Beyond Culture Wars

Beyond Culture Wars
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
African Athena: New Agendas

Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon
Print publication date: 2011

Print ISBN-13: 9780199595006
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199595006.001.0001
Beyond Culture Wars

Reconnecting African and Jewish Diasporas in the Past and the Present
Toby Green
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199595006.003.0009
Abstract and Keywords

In this paper theoretical and historical connections between African and Jewish diasporas
are explored through 17 th century Senegambia. Building on the work of Gilroy (1993)
and Clifford (1994), and their emphasis of similarities in the histories of both African and
Jewish diasporas, and also on Schorsch (2004)'s analysis of AfricanJewish relations in the
Atlantic world, this paper illustrates multiple connections in the early modern Atlantic
histories of African and Jewish diasporas. The chapter underlines the importance of the
work of Bhabha, Young and others in the emphasis of hybridity in the analysis of
contemporary cultural discourse, showing how it is also of relevance to the analysis of
historical interactions in the past. This emphasis on historical hybridities unmasks the
implicit problems in essentialist rhetorics, and modulates the debate on culturalist
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Beyond Culture Wars

essentialisms in which the publication of Black Athena has played a part.
Keywords: Diasporas, Africans, Jews, Senegambia, Culture Wars
Martin Bernal's Black Athena project has been one of the most debated scholarly
projects of the past generation in the humanities. And yet, in one notable fashion, Black
Athena has not lived up to its author's hopes. In his first volume, Bernal stated that one of
his intentions was to bring African and Jewish histories closer together (Bernal 1987:
437). And yet, on the contrary, Black Athena has provoked violent disagreements
between African American and Jewish American scholars; while the breakup of the black
Jewish alliance of the civil rights era preceded the publication of Black Athena by some
distance, Bernal's book has certainly done nothing to repair matters. Some have
suggested that it has fostered antiSemitism among African American scholars (Cartledge
2000: 4961); others, that it has fostered antiblack racism among Jewish scholars. Far
from bringing the scholarly community towards an understanding of the shared history
of exclusion and otherization that African and Jewish diasporas have experienced, Black
Athena has left the discourse surrounding African and Jewish histories much more
polarized.1
(p.140) What I hope to do in this chapter is to suggest certain ways in which this
dispute can be overcome. We need to understand ways in which the blackJewish alliance
could be reinvigorated; to appropriate aspects of the past that can paint a more nuanced
vision of historical relationships between blacks and Jews than is often the case. This is no
small task, but it is an important one, especially in the light of the ugly way in which certain
political forces sought to play on Jewish fears about the Obama candidacy during the
2008 US presidential election campaign.2 Trying to ground African and Jewish histories in
some positive shared elements of the past may prove to be a significant way of
reconnecting trajectories that have much in common.
If we are to grasp how important it is to address this issue, and revisit the possibility of a
blackJewish alliance, as Gilroy (1993) invited, it is important to say something about the
nature of the polarity that Black Athena has catalysed. The polemics emerged most
recently in the 2008 book by Mary Lefkowitz, History Lesson: A Race Odyssey. Here she
describes ugly personal vendettas between herself and the scholar Tony Martin that
followed the publication of her book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an
Excuse to Teach Myth as History (Lefkowitz 1996). Lefkowitz and Martin were both
professors at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and the disputes over the legacy of
Bernal's book led to trading of accusations and Martin's insinuation of a disproportionate
Jewish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Such accusations drew some of their
substance from the infamous work by the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan,
on this subject, a work that was the cause of several notable rebuttals during the 1990s
(see in particular Davis 1994 and Faber 1998).
These debates have torn across campuses, relating to both the ideological and the
historical content of Bernal's work. The combative subtitle of Lefkowitz's first book on the
subjectHow Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as Historyis a reminder
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Beyond Culture Wars

that the very ideas that Bernal has been at such pains to put forward in his work have
been subject to stinging disagreements on issues of fact as (p.141) much as on issues
of politics. If Lefkowitz and other more traditional classical scholars are right, and the
EgyptioPhoenician model for the origins of Greek civilization posited by Bernal are
exaggerated and fail sufficiently to differentiate Egyptian from other African cultures, then
we must be left to ponder the status of Bernal's more political and ideological
programmes, such as, for instance, the reconnection of African and Jewish histories, and
the need to revisit the blackJewish alliance of the 1960s.3
There are vital critical subtexts to this debate. One of the important contributions of the
first volume of Bernal's work was to show how ideology projects itself onto historical
interpretations in any given era, so that history constantly remakes itself and there is no
history that can stand outside the context of its production. There is, indeed, a sense in
which this reveals one of the greatest contradictions within Black Athena, for while
destroying the pretensions of the idea of scientific history, the work (especially in
volumes ii and iii) also seeks to put forward its own narrative of the origins of classical
civilization in exhaustive and protoscientific detail. This contradiction should not be seen
to detract from the value of Black Athena itself. Contradictions are a typical quality of
every system of thought. In the long run, the most deeprooted impact of Black Athena
may be in its excoriating vision of historiography's connection to ideologies rather than in
its contributions to debates in Classical Studies.
