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Racism
A Short History
By George M. Fredrickson PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2002 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7367-8
CHAPTER 1
Religion and the Invention of Racism
It is the dominant view among scholars who have studied conceptions of difference in the ancient world that no concept truly equivalent to that of "race" can be detected in the thought of the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians. The Greeks distinguished between the civilized and the barbarous, but these categories do not seem to have been regarded as hereditary. One was civilized if one was fortunate enough to live in a city-state and participate in political life, barbarous if one lived rustically under some form of despotic rule. The Romans had slaves representing all the colors and nationalities found on the frontiers of their empire and citizens of corresponding diversity from among those who were free and proffered their allegiance to the republic or the emperor. After extensive research, the classical scholar Frank Snowden could find no evidence that dark skin color served as the basis of invidious distinctions anywhere in the ancient world. The early Christians, for example, celebrated the conversion of Africans as evidence for their faith in the spiritual equality of all human beings.
It would of course be stretching a point to claim that there was no ethnic prejudice in antiquity. The refusal of dispersed Jews to accept the religious and cultural hegemony of the gentile nations or empires within which they resided sometimes aroused hostility against them. But abandoning their ethnoreligious exceptionalism and worshiping the local divinities (or accepting Christianity once it had been established) was an option open to them that would have eliminated most of the Otherness that made them unpopular. Jews created a special problem for Christians because of the latter's belief that the New Testament superseded the Old, and that the refusal of Jews to recognize Christ as the Messiah was preventing the triumph of the gospel. Anti-Judaism was endemic to Christianity from the beginning, but since the founders of their religion were themselves Jews, it would have been difficult for early Christians to claim that there was something inherently defective about Jewish blood or ancestry. Nonetheless there was an undeniable tendency to consider the Jews who had not converted when Christ was among them as a corporate group that bore a direct responsibility for the Crucifixion. "For the organization of Christianity," writes the French historian Léon Poliakov, "it was essential that the Jews be a criminally guilty people." In Matthew 27:25 Jews who called for the death of Christ cry out after the deed has been done: "His blood be upon us and our Children."
The notion that Jews were collectively and hereditarily responsible for the worst possible human crime — deicide — created a powerful incentive for persecution. If it had been believed that the curse fell on individual Jews in such a way that they could never be absolved of it, racism would be a proper term for the prejudice against them. But the doctrine, as expounded by Saint Augustine and others, that the conversion of the Jews was a Christian duty and essential to the salvation of the world meant that the great hereditary sin was not an indelible and insurmountable source of difference. Anti-Judaism became antisemitism whenever it turned into a consuming hatred that made getting rid of Jews seem preferable to trying to convert them, and antisemitism became racism when the belief took hold that Jews were intrinsically and organically evil rather than merely having false beliefs and wrong dispositions.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the attitudes of European Christians toward Jews became more hostile in ways that laid a foundation for the racism that later developed. Once welcomed as international merchants and traders, Jews were increasingly forced by commercial competition from Christian merchant guilds into the unpopular and putatively sinful occupation of lending money at interest. But in this period of intense religiosity, it was the spiritual threat Jews allegedly represented that inspired most of the violence against them. Massacres of Jews began at the time of the First Crusade in 1096. In a few communities, mobs, stirred up by the rhetoric associated with the campaign to redeem the Holy Land from Muslims, turned on local Jews. Later Crusades stimulated more such pogroms. The church and the civil authorities viewed Muslims as a political and military threat to Christendom, while Jews had seemed to them to be relatively harmless and even somewhat useful. The church valued the presence of dispersed and suffering Jews as witnesses to divine revelation, and rulers sometimes employed them as fiscal agents. Consequently the ruling powers tried, with varying degrees of conviction and success, to protect Jews from the murderous mobs and roving bands that perpetrated violence against them in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. But even the mobs did not regard Jews as beyond redemption. Most historians affirm that to be baptized rather than killed was a real option. That so many Jews chose to die was a testament to the strength of their own faith and that of their executioners rather than a prelude to the Holocaust.
