Judaism discovered

Maimonides: Premiere Anti-Black Racist

The perplexing problem of what to do with the scurrilous anti-Black pronouncements of the rabbi hailed as one of the most eminent Judaic thinkers of the ages, has been a difficult one for his acolytes. When in doubt, the usual policy has been to falsify his texts, bowdlerizing and sanitizing them. The first English-language translation of Maimonides' famous Guide of the Perplexed was completed in 1881 by M. Friedlander, PhD. A second edition was prepared in 1904. A "Rev. H. Gollancz" is credited with translating some parts of the first twenty five chapters. However our concern here is with the remaining 29 chapters translated by Friedlander himself; specifically chapter 51. Before commencing our scrutiny it should be noted that Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed has become a classic among those in the West who pride themselves on their humanist and progressive credentials. The New York Times Magazine (July 22, 2007) refers to Maimonides as "Easily the most extraordinary figure in post-biblical Jewish history." Largely thanks to the Friedlander translation, which was published for popular consumption in an inexpensive, mass market printing (Friedlander called it a "cheap edition"), Guide of the Perplexed has entered the Western canon as a paradigm of lofty rabbinic philosophy, on par with Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas as worthy of study, application and

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emulation by those seeking genuine enlightenment. ⁵⁹⁷ Dr. Friedlander and his backers knew that in Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed there were egregiously racist teachings about Black people, viz., that they are a subhuman species, above simian, but below human. Here is how Friedlander translated the problem passage in his popular version intended for the masses:

"The people who are abroad are all those that have no religion, neither one based on speculation nor one received by tradition. Such are the extreme Turks that wander about in the north, the Kushites who live in the south, and those in our country who are like these. I consider these as irrational beings, and not as human beings, they are below mankind, but above monkeys, since they have the form and shape of man and a mental faculty above that of a monkey." ^59S

But this is not what Maimonides actually wrote. His actual words as published in an accurate translation by Shlomo Pines intended mainly for scholars, are as follows:

"Those who are outside the city are all human individuals who have no doctrinal belief, neither one based on speculation nor one that accepts the authority of tradition: such individuals as the furthermost Turks found in the remote North, the Negroes found in the remote South, and those who resemble them that are with us in these climes. The status of those is like that of irrational animals. To my mind they do not have the rank of men, but have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher than the rank of apes. For they have the external shape and lineaments of a man and a faculty of discernment that is superior to that of the apes." ⁵"

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It would be difficult to assess the degree of oppression which this Talmudic passage, as codified by Maimonides, as well as another Talmudic passage we shall examine, has created for the Black race. ⁶⁰⁰

The Legend of Maimonides the Humanitarian, as told by the

New York Times

In spite of what the documentary record reveals about Rabbi Maimonides, Judaism's formidable public relations machine regularly generates a benign image of him. Here below we reproduce an ecumenical propaganda tale from the Zionist grandees at the New York Times. It's a classic "feel good" human interest story dedicated to propagating the myth of the "Rambam." The central features of Maimonides' mythology repeated in this NY Times' horse "tail" (we could allude to another substance produced by horses in this connection, but will spare the reader the analogy), are:

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   Maimonides was a wise and wonderful religious teacher who had love for all, especially the Arabs.
   
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   Maimonides is an ecumenical bridge to all peoples on the path to peace and understanding.
   

Both propositions are a huge joke on the gentiles in general, and Muslims and Christians in particular. As every Orthodox rabbi knows, but the Times is keeping secret, Maimonides despised Muslims, reserving his severest rancor for Mohammed himself. Observe how shrewdly this facet of Maimonides' biography is handled in the report in the New York Times. It is never stated in the article that Maimonides liked Muslims or had anything good to say about them. The whole thing is handled from the perspective of the people he fooled, while none of his own statements are cited or assessed:

"He was respected and honored by both Jews and Arabs. This is especially relevant now in our life and times...He was a very special man who was highly regarded by all people, regardless of faith..." Correct. The rooks and sycophants among the goyim love him. But did Maimonides love them in return? The Times article does not say. It cleverly implies that he did, since he is allegedly "highly regarded by all people."