In understanding why Bernal's book has had this effect on the debates among African
American and Jewish American academics, it is worth reflecting on how the book came to
be so significant. Black Athena's first volume followed a decade or more of work by
scholars such as LaCapra (1985) and White (1975, 1990), who sought a fundamental
repositioning of the notion of historical truth. Such ideas have been challenged by more
traditional scholars, in particular Himmelfarb (1997: 164, 170), but they have been
accepted even by some quite mainstream historians. History is now painted by writers
such as Evans (1997: 6ff.) as more akin to a branch of Wissenschaft than science, as its
more ambitious promoters hoped in the 1950s and 1960s. In that context, Bernal's notion
of the impact of institutional prejudice on historical productions was pushing at an open
door.
(p.142) On this reading, the resonance of the work is the growing feeling among many
scholars that history itself is a heavily annotated, scrupulously researched, and highly
persuasive sort of myth. The tension between myth and history is one of the enduring
features of Black Athena, and in scholars' responses to it (as this volume attests).
Scholars have, after all, long been aware that history emerged as a discipline at precisely
the moment when Enlightenment thinking had destroyed many of the foundational myths
of Western culture. In other words, the discipline of history stepped into mythology's
shoes to provide new mythologies on identity and past origins that reflected what the
present wanted to hear. In such circumstances, Bernal's view that the relevant myths to
nineteenthcentury ears were those that stressed the Aryan origins of Greek and
thereby of Western civilization is heavily persuasive.
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Yet the ideological role of the historian as mythographer is precisely what traditional
historians are at such pains to deny, as they claim to be expounding the truth of the
past. It would rather appear to be as John Gray (2007) illustrated in his recent book,
Black Mass: society needs myths, whether in religious or disguised religiosecular forms.
It is no coincidence that, in a work published at almost the same time as the first volume
of Black Athena, V. Y. Mudimbe (1988: 33) wrote that one could think that history is
fundamentally a mythHistory is a legend, an invention of the present. It is both a
memory and reflection of our present.
These reflections on the ongoing interrogation of the programme of historical writing are
intimately related to the rows between the Lefkowitz school and followers of Bernal such
as Tony Martin. For related to these debates are concerns relating to the possibility of
historical objectivity. While Bernal presents a quasiscientific objective proof of the
EgyptioPhoenician origins of Greek culture in volumes ii and iii of his work, he undercuts
this by questioning whether such objectivity can ever be found in the study of the past. It
may be this implication that has enraged his critics: note the subtitle of Lefkowitz (1996)
on the teaching of myth as history.
Certainly, when one finds such contradictory responses to his work as Lefkowitz's view
of misplaced Afrocentrism and Path Diagne's allegation (2002: 118, 121) that the work is
a semiticization of history, it is only possible to acknowledge the truism that inheres to the
Black Athena project as a whole, of the recognition that history can all too often be a myth
that we appropriate about the past. Indeed, the (p.143) impossibility of bringing closure
to these rancorous disputes derives precisely from the fact that the disputes are based,
not in historical fact, but in historical myths. We cannot move on, because the disputes
about the past reflect disputes centred in the actual presentsomething that, of course,
should not surprise close readers of Bernal.
Bernal himself should not be too heavily criticized for creating these arguments. Black
Athena itself did leave the door wide open to the reconnection of the histories of the black
and Jewish diasporas: it was just that scholars did not take advantage of this. For, as
Bernal showed, it was both African and Semitic histories that Enlightenment ideology
suppressed. Here is a shared trajectory that has not really been expanded on since the
publication of Black Athena. It is a commonality that other influential scholars have
explored (Clifford 1993: 3045, 321; Gilroy 1993: 20515). If the intrinsic violence of
humanity is in some small measure to be overcome, it is surely by looking towards what
is shared in common rather than towards what is held apart.