Nevertheless, in the heat of killing Jews and pillaging their communities, some must have questioned the notion that Jews had souls to be saved, and that they chose to be the way they were rather than being naturally and irredeemably perverse. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a folk mythology had taken root that could put Jews outside the pale of humanity by literally demonizing them. The first claim that Jews had crucified a Christian child for ritual purposes was made in England around 1150. Other such accusations followed in England and elsewhere, often combined with the assertion that Jews required Christian blood for their most sacred ceremonies. After the doctrine of transubstantiation was made an article of faith in 1215 came the most bizarre charge of all. Despite the traditional notion that the Jews' principal deficiency was their lack of a belief in the divinity of Christ, some of them were accused of stealing the consecrated host from Christian churches and torturing it, thus repeating their original crime of torturing and killing Jesus. (This myth presumed that what was wrong with Jews was not their unbelief but rather their evil disposition; like Satan himself they seemingly knew very well that Christ was the Son of God but nonetheless arrayed themselves against him.)
Increasingly in popular mythology, folklore, and iconography, an association was made between Jews and the Devil or between Jews and witchcraft. In the popular mind of the late Middle Ages, the problem presented by Jews was not so much their unbelief as their malevolent intent against Christians and their willingness to enlist the Powers of Darkness in their conspiracies. The highest authorities in the church for the most part repudiated such fantasies and generally adhered to the principle that the existence of Jews must be tolerated because their ultimate conversion was essential to God's plan for the salvation of the world. But the popular belief that all Jews were in league with the Devil scarcely encouraged a firm conviction that they were fellow human beings. According to Cecil Roth, a pioneer historian of medieval antisemitism, the Jews' "deliberate unbelief" made them seem "less than human" and "capable of any crime imaginable or unimaginable." The verdict of Joshua Trachtenberg, author of the classic study of medieval associations of Jews with the Devil, was similar: "Not being a human being but a demonic, a diabolic beast fighting the forces of truth and salvation with Satan's weapons, was the Jew as medieval Europe saw him." Although more recent historians of medieval antisemitism have found this picture to be exaggerated if taken literally, at least some medieval Christians — a substantial minority, if not an actual majority — undoubtedly felt this way about Jews. The terminology and frame of reference continued to be religious, but the conception of Jews as willing accomplices of Satan meant, at least to the unsophisticated, that they were beyond redemption and should probably be killed or at least expelled from Christendom.
At the time of the Black Death in the mid–fourteenth century, thousands of Jews were massacred in those countries that had not already expelled them, because of a widespread belief that Christians were dying, not because of disease, but because Jews had poisoned the wells. Peculiar to the denigration of the Jews over the centuries, whether as imps of Satan, international financiers, or fomenters of world revolution, has been the role of mass paranoia. Intense irrational fears have been somewhat less central to the racialization of other groups, who were more likely to be viewed with a mixture of contempt and condescension. Jews have again and again served as scapegoats for whatever fears and anxieties were uppermost in the minds of antisemites. Medieval Christians were concerned with the growth of market economies, the enhancement of state power and bureaucracy, and threats to religious orthodoxy from a variety of quarters. Perhaps, as Gavin Langmuir has suggested, some were beginning to doubt their own faith and needed to be reassured by the kind of militancy that hating and persecuting Jews (or heretics) signified. Always a scavenger ideology, racism reared its ugly head in this instance by adopting the garb of Christianity while implicitly repudiating its offer of salvation to all of humanity, including Jews. Medieval antisemitism is sometimes distinguished from its modern manifestations on the grounds that it functioned in a society premised on hierarchy, and that discrimination against Jews was merely part of a general pattern of group inequality. But to the extent that Jews were relegated to pariah status and isolated from the larger society, they became external to the official hierarchy of estates or status groups and therefore became truly Other and expendable. The premise of equality that operated for Christians was that all were equal in the eyes of God, whatever their earthly station. Those medieval Christians who viewed Jews as children of the Devil in effect excluded them from membership in the human race for which Christ had died on the cross. (They also excluded non-Jewish witches and heretics, but not because of their ethnicity.) The scriptural passage most often quoted to associate Jews as a collectivity with Satan was Christ's denunciation of the Jews who rejected him: "You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires" (John 8:44 RSV).
