It is clear to anyone who has more than a cursory understanding of the period of time of the African slave trade that every group was involved in the African slave trade. There is blood on everyone’s hands: Christian, Jew, Muslim and African—Black and white alike. Even Native people bought, owned and sold slaves. As a descendant of survivors of the Middle Passage, and the atrocity of slavery, I am pissed to hell with all of them.
—M. NourbeSe Philip, Showing Grit
When Toni Morrison dedicated her landmark work of slavery fiction
Beloved (1987) to “
Sixty Million and more,” her apparent reference to the Nazi genocide sparked a debate that has larger implications for the literary representation of Blacks and Jews.
Beloved’s dedication and the surrounding controversy are underpinned by a logic of ethnic competition.
1 This logic, which pervades discussions of Black-Jewish relations in the United States, contrasts strikingly with the stress placed on correspondences and mutualities between Black and Jewish histories by Caribbean/diaspora intellectuals. Gilroy, for example, vigorously defends Morrison against the accusation that
Beloved is “a blackface Holocaust novel” (Crouch 67) on the grounds that this view fails to consider “the possibility that there might be something useful to be gained from setting these histories [of slavery and the Holocaust] closer to each other not so as to compare them, but as precious resources from which we might learn something valuable about the way that modernity operates” (
The Black Atlantic 217). One contributor to the debate suggests that, in advancing this defense of Morrison, “Gilroy may not be fully taking into account either the actual language of Morrison’s novel or the [U.S.] cultural context in which this fiction is being written” (Budick 165). Looked at from a different angle, however, what Gilroy’s comments reveal is not so much an insensitivity to the U.S. context as the alternative modes of drawing Black and Jewish histories into relation that become available when we widen our lens to encompass a broader African diaspora cultural landscape.
2
As
Beloved’s dedication attests, an association between slavery and the Holocaust is a feature of contemporary slavery fiction as well as of the public memorialization of slavery more broadly. Both
Beloved and another seminal slavery novel, Octavia Butler’s
Kindred (1979), take up historian Stanley Elkins’s thesis that slavery was an American holocaust.
3 This view also informs public memorials and institutions such as the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee.
4 However, instead of pursuing the Holocaust analogies invoked by Morrison and other African American writers as well as by some public institutions, the Caribbean slavery fiction and drama that I discuss here recalls an earlier traumatic moment in Jewish history in which Sephardic Jews sought opportunities in the New World in the aftermath of the 1492 expulsion from Spain. In this chapter I show how adopting a transnational and hemispheric approach to Black-Jewish literary dynamics brings to light a recurring script about the Sephardic port Jew in Caribbean slavery literature. I argue that this script cannot be adequately interpreted through the competitive memory paradigm. Instead, it requires alternative frameworks such as those proposed by Gilroy and Rothberg in which memory is understood not as competitive but as “
multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (Rothberg 3).
In his study of slavery fiction, Tim A. Ryan remarks that the challenge for the contemporary novelist “is to engage with slavery’s historical actuality and its discursive traditions without becoming dependent upon conventional literary formulas for representing the institution and its subjects” (191). For this reason, the generic patterns established in the classic slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, and others are continually being reconfigured by contemporary writers, who have increasingly eschewed a protest literature mode in favor of a more theoretical approach that explores the nature of slave subjectivity, treats history as a discursive field, and problematizes the idea of resistance. Ryan singles out as an example of such innovation Edward P. Jones’s
The Known World (2003), which introduces the figure of the Black slaveholder to disrupt the binary of Black slave and white master.
5 Similarly, the novels I consider in this chapter, Maryse Condé’s
Moi, Tituba, sorcière…noire de Salem and David Dabydeen’s
A Harlot’s Progress, defamiliarize the institution of slavery and destabilize the racial binary that typically structures the slave narrative by featuring the port Jew.
6 Moreover, in Condé’s and Dabydeen’s postmodern slavery novels, the presence of the Jew signals a metafictional concern with literary and art historical traditions of representing racialized Others. Condé’s and Dabydeen’s inclusion of Jewish protagonists underscores the degree to which their parodic, highly self-conscious interpretations of the slave narrative ultimately are less concerned with filling in gaps in the slavery archive than they are with reflecting on its discursive conditions.
The slavery fiction and drama examined here unfolds a surprisingly consistent plot in which a male Sephardic Jew purchases a Black slave, rescuing him or her from a worse fate at the hands of a brutal Christian master and facilitating the slave’s eventual emancipation. In what follows, I preface my discussion of Condé’s and Dabydeen’s variations on this plot by briefly considering a Derek Walcott play,
Drums and Colours, which offers an early example of a work of Caribbean slavery literature that incorporates the port Jew. Another key reference point in this chapter is Black Canadian author Lawrence Hill’s neoslave narrative
The Book of Negroes, which advances a similar script about the port Jew but whose treatment of this figure is more ambivalent. In
chapter 4 I turn to McLeod’s novel
Hoe duur was de suiker?, which employs an alternative generic framing that resituates this script within a more extensive treatment of Jewish plantation life. These late twentieth- and early twenty-first century texts vary in their settings, encompassing both Caribbean and European locales. They also vary in the degree to which they reflect on the discursive traditions that surround the linked figures of the slave and the Jew as well as in the extent to which they associate Jewishness with ethics. Each of them, however, largely eschews the competitive memory model, approaching Black and Jewish experience, not as discrete histories of victimization to be measured against one another, but as intersecting and mutually imbricated.
The slavery literature that I consider advances a predominantly identificatory reading of the port Jew and thus is distinguished by its multidirectional rather than competitive engagement with the slavery past. At the same time, the historical phenomenon of Sephardic Jewish slaveholding that this literature evokes also requires us to take some distance from narratives of Jewish victimhood, reminding us that colonial New World Jewry were both the targets of continuing discrimination and the beneficiaries of some of the privileges of whiteness that certain Caribbean colonies made available in “a historically unique dismantling of Jewish powerlessness” (Schorsch, Jews and Blacks 303). In these works the ambivalent position that Jews occupied between Black slaves and the Christian plantocracy—their doubled role as both brokers and victims of the colonial project—proves fertile ground for a reframing of the slave narrative genre.
WRITING THE JEWISH ATLANTIC
The fiction and drama that I discuss in this chapter identifies a series of sites of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Black-Jewish interdiasporic encounter in both Europe and the Americas, sites that extended Old World patterns of contact between Africans and Jews in the Ottoman Empire and in the Sephardic enclaves of North Africa and the Senegambian Coast.
