‘Why do we always picture Jews as white?’
CLOSE YOUR eyes and picture a Jewish person. They may be tall or short, fat or skinny, male or female, observant or not. But they will probably be white. And if not, almost certainly not black, Chinese or Indian. Why not?
This was the thesis of Jews of Colour: Race and Afro-Jewishness, a lecture by US academic Professor Lewis Gordon at Birkbeck, University of London hosted by the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism.
Clearly, the talk’s title piqued interest — and not just that of knowledge-thirsty students and academics.
A large contingent of London’s Jews, primarily of the older generation, packed the front rows of the lecture hall.
Rather than denying that the majority of Jews are either Ashkenazi, Sephardi or Mizrachi, Prof Gordon challenged the assumption that Jews have always fallen into a few distinct ethnic groups, while also discussing how we have come to look the way we do.
In his words, there is a lack of “understanding of the history of how dominant representations of Jewish people came into being”.
“Calling Jewish people white is a very recent thing,” he told attendees. “Implicit in the question of how black Jews become Jews is a presupposition that Jews were not black.
“The real question is ‘why are white Jews white?’ When a lot of people talk about Jewish history today, they don’t talk about the history of empires and colonialism.
“And because they don’t talk about the history of empires and colonialism, they don’t talk about crucial things that have affected the identity and history of Jewish peoples.”
Prof Gordon himself is an AfricanAmerican Jew; his Jamaican Jewish mother’s family left Jerusalem during the 19th century.
A professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, he also holds affiliations in Jewish Studies and Caribbean and Latin American Studies.
So why are Jews — or Ashkenazim, at least — white?
During the emergence of European colonialism in the 15th and 16th centuries, Prof Gordon argued that race and whiteness, as defined by Christendom, took on newfound importance.
Rather than people of colour converting to Judaism, black Jews actually always existed. It was just that, at the same time, other Jews sought to become more white — to take advantage of the changing racial power balances.
He explained: “Euro-modernity says, in a nutshell, that you are a full human being if you can become now a new group of people. And this new group is called ‘white’.
“In some colonies, like the Americas, whiteness promised something that many Jewish people struggled for: full citizenship. The problem is you have to make the Jewish race white.
“And so an attractive separation emerged, which is an effort to de-link a racial-ethnic identity through the construction of an exclusively religious identity.”
As engaging as the origin of the lecture was, two separate question and answer periods repeatedly led back to another topic: the role of Jews in the global slave trade.
Many antisemitic conspiracy theories focus on how “Jewish money” offered financial backing to various evils of the world — and this is no different.
But, as Prof Gordon pointed out, that is not to say there were no Jewish slave owners.
He has no academic interest in “romanticising” any particular ethnic or national groups, he said. History is complicated.
“There were Jews during enslavement who would go the ports to purchase people to manumit (free) them, which means we know Jews were in Africa.
“But there were also those who did practise slavery. There were Jewish plantations, and of course Jewish slaves, whose only way of life they knew was a Jewish one.”
He closed his talk, a somewhat rambling but engaging two hours, with a unifying argument that there is no contradiction between being black and being Jewish.
Whether it relates to the ancient enslavement of Jewish people, or the more modern black slavery, Prof Gordon said being part of being Jewish is “to connect to and fight for the cause of
liberation”.