What this chapter hopes to achieve is to suggest how Bernal's work can be used to work
towards a concentration on such commonalities rather than increasing separation. Just as
Black Athena used a discourse about events long in the past to reflect upon the politics of
doing history in the present, so I wish to propose something similar. For we need, quite
urgently, to look at what is and what was shared between African and Jewish diasporas.
To do this for the past may be a subjective project, in common with so many histories,
but it can also hope to contain something of truth. Just as we can interpret John Gray's
recent work (2007) as showing us that religious myths hold fundamental and inalienable
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emotional truths, so perhaps historical myths hold within them some factual kernels that
can be used to hint at commonalities in past experience and in shaping present states of
mind, present conflicts, and present opportunities.
This is, in fact, precisely, one of the subtexts of Black Athena, and why it remains relevant
in thinking about blackJewish relations today. On Bernal's account, the historical myth of
the Aryan construction of classical civilization also contains, inalienably, a negative myth:
that of the nonparticipation of Africans and Semitic peoples in that project. In this negative
construction of historiography is also, therefore, a shared history of fact for the African
and Jewish diasporas. But we should look at positive as well as negative shared (p.144)
histories. To this end, this chapter goes right back to the dawning of the Atlantic world,
and shared diasporic histories among some Africans and Jews. What this picture can show
us is that, far from being at odds and separate from one another, the experiences of
Africans and Jews were not mutually exclusive in that era. On occasions, they worked and
lived together and created shared communities, just as we can hope they may do in the
future.
Polemics of the Black and Jewish Diasporas of the Atlantic World

Before looking at the details, however, it is important to be explicit about what such a turn
to the Atlantic world might achieve, and how questions of the study of the early modern
Atlantic relate to the disagreements we have already looked at. Black Athena, as we have
seen, is about both history and the politics of history. In discussing the interactions of
Africans and Jews in the Senegambian region in the seventeenth century, I propose
something rather similar. I propose to discuss here how things might have actually
happened in the past. But I am also hoping to show how this discussion may also reflect
the politics of how things are discussed in the present. Thus I can answer not guilty to
White's charge (1990: 41) that the historian who looks at the past solely for its own sake
does so either as a wilful obscurantist or as a cultural necrophile. This look at history will,
I hope, show me to be neither an obscurantist, nor a necrophile.
Let us look first at the politics of this history. On the one hand, we have some who claim
that the Jews had a disproportionate role in establishing the transatlantic slave trade.
There is, of course, the famous work of Farrakhan on this subject, and it was a charge
that subsequently emerged in the accusations traded by Lefkowitz and Martin. But one
can also point to supposedly serious academic historians from the Lusophone world
such as Jos Goncalves Salvador and Maria Mateus de Ventura, who, apparently wishing
to absolve the pure Portuguese of culpability in the trade, ascribe it to the Portuguese
Jews, and all too often use the terms Jew as a synonym for a Christian whose ancestors
had converted from Judaism and may or (p.145) may not have had sympathy for the
Jewish faithsuch people being known as the socalled New Christians.4
It is disturbing that such confusion of categories should also have affected some of the
most praised scholarship in recent years on the early transatlantic slave trade. In a book
that was awarded the Herskovits Award in 2008 for the best work in African Studies,
Linda Heywood and John Thornton (2007: 13) describe merchants based in Antwerp
with contracts to deliver slaves to Spanish America in the late sixteenth century as Jews,
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even though no Jews were permitted to reside there at that time. These merchants were
rather New Christians, the descendants of those who had forcibly converted from
Judaism in Portugal a century before. While some of them were secret Jews, and went on
to help to found the Jewish community in Amsterdam in 1596, as many again were not,
and this labelling of an undifferentiated religious identity to this group is unsophisticated,
inaccurate, and clumsy.5 It emphasizes how easily misapprehensions about the Jewish
role in the transatlantic slave trade still get circulated even in respectable scholarly
publications.6
There is an equally egregious reading of history on the other side of this argument. Here,
Jewish historians such as Eli Faber and Mordechai Arbell have made claims that also
reveal an ideological rather than a scholarly concern with material. Faber's work (1998)
tried to reveal what he claimed to be a disproportionately lesser participation of Jews in
the Atlantic slave trade than their trading activities would otherwise have warranted.
