Flight from Egypt: Blacks, Jews, Diasporas

Judaism, Wntr, 2001 by Robert Philipson

But it was not the "American white Gentile" who created these legends, no matter how much he may have manipulated them to his benefit. They were, and are, a legacy of Europe. The myths of Black inferiority and Jewish greed were not the invention of the Enlightenment, but the eighteenth century gave them their modem form. If the West eventually admitted that Blacks could not mate with orangutans and that Passover matzoh did not require the blood of Christian babies, other theories were propounded to show that Blacks and Jews remained irredeemably alien. It was within this shadow of Enlightenment prejudice that American Jews and Blacks found the common ground of cooperation.

As the writings of Marcus Garvey, Richard Wright, Alfred Kazin, and Norman Podhoretz show, however, the concept of the Grand Alliance wasn't all-pervasive even during its heyday. Black and Jewish spokespersons have confronted one another again and again in the public arena: the New York teachers' strike of 1968, the demonstrations against "public housing" (code for "poor Black neighbors") in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, the forced resignation of Andrew Young as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the Jewish firestorms of protest against the antisemitic slurs of Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakahn, the anomalous but spectacular Crown Heights riots. It is now commonplace for Jews to charge Blacks with antisemitism, just as Blacks routinely accuse Jews of racism. This mutual suspicion, combined with mutual recognition, has given a peculiarly intense quality to the relationship between these two minorities.

The origins of this tension can be traced to Enlightenment attitudes toward non-Western peoples. Eighteenth-century Europe engaged in a discussion about the nature of Black and Jewish identity that set the terms of response by the intellectual representatives of those groups. Drawing from a legacy of classical literature, Christian ideology, and the realpolitik of nation-state competition, eighteenth-century discourse coalesced around new theories of race, human nature, and environment that were to remain thematically dominant as long as Enlightenment assumptions defined the political will of the West. For Blacks and Jews, this discussion was more than theoretical; Black and Jewish intellectuals who tried to better the condition of their brethren found that the terms of the debate had already been defined for them. Western attitudes could dictate for both outgroups ostracism or inclusion, slavery or freedom, dialogue or silence. Westernized intellectuals could refute negative stereotypes; they could embrace Enlightenment tolerance and egalitarianism; and they could criticize what the philosophes criticized. French, British, and German sympathizers and advocates did the same. What Black and Jewish writers brought to the Western discussion that was new was an insider's perspective, a subjective experience that was as persuasive to its readers as the author's rhetorical skill and mastery of European letters could make it. It was no accident that the period which saw the publication of the first Black and Jewish "ethnic" writing, the last quarter of the eighteenth century, was also the period in which these two groups, for the first time in Western history, were granted localized emancipation. However briefly and hesitantly, this was the moment when the French Revolution emancipated French Jews and abolished slavery in the French Empire.