Abstract
Michelangelo’s Nakedness of Noah signaled a turning point in a myth, foundational for nearly half a millennium in the Euro-American construction of race and ethnicity, the myth of Noah and his Sons. With this image, the theology of Noah as a first Christ contracted and the anthropology of Noah as a second Adam expanded. With this image, the story of Noah and his Sons started to shift from a vehicle for Jew-hatred to a vehicle for Black-hatred. It was only after this image was painted and its implications diffused that the Curse of Ham, the most widespread justification for the enslavement of Africans, dominated biblical exegesis. However the role of Michelangelo in this transformation, please note, is not causative, but rather indicative.
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NOTES
Acknowledgments: Earlier versions of this paper were given at various forums that stimulated my thinking and improved my argument. I thank Dr. Vera Lind and Prof. Helmut Keil, of the German Historical Institute, Washington DC and American Studies Institute, University of Leipzig respectively, Prof. David Brion Davis and Dr. Robert Forbes of the the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale University, Prof. Michael Fishbane and the Programs in Jewish Studies, Race and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies, and African Studies and the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, Prof. Maurice Kriegel of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris as well as Prof. John Brady of the Liberal Arts Luncheon Lecture, Smith College. This article is a summary without the iconographic evidence, of what will appear as Part One, “The Nakedness of Noah” in my Sex, Slavery, and Racism: The Secret History of Noah and His Sons, to be published by Alfred J. Knopf.
“Les deux hommes nuds debout,” Adam Bartsch, Le Peintre Graveur (Vienna: J. V. Degen, 1811), no. 464, 13:345–346.
Josiah Priest, Slavery, as it relates to the Negro, or African race, examined in the light of circumstances, history and the Holy Scriptures; with an account of the origin of the black man’s color, causes of his state of servitude and traces of his character as well in ancient as in modern times: with strictures on abolitionism (Albany: C. Van Benthuysen, 1843), 152.
Gerald B. Guest, ed., Bible Moralisee, Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1995), 57. For a recent discussion of this genre and its role in fostering Jewhatred see Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: the Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisee (Berkeley: University of California, 1999).
Vatican ms. Codex Palatinus Latinus 871, Biblia Pauperum, Armenbibel, ed. Christoph Wetzel and Heike Drechsler (Stuttgart: Belser Verlag, 1995), folio 12 verso; Die Armenbibel des Serai: Rotulus Seragliensis Nr. 52, ed. Adolf Deissmann and Hans Wegener (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1934), plate 21; Biblia pauperum, ed. Avril Henry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), folio c.
Augustine, The City of God, tr. Marcus Dods (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), Book 16:2, p. 523; CCSL XLVIII, De Civitate Dei (Turnholt: Brepols, 1955), 500.
This argument is fully developed in Part Three, “The Blackening of Ham,” in my Sex, Slavery and Racism. See also my “Cham et Noë. Race, esclavage, et exegese entre Islam, JudaIsme, et Christianisme,” in the theme issue devoted to L’Exercice de la comparaison: Comparer au plus proche/comparer au pluriel in Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, March 2002.
See Pall Mall Gazette, April. 28, 1865, where the king of Ethiopia is an “Asiatic monarch.” Cf. my “Palgrave and His Critics, the Origins and Implications of a Controversy: Part I, the Nineteenth Century—the Abyssinian Imbroglio,” Arabian Studies, 7 (1985): 97–139.
British Library, Department of Western Manuscripts, King’s 395, Folio 3 recto. The porosity of a distinction between Kush (Ethiopia) and the other Noahides in pre-modern culture was not limited to iconography, but appears repeatedly as a variant in the most popular secular literary corpus of the Renaissance, the hundreds of manuscripts and printed editions of the mid-fourteenth century Mandeville’s Travels. See my “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 54 (1997): 103–142.
British Library, Department of Western Manuscripts, Egerton 1395: folio 5 recto, Nimrod and fire; folio 4 verso, Ham’s descendants including Nimrod; folio 2 recto, Enoch among others.
Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Haus 2, Ms lat. f. 141, Rotullus of the Genealogy of Christ, c. 1230. See the multivolume, multiauthored collection The Image of the Black in Western Art: vol. 2, pt. 1, Jean Devisse, From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery”: From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood, tr. William G. Ryan, (New York: William Morrow, 1979), 142–144.