7 They unearth stories not only of slaves’ experiences but also of the early modern Jewish merchants and planters whose traces may be found in the sand-floored synagogues and decaying Jewish cemeteries that are scattered across the Caribbean, as well as the small but active Jewish congregations that survive in islands such as Curaçao and Jamaica. For, as Israel explains, “Of the various trading diasporas that played a significant part in the commerce and maritime links of the Atlantic world during the early modern era, the Sephardic Jewish variant…surely was the widest-ranging in its operations and the longest-lasting in its general impact, on both culture and society and on the international trade system” (“Jews” 3).
Historians have proposed the rubric “port Jew” to describe the early modern Jewish merchants who circulated across cultural, linguistic, political, and geographical borders in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
8 In a recent critique, one scholar complains that this “social types” approach is overly restrictive given “the difficulties of maintaining the legitimacy of any single, uniform type, especially within a transnational, Atlantic world context” (Monaco 139). Yet if the social type model has limitations as a historical methodology, it proves well suited to the literary texts under discussion, which tend to adopt a typological strategy in which an isolated Jewish protagonist stands in for the larger presence of Jewish trade networks in the Americas. In so doing this fiction and drama charts not only the history of the Black Atlantic but also of the Jewish Atlantic, a paradigm that has not yet gained much currency among literary critics but that is the focus of an emergent historical discussion against which I will read the literary texts.
9The conception of a Jewish Atlantic brings to light transnational networks of exchange that developed among Sephardic communities in Europe and the Americas and documents the ambivalent categorization of Jews in colonial power structures. From its inception, Jews were positioned in the colonial enterprise as “the international ‘cross-cultural brokers’ par excellence” (Sutcliffe 19), serving as navigators, translators, and traders who facilitated the conquest of the New World where they also introduced agricultural techniques that helped to develop the plantation economy. As not quite white, socially inferior members of New World colonial societies, Jews faced limitations on property rights (including slave ownership), yet at the same time benefited from the plantation economy. Robert Cohen describes the contradictory positioning of Jews in eighteenth-century Suriname as follows:
Jews, being white, undoubtedly belonged to the small apex of the societal model. They had more in common with the ruling elite than just their color. They were but a small group of the population, whose socio-economic position had little to do with their numerical strength. But in spite of their color, Jews did not enjoy full political and social acceptance in white society. As whites, they could not and did not belong to the lower strata. As Jews, they could not belong to the white apex.
(157)
These contradictions are also manifest in the quest of Jamaican Jews for enfranchisement, a struggle that Snyder shows was linked to that of free people of color as well as the broader trend toward the abolition of slavery. In Jamaica, Jews gained full citizenship only in 1831 when it was also granted to free people of color. The profound irony of this chapter of Jewish history in the Americas, then, is that the disproportionate presence of Jews in the colonial enterprise was a reflection of their own persecution and marginalization—a pattern that continued in the New World.
The emerging scholarship on the Jewish Atlantic serves as a corrective to two opposing trends. On the one hand, it continues the work begun by Eli Faber, Saul Friedman, and others of rebutting spurious charges made by the Nation of Islam regarding the extent of Jewish involvement in the slave trade, affirming the conclusions of such scholars that Jews in fact played a relatively minor role in the trade. By the same token, this scholarship also challenges apologist Jewish historiography by insisting that “Jews cannot be neatly extricated from the wider colonial projects of which they were among the agents and beneficiaries” (Sutcliffe 20). Histories of Caribbean Jewry tend to contain only limited acknowledgment of Jewish slave ownership or to treat it as anomalous. In her historical study of the Jamaican Jewish Lindo family, for example, Ranston notes that in the first two months of 1793 the slave-trading firm of Alexandre Lindo—whose surname is shared by the Jewish protagonist of Hill’s novel—“advertised the largest number of slaves for sale by any one firm among Kingston factoring enterprises, exceeding one-third of the total” (49). Yet Ranston also maintains that “while the Jews were owners and dealers in slaves, Jewish codes of conduct clearly stated that the slave must not be treated unfairly or ill-treated. One interpretation is that the Jews should never forget what it had been like for them in Egypt” (44). As Schorsch has shown, leading Jewish historians have pursued similar arguments, tending to overstate claims about Jewish manumission and to write from the basic premise that “the behavior of Jews toward blacks…was not
Jewish” (“American Jewish Historians” 120). In
Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, Schorsch presents a more nuanced picture, demonstrating that Jews participated in anti-Black discourse and in the slave economy, but not in an exceptional way, and that their limited involvement in abolitionism was a reflection in part of their own tenuous position. Schorsch dispells the myth of Jewish moral superiority, suggesting that factors of class, geography, and occupation were more determinative of behavior and attitude than was religion.
10 By the same token, he is careful not to exaggerate the extent of Jewish anti-Black sentiment, which he suggests did not have the intensity or vehemence of its Christian counterpart.
Interestingly, according to Schorsch none of the authors of eighteenth-century slave narratives references Jews in relation to slavery, a fact that he attributes to “the unremarkable nature of Jewish conduct within the slave economy” (Jews and Blacks 299). On this point postslavery writing diverges significantly from the classic slave narratives, for, as we will see, Sephardic Jews make noteworthy appearances in several works of Caribbean slavery fiction and drama. Moreover, while Schorsch’s research calls into question the view that “Jews…behaved toward their slaves like Jews when for the better, but like non-Jews when for the worse,” the belief in “an intuited higher Jewish moral sensitivity” (298) will prove central to postwar and contemporary slavery literature.
DRUMS AND COLOURS: “OUTCASTS TOGETHER IN ONE SORROW”
Before turning to Condé’s and Dabydeen’s fiction, it is worthwhile considering an early, more concentrated instance of a Caribbean narrative of slavery that introduces the figure of the port Jew and invests him with moral authority. Walcott’s 1958 play
Drums and Colours, which was the first production by his Trinidad Theatre Workshop, introduces a pattern of engagement with Jewishness that (as we saw in
chapter 1) would recur across the St. Lucian writer’s corpus. At the same time, the play also establishes a basic plot and typological strategy that would be reworked by a subsequent generation of Caribbean and postslavery writers. Commissioned for the inauguration of the short-lived West Indian Federation,
Drums and Colours covers a broad swath of Caribbean history, offering up a series of emblematic scenes including Columbus’s voyages of discovery, Raleigh’s search for El Dorado, Toussaint’s revolution in Haiti, and the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. In the Middle Passage section of the play, the figure of the Jew emerges to occupy an intermediary space between the slaves on the one hand and the slave traders and sailors on the other. Identified as a key forebear of contemporary Caribbean society and as a protector of the slave, the Jew helps to promote Walcott’s synthetic vision of Caribbean culture.