However, his work had nothing to say on the early Portuguese and Spanish trade, which,
while it was certainly not the preserve of Jews, did involve the participation of some
people who would have considered themselves to have Jewish connections.7 Arbell's
(p.146) work (2002: 29, 31) is more concentrated on the Caribbean, where he argues
that Jews were more benign in their treatment of their slaves on the Caribbean
plantations than were their Christian counterparts. The implication is that this was due to
moral concerns, and yet the Jewish communities of the Caribbean, as largely urban,
simply did not have comparable landholdings to that of the rest of the population; since
slaves were associated with the industries of rural cultivation, it was inevitable that Jews
in the Caribbean would have less contact with them than other people of European origin
living there.8
Where this subject is concerned, there is, therefore, an ahistorical and confusing
tendency to read moral content into statements of fact, a violation of what analytic
philosophy describes as the is/ought distinction. These disputes seem to have their
origin, therefore, in the different moral evaluations ascribed to the same statement of
fact. And, whereas it is possible to convince through rational argument another person on
a question of fact, moral judgements are much less open to this type of persuasion. This
analysis of the debates regarding Jews and the slave trade therefore helps us to
understand exactly why these arguments are so longstanding and difficult to resolve: it
is because they depend on moral sentiment and not scholarship. Thankfully, however,
there are some few who have managed to allow balance and realism to overcome the
intrigue of doing politics through history. Here one can cite David Brion Davis's well
known article (1994) in the New York Review of Books, The Slave Trade and the Jews,
and also Jonathan Schorsch's more recent book (2004), Jews and Blacks in the Early
Modern World.
Schorsch's work (2005) shows how Jews' attitudes changed from one of moderate
inclusivity to increasing otherization as what we might term the general otherization that
developed with the Atlantic trading system gathered pace in the seventeenth century. In
other words, he sees Jewish activities and attitudes as neither better nor worse than
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their counterparts in this system, but merely integrated into it.
(p.147) In many ways, Brion Davis's article is even more nuanced. He makes one
outstanding point that should be highlighted here. While dismissing the charges of Jewish
involvement in the slave trade as having been disproportionate, he notes that the entire
cause of Jewish emancipation in Western culture was given a huge impetus by the
growing emancipated status of Jewish communities in the Caribbean plantation cultures
where a newly otherized groupconstituted, of course, by the African diasporahad
developed (Davis 1994: 16).
It may be that, at the very root of the ideological wars that have overtaken this subject,
lies this point made by Davis. Perhaps the emotions that underpin these polarized
arguments that have torn across campusesonly emotional beliefs on both sides can
provoke this type of exchangederive from the very understandable and legitimate
resentment/defensiveness directed by some scholars towards this complex reality. That
is, from the African American perspective, an awareness of Jewish emancipation as
resulting from the emergence of the enslaved African diaspora; and, from the Jewish
perspective, the development of an emotional position centred in Jewish perspectives on
the Holocaust as overriding this previous emancipation, coupled with suspicion in Jewish
scholars, prompted by Holocaust revisionism, of postmodern attempts to relativize fact.
How can we possibly resolve these deepseated feelings and issues? No resolution will
develop through the perpetuation of a culture of blame. As Davis also outstandingly
notes, the historian who attempts to decipher whether the Portuguese traders of the
sixteenth and seventeenth century were really secret Jews comes perilously close to
acting like the Inquisition itself. Or, one might say, like the modern inheritors of the
Inquisition's quest to uncover who was and was not a Jew, the bureaucrats of the Third
Reich obsessed with their lineage definitions of this category, the Mischling First and
Second Degrees.
That is to say, these debates on Jewish involvement in the slave trade really turn on the
definition of Jewishness. Historically, debates on who does or does not count as a Jew
have usually been invoked in periods of mass antiSemitism. That alone should be a
caution enough, if what we are seeking is reconciliation. Instead, I propose that we should
examine moments of collaboration and coexistence to see that there is also a shared
positive history between the African and Jewish diasporas. The historical conditions of
former blackJewish alliances may allow us to reflect on the difficulties of such alliances in
the presentallowing us to reposition our understanding of the (p.148) importance of
Bernal's work in a new light. The fact that the era of the Atlantic slave tradepainted by
some scholars as a time of discord between Africans and Jewsallowed for such alliances
may also give pause for thought, today, at a time when such discord has undeniably been
on the rise.