Brussels, Bibliotheque royale Albert 1ef, La fleurdes histoires, 281v-282r. Ulrichs von Richental Chronik des constanzer Concils 1414 bis 1418, ed. Michael Buck (1882, reprint Hildesheim: Olm Verlag, 1962), pp. 158, 171, 203, and 206. The English translation must be dismissed as unreliable, Louise Ropes Loomis, tr., The Council of Constance: The Unification of the Church, ed. John Hine Mundy and Kennerly M. Woody (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). The editors of this posthumously published work did note that “occasional repetitious material has been cut,” but the numerous references to Africa were cut even before they could be repeated.
Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie in foure Bookes (London: Henry Seile, 1652).
My argument for this late date is confirmed, inter alia, by the magisterial and prodigiously illustrated collection, The Image of the Black in Western Art, gen. ed. Ladislas Bugner (New York and Cambridge: William Morrow and Harvard University Press, 1976). Even more thorough is the source on which these volumes are based, the Image of the Black in Western Art, Research Project and Photo Archive, Harvard University, whose collection is ten-fold larger than what has been published. I thank its director, Dr. Karen Dalton, and her assistant, Dr. Sheldon Cheek, for allowing me to consult their records. Despite the absence of a pre-nineteenth century iconography of the Black Ham, Jean Devisse persisted in taking his black servitude for granted, rather than problematizing its origins, e.g. see., Devisse, From the early Christian Era, vol. 2, part 1, p. 55–56. Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both, Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 99, was the first to call attention to the originality of Priest’s illustration.
Rev. Robert Jamieson, Old Testament Genesis-Esther, vol. I of A Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Old and New Testaments (first edition Edinburgh, 1861–65 reprinted Hartford and Philadelphia, 1871), p. 23.
British Library, Oriental and India Office, Manuscripts Or. 2884, Sister Haggadah, folio 3 recto.
The sodomy is evident through comparing Leviticus 18 to Genesis 9, which tie Canaan son of Ham with the violation of sexual taboos, most notably incest against a parent. See also the second-century bishop, Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum, tr. R. M. Grant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 124–125, book 3:19 and the debate attributed to the third-centuries rabbis, Rab and Samuel, Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin, 70a.
Louis Doutrelau, S. J., ed. and tr., Origene, Homelies sur la Genese, new edition (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1976), pp. 76–114.
Gary Taylor, Castration, an Abbreviated History of Western Manhood (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 185–209; Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch, Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 245–254.
The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, second edition, revised and expanded (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: the Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell Univerity Press, 1982), p. 129.
See my, “The Myth of the Sefardi Economic Superman,” in Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, ed., Trading Cultures, the Worlds of Western Merchants, Essays on Authority, Objectivity, and Evidence (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2001), 165–194.
I thank Catherine Turrill, Keith Christiansen, and Leo Steinberg, respectively, for calling these works to my attention. Stephen John Campbell, Cosme Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics, and the Renaissance City, 1450–1495 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), plate 99, p. 124, plate 87, p. 108, plate 102, p. 102. Michael Levey, National Gallery Catalogues: The German School (London: National Gallery Publications, 1959), 84.
Heinz Schrenkenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History (New York: Continuum Publishers, 1996), 145, 280, and 278.
The fullest discussion of this image is Leo Steinberg, “A Corner of the Last Judgment,” Daedalus, 109 (1980), 207–274.
Giovanni Nanni of Viterbo, Commentaria super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium (Commentaries on the Works of Various Authors who Spoke of Antique Matters), Rome, 1492.
Winthrop Jordan, White over Black, American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 17, 40 mischaracterizes Best’s argument as a diversion; Alden Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Before Othello: Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 54 (1997): 27.
(London, 1598–1600), vol. 3, 48–69.
Best A True Discourse of the Late Voyages (1578), 18, 19–20, 28–32.
In general, see Valerie I. J. Flint, “Monsters and the Antipodes in the Early Middle Ages and Enlightenment,” Viator, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 15 (1984), 65–80; Susan Scott Parrish, “Poisoned Knowledge and the Curious Body in America,” Paper for the Early Modern Colloquium Panel, “Rethinking the History of Science: Race, Climate Theory, and Physiology, England and America,” November 17, 2000; Jim Egan, Authorizing Experience: Refigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 15–16; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” William & Mary Quarterly, third Series, 41 (1984): 213–240, and “The Puzzle of the American Climate,” American Historical Review, 87 (1982): 1262–1289. I thank Prof. Parrish for allowing me to consult her unpublished work.
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Braude, B. (2005). Michelangelo and the Curse of Ham: From a Typology of Jew-Hatred to a Genealogy of Racism. In: Beidler, P.D., Taylor, G. (eds) Writing Race Across the Atlantic World. Signs of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980830_5
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