize the Iberian appropriation of African lands, but also license the trade in enslaved peoples by representing Africans as already inferior enemies of Christendom.

Making Darkness Visible

This chapter demonstrates how figural inferiority shapes visual representations of Passion scenes in which dark-skinned Jews attack Jesus. These portrayals emerge in a period when accounts of the Passion increasingly emphasize Jesus’s suffering at the hands of his Jewish enemies. Scholars have explained English psalter illuminations of dark Jews as participating in negative patristic associations of the “Ethiopian.” This chapter argues that dark colors connoting death and damnation provide another explanatory context. The author considers representations of the damned and of devils portrayed as blue, gray, and brown to interpret images of similarly toned Jews in thirteenth-century psalters. In attacking Jesus, whose sacrifice secures redemption from eternal death, the Jews bring upon themselves not only the curse of a servile life, but also the damnation of the soul that leads to everlasting death. The images embody the Jews’ spiritual abjection as infernal: not only hellish, but inferior.

The Mark of Cain and Embodying Inferiority

Although hereditary inferiority initially defines a status absent a corporeal effect, the figure of Cain provides a means by which the Jews’ subjection could be embodied. Medieval Christian theologians employ the marked and cursed figure of Cain in the invention of a divinely inflicted curse of bleeding that functions to humiliate and subordinate male Jewish bodies. The author demonstrates that Jacques de Vitry’s account of this disease in his Historia Orientalis very closely traces the logic of papal decretals referencing Cain and Jewish servitude. Following the objective of legal attempts to define and enforce Jewish inferiority, the discourse of Jewish bleeding, whether described as menstrual or hemorrhoidal in subsequent texts, seeks to embody inferiority by means of demeaning disease. The theological concept of servitus Judaeorum influences discourses of natural philosophy and medicine that represent materially inferior Jewish bodies through the force of shaming infirmity.