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I offer in this article a brief exploration of some of the difficulties posed by the study of Jews of color, especially Afro-Jews, in the north American and Caribbean contexts, and i summarize the portrait of Jews today (and a little bit of yesterday) that follows from such study.
There is much to support the reluctance to conjoin discussions of Jews with discussions of race. This reluctance derives not only from the history of inquisitions, pogroms, and the shoah, but also from the ironically intimate link between the concepts of race and Jewish history. The prototypical term raza from which the word "race" emerged was, after all, a Medieval spanish word to refer to breeds of dogs, horses, Jews and Moors (Afro-Muslims).1 we could add to this the upheavals marked by the transition of Christendom into a trans-Atlantic force in the fifteenth century and that of the term from its theological underpinnings to its naturalistic aspersions as a science of human division, an anthropology. it is no accident that the later "classic" modern formulation of racism, Arthur de Gobineau's Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaine (1853-1855), devoted attention to the mixed racial constitution of Jews, and it is also not accidental that a term developed by the French linguist ernest Renan, "semitic languages," eventually became a racialized one: "semite." All this is familiar stuff to scholars, not only in the study of race but also in the study, specifically, of Jews.2 This narrative is wanting, however, in many regards - first, because of its seamlessness, and, second, because it doesn't address the question of why race arose as a negative concept.
To begin, there is already difficulty in talking about Jews because of the presumed universality of local manifestations of Jewish people. As Jews traveled through all parts of the globe, nearly every country developed some notion of Jews on the basis of its local Jewish population. This did not pose much of a problem in the past, since international, intercultural, and global communication was limited. But today, "local" versus "global" influence each other to the point of creating hegemonic forms of symbolic life. what is often lost, however, is an understanding of the history of how such dominant representations came into being. Jewish people...