Flight from Egypt: Blacks, Jews, Diasporas

Judaism, Wntr, 2001 by Robert Philipson

Because of the historical conditions of the Enlightenment, autobiographies were among the first works that these Westernized intellectuals produced. The trickle of ethnic autobiographies produced in the eighteenth century had become a veritable torrent in the twentieth; but all of the themes, contradictions, and manifestations of double consciousness articulated by the first of these autobiographers were recapitulated a century and a half later by Black and Jewish autobiographers in America who still subscribed to Enlightenment assumptions. Two of the best-known American autobiographies, Richard Wright's Black Boy and Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City, can be seen as echoes of the journey from the ethnic margins to the universal center first undertaken by their Enlightenment ancestors.

Olaudah Equiano was the first Black to write and publish his life story at full-length, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. His book is regarded as the earliest masterpiece of Black autobiography written in English. Its author did not conceive of himself as a literary man, but his rhetorical skill is evident throughout. As an eighteenth-century document, it embodies the double consciousness and ambivalent engagement with Western discourse that were later to be recognized as a hallmark of Black writing in European languages. As eighteenth-century propaganda, it served as a testament to Black will and intelligence in the centuries following its appearance. What is most striking, however, is how its engagement with Black consciousness in the Enlightenment would remain central to discussions of the diasporic experience.

Although Solomon Maimon's Lebensgeschichte is currently out of print, rarely mentioned, and has not seen a new translation into English for over a century, it plays a similar role in Jewish literature. Its case is not helped by the fact that Maimon was no master rhetorician and that his German style rarely rises above the serviceable. Nonetheless, his autobiography is as revealing as Equiano's as an Enlightenment expression of ethnic identity. We see in it the same themes of divided consciousness, the same desire to harmonize ethnic difference with the promise of Enlightenment acceptance, the same effort to interpret the ultimate meaning of life through the ideology of the dominant culture--in this case Deism rather than Equiano's dissident Protestantism.

In many ways, the terms of debate established during the Enlightenment had not changed by the twentieth century. At least until the 1960s, America's offer of full acceptance in civil society reflected the highest ideals of Western civilization. Although the specific terms differed for each group, the contradictions established a century and a half earlier remained: Blacks still lived under legalized segregation, and Jews found themselves socially hemmed in by restrictive covenants. Assimilation into a universal culture was still "the price of the ticket," to use James Baldwin's phrase, and ethnic activists who wished to remedy the deficiencies of American liberalism accused the United States of not living up to the ideals of its political culture. Ethnic literature written in English had long been a part of a larger American dialogue, always the product of authors who crossed cultural boundaries. Black and Jewish autobiographers writing at the end of Enlightenment hegemony share the same themes as their eigh teenth-century counterparts: double consciousness, a striving toward universal culture (variously defined in accordance with the prevailing intellectual climate), and an ambivalent relation to the ethnic community left behind.