Jews and Black People
Authors: Schorsch Jonathan 
Published: October 2014

Relations between Jews and Black people holds inherent interest for scholars of the Atlantic world. Defining the terms themselves remains fraught with complications, however (i.e., black, sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants, people of color, Afroiberian, African American?) and the experience of these groups in the Atlantic world likewise attests to the complexities and ambiguities of the region’s history (i.e., tensions between Black people and mulattos or between slaves and free Black people; should Judeoconversos be considered Jews? what about syncretistic black Jews? how do we categorize those who are both black and Jewish?). Beyond historical parallels as subaltern groups in the Euro-American sphere of influence, the question of how Jews and Black people (the latter term is used merely as the most efficient shorthand) related to one another—one group non-Christian but considered monotheistic and white, the other increasingly Christianized but seen as nonwhite and of pagan origin—gained significance with recent transformations in scholarship connected to identity politics, ethnicity, and postcolonial thought. Until the eighteenth century, more plausibly the nineteenth, with the rise of Old Testament–oriented Protestantism among Black people in the Caribbean and the United States and the growing awareness among Jews of the perceived parallel experience of Black people under slavery, Black people and Jews held no sense of anything particularly special about their relationship. Clearly conditions changed dramatically over the course of five centuries since the beginning of European expansion into Africa and the expansion of European commercial activities spanning four continents. Black Africans, the diverse population of the larger part of an entire continent, were not subaltern at home, and, even under rising colonialism, they were certainly not dominated in the way slaves in the Americas were subjugated. Jews, a relatively tiny group of immigrants in Christian lands who were numerically small but laden with disproportionate significance due to the rise of Christianity, faced legal and social discrimination in the medieval and Early Modern periods; however, with gradual emancipation beginning in the eighteenth century, they faced fewer instances of legal exclusion. The exception is Jews in Dutch territories, who found a relatively hospitable and oppression-free climate as early as the seventeenth century. In European territories Jews were frequently massacred, expelled, and discriminated against as religious “others,” and they were exploited economically. However, after the medieval period they also participated in real and significant ways as tolerated members of white society. Kidnapped or captured Africans, on the other hand, despite some few exceptions, made up the overwhelming majority of the slave population throughout the Americas, living often in a state of near total lack of freedom. This disparity was lessened somewhat for manumitted individual slaves and in the post-emancipation world of the nineteenth century, though legal discrimination against people of color continued far longer than against Jews. The above examples are merely selective; it is impossible here to cover all the shifting nuances of the pertinent historical situation. This article is not a treatment of the vast and mostly independent histories of Black people or Jews in the Atlantic world but of the intersection of these two sets of peoples. The field of Jewish-black relations can be divided roughly into several periods: ancient and medieval precedents, colonization during the Early Modern period, and slavery, abolition, and post-emancipation. Given the often marginal place occupied by this topic in several vast fields of scholarly literature, works listed in this article include only those that directly address the intersection of the Jewish and black experiences. Most such works emphasize 20th-century topics, putting them beyond the scope of this article. Researchers wishing to dig deeper will have to follow the textual trail via the bibliographies found in the listed works, leading ultimately back to the archival sources, many of which could use further scrutiny or remain surprisingly unexamined. Because the bibliographic project of which this article is a part focuses on the Atlantic world, coverage of important subjects, such as Judaism and the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, the black Jews of Cochin, and the experience of the Ethiopian Jews and black Hebrews in the State of Israel, has perforce been excluded.