Interactions between Jolofs and Jews in Senegambia in the Seventeenth

Century
The historical material presented in this chapter relates to exchanges between Africans
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and Jews in the Senegambian region over the course of some thirty or forty years, dating
from the end of the sixteenth century to the 1630s. This was the only African locale
integrated into the Atlantic world where Africans and Jews interacted prior to the
nineteenth century. As was usual for members of the Jewish diaspora, in Senegambia
they resided as guests of a host community and adapted themselves substantially to the
customs that they found there.
The last few years have seen many publications on these cases. Most notable is the work
of Horta and Mark (2004, 2005), as well as mine (Toby Green 2005, 2007, 2008a, b),
while Silva (2002) and Mendes (2004) have also made useful contributions. The material
confirms that we are dealing with the interactions of the Jolof communities of the
Senegambian coast between Cape Verdethe peninsula that is today the site of Dakar
and the Salom delta, some 100 miles to the south, and Sephardic Jews with extensive
connections to the new Jewish community of Amsterdam (founded 1596) and to New
Christian communities in Brazil (Horta and Mark 2004; Toby Green 2005: 173). The
Sephardic Jews were settled in three ports, Rufisque, Joal, and Porto de Ale, and had
sufficient numbers to have a congregation (this requires at least ten adult males). They
had Torahs, which had been brought from Amsterdam, and a butcher trained in
slaughtering according to the rites of Kashrut, and some ceremonies of circumcision
were carried out there (Horta and Mark 2004: 2412, 247). This was a community of
open and unashamed Jews living on the African coast with a synagogue and all the
(p.149) requisites for their rites of worship (on these earlier communities, see in
particular Toby Green 2007: pt 2, and also Toby Green 2011).
Just as the religious context of the Jewish communities is important, so is that of the
African locale in which they found themselves. The Jolof of Senegambia had for a long
period practised Islam, following interactions with itinerant traders from North Africa
engaged in the transSaharan trade in gold and slaves (Boulgue 1987). Indeed, together
with the Mandinka of the Gambia river region, these Jolof constituted the southernmost
Islamized community on this part of the West African coast.9 It may be significant that
these Jews chose to settle in an area of Islamic belief; some argue that this derived from
their experience of the Ottoman Empire welcoming Sephardic refugees in the sixteenth
century (Horta and Mark 2005: 33).
Thus, on this interpretation, the establishment of the Jewish communities in Senegambia
depended on African cultural conditions. As I have argued elsewhere (Toby Green
2008b: 7), it may indeed be significant that this discrete Jewish community was
established precisely in an area with a dominant religion that recognized the existence of
Judaism and its potential dhimmi status. Further south, where Islam was not practised,
the judicial position of Jewish migrants would not have fallen into any existing pattern, and
it may therefore have been harder to establish such communities, or at least to maintain
their Jewish identity.
The political context of these developments is critical. While at the time of the first Atlantic
contacts between Africans and Europeans in the 1440s the Senegambian coast was a
tributary of the empire known as Greater Jolof, by the late sixteenth century the five
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subordinate kingdoms within Greater Jolof had broken away and achieved independence.
As the historian Jean Boulgue (1987) has shown, this political fragmentation was directly
connected to the Atlantic turn, and the availability of horses for use as cavalry by the
kingdoms nearer the coast.
Thus, by the end of the sixteenth century, the kingdoms of the Senegambian coast
already had 150 years' experience of trading interactions with European mariners. This
makes it clear that the Jewish settlement there cannot have been unwelcome to the Jolof,
and indeed, when the Portuguese asked the Jolof to banish the Jews, they (p.150) were
told that such matters were not for outsiders and that everyone had the right to practise
the religion they wished. Clearly, as far as the king was concerned, the Jewish community
was to his advantage.
Thus the Jewish presence in Senegambia at this time fitted very much into the existing
social pattern defined by scholars as that of the landlordstranger relationship (Brooks
1993). Jewish activity in Senegambia was defined by what was and was not permitted by
Jolof society. Jolof kings confiscated goods of certain Jews for breaches of social norms
(Toby Green 2005: 177). It should be borne in mind that, as the scholar of Louisiana
Creole culture Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (1992: 200) has noted, Senegambia had for several
centuries been a crossing place of different peoples (see also Nafaf 2007: 735; Toby
Green 2011). In this light, the arrival of a new group such as the Sephardic Jews was
easily incorporated into the existing social framework.
Thus the settlement of this Jewish community in Senegambia in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries was achieved through its accommodation to an existing
plural cultural and religious world. Clearly, therefore, cultural exchange between Africans
and Jews was at this time marked by something that at least approached reciprocity.