In Drums and Colours we find ourselves squarely in the territory of the port Jew, who is presented as a notable participant in the drama of empire but as a victim rather than agent of colonialism. The setting of scene 2 of Walcott’s pageant of Caribbean history is a wharf in the port city of Cadíz, where the Cristobal Colon, a ship carrying a cargo of slaves, is being readied for departure to the Indies. An unnamed Jew—described in the dramatis personae simply as “A JEW, emigrant to the New World” (116)—appears with his belongings and requisite papers seeking permission to board the ship. The Spanish setting and year (1510) are significant in determining the tone of Walcott’s portrayal of the Jew, for they immediately evoke the Iberian expulsion, thereby casting the Jew as a victim of the same forces that are responsible for the slaves’ fate. One of the slave brokers surmises that the Jew must be “fleeing the persecutions,” to which the sailor García anachronistically replies, “I thought he was a kike” (155).
While preparing to board the ship, the kindly Jew becomes aligned with Paco, a Taino boy to whom he refers as “my friend” and “my son” and of whom he anxiously inquires whether the Indies are “a place a Jew can live in peace?” (155). The Jew’s uncomprehending reaction to the sight of the slaves being loaded onto the ship underscores both his own ethical nature and the inhumanity of the trade:
JEW
What are these people?
They will be travelling with you, Excellency.
JEW (Softly)
The stranger that dwelleth with you, saith the prophet,
Shall be unto you as one born among you,
And thou shalt love him as thyself.
(157)
Upon encountering the slaves and learning of their fate, the Jew immediately sympathizes with them and embraces them as fellow exiles, for the slaves’ uprooted condition resonates with his own.
11
JEW
Because they have wrenched my people from the roots,
I am like a shattered timber cast adrift. O God,
The shores of the new lands will soon be known.
Preserve my faith, O Lord, comfort Thy people.
(167)
The Jew’s exilic lament serves as a poignant counterpoint to the sailors’ coarse exchanges, his benevolent behavior and solicitous manner throwing into relief their brutality.
The Jew’s defining action in Walcott’s play is to rescue the enslaved son of the ailing African king who dies after the sailors force him to dance and then beat him. When the sailors wrest the king’s son from him, the Jew intervenes, depleting his savings to purchase the slave boy from his Spanish captors. Not content to stand by, he feels a moral obligation to intercede and to treat the Other as his own kin: “I have to save the boy,” he insists (176). Notably, the Jew’s transformation from refugee to slave owner is not a source of tension in the play. Rather than associating the Jew with the colonial economy in which he is poised to play a role, Walcott unequivocally aligns Jews and slaves as uprooted peoples who in the aftermath of 1492 are engaged in a common struggle to survive the voyage. They share a deep sorrow of exile and join each other in the search for a new homeland:
…
Come stand by me; perhaps we shall be taken,
But we shall find roots in the new land together.
Come, move out of this danger of the battle.
I will take care of thee, as my own son,
For we are outcasts together in one sorrow.
(176)
As we learn later in the play, the Jew will be remembered by the slave’s great-great-grandson, Mano, who is the leader of a Jamaican band of Maroons. As one critic notes, the character’s full name, Emmanuel Mano, inscribes a dual Jewish/African ancestry, so that Mano represents a symbolic fusion of Jew and African (Kraus 71). By incorporating this Jewish lineage, Walcott acknowledges the European component of Caribbean genealogies while casting this legacy in a sympathetic light.
In
Drums and Colours Walcott introduces a Jewish protagonist in order to advance a pluralistic vision of Caribbean society at the moment of the creation of the West Indian Federation. The Jew’s presence is thematic of the multiethnic composition of the Caribbean more broadly, which is also signaled by the chorus of Indian, Chinese, and Afro-Caribbean carnival revelers whose commentary frames the action of the play. Echoing the political project of the West Indian Federation, the play knits together the Caribbean’s various cultural elements.
12 Accordingly,
Drums and Colours concludes by affirming the Caribbean’s creolized condition:
That web Columbus shuttled took its weave
Skein over skein to knit this various race
Through warring elements of the past compounded
To coin our brotherhood in this little place.
(292)
A running metaphor in the play is that of the weaver’s shuttle intertwining disparate histories to produce contemporary Caribbean society. The Jew’s fate and that of the African slaves with whom he makes the ocean crossing are presented as imbricated in keeping with the play’s overarching project of connecting histories. In its connective orientation,
Drums and Colours anticipates the more fully articulated examples of Caribbean literary sephardism that I examined in
chapters 1 and
2, including Walcott’s own
Tiepolo’s Hound.
At the same time as it contributes to Walcott’s synthetic vision of unity in diversity, the Sephardic motif in Drums and Colours also introduces an emphasis on ethics. As the Jew’s quasi-biblical rhetoric underscores, his function is to provide moral commentary on the actions of the European slavers. True to the pageant form, with his archaic speech and lack of a proper name, Walcott’s Jew is not an individuated character but a type who embodies an ethical principle of compassion borne out of the suffering of exile. Accordingly, instead of identifying the Jew with the colonial economy or the plantation, Walcott situates him in Europe (suggesting persecution and expulsion) and on the ship (suggesting displacement and the search for a new home). This association of the Jew with sea voyage foregrounds the anguish of displacement that Blacks and Jews share in the wake of 1492.
Walcott’s depiction of the Jew as a figure of pathos and moral authority is made possible in part by the early postwar context of Drums and Colours. It was in this period, before arguments about the uniqueness of the Holocaust had taken hold, that Rothberg suggests there was a particular openness to comparing colonial and Jewish histories of trauma. Yet, as we will see, Walcott’s presentation of Blacks and Jews as fellow sufferers and his identification of Jewishness with an ethical critique of slavery is not exclusive to the early postwar years but instead is echoed by more recent Caribbean slavery fiction.
BLACK-JEWISH ROMANCE IN MOI, TITUBA, SORCIÉRE…NOIRE DE SALEM
Thirty years after Walcott’s
Drums and Colours, Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé’s
Moi, Tituba, sorcière…noire de Salem (
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, 1986) similarly affiliates Blacks and Jews on the basis of their common experience of persecution and identifies Jewishness with a higher moral sensitivity.
Moi, Tituba is distinctive, however, in depicting a phenomenon that is currently of considerable interest to scholars of the Jewish Atlantic: Jews’ relationships with their slave concubines. Historians read between the lines of wills, manumission, and conversion records to glean hints of affective bonds between Jews and their concubines as well as to challenge apologist historiography stressing Jewish humanitarianism. In the absence of more complete archival records documenting affective and sexual relationships between slaves and their masters, however, such scholars have little choice but to engage in a form of speculative historiography. Novelists are at an advantage in this regard, for they can redress gaps in the historical record through an imaginative archaeology of the slavery past. In her fictional reimagining of the life of Tituba Indian, a Barbadian woman who was one of the first to be accused in the Salem witch trials, Condé takes full advantage of her literary license to give Tituba several love interests, the second of which is the Sephardic Jewish tobacco merchant Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo.
