Flight from Egypt: Blacks, Jews, Diasporas

Judaism, Wntr, 2001 by Robert Philipson

This is the Janus-faced legacy of the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century Europe articulated the liberating political philosophies of liberalism (Adam Smith, Locke, and the French philosophes) before the emancipation of its domestic Jewish communities while orchestrating a racialized slave trade and plantation system in its colonies. As Gilroy and others point out, Black oppression is integral to the creation of Western modernity--Gilroy writes of "the internality of blacks to the West" [24] As the Mendes France case demonstrates, the same could be said of the Jews, who functioned as Christian Europe's domestic Other.

Modern conceptions of Black and Jewish identity as well as the modern forms of racism that came to term in the eighteenth century entered American culture whole cloth. Rather than constituting an exception to Enlightenment discourse, the paradox of a slave owner penning the American Declaration of Independence perfectly expressed the dualism of the age. [25] The position of Blacks and Jews in the New World was different, but the logic of proclaiming a democratic republic with legalized forms of oppression attracted only perfunctory comment in either Jeffersonian America or Napoleonic France. Still, Enlightenment optimism comes ringing through the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. For immigrants of the nineteenth century--the Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, and Jews--America represented a new promise, a clean slate, a second chance. The first book-length autobiography published by an American Jew was entitled The Promised Land (1911), and its author, Mary Antin, consiste ntly secularizes the myth of Exodus. Referring to a Passover celebrated shortly after the wholesale expulsion of Jews from Moscow, she writes:

In the story of Exodus we would have read a chapter of current history, only for us there was no deliverer and no promised land. But what said some of us at the end of the long service? Not "May we be next year in Jerusalem," but "Next year--in America!" So there was our promised land, and many faces were turned towards the West. And if the waters of the Atlantic did not part for them, the wanderers rode its bitter flood by a miracle as great as any the rod of Moses ever wrought. [26]

Unlike Mary Antin, Africans brought to North America did not liken their journey across the water to the Exodus. They came to refer to their trans-Atlantic voyage as the Middle Passage, the second phase of their journey from Africa to their place of servitude. "The hellish conditions of the passage have long made it a byword for horror and a metaphor for human suffering and cruelty," states The Encyclopedia of African-American Culture in its article on the slave trade. By the time slaves and their children learned of the Exodus story, they knew that they were living in no land of milk and honey. "I'm on my way to the promised land," they might sing in the spiritual, but they realized that Beulah land didn't exist for them in this lifetime. Yet hope for a secular salvation refused to die. Even after the dream of emancipation vanished in the creation of Jim Crow segregation, Southern Blacks placed new faith in the industrial cities of the north. One of the children of these Black dreamers, Claude Brown, called his fictionalized autobiography Manchild in the Promised Land (1965) and wrote in his foreword about where the name came from: "These migrants were told that unlimited opportunities for prosperity existed in New York and that there was no 'color problem' there. They were told that Negroes lived in houses with bathrooms, electricity, running water, and indoor toilets. To them, this was the 'promised land' that Mammy had been singing about in the cotton fields for many " [27]