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In truth, Maimonides was a mole, spying on the Muslim religion and closely scrutinizing Arab ethnography; the insights he obtained allowed Judaism to gain an ever more firm purchase inside Islam, until today the Al Qaeda/Salafist operation (that's the western-intelligence agencies' Trojan horse), is a mirror image of rabbinic doctrine on war (i.e. terror).

Maimonides was one of the most depraved figures in all of history. He applauded the murder of Christ and advocated the murder of Christians. The grief, misery and slaughter his teachings have caused are incalculable. His for Judaics-only writings on Muslims and Mohammed are dripping with venom and homicidal hatred. But due to a highly sophisticated and, pardon the pun, well-oiled propaganda machine, Maimonides' benign image is generally taken at face value by a dumbed-down population of Arabs and Christians. Because Thomas Aquinas made favorable remarks about Maimonides' treatise against atheism, (otherwise Aquinas knew next to nothing about Maimonides' covert doctrines), Maimonides is also occasionally presented as bearing a Catholic imprimatur. ⁶⁰¹

As for his supposedly humanitarian medical care: Maimonides taught the clandestine rabbinic principle of indirectly causing the deaths of gentiles: you see them stuck in a deep hole, you leave them there. Would you want this fellow for your physician, if you were a gentile?

According to halacha, sound medical care is relative to circumstances: to be extended only to a population of dangerously alert gentiles who are highly suspicious of Judaics, and then solely in order to win their favor and overcome their premonitions of Judaic treachery. Eight hundred years later, the legend of Maimonides' medical humanitarianism lives on in Arab society, hence the "services" he rendered the sultan's family, have paid huge dividends in maintaining prestige for the religion of Judaism in the Middle East, in spite of hostility toward Zionism.

In the West, he is viewed through an intellectual prism, as a philosopher in the same exalted league as a genius on par with Einstein, and as an Old Testament ethicist who tried to put the brakes on the Kabbalah (actually he

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only curbed its excesses for the sake of not wanting to blow Judaism's Biblical cover, while reaffirming the core of the goddess-worshipping cultus which is intrinsic to Orthodox Judaism). Maimonides wished the deaths of all faithful Christians and Muslims, yet in our upside down Zionist world, he is presented to the public as the catalyst for a twenty-first century Runyonesque tale of Judaic-Arab cooperation, peace and love, in of all places, the Saratoga racetrack. But can real peace and true love be based on lies?

New York Times, September 3, 2007:

"Sharing a Name and a Message. (A heart-warming photo of lovable, bearded Talmudists affectionately gathered around a race horse accompanies this article. The photo was featured on the front page of the Sept. 3 issue of the Times). Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Sept. 2 — Rabbi Israel Rubin conceded that it was an unusual field trip for his students. They were here at Barn 70 on the backside of Saratoga Race Course on Friday morning to see a trainer about a horse. The trainer was Bob Baffert, and the horse, Maimonides, was a fast one who just may capture the Kentucky Derby next May. Maimonides cost $4.6 million at last year's Keeneland September Sale, and last month he appeared as if he was worth every penny when he won his debut by 11 lengths. He is one of the favorites Monday to win the Grade I $250,000 Hopeful Stakes, a seven-furlong sprint for 2-year-olds. None of that, however, interested Rubin or his charges. He does not attend horse races or gamble. In fact, upon hearing about the colt, Rubin thought long and hard before arranging to take his students here. 'Some may think this is sacrilegious,' he said.

"Ultimately, however, the rabbi and his students were drawn here from the Maimonides Hebrew Day School in Albany for what is in a name. The school and the colt are named for Moses Maimonides, who lived more than 800 years ago and is considered among the greatest Jewish philosophers. He was the chief rabbi of Cairo and the physician to the sultan of Egypt. 'He blended religious study and intellect with worldly manners to heal the sick and guide the healthy,' Rubin said. 'He was respected and honored by both Jews and Arabs. This is especially relevant now in our life and times.'

