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The Identity Question: Blacks and Jews in Europe and America. By Robert Philipson. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. xxi + 254 pp.
Robert Philipson states in his introduction that his objective in this volume is not a study of interrelations between Blacks and Jews, as indeed the title might seem to imply; rather he intends to focus on the relatedness of Blacks and Jews. This is a major difference between this work and most other recent similar studies, such as Michael Lerner and Cornel West's Jews & Blacks,1 that explore tensions that have surfaced between these erstwhile allies for social justice. In shaping the analytical framework for his book, Philipson employs the concept of diaspora articulated in recent literature by Paul Gilroy and others.2 The recurrent theme connecting the book's six chapters is that the origin of many of the central issues under discussion can be found in the intellectual premises of the European Enlightenment. In Philipson's view, "Blacks and Jews were forced to define themselves in opposition to and in conjunction with European ideas about who they were" (p. xiv). This experience in turn produced among intellectuals of the two groups a consciousness that Philipson describes as diasporic - diasporic because, under constant pressure to define themselves simultaneously in terms of Western standards and their respective ethnic norms, Blacks and Jews must resort to universal concepts of belonging. There is no national entity into which they are fully accepted. In other words, the contradictions between the bright promise of inclusiveness of the Enlightenment...