The presence of the port Jew in Condé’s neoslave narrative reflects her broader interest in the politics of representation and in exploring the tension between historicity and invention. For at the same time as engaging in a literary archaeology of slavery, Condé’s highly self-conscious treatment of the slave narrative genre also calls such an endeavor into question. As Caroline Rody observes, while at first glance
Moi, Tituba appears designed to satisfy the reader’s desire for historical fiction that restores the voices of the silenced, in fact the novel also undercuts this project (
The Daughter’s Return 187). Condé famously cautions the reader in an interview that is included in the novel’s English language edition not to “take
Tituba too seriously,” emphasizing “that the element of parody is very important if you wish to fully comprehend
Tituba” (212). Several critics have confessed to an initially naive encounter with the novel that overlooked the ironization of the recuperative impulse signaled by its rejection of realism, its jarring use of anachronisms and intertextuality, its exploration of performative identities, and its problematization of the relationship between author and subject. In my reading this ironic stance is signaled by Condé’s highly parodic portrayal of the port Jew. Paradoxically,
Moi, Tituba also exhibits a countervailing tendency to unself-consciously identify the Jew as a figure of moral righteousness. This doubleness in Condé’s treatment of the Jew corresponds to what Rody describes as the novel’s “ambivalent historiographic desire,” which simultaneously parodies and pursues the recuperative project (
The Daughter’s Return 188).
Moi, Tituba makes several important interventions into the slave narrative genre. Preeminently, the novel recasts the relationship of white mistress and Black slave woman by exploring the possibility of cross-cultural friendships and alliances that transcend racial boundaries. Moreover, the novel notably reinscribes the female slave as a sexually desiring subject. Finally, as critics have remarked, Condé’s retelling of the Salem witch trials decenters the United States by foregrounding its historical relationship with the Caribbean, from which Tituba is said to have originated. I argue that Condé’s introduction of the port Jew into her novel is critical to all three interventions, helping to undermine racial binaries as well as standard depictions of slave women as genderless chattel while also contributing to a hemispheric reframing of this chapter of U.S. history.
Condé’s Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo is a Sephardic Jewish merchant who lives in the port town of Salem where Tituba is imprisoned after the witch trials. Benjamin’s family’s migratory history echoes Tituba’s own transamerican journey from Barbados to Massachussetts: “Benjamin’s family had come from Portugal, where religious persecution had forced them to flee to Holland. From there, one branch of the family had tried for Brazil, Recife to be exact, but had to flee once again when the town was recaptured by the Portuguese. They then split into two clans, one settling in Curaçao, the other trying its luck in the American colonies” (123). By incorporating this potted history of Sephardic rediasporization in the Americas, including their movement via Recife into the Caribbean after the Portuguese reconquest of Brazil in 1654, Condé calls attention to the overlapping trajectories of the African and Jewish diasporas. Benjamin’s Atlantic Jewish trade network, with whom he “was in constant touch by letter and trade” (124), mirrors the transatlantic circulation of slaves such as Tituba.
FIGURE 3.1. Gravestone in the Nidhe Israel synagogue cemetery, Bridgetown, Barbados. The name on the gravestone, Benjamin C. d’Azevedo, is the same as that of Maryse Condé’s Jewish protagonist in her novel Moi, Tituba, sorcière…noire de Salem. Photo Sarah Phillips Casteel.
Benjamin’s ties to the Caribbean are indeed the initial source of his appeal for Tituba. “A merchant? Probably trading with the West Indies? With Barbados?” she wonders with excitement upon first meeting him (120). Tituba tells Benjamin her hope that she will one day “take a berth on one of your ships and set sail immediately for my Barbados” (128), and, in fact, it is Benjamin who ultimately makes possible Tituba’s return to Barbados, where he urges her to contact a Jewish business connection of his, one David da Costa. With such plot details, Condé demonstrates her awareness of Barbados’s historical status as a center of Jewish life in the early modern Atlantic world, Caribbeanizing Jewish American history just as she foregrounds the Barbadian dimension of the Salem witch trials. Barbados and New England are linked in the novel by a colonial economy that circulates both slaves such as Tituba and port Jews such as Benjamin and David da Costa across its networks; neither these characters nor the Salem witch trials themselves, Condé suggests, is entirely legible within a national framework.
In Condé’s retelling, Tituba becomes a slave as a result of her passion for John Indian, which in turn results in her relocation from Barbados to Salem where she falls victim to the hysteria of the witch trials and is imprisoned. Two thirds of the way through the novel, after a lengthy ordeal in which she suffers all matter of indignity and deprivation, relief finally comes in the unexpected form of Benjamin, a hunchback Jewish widower who brings her to his home in the town of Salem. When Benjamin buys Tituba from the prison superintendent, her chains are smashed in a vivid scene in which she is figuratively reborn; thus, in keeping with the basic script that we have been following, the Jew, who is physically, linguistically, and behaviorally marked as different from the Puritan majority, is a conduit of emancipation for the slave protagonist. Benjamin’s treatment of Tituba proves utterly distinct from that of her previous owner, the Puritan minister Samuel Parris, in whose service Tituba was brutalized and dehumanized. Benjamin shows Tituba “little acts of kindness, little services, and little signs of recognition” (124) that restore her dignity. When Benjamin and Tituba embark on a passionate love affair, she recovers her sexuality as well and begins to acculturate to her adoptive Jewish family, learning Portuguese as well as the Shema. Their romance is strained, however, by Benjamin’s refusal to grant Tituba’s request for freedom. Later, after a terrible fire set by an antisemitic mob kills all nine of Benjamin’s children, he interprets their deaths as God’s punishment for his failure to manumit Tituba. He frees Tituba and purchases her passage back to Barbados, disregarding her protests that she would rather remain with him.
Although tensions emerge in
Moi, Tituba surrounding Benjamin’s initial refusal of Tituba’s request for manumission as well as the feasibility of her conversion to Judaism, they tend to be transcended by the novel’s overriding emphasis on an alliance between Blacks and Jews as persecuted peoples.