"Maimonides is owned and was named by Ahmed Zayat, an Egyptian now living in New Jersey. He did not know about Rubin's visit, and, indeed, was flying back from San Diego and Del Mar on Friday morning. When told of the smiles of the youngsters petting the nose of his expensive colt, however,

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Zayat was beyond gratified. He is a Muslim who grew up in a suburb of Cairo and had put much time and effort into bestowing the name Maimonides on his prize purchase.

"He was a very special man who was highly regarded by all people, regardless of faith,' Zayat said of Maimonides. 'What has happened with Sept. 11, Iraq, and what's going on in the region is contrary to the way I grew up. If this horse was going to be a superstar, I wanted an appropriate name. I wanted to say something with the tool I had, which was a horse. I wanted it to be pro-peace, and about loving your neighbor.' When Zayat tried to register the name Maimonides with the Jockey Club, however, he discovered that it had been reserved for more than nine years by Earle I. Mack, a New York real estate investor and a former ambassador to Finland. In 1997, Mack, then the chairman of the board for the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, was instrumental in bringing King Juan Carlos I of Spain to New York to accept the school's Democracy Award. Mack had been moved by the king's remarks about how much Spain's culture had lost when the country expelled its Jews in 1492 as part of the Inquisition. The king mentioned Maimonides, who was born in Cordoba, Spain, in 1135, and who, with his family, was forced out of the country while Spain was ruled by Muslims. 'I was just waiting for a horse good enough to deserve the name,' Mack said. He has owned and bred horses for more than 40 years, and knew that Zayat's colt, a son of Vindication, was bred to be special. Each also understood the other's good intentions. Zayat donated $100,000 to Cardozo to commemorate the king's visit there, and to promote tolerance. Mack released his claim to the name Maimonides. 'He had the right horse, and the right motives,' Mack said. 'We are all after the same thing: to touch people across cultures.' Zayat and Mack know that horse racing is an unpredictable business, and a thoughtfully named horse hardly guarantees future fame and fortune. When Eli O'Brien, 14, patted Maimonides between the ears and promised to say some prayers for him, Baffert nodded enthusiastically. 'We'll take anything you can give us,' Baffert said" (end quote from the New York Times).

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The Rabbinic Texts: The Most Virulent Source of Anti-Black Racism in the West

The process of dissimulation through the substitution of code words (Kush for Negro and Kush for goy in the Soncino edition of the Talmud) is a feature of numerous texts of the religion of Judaism. The most virulent source of anti-Black racism in the West, often mistakenly attributed to the Bible, centers on the story of Ham and Noah's cursing of Canaan. Let us make clear a fact which others have concealed: the Biblical curse of enslavement in Genesis ch. 9 has no specific racial identification and contains no anti-Black bigotry.

Judaic scholar Harold Brackman in his 1977 Ph.D. dissertation indicated that the source of the racial taint attached to Ham and his son Canaan and their descendants, is the Talmud, not the Bible: "The opening centuries of the Christian era constituted an interregnum in the native African record of historical achievement separating Cush's era of ancient prominence from the medieval accomplishments of the great Negro states of the Sudan. These same centuries formed the seedbed of rabbinic Judaism. And this fateful coincidence goes far toward explaining why they also formed such fertile soil for the growth of Jewish lore demeaning the Negro. The most famous of these anti-Negro legends cluster about Ham and Noah's cursing of Canaan....There is no denying that the Babylonian Talmud was the first source to read a Negrophobic content into the episode by stressing Canaan's fraternal connections with Cush...The Talmudic glosses of the episode added the stigma of blackness to the fate of enslavement that Noah predicted for Ham's progeny."