Something of this also emerges in the trajectory of these Jewish communities in
Senegambia. The last avowed Jews were recorded in the mid1630s (Saint Lo 1637: 137).
Thus the Jewish community here lasted for around forty years, from the last years of the
sixteenth century to the end of the first third of the seventeenth century. Part of the
reason for this is that one of the trading expeditions linking Amsterdam, Senegambia, and
Italy in the 1610s was a commercial disaster (Toby Green 2005: 172). But also significant
was the development of mixed communities.
As with most communities of European traders in the nonEuropean world, the vast
majority of the Sephardim in Senegambia in these years were male. As in Jewish custom,
identity passed through the maternal line; this meant that the creation of a longlasting
community was very difficult. But the absence of Jewish women also naturally led the
male Sephardim to form unions with Jolof women. There is evidence of marriages
between Jolof women and Jews, and of the children of these marriages eventually forming
an important part of what became known as the LusoAfrican trading class of the region
(Horta and Mark 2004; Toby Green 2005). Accounts from the latter seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries (p.151) talk of the LusoAfricans as possessing a hybrid
religion incorporating elements of all their inherited traditions: African practices were
mixed with elements of Christianity and Judaism.
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This hybridity and integration are indicative of mutual tolerance and perhaps even
respect. The Jolof kings of the Senegambian coast, as we have seen, controlled the terms
of Jewish residence in Senegambia, and on occasion punished Jews because they had
contravened their customs. And yet, at the same time, they were adept at interacting
with the Atlantic world and its emissaries. Thus they were happy to accept intermarriages
and the development of the LusoAfrican caste. The Jews, for their part, were happy to
marry into Jolof ruling circles and settle in a region far from persecution by the
Inquisition. There is, in other words, a noteworthy contrast between the experiences of
Jews here and their experiences elsewhere in the Iberian Atlantic world. Ironically, it was
precisely in these differences that some of the main causes of the disappearance of this
Jewish community lay. Here perhaps we should recall Spinoza's famous dictum that
Judaism has tended to survive because of antiSemitism. For it is plausible that the rapid
disappearance of the Senegambian community was in part the result of the absence of
antiSemitism there. At the dawn of the most intense centuries of the Atlantic era, there
was nothing inevitable about contradictory narratives and trajectories among Africans
and Jews.
This conclusion is at striking odds with moralistic narratives about the past or the present
of Africans and Jews, such as those that this chapter has already looked at. This emerges
most clearly when we consider the question of slavery. For these trading ventures by
Amsterdambased Jews to Senegambia, and the establishment of a trading community
there, had nothing to do with the transatlantic slave trade. Until the 1640s, when Dutch
forces seized Luanda from the Portuguese and attempted to gain control of Brazil's
sugar industry, Dutch merchants did not trade directly in slaves in West Africa
(Heywood and Thornton 2007: ch. 1). The Sephardim who settled in Senegambia were no
different from the other traders of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Their main trade was in
animal hides shipped from Joal and Porto de Ale to Europe (Toby Green 2005: 1745);
these hides were in widespread use in the burgeoning leather industries of Europe of
the sixteenth century (De la Fuente 2008). They may also have been involved in the
sword trade in Senegambia (Horta and Mark 2005). They had no connection to the trade
in slaves (p.152) to ports such as Cartagena de las Indias and Veracruz in the New
World, a trade that expanded rapidly at the very time in which these communities were
formed in Senegambia (Vila Vilar 1977; Newson and Minchin 2007: 616).
The Jewish trading activities in Senegambia will not, therefore, permit a negative myth
about Jews and the transatlantic slave tradeyet nor will they allow for some sort of
moral superiority. For, while they did not participate in the transatlantic slave trade,
these Sephardim were certainly not averse to slavery. They purchased small numbers of
slavesthe documents refer to three or fourto take back to Amsterdam as personal
servants (Toby Green 2005: 175). They may also have sold small numbers of slaves to
other traders (Newson and Minchin 2007: 50). Thus they were neither fully implicated in,
nor fully free of, the implications of the trade in slaves. They were a part of their
ideological surroundings, and neither better nor worse than the rest of that world:
indeed, only emotional ideas and projections could really allow us to think otherwise. But,
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as we have already seen in this chapter, too often when it has come to the relationships of
Africans and Jews in the past and the present, emotional ideas have been in the
foreground on both sides.