13 Condé explains that she “combined Jews and Blacks to establish a link between the Black and the Jewish Diasporas, and to show that the Black community has not been the only one to suffer racism and prejudice in the United States” (“Return to the West Indies” 62). Accordingly, after first meeting Benjamin, Tituba prays: “May their combined powers make me fall into the hands of that merchant whose look told me that he, too, was from the land of the suffering and that in some undefinable way, we were, or we could be, on the same side” (121). Later, when Tituba confronts the mob that sets fire to Benjamin’s house, one man shouts: “‘Did we leave England for this? To see Jews and niggers multiply in our midst?’” (132). In
Moi, Tituba, Blacks and Jews are also aligned against the Puritan majority through their openness to the occult and a positive view of sexuality.
In keeping with this essentially philosemitic and identificatory reading of Jewishness, in Moi, Tituba Benjamin embodies the experience of tragedy, suffering, and exile. Moreover as in Walcott’s play, in Condé’s novel Jewishness is identified with an ethical stance. Condé depicts the Jewish slave owner as a benevolent (if imperfect) master who is eventually compelled by his ethical principles to liberate his slave. Benjamin contrasts in this regard with the tyrannical Reverend Parris as well as the rapacious Barbadian planter Darnell who had been responsible for Tituba’s mother’s death. Benjamin’s narrative is framed in religious terms of sin and redemption; his failure to grant Tituba her liberty is punished by God through the deaths of his children and the loss of his ships, for which he atones by freeing Tituba, thereby restoring his moral standing and in effect, his Jewishness itself.
While Condé echoes Walcott’s presentation in
Drums and Colours of the Jew as morally upstanding and as sharing the slave’s condition of displacement, she also pushes the theme of Black-Jewish empathy further by positing a consensual sexual relationship between the Jewish slave owner and his slave. Although this relationship may seem anachronistic to some readers, it corresponds to historical evidence indicating that Jews conformed to the conventions of the plantation societies in which they lived, including the practice of concubinage.
14 Condé’s emphasis on female sexuality and desire in
Moi, Tituba revises classic slave narratives such as that of Mary Prince, whose abolitionist editors feared that any acknowledgment of her sexual history would taint her moral character and undermine the effectiveness of her narrative as propaganda for the antislavery cause (Sharpe 134–35). Neoslave narratives such as
Moi, Tituba that foreground female sexuality a redress this lacuna and restore the slave woman’s humanity as well as agency.
15 At the same time, the novel’s celebration of female sexuality also fulfills the more specific purpose of advancing a critique of Puritan society.
The romance narrative in Moi, Tituba not only humanizes the slave protagonist but also serves as a way of reclaiming the Black female body from racializing discourses. In this regard as well, the Jew is an important presence. When Tituba initially meets Benjamin in the prison, her perception of him is overdetermined by anti-Jewish physical caricatures of the period:
One afternoon I found grace in the eyes of a man. But my God, what a man! He was small and hunchbacked, with a complexion the color of eggplant and large, ginger-colored side-whiskers that merged into a pointed beard.
Noyes whispered contemptuously: “He’s a Jew, a merchant. They say he’s very rich. He could afford a whole cargo of slaves and here he is haggling over a jailbird!”
(120)
Here, Condé’s exaggerated, parodic portrayal of the Jewish body once again aligns Black and Jew, but this time with respect to the racializing regimes that target both populations. Condé’s Benjamin, a misshapen, almost grotesque figure, is marked as physically Other in a manner that mirrors Tituba’s own experience of being made to feel “ugly, coarse, and inferior” (24). Condé’s depiction of Benjamin specifically invokes representations of the Jew’s body as devilish and diseased. His red hair conforms to medieval images of the Jew as demonic, while his limping physical movements reference a discursive tradition that associates the Jew with effeminacy.
16 Yet after Tituba meets Benjamin and learns of his connections to the Caribbean, he becomes an object of attraction rather than repulsion: “Suddenly I looked at the Jew with new eyes, as if his downright ugliness had become the most appealing of assets” (120–21). This abrupt shift signals the discursive rather than empirical character of Tituba’s original appraisal of Benjamin. Thus Condé deploys tropes of sexuality and cross-cultural romance to contest representational regimes that denigrate both Jewish and Black bodies.
Although Benjamin’s body becomes an object of sexual attraction for Tituba, he is neither virile nor potent in the manner of her other lovers. Instead, he exhibits an effeminacy that is once again in keeping with conventional views of Jewish masculinity as incomplete. Even this apparent deficiency, however, serves a positive function in advancing Condé’s critique of masculinist modes of resistance. Benjamin represents an alternative model of masculinity and intercultural relations that conforms neither to John Indian’s accommodationist minstrelsy nor to the Maroon leader Christopher’s hypermasculine racial separatism. Instead of the celebration of the heroic figure of the Maroon that typifies some Caribbean fiction, Condé pursues what has been described as a “female” mode of resistance, one that works through
métissage and establishing links with the Other.
17 As much as Tituba’s cross-cultural friendships with Hester Prynne and other white female characters upon which the critical discussion has focused, the romance narrative with Benjamin supports Condé’s hallmark rejection of essentialism and simplistic models of resistance. Condé’s strategy in
Tituba is to present interconnected histories in a manner that underscores her basic belief “that especially we as writers, we should try to produce a communication between people not based only on color but maybe on ethics, knowledge, sympathy” (“An Interview” 353).
The romance narrative’s promise of intercultural sympathy is called into question, however, in a key scene during which Tituba and Benjamin weigh the comparative misfortunes of their people. In the intimacy of their lovers’ bed, Benjamin reels off a catalog of Jewish suffering, easily winning the contest because of the greater availability of Jewish recorded memory:
“Tituba, do you know what it is to be a Jew? In 629 the Merovingians expelled us from their kindgom in France. Pope Innocent III’s Fourth Lateran Council ordered all Jews to wear a circular mark on their clothes and to cover their heads. Before leaving for the Crusades, Richard the Lion Hearted ordered a general attack against the Jews. Do you know how many of us lost our lives under the Inquisition?”
I retorted by interrupting him: “And what about us? Do you know how many of us have been bled from the coast of Africa?”
But he went on. “In 1298 the Jews of Rottingen were put to the sword and the wave of murders spread to Bavaria and Austria. In 1336 our blood was shed from the Rhine to Bohemia and Moravia.”
He outdid me very time.
(127)
In keeping with the novel’s broader strategy of introducing anachronisms to disrupt the realist conventions of the historical novel, this passage channels contemporary contestations between Jewish and African Americans that would come to a head in the years following the novel’s publication.
18The limits of intercultural sympathy are further suggested by Benjamin’s failure to impregnate Tituba.
