The Curse of Ham
ISBN: 9781400828548
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Princeton University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Black race; Slavery; Muslims; Christians; Jews; Blacks; Blacks in the Bible.;

The Book of Genesis records an instance of Noah cursing his son Ham's descendants to be slaves. Although there is no biblical evidence that Ham was the "father" of African peoples, various Jewish, Christian and Islamic writers came to believe that he was, and their association helped to justify centuries of African enslavement. When did this interpretation creep in? In this sweeping and ambitious work, Goldenberg shows that early Jewish sources actually had positive or neutral associations for Africa and for Ethiopians (sometimes called "Kushites"), but that postbiblical writers such as Philo and Origen began associating "blackness" with darkness of the soul. Goldenberg's final chapters painstakingly trace the historical trajectories for "the curse of Ham" and "the curse of Cain" in Western thought through the 20th century. (Supporters of slavery thought that the "mark" that God put on Cain after he murdered Abel was black skin. The linguistic discussions in this book can be highly technical, but the research is meticulous and important. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

David M. Goldenberg is Isidore and Theresa Cohen Chair of Jewish Religion and Thought at the University of Cape Town, and Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He was formerly President of Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, Associate Director of the Annenberg Research Institute for Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, and Editor of The Jewish Quarterly Review .

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