Shared Communities, Past and Present?

The actual interactions of these African and Jewish communities in early seventeenth
century Senegambia are precious. There is no intention here of mythologizing or
idealizing the past. This is, of course, only one case study of a small cross section of
people in a tiny corner of the Atlantic world. It would be foolish to extrapolate from this
into universalizing statements about the historical relationships of Africans and Jews.
Rather, perhaps, what this picture can show us is what can be possible, in the right
circumstances. History may be based on myths, and the production of what we accept as
history on unequal power relationships, but all myths can sometimes point to some more
enduring truths; indeed this may be one of the subtler subtexts of Bernal's work, in
which his historical work on classical civilization, while partly subscribing to the
mythologizing tendency of histories, points the way to some deeper truths concerning
ideology, power, and the reception of history.
(p.153) The foregoing summary of such evidence as we have suggests that the Africans
and Jews of Senegambia had shared interests and developed, in some sense, a shared
history. The Jolof kings were grateful for the Jewish presence in expanding the trade in
hides into new parts of the Atlantic. The Jews were grateful for a sphere of religious
tolerance. In time this sharing developed, and the Jewish community disappeared as the
Jews intermarried with their host community. One could even talk, as I have done in
another article (Toby Green 2008b), of this as a sort of religiocultural proselytizing on
the part of the Jolof host community.
In their many works, Bhabha and Young have shown essentialism to be a flawed category
for the understanding of the present; this case study also shows it to be a flawed
category for the understanding of the past (see, e.g., Young 1990; Bhabha 1994). There
was no universal paradigmnegative or positivefor AfricanJewish relations in the early
Atlantic world, just as there is none today. What emerged in Senegambia was a sharing of
culture and history. Moreover, the moral essentialism that sees present protagonists
read good and evil myths into actors of the past is also shown up for the shallow sort of
discourse that it is. Morality is nothing if not messy; clear moral judgements about the
past are usually made by people who would like to make analogous judgements about the
present. In Senegambia, the trade involving Sephardic Jews and their Jolof host
community had some connections to the transatlantic slave trade but also touched many
other aspects of commerce in that part of West Africa. We can make no unequivocal
judgement about it. And such a conclusion is a very long way from some of the political
and academic discourses referred to in the earlier half of this chapter: they show these
simplistic discourses to be exactly thattoo easy to be taken seriously.
We need to expand this notion of shared histories. For, when we are talking of shared
histories between Africans and Jews, we need not look only at Africa. As well as this
history of Jewish acculturation to Jolof society in Senegal, one can look also at the history
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of Africans among Jewish groups elsewhere in the early modern Atlantic. Over the last
few years, scholars have examined the status of Africans in Jewish communities of the
seventeenthcentury Atlantic, with an especial focus on Amsterdam, Brazil, and Suriname
(see especially Schorsch 2004; Toby Green 2008b).
One of the interesting things to emerge is the level of religious sharing that characterized
some of these communities here, as in (p.154) Senegal. There were African members of
the Jewish congregations of Amsterdam and Suriname, and there is strong evidence that
Jews tried to convert their household slaves to Judaism in both locales. Africans were
able to perform certain halakhic rites in the Amsterdam community, although the
evidence is not so clearcut for Suriname. There is also evidence that there was a mixed
race rabbi in Venice in the late sixteenth century.
Such examples attest that acculturation was a twoway process, something that affected
Jews in Africa and Africans among Jewish communities elsewhere in the Atlantic world.
One must also note, in line with Schorsch's argument, that intolerance had grown in these
Jewish communities by the midseventeenth century, with edicts barring African
members of the congregation from performing certain tasks. Schorsch suggests that
these reveal the fear of the Jewish congregation of defining itself as too far outside the
growing racialized consciousness of Western Europe (Schorsch 2005: 1289).
In seeking to reinterpret shared histories, however, these examples are important. What
they suggest is that cooperation and cultural respect were not impossible for the Africans
and Jews of the early Atlantic world. It was the rise of the Atlantic system that began to
make it more difficult. In the final analysis, it may also be that same Atlantic system and its
difficult and painful legacies that have helped to shape the arguments and counter
arguments between African Americans and Jewish Americans that began in the 1970s and
have gathered pace since the publication of Black Athena.
In conclusion, we may ask what it was that created the shifting atmosphere and
relationship between Africans and Jews in this early modern period. Undoubtedly, the
answer must be that these changes developed with shifting political and ideological
conditions. The rise of the Atlantic system was also, of course, a rise in the imbalance of
Atlantic power, and the Atlantic system was fully established by around 1650. For as long
as there was a relatively equitable balance of Atlantic power, it had been possible for
peoples to acculturate and respect the culture of others at various specific locations
within that system. However, the growing imbalance of power, and the ideology of
racialism that developed concurrently, subverted the possibility of such exchanges.
This question of the balance of power relates very clearly to the contemporary debates
that have followed the collapse of the blackJewish alliance of the civilrights era. First the
civilrights era, and (p.155) now the election of the first African American President of
the United States have redefined the boundaries and nature of black influence in
America; similar redefinitions occurred in the Jewish definition with the rise of neo
conservatism, whose luminaries included many Jewish thinkers. Reconfigurations of the
balances of power may illuminate what it is about Bernal's book that had the power to be
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Beyond Culture Wars

so provocative to both sides of this divideand also illustrate how a distant time and
place can still be relevant today.
At the beginning of this chapter, it was suggested that by looking at some of the possible
facts of the past we might be able to learn how the recreation of shared positive histories
could be achieved in the future. It was also mooted that this was absolutely central if we
are to draw a line in the sand in understanding the shared histories of African and Jewish
diasporas, rather than in merely polemicizing supposedly conflicting trajectories. What we
have seen here is that this goal of shared positive futures depends upon the balance of
power. It has been one of the disastrous social effects of the last thirty years, that we
have witnessed growing imbalances of power at all levels. Such imbalances mirror the
imbalances that took root in the early modern Atlantic world and that may, as I have
suggested, be at the heart of the polemics related to the Black Athena controversy.
Ultimately, it may only be by working to redress such imbalances that we may achieve a
renewed sense of a shared diasporic history among Africans and Jews, which was one of
the original goals of the Black Athena project.
Notes:
(1 ) Although one should note here Shavit's work (2001: 1723, 176) on Afrocentrism, in
which he places his sympathetic work within the context of the strained relationships
between African Americans and American Jewish communities. Moreover, Shavit states
that he was drawn to the study of Afrocentrism because of perceived parallels between
the diasporic history of African and Jewish peoples. An excellent summary of the nature of
the blackJewish relationship in the USA is Davis (1999).
(2) Thus, shortly before the presidential vote, in late October 2008, an email was
circulated to Jewish voters in Pennsylvania from the Republican Federal Committee, and
signed by three prominent Jewish Republicans, stating that a vote for Barack Obama
could precipitate another Jewish Holocaust, apparently in reference to his allegedly anti
Israel political views. See http://jta.org/news/article/2008/10/26/110878/ bcoslov102008
for more details.
(3) This ready association of ancient Egyptian with subSaharan cultures has been used
by other wellknown Afrocentrists, in particular Cheikh Anta Diop (1987).
(4) Thus Salvador (1981) often uses terms such as Jews and cristos novos [New
Christians] interchangeably, appearing to assume that every cristo novo is a Jew. More
recently, Ventura (1999: 36) refers to Jews, New Christians or Judaizers (Judeus,
cristosnovos ou judaizantes) with no attempt to differentiate among these categories
or see how they might overlap; for unproven assertions of the Judaic origins of the
Portuguese slavers, see Ventura (1999: 31, 37, 117).
(5) The best recent work on the complexity of the identities of these individuals is
Graizbord (2004). See also Israel (2002) for a nuanced account of the identities of these
New Christians.
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(6) For a more nuanced and systematic study of the identity of these merchants, see
Toby Green (2007).
(7) The best recent work on this is that of Newson and Minchin (2007) on the cryptoJew
of Lima, Manuel Bautista Prez, and his slaving voyages to Upper Guinea in the 161619
period. Bautista Prez was eventually sacrificed by the Inquisition in Lima in the Auto da
F of 1639, accused of being an unrepentant cryptoJew, although some have cast doubt
on how Jewish Bautista Prez really was; Wachtel (2001), for instance, notes the eclectic
taste of his library and how it tends towards work of rationalism rather than divinity.
(8) See, e.g., Brathwaite (1971: 105) for a nuanced account of a Jewish population of
Jamaica, which, although discriminated against, counted legally as white.
(9) Islam probably reached the Gambia river region c.1143 (Cissoko and Sambou 1974:
11115).
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African Athena: New Agendas

Print publication date: 2011