The historian Robert Bartlett has argued that the racism or protoracism of the late Middle Ages extended well beyond the Jews. As the core of Catholic Europe expanded, conquering and colonizing the periphery of the continent, attitudes of superiority to indigenous populations anticipated the feelings of dominance and entitlement that would characterize the later expansion of Europeans into Asia, Africa, and the Americas. If the demonization of the Jews established some basis for the racial antisemitism of the modern era, the prejudice and discrimination directed at the Irish on one side of Europe and certain Slavic peoples on the other foreshadowed the dichotomy between civilization and savagery that would characterize imperial expansion beyond the European continent. "On all the newly settled, conquered or converted peripheries," Bartlett writes, "one can find the subjugation of native populations to legal disabilities, the attempt to enforce residential segregation, with natives expelled into the 'Irishtowns' of colonial Ireland, and the attempt to proscribe certain cultural forms of native society. Ghettoization and racial discrimination marked the later centuries of the Middle Ages." To support his thesis that this intolerance was not purely cultural or "ethnocentric," Bartlett describes legislation in parts of eastern Europe in the fourteenth century that made German descent a requirement for holding office or belonging to a guild and banned intermarriage between Germans and Slavs. In Anglo-Irish cities, at about the same time, guild membership was being denied to those of "Irish blood or birth," and "there were to be no marriages between those of immigrant and native stock."
What was missing — and why I think such ethnic discrimination should not be labeled racist — was an ideology or worldview that would persuasively justify such practices. Bartlett's account suggests that these ethnic exclusions were usually the self-interested actions of conquering families and lineages and were likely to be condemned by church authorities as a violation of the principles governing the rights and privileges of Christian fellowship. Where a conquered population had not been converted to Christianity, as in the case of the Muslims of Castille in the fifteenth century, discrimination on religious grounds could be justified. But where the natives had embraced Catholicism, unequal treatment is best regarded as an illicit form of group nepotism, lacking the full legitimacy that a racial order would seem to require. The notion that Jews in particular were malevolent beings in league with the Devil provided such an ideology and gave antisemitism an intensity and durability that prejudice against the peripheral Europeans would never quite attain. Suspicions that recent Slavic or Scandinavian converts had not fully internalized the true faith, and might even remain secret pagans, may well have been justified in some cases. But unless — or until — it was presumed that such infidelity was organic and carried in the blood, it would not be proper to describe such an attitude as racist.
It remains true, however, that medieval Europe was a "persecuting society," increasingly intolerant, not only of Jews, but also of lepers and anyone whose beliefs or behavior smacked of heresy or deviance at a time when religious and moral conformity were being demanded more insistently than ever before. It stands to reason that such a drive for uniformity and homogeneity would engender resistance to cultural pluralism and provide fertile soil for ethnic intolerance. Encouraging and exacerbating this heterophobia were the tensions and anxieties resulting from momentous social, economic, and political changes. The gradual consolidation of countries such as England, France, and Spain into relatively large dynastic states with definite borders and a single predominant language was beginning to threaten local autonomy, and an acceleration of urbanization and commercialization were bringing people of diverse culture and appearance into fractious contact and creating conflicts between feudal lords and an emerging bourgeoisie. But in the fourteenth century the incredible catastrophe of the Black Death inspired an especially urgent hunt for scapegoats. As we have seen, the demonization of the Jews in the popular Christian mind was brought to fruition by the widely believed allegation that they had poisoned the wells as part of a diabolical plot to exterminate the followers of Christ.
If racial antisemitism had medieval antecedents in the popular tendency to see Jews as agents of the Devil and thus, for all practical purposes, beyond redemption and outside the circle of potential Christian fellowship, the other principal form of modern racism — the color-coded, white-over-black variety — did not have significant medieval roots and was mainly a product of the modern period. In fact there was a definite tendency toward Negrophilia in parts of northern and western Europe in the late Middle Ages, and the common presumption that dark pigmentation inspired instant revulsion on the part of light-skinned Europeans is, if not completely false, at least highly misleading.
Before the middle of the fifteenth century, Europeans had little or no direct contact with sub-Saharan Africans. Artistic and literary representations of these distant and exotic peoples ranged from the monstrous and horrifying to the saintly and heroic. On the one hand, devils were sometimes pictured as having dark skins and what may appear to be African features, and the executioners of martyrs were often portrayed as black men. The symbolic association of blackness with evil and death and whiteness with goodness and purity unquestionably had some effect in predisposing light-skinned people against those with darker pigmentation. But the significance of this cultural proclivity can be exaggerated. If black always had unfavorable connotations, why did many orders of priests and nuns wear black instead of white or some other color?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Racism by George M. Fredrickson. Copyright © 2002 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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