Professional Documents
Culture Documents
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199595006.003.0009
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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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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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