Brackman cited what he called an "important" Talmudic "version of the myth": "Ham is told by his outraged father that because you have abused me in the darkness of the night, your children shall be born black and ugly; bcause you have twisted your head to cause me embarrassment, they shall have kinky hair and red eyes; because your lips jested at my expense theirs shall swell; and because you neglected my nakedness, they shall go naked."⁶⁰²

Christians who pay the Talmud no heed will not espouse its identification of the African race with Bible-sanctioned enslavement. But

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Christians who over the centuries have conceded some authority to the "Talmudic glosses" which "added the stigma of blackness" to the account in Genesis 9, will — as in so many other instances where the Talmud is heeded —fall into a pit of bigotry and falsehood having no Scriptural basis. Brackman quotes the Talmud's version of Genesis 9: "Ham is told by his outraged father that, because you have abused me in the darkness of the night, your children shall be born black and ugly; because you have twisted your head to cause me embarrassment, they shall have kinky hair and red eyes; because your lips jested at my expense, theirs shall swell." ⁶⁰³

One of the thorniest problems for the rabbinic and Zionist powers is to recover the lost glory of their once untarnished reputation as the planet's primary champions of "Black Civil Rights," something that has become increasingly difficult to maintain, given the unabashed racism and tribalism of the Israeli apartheid regime and its mass murder, extrusion, and discrimination against Palestinians of color. Nonetheless, Jonathan Schorsch, "Professor of Jewish Studies" at New York's Columbia University, sets out on this daunting task in his book, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World. A supposed "progressive Jew," he writes for the liberal-Zionist Tikkun magazine and his thesis about Judaics and Black people was chosen for publication by one of the premiere academic publishers, Cambridge University Press. At $85 a copy, this book is clearly not intended for the herd, but rather for those who steer the herd into correct-think: the religion writers and columnists of the West's newspapers and wire services, the history teachers and the leading bureaucrats. It is also intended to wash the brains of educated Blacks who may have been so foolish as to have been led astray by what Schorsch terms the "specious and outrageously myopic charges of the Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews." As a library book, Schorsch's work is intended to become the staple reference on the subject. In spite of all of the author's high-falutin' commendations and titles however, he is possessed by a familiar strain of fundamentalist Talmudic nationalism, the spectre that haunts the psychology of so many Judaic intellectuals who lay claim to enlightenment principles. Take a gander at this

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doozy from Schorsch: "However ugly and purposefully hurtful Black nationalist tirades against Jewish slave-trading have been..."

Let's run his sentence fragment through our turn-the-tables mechanism: "However ugly and purposefully hurtful Judaic tirades against German concentration camps have been..." The latter sentence is not allowed and would be shouted down in any liberal or conservative salon. The "ugliest" and most "purposefully hurtful" Judaic "tirade" against German concentration camps would never constitute a "tirade" in any discussion or analysis of the "Holocaust." There is no limit on whatever sort of "ugly and hurtful tirade" one would choose to launch against Germans. Correct-think deems that there can be no limit on what Germans should be subjected to for their crimes — real and imagined— and they had better take their well-deserved, ritual and perpetual punishment, humbly and on their knees.

For Jonathan Schorsch and Zionist academics like him, however, "Jewish slave trading" is a lesser crime. Talmudic supremacist psychology holds that crimes committed against Judaics take precedence over all other crimes on the scale of moral "outrage," including the Judaic role in the enslavement of Blacks, which African-Americans and others regard as a holocaust. From page one of Schorsch's book, we learn that "Jewish slave trading" is not going to be the hideous crime that German concentration camps are. The high crime against which Schorsch points his pen is the outrage directed against the Judaic role in the slave trade. Schorsch's tribal Talmudic hubris is a manifestation of his hallucinatory nationalism, which places a higher premium on Judaic hurt feelings than it does on the mass enslavement and death of Black people. Coupled with this is the author's casual denial of the Judaic role: "...the questions surrounding Jewish slave trading should be easily and quickly resolved at this point, on the basis of the recent work of such scholars as David Brion Davis, Eli Faber and Seymour Drescher."

Everyone of those cited works is either a pamphlet or an article in a periodical, (with the exception of Faber) and appeared after the publication in 1991 of the Nation of Islam's magisterial history book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. There has been a sustained attempt to refute this book. One wonders why, if it so "specious" and "outrageously myopic"? The record will show that none of these salvos cited by Schorsch constitute any sort of refutation, however.

