Flight from Egypt: Blacks, Jews, Diasporas

Judaism, Wntr, 2001 by Robert Philipson

During the eighteenth century, philosophes and enlightened rulers preached and practiced new principles of tolerance. As these ideas gained currency, they created an occasional escape hatch for the exceptional Jew who could provisionally leave the ghetto or the industrious Black who could buy himself out of slavery. As greater numbers of these individuals attained recognition in Enlightenment culture, a consciousness grew up between these modernized members of the two groups that can only be characterized as diasporic. This consciousness is made manifest in the first "ethnic" writings by Blacks and Jews in the languages of the West, e.g., Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem (1783), and Ottobah Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the HumanSpecies...(1787). As Clifford writes, "[Diasporic cultural forms] are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments, and they encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host coun tries and their norms." [18]

The intellectual premises of the Enlightenment created the first secular, transnational culture that seemed to offer full membership to those who were perceived as different. Paul Berman notes that "Enlightenment liberalism... sliced neatly through the knotty problem of being an unloved minority in a majoritarian world." [19] The solution, however, created an intellectual crisis for both Blacks and Jews as they sought to evaluate and come to terms with Enlightenment promise. Summoned to discussion (in European languages and under Enlightenment assumptions), Blacks and Jews were forced to define themselves in opposition to and in conjunction with European ideas about who they were. The "identity" they produced combined categories of European thought, usually stereotypes, with insider knowledge of their own community. Intellectuals of both groups could not help but articulate the "double consciousness" so famously identified by W. E. B. DuBois, the dual measurement of one's life provided by the ethnic and the W estern yardstick. Some discovered elements of their culture and identity that they could not or would not abandon in the call to assimilate. The continued racism of the dominant culture only reinforced these "retrograde" tendencies. As Clifford recognized, "Peoples whose sense of identity is centrally defined by collective histories of displacement and violent loss cannot be 'cured' by merging into a new national community. This is especially true when they are the victims of ongoing, structural prejudice." [20] The Enlightenment itself was not sure to what extent it welcomed those still perceived as alien.

The Mendes France case provides a good example of eighteenth-century ideological confusion. In June of 1775, Isaac Mendes France, originally from the Bordeaux community of so-called "Portuguese Jews," returned to France after a twelve-year stay in the sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. He brought in his train three slaves, Pampy, born in Saint-Domingue, Cezare, an Arada native, and Julienne, a young woman originally kidnapped from the West Coast of Africa. Seven months after the group had settled in Paris, Pampy and Julienne sued their master for their freedom. Citing natural law as it was understood in the eighteenth century ("All men issuing from the hands of Nature are born free"), [21] as well as cataloging the master's cruelty, their French lawyer, Maitre Dejunquieres, availed himself of the prevailing antisemitism to argue his case. "Mr. Mendes accuses all Negroes of being crooks and liars. The unfortunates which he pursues could launch the same accusation against the Jewish Nation, and the latter could v ery well suffer in comparison." [22] As Pierre Pluchon points out in his discussion of the case, "One hears a veritable indictment against the inhuman and barbarous Jews, enemies of the true religion; one reads a philosophical discussion on the unnatural condition of servitude, and on the moral rectitude of the Blacks." [23] Mendes France was found guilty and forced to pay damages to both his former slaves who were thenceforth free to go where they wished. Enlightenment convictions about the essential equality of humankind brought freedom to the African slaves, but this noble enterprise was aided by an antisemitism that didn't even recognize itself as such.