19 Tituba’s relationship with Benjamin is on some level unproductive and is characterized by a peculiar mix of attraction and revulsion: “I must confess that when he undressed, revealing his crooked, pasty body, I couldn’t help thinking of the dark-brown muscles of John Indian. A lump would rise up in my throat and I would choke back the sobs. But that didn’t last and I pitched and heaved just as well on the sea of delight with my misshapen lover. The sweetest moments, however, were those when he talked. About us. And only about us” (127). Benjamin proves deficient in other ways as well, as for example when he naively insists that Tituba can find full acceptance as a Jew despite evidence to the contrary. Accordingly, at the height of Tituba’s assimilation to Jewish life, an encounter with another Black slave from Salem Village sows seeds of doubt. After Tituba’s return to Barbados, her identification with a Jewish perspective dissipates; while before she had embraced a Jewish worldview and way of life, she now struggles to explain to her young lover Iphigene the nature of the Jews’ conflicts with the Gentiles.
Although the alliance of Tituba and Benjamin is presented as having certain limitations, the novel nonetheless insists on the romantic—rather than exploitative—nature of their relationship. Indeed, while Benjamin repents for his behavior toward Tituba in failing to grant her her freedom, he does not atone for his sexual exploitation of his slave. Instead, concubinage is presented (albeit parodically) as licensed by Jewish tradition: “It’s God who is punishing me. Not so much because of my passion for you. The Jews have always had a strong sexual instinct. Our father Moses in his great age had erections. Deuteronomy says so: ‘Nor was his natural force abated.’ Abraham, Jacob, and David had concubines…. No, He is punishing me because I refused you the only thing you desired, your freedom!” (134). While the loss of Benjamin’s ships suggests that his participation in the colonial economy is a sin for which he must atone, the affair between Benjamin and Tituba is depicted as unequivocally consensual, reflecting the novel’s broader philosemitic tendency to align slaves and Jews as fellow victims of the Puritans.
20In this regard, a question that confronts the reader is how to interpret the blend of romance and concubinage that characterizes Benjamin’s relationship with Tituba. I would argue that the romance plot between Tituba and Benjamin is susceptible to Jenny Sharpe’s charge that depictions of consensual romances between slaves and their masters attribute choice where there was none and thereby “creat[e] a new ‘mystique of reciprocity’…for a postcolonial, multicultural era like our own” (102).
21 In her provocative reading of the figure of the concubine, Sharpe identifies the paradoxical position of slave women who “achiev[ed] a degree of mobility through sexual subjugation,” exhibiting a complex blend of agency and victimization (xx).
22 Thus the figure of the concubine, who has traditionally been read in negative terms as accommodating to the slavery system, complicates our understanding of resistance and is not easily interpreted within the frameworks through which we have conventionally approached the slavery past.
Condé accordingly calls attention to Tituba’s indeterminate status in Benjamin’s household, where she finds herself in “that odd situation of being both mistress and servant” (127). Moreover, by casting Tituba’s master as a Jew, Condé heightens the sense of ambivalence that attends the motif of concubinage as well as relations between men and women more generally in the novel. Yet Condé’s larger emphasis on Benjamin’s deeply held ethical convictions and on the consensual nature of his relationship with Tituba—which is such that he has difficulty persuading her to leave him and return to Barbados—tends to shut down questions surrounding his collusion in her oppression in favor of a romance narrative that allies the Jewish slave owner and his Black slave as joint victims of seventeenth-century Puritan society.
23 In their analysis of archival records such as slave owners’ wills, historians suggest that concubinage among Jewish men was characterized by a complex mix of coercion and consent. They note some evidence of affective bonds but also counterevidence such as records of the sale of slave offspring and an apparent resistance to recognizing these relationships in legal documents. In
Moi, Tituba, however, Condé’s reliance on the romance narrative flattens out such tensions. Favoring tropes of sympathy and reciprocity, the novel instead stages an emblematic alliance of Black and Jewish Others. By the same token, Condé’s philosemitic reading of the port Jew in
Moi, Tituba also constrains her reflections on “the Jew” as a sign. For while Condé calls attention to stereotypical images of the Jew’s body, she appears less self-conscious with regard to discursive conventions surrounding the Jew’s moral character.
Moi, Tituba’s presentation of the relationship between Jewishness and ethics can be further illuminated through a comparison with Black Canadian writer Lawrence Hill’s treatment of the port Jew in his neoslave narrative The Book of Negroes (2007). The heroine and narrator of Hill’s novel is a West African woman, Aminata Diallo, who after surviving the Middle Passage and plantation slavery in South Carolina joins the Black Loyalists in their journey from New York to Nova Scotia. Toward the middle of the novel, Aminata encounters the Sephardic indigo inspector Solomon Lindo on the plantation of her brutal master Robinson Appleby. After inadvertently saving Aminata from being raped by a slave trader, Solomon decides to purchase her, explaining: “I saw the intelligence in your eyes and I wanted to lift you up” (201). Like Condé’s Benjamin, Hill’s Solomon appears to be an enlightened and sympathetic master. While in the indigo inspector’s service, Aminata is taught to write and becomes more mobile, gaining exposure to emancipating ideas as Solomon moves her out of the lowlands of Carolina to Charleston and later to the metropolis of New York, where she finally absconds.
On one level, then,
The Book of Negroes rolls out the by now familiar script in which the Jew is a conduit toward the slave’s emancipation. Strikingly similar to
Moi, Tituba in particular,
The Book of Negroes introduces a wealthy Jewish broker figure who at some point suffers the loss of both his wife and children, purchases a female slave from an abusive Christian master, treats the slave respectfully and facilitates her rise, and finally in a
prise de conscience grants her her freedom. Yet, unlike in
Drums and Colours and
Moi, Tituba, in
The Book of Negroes the Jew quickly becomes a figure of suspicion. When Solomon discovers that Aminata is a Muslim, he tells her, “You see, we are not so very far apart at all,” noting that their “religions come from similar books” (201). Although intrigued by connections between Jews and Muslims such as the practice of circumcision, Aminata is from the first skeptical of Solomon’s overtures and repeatedly exposes the hypocrisy that underlies them. In a proleptic imaging of twentieth-century race relations, where Solomon claims affinity and moral imperative, Aminata detects utility and self-interest. Accordingly their relationship rapidly deteriorates as Solomon’s Pygmalion-style experiments with her education prove to be motivated by his desire to “collect a return on [his] investment” (204).