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Revisionist historian William N. Grimstad: "In the early 1990s...Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam published its astounding study, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, laying bare in awesome detail the long-buried story of Jews and the African slave trade. The unnamed but clearly astute authors...explore the proposition that 'Jews have been conclusively linked to the greatest criminal endeavor ever undertaken against an entire race of people'...the Nation of Islam study...is based upon a huge number of scholarly sources, predominately by topflight Jewish authors..-this is a formidable work of scholarship of a classic style not often seen these days. The tone is unfailingly judicious...Small wonder, then, that The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews touched an extremely sore nerve...the American Jewish Committee's Kenneth Stern darkly declaimed that (its) 'continued distribution and promotion...is one of the most dastardly anti-Semitic acts in American history...Each (Jewish) agency then followed up with pronouncements almost as ritualized as a papal anathema...Well-drilled Gentile editors and publishers know that such interdicted items are not to be given a moment's further consideration, nor brought to the attention of the public beyond the most minimal level. Such indeed has been the fate of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews..." ⁶⁰⁴

Prof. Schorsch gloats over the obscurity of the Nation of Islam's book: "Thankfully, the red-herring issue of Jewish slave trading seems to have receded somewhat from the media horizon since its torrid flashes of the early 1990s." Yet here is Schorsch with his 500+ pages devoted to "...a cultural history of Jews and Judaism...within the increasingly slave-dependent Atlantic territories...it is amazing how little source material can be found describing the relationship of Jews and their slaves..." Throughout his thick tome the professor writes in this contradictory style, more suitable to a tabloid of the kitty litter variety than an august university publishing house, though his dense, lawyerly and Talmudic style does befit the obtuse genre of

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university publications. Schorsch whets the reader's appetite with a description of the tantalizing questions he intends to answer in his pages: "What do primary sources tell us about relations between Blacks and Jews? What do Jewish sources, textual and archival convey about Blacks? If Jews lived according to Jewish law, to what degree did Jewish behavior toward Blacks take shape under its influence? What does the halakha, the Jewish legal tradition, say about slavery and behavior toward slaves?"

These are good questions, but many of his supposed answers are fudged, or buried in footnotes in a deceptive manner. Yet by studying what Schorsch fears to reveal openly, and what he buries in his notes, we can both track Establishment circumlocution on this subject, and discover potentially incendiary new data that is intended for the upper strata literati. The revisionist perspective on Black slavery takes many forms, including questions concerning the comparative degree of oppression obtaining in White and Black enslavement, which this writer considered in They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America. Since the 9/11 attacks there has been a greater willingness to discuss the enslavement of Whites by Arabs and Muslims, though little is said about Muslims enslaved by people of the West. It was for example, legal to enslave Muslims in Sicily as late as 1812. ⁶⁰⁵

Slavery in the western hemisphere represented a new level of commerce and sophisticated management on the part of the most "progressive" and "scientific elements" among the slavers. Early modern white slavery was a function of the new unbridled capitalism that came about with the enclosure acts mandated by the Protestant revolution of Elizabeth I; as well as the subsequent perfection of this predatory system within the deracinated but highly influential eighteenth century political economy of Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo. The seventeenth century commerce in white slaves was mostly handled by their treacherous upper class white brethren, while the new commercial basis for Black slavery was an overwhelmingly Judaic enterprise. Judaics had no major role in the enslavement of whites in colonial America or the early Republic, though enslavement of whites by Judaics is a practice as old as the Talmud. The Jerusalem Talmud in Shabbat 6:9 and Yoma 8:5 records that Rabbi Judah Hanassi had a "German" (i.e. White)

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slave. Grimstad in Talk About Hate: "While it is true that slavery was practically universal from the earliest times...it was the Jews' unique contribution to organize it as a section of international commerce." David Brion Davis expands on this point: "Plantation slavery, far from being an aberration invented by lawless buccaneers and lazy New World adventurers, as 19th century liberals often charged, was a creation of the most progressive elements and forces in Europe...Jewish inventors, traders and cartographers; Dutch, German and British investors and bankers..." ⁶⁰⁶

The Talmudists have a penchant for branding gentiles of the American Southland as the paradigm of vociferous advocacy of slavery, racism and oppression, even as the Judaic dynasties which historically profited from the slave trade, reinvented themselves in the 1960s as apostles of Black Civil Rights. According to Israel Shahak in Jewish History, Jewish Religion, the anti-Black racists among the rabbis used the "Civil Rights" movement to destroy the White gentiles of America. Grimstad pioneered this theme in his early identification of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: "...a strong call is made to patch up the unraveling Black-Jewish coalition...which flourished back in the days when Martin Luther King could march arm-in-arm with Abraham Joshua Heschel, the much-honored Kabbalistic sage...Jews are taxed with having done a Sorcerer's Apprentice number with American Blacks..." ⁶⁰⁷ Israel Shahak in Jewish History (p. 26) stated, "...quite a few of Martin Luther King's rabbinical supporters were...anti-Black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of 'Jewish interest' (wishing to win Black support for American Jewry and for Israel's policies...)"

Schorsch's devious tactics are evident to any specialist in this field. One of his missions is to explain away the preponderance of anti-Black invective in sacred rabbinic texts. This gets interesting because the Old Testament contains no anti-Black invective. Ergo, in the course of exploring anti-Black invective in Judaism the student of this subject receives an immediate education in the hidden side of Judaism's "Torah," its vast Talmudic, Kabbalistic, Midrashic and Aggadic traditions. The most virulent anti-Black racist in Judaism is Moses Maimonides, who, as we have seen, taught in his Guide of the Perplexed, that Blacks are subhuman. Schorsch has written 546

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pages on the relationship of Jews and Blacks. One would think that he would explicate Maimonides' teaching about Black people at length, since it forms the heart of Judaism's attitude toward Blacks. However, since Maimonides is indefensible, Schorsch dares not. Hence, like any propagandist, the Columbia University professor buries the inconvenient Maimonides, in this case in the endnotes of Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, where we find Maimonides racist teaching quoted in small type, with no comment or exegesis of any kind, as if it were the doctrine of only some long-forgotten village rebbe. Neither can Prof. Schorsch bring himself to quote the Talmudic and Midrashic accounts of the curse on Ham, which form the very heart of the canonical Judaic understanding about Black people. By shying away from a confrontation with these texts he does little to dispel the critique by Tony Martin and others. Prof. Martin quoted these anti-Black rabbinic teachings during his speech in Cincinnati at a revisionist history conference. How can Schorsch claim to debunk the Martins of the world when he can't even bring himself to confront the problem sacred rabbinic texts? Schorsch is not really a scholar, he's more of a lawyer and lawyers are prone to embody the Talmudic mentality. Let's observe lawyer Schorsch in action. He says, "Seeing a Jewish curse of Ham behind every English notion of Black accursedness will not do. If one looks carefully, the explicit citation of Jewish authors remains extremely rare in early modern writings...Some of course, did indeed cite Jewish authorities. But overall, the curse of Ham seems to comprise a case of intra-Christian discursive influence. The Jewish Bible having been claimed as a Christian text already long before the medieval period, early modern Christian authorities continued to make use of it as a component of the Christian canon" (p. 139).

Nice try, Prof. Schorsch, but the fact is, the Israelite Bible was misappropriated by the rabbis, not the Christians, who are its rightful heirs. Furthermore, Schorsch misleads readers into thinking that it is the Biblical teaching about Black Africans that is the pivot of anti-Black racism in the West, when Schorsch knows very well that the anti-Black rabbinic dogma is diametrically opposed to the Old Testament. Therefore, citing the Old Testament in a racial context, as the curse of Ham's "intra-Christian discursive influence" is nothing more than a lawyer's trick with a fifty dollar phrase. The author never troubles to quote even one Talmudic or Midrashic text concerning the curse of Ham, in spite of the fact that these texts

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represent the authoritative rabbinic images of Blacks. He doesn't quote them because he can't quote them and still sustain his thesis — since there is no way around the ferocious racism they contain. They are utterly inexcusable and citing them in print would serve to shock many readers into an encounter with a level of institutional racism in Judaism heretofore undreamed of. Instead of a citation, we get a fleeting allusion to "...midrashim that glossed the somewhat confused and cryptic biblical account."

Schorsch also makes brief reference to "Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 70a" and "108b" (pp. 140 & 407). Schorsch is pleased to take obscure passages from fifteenth century rabbis dealing with sexual passion and quote from them at length and then triumphantly declare, "Not one of these passages referred, explicitly or implicitly, to Blacks...Few Jewish thinkers understood Ham's curse to initiate his or her progeny's blackness" (pp. 143-144). The mendacious chutzpah represented by this outrageous dissembling is truly audacious. Such a gambit can only be sustained before a readership unschooled in the relevant, foundational rabbinic texts, from Gemara to Mishnah Berurah. This statement by Schorsch exhibits a marked contempt for his readers, who, as previously stated, given the price of the book and its dense style of argumentation, consist of the American and British intelligentsia. Contrary to what Schorsch maintains, the Curse of Ham as taught by the rabbis, is what Abraham Melamed momentously terms the "locus classicus" of Judaism's historic antipathy toward Black people, and the exegetical source of its racist teaching, from the Amora'im of Babylonia to Moses Maimonides.⁶⁰⁸

The dogma that the Black person is a slave by nature is rabbinic in origin.

Canaan is identified as a Black man and Blacks as an inferior people only in the Gemara, Midrash and later writings of the rabbis, not the Bible. The rabbinic account of the malediction against Ham stipulates that Ham's son Canaan, and all Canaan's issue, are forever fated to suffer perpetual slavery and Black skin without the possibility of their condition ever being ameliorated. It is this anti-Old Testament rabbinic gloss that influenced those fifteenth century Renaissance humanists who had crossed over into the

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forbidden territory of the Talmud, Midrash and Kabbalah as part of a supposedly enlightened act. It is an irony of history that as a result of this supposedly progressive development by celebrated avant-garde Renaissance thinkers, the abominable view of Black people as a congenitally-determined race of perpetual slaves, became entrenched among the western liberal intelligensia for at least the next 300 years. Contrary to the lie Schorsch retails in Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, ("Few Jewish thinkers understood Ham's curse to initiate his or her progeny's blackness"), the classic rabbinic texts hold that the punishment visited upon Ham was the transformation of his son Canaan and all Canaan's progeny into Blacks: "...therefore your seed will be ugly and dark-skinned" ("kaur ve' mefuham"). Some texts hold that Ham himself was thus transformed. Rabbi Hiyya said: Ham and the dog copulated on the Ark, therefore Ham came forth dark-skinned." ⁶⁰⁹

There is a preponderance of authoritative rabbinic texts like the preceding, differing only in the extent to which the lecherous rabbinic authors fantasize about the nature of the sexual transgression they attribute to Ham with regard to Noah; the intimate details of the act of sodomy which they say Ham committed upon a dog while on board Noah's ark, and a sex perversion with a raven that is too filthy to recount here.

The Biblical account in Genesis chapter 9 concerns Noah's having drank too much and of Ham brazenly drawing attention to his father's nakedness. There is nothing in Genesis ch. 9 that points to a subtext of sexual perversion, or that Ham, or his son Canaan, were transformed into dark-skinned or Black men. In so far as Christians strictly adhered to the Old Testament account of Noah and his sons, no inference concerning perpetual enslavement of black people could be drawn. The notion of a Bibhcal mandate for Black slavery was transmitted through rabbinic interpreters and commentators who falsified the Old Testament text, an observation Christ first made about the Pharisees in Mark 7 and Matthew 15. We conclude with this risible pronouncement from Columbia University's Jonathan Schorsch: "...the 'Jewish' source of the curse on Ham remains an invention of twentieth-century Christian polemicists."

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