Book Description

"The study of western racism has tended to concentrate either on the hatred and murder of Jews or the hatred and enslavement of black people. As chief objects of racism Jews and Blacks have been linked together for centuries, peoples apart from the general run of humanity. In medieval Europe Jews were often perceived as Blacks, and the conflation of Jews and Blacks continued throughout the period of the Enlightenment. With the discovery of a community of Black Jews in Loango in west Africa in 1777, and later of black Jews in India, the Middle East and other parts of Africa, the figure of the hybrid black Jew was thrust into the maelstrom of evolving theories about race hierarchies and taxonomies. The new hybrid played a particular role in the great battle between monogenists and polygenists as they sought to establish the unitary or disparate origins of humankind. From the mid-nineteenth century to the period of the Third Reich Jews and Blacks were increasingly conflated in a racist discourse which combined the two fundamental racial hatreds of the west. While Hitler considered Jews 'Negroid parasites', in Nazi Germany as in Fascist Italy, through texts, laws and cartoons, Jews and Blacks were combined in the figure of the Black/Jew, the mortal foe of the Aryan race"--