In The Book of Negroes Hill destabilizes the categories of perpetrator and victim by drawing attention to less obvious stakeholders in the slavery economy who become compromised by their very presence within an inhumane system. Solomon is only one of a series of complicating figures that the novel introduces, among whom are an African boy who abets Aminata’s capture at the beginning of the novel. What is striking, however, is the extent to which Hill’s Jewish protagonist comes to signal this approach. When asked by an interviewer about the character of Solomon, Hill responded: “I feel that so many people suffered as a result of their encounters with [the slave trade], not just those who were enslaved but also those who did the enslaving. I think that many of them must have felt that their humanity was diminished…. That is a much more interesting thing to explore than someone who is an outright monster, such as a Robinson Appleby, who really doesn’t have any redeeming qualities and who is simply an awful slave owner and that’s it. So I was interested in exploring Solomon Lindo. Who better to select in that role than a Jew?” (“A Conversation” 22, emphasis added).
Hill is explicit here that the symbolic function of the Jew is to highlight ambiguities that were inherent in the relationships engendered by the plantation. This complicating presence of the port Jew as both victim and beneficiary of the plantation economy becomes most acute in the trial scene. The hearing’s ostensible purpose is to ascertain whether Aminata has the right to depart for Nova Scotia with the Black Loyalists, but it also puts the Jew on trial for his role in the crimes of slavery. The scene establishes that it was not Solomon but Appleby who had attempted to prevent Aminata’s departure. It further affords the penitent Solomon the opportunity to “correct the record” regarding his motivation for arranging the sale of Aminata’s son and to “mak[e] peace with [the] past” by manumitting Aminata (309–10). Yet Aminata’s final judgment of Solomon is that although he is a “better class of man than Robinson Appleby,” he is “tainted by the very world in which he lived, and from which he too richly profited” (311), and she refuses to hear his apology.
Hill’s ambivalent presentation of the port Jew bespeaks in part the decidedly American inflection of his work. The son of an African American father and American mother, Hill is strongly influenced by the African American literary tradition. By the same token, he remains something of an outsider to this tradition by virtue of his Canadian positioning, as is illustrated by the fact that he was forced to change the title of his novel for the U.S. market, where it was judged that the use of the term “Negro” would offend readers’ sensibilities (Hill, “Why I’m Not Allowed My Book Title”). On the one hand, then, much as in Caribbean portrayals of the port Jew, Hill’s Canadian vantage point enables him to introduce the figure of the Jew into his neoslave narrative unburdened by the cultural and political weight that such a gesture would carry in the United States. Yet, at the same time, Solomon’s condescension and hypocrisy and the undertone of competitive memory that characterizes some of his exchanges with Aminata ventriloquizes contemporary contestations between Jewish and African Americans. The arc of Aminata’s and Solomon’s relationship, in which an initial sense of alliance tinged by doubt is followed by the collapse of the alliance, recriminations, and the rebuffing of efforts to “repair the damage” (229), closely parallels the trajectory of Black-Jewish relations in the twentieth-century U.S. Moreover, the novel’s portrayal of Solomon’s relationship to whiteness speaks more to a contemporary interest in the processes of “whitening” that Jews underwent in post–World War II North America than to the racial anxieties of early modern Sephardim. In the novel Solomon asserts his non-whiteness in order to affiliate himself with Aminata, in contrast to early modern Sephardim who actively sought to establish and shore up their whiteness.
24Hill’s neoslave narrative thus invokes the competitive discourse of U.S. Black-Jewish relations in a much more pronounced and sustained fashion than does Condé’s novel. Relatedly, while only hinted at in Moi, Tituba, the port Jew’s complicity in the plantation economy becomes a focal point of The Book of Negroes. For if both Condé and Hill introduce the figure of the Jew to challenge the dichotomy of Black and white that traditionally underpins the slave narrative genre, their depictions of the Jew are motivated by opposite impulses: while Condé emphasizes that Blacks were not the only victims of colonial racism, Hill’s aim is to explore the responsibility borne by those historical actors who facilitated the workings of the machinery of slavery without being its primary operators. What Condé’s and Hill’s portrayals of the port Jew have in common, however, is an unself-conscious, highly conventional identification of Jewishness with a moral posture that is alternately upheld or betrayed by their Jewish protagonists.
THE INVENTED JEW IN A HARLOT’S PROGRESS
Among the central themes of both Condé’s
Moi, Tituba and Hill’s
The Book of Negroes are the discursive regimes that contributed to the oppression of slaves and the need to contest such regimes, as Hill’s heroine does when she refuses to allow the abolitionists to write her life story for her. Just as Condé’s novel redirects the neoslave narrative from an emphasis on protest to an interest in the politics of representation, Hill repeatedly draws attention to the limitations of the historical archive as a representation of the slavery past by illustrating how the language employed in various kinds of registries effaces the slaves’ subjectivity. Notably, however, Hill does not extend this critique to include representations of the Jew. Instead, he presents Solomon as colluding in a discursive violence that deprives Aminata of her identity. Although Solomon is shown to have suffered some material forms of exclusion in Charleston society, he is not depicted as the target of discursive oppression, only as its agent.
25 The Book of Negroes is thus acutely sensitive to the representational regimes of slavery but largely unself-conscious in its isolated depiction of the Jew as a figure of moral compromise. For her part, although Condé’s more parodic treatment draws attention to antisemitic discourses surrounding the Jew’s body, as we have seen, she preserves the imaginative tradition of investing the Jew with ethical value.
In this respect, both novels stand in contrast to Guyanese British author David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999). Like The Book of Negroes, A Harlot’s Progress introduces a morally ambiguous Jewish protagonist as part of a larger schema in which the ethical status of all players in the slavery economy is cast into doubt. And, like Moi, Tituba, Dabydeen’s more formally experimental interpretation of the neoslave narrative foregrounds the representational instability and invented quality of “the Jew” as a sign. Whereas both Condé and Dabydeen approach the slave narrative genre with a postmodern playfulness that thematizes and unmoors its organizing conventions, however, the destabilizing power of the Jew with respect to these conventions becomes more sharply apparent in Dabydeen’s novel, which disassociates Jewishness from ethics.
Dabydeen’s intricately plotted and often bewildering postmodern slavery novel produces a vertiginous reading experience in which the reader encounters a proliferation of contradictory representations that ultimately expose the discursive status of the slave narrative genre. Like
Moi, Tituba and
The Book of Negroes,
A Harlot’s Progress gives significant attention to the discursive regimes and historiographic traditions that shaped the perception of Blacks and contributed to their enslavement and dehumanization.
26 A Harlot’s Progress takes this critique still further, however, frustrating the reader’s desire to locate a stable truth in the narrative by introducing multiple conflicting accounts of the events that it relates. Moreover, in
A Harlot’s Progress the very idea of character becomes problematized so that instead of revealing the true nature and humanity of the slave, the protagonist Mungo—who is variously named Noah and Perseus at different points in the novel and who can remember neither his original name nor his geographical origin—emerges not as an individuated character but as a compilation of signs. If Condé’s novel simultaneously pursues and undermines a literary archaeology of the slavery past, Dabydeen dispenses more resolutely with the project of historical reclamation as well as with the conventions of realism. His slavery fiction uncovers, not an authentic slave voice that has been lost from the archive, but rather the inescapably contradictory and obfuscating nature of the archive itself. Moreover, Dabydeen applies his discursive critique not only to the figure of the slave but also to that of the Jew. His antimimetic emphasis on representational schemes is notably supported in the novel by the presence of the Jewish quack doctor Sampson Gideon, a sympathetic but also highly performative figure who exhibits what Cheyette identifies as the “slipperiness and indeterminacy of ‘the Jew’” (
Constructions of “the Jew” 11).
As is suggested by the novel’s title, which alludes to Hogarth’s eponymous 1732 series of engravings, Dabydeen’s fictional commentary on the codes of signification that regulated depictions of slaves engages not only textual traditions but also visual ones. Each section of the novel opens with a detail from Hogarth’s
A Harlot’s Progress that foregrounds a particular figure or visual element; at the same time, the novel also incorporates references to Joshua Reynolds and other eighteenth-century artists who depicted Black slaves as well as a host of historical and literary allusions.
A Harlot’s Progress’ primary intertext, however, is Hogarth’s series, various aspects of which the novel reworks. Among these is the encounter of the Jewish merchant and the Black slave boy depicted in plate 2 of Hogarth’s
A Harlot’s Progress, a scene that is restaged in book 7 of Dabydeen’s novel as well as in his more recent work of slavery fiction
Johnson’s Dictionary (2013).
27 In plate 2 of Hogarth’s original series, the harlot Moll has become the mistress of a Jewish merchant, whom she is deceiving with a secret lover who escapes in the background of the engraving. Moll is situated in between the figure of the cuckolded Jewish merchant and a turbanned slave boy. The Jew and the slave boy, who stare at each other across a table and tea service that is in the midst of being overturned, wear matching expressions of surprise that are echoed in the monkey’s visage in the bottom left corner of the engraving. The Jew’s presence in Dabydeen’s novel thus is inspired by Hogarth’s print, which presents the Jew as an incompletely anglicized figure who is associated with social disorder, mimicry of Englishness, and a sexual appetite for Christian girls.
FIGURE 3.2. William Hogarth, A Harlot’s Progress, plate 2 (1732). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection.
Dabydeen’s
A Harlot’s Progress takes up both the figure of the slave boy and that of the Jewish merchant, reinterpreting them in a manner that highlights the discursive traditions that govern Hogarth’s caricatures. In the novel, the slave boy from Hogarth’s engraving becomes the protagonist Mungo, the author of an eighteenth-century slave narrative who narrates the story of his enslavement to the abolitionist Thomas Pringle (a character based on the editor of Mary Prince’s narrative). Meanwhile, Hogarth’s Jewish merchant becomes Sampson Gideon, a name that Dabydeen borrows from the prominent eighteenth-century Sephardic English banker who may have inspired Hogarth’s caricature. The historical Sampson Gideon was the son of Rowland Gideon (originally Abundiente), a West India merchant of Portuguese descent who lived, in classic port Jew fashion, in Barbados, Boston, Nevis, and London. In Dabydeen’s rendering, Sampson is not a financier but a quack doctor who encounters Mungo at the house of his master Lord Montague where he is tending the ailing Lady Montague, to whom he administers his “Amazing Eastern Cordial” (227). Before Sampson’s relatively late arrival in the novel, however, we meet the figure of the Jew through the anti-Jewish invective of the washerwoman Betty and the abolitionist Pringle.
From the outset, Dabydeen’s Jew is a highly unstable figure who is subject to invention and caricature, as is signaled by Betty’s extreme unreliability as a narrator as well as Pringle’s distortive editorial presence. When Mungo first arrives in England in part 5 of the novel, Betty is entrusted by Captain Thistlewood with the task of fattening him up for the slave auction. While in her care, Mungo becomes the audience for Betty’s hysterical stories about a foreign Jew whom she claims is responsible for the death of her friend Mary (Hogarth’s Moll Hackabout). Betty’s orientalist narrative reproduces the anti-Jewish fantasy of Hogarth’s original engraving, depicting the Jew as decadent figure who seduces the innocent country girl Mary. Betty begs Mary not to “trust Jews, they’d come at night and try to steal the very stone they rolled at our Lord’s tomb to sell it at some other funeral. O let the Jews do what they want with the rich, rob them blind and wreck their lives, but not my Mary’s!” (129). Betty’s Jew conforms to Hogarth’s depiction of the Jewish merchant as preying on young Christian girls: “Mary was pretty. Pretty curled blonde locks. Pretty eyes. The ideal servant girl to wait upon a Master. The Jew sensed her youth. Instantly he calculated what it would take to get her” (145). The truth value of Betty’s narrative, however, is cast into doubt when she confesses that Mary was hanged after Betty falsely accused her of stealing some soap. This revelation is followed by a proliferation of other possible accounts of what may have taken place so that ultimately it becomes unclear whether Mary in fact ever existed.
28A second and equally questionable source of images of the Jew is the abolitionist Thomas Pringle, whose paranoid anti-Jewish fantasies are interwoven with Betty’s in part 5 of the novel. Pringle’s problematic role as editor and mediator of Mungo’s slave narrative is illustrated in part through his bigotry toward Jews, whom he considers a threat to the moral health of the nation. In Pringle’s view the Jews’ morally degrading presence is a punishment for England’s sin of slavery.
29 He relates Betty’s theft and libel to the larger contaminating presence of the Jew: “The ruination they cause by speculation in stock, or in creating false Bubble schemes, is a grander version of Betty’s crime. They’re all thieves together, great and small, their joint actions eroding the foundation of the country. True, the Jew is worse, his money-making being part of a conspiracy with Papists and Jacobites to create chaos…The Jew will profit from England’s demise” (143). As editor of Mungo’s narrative, Pringle omits some details of the story while inventing others. At one point he concocts a vengeful Jew to insert into the slave narrative: “Mr Pringle will invent a Jew who wears a skull-cap over his black hair, like a moon fastened in spiteful clouds. Just before Mungo is to board the ship the Jew comes up to Captain Thistlewood and offers money for him.” Thistlewood refuses, humiliating the Jew, “who glares at Mungo and in his mind promises to gain revenge against the boy for his humiliation—the greatest shame suffered by a Jew being failure to seal a contract with the finality of the round stone sealing Jesus’s tomb” (124). Thus in
A Harlot’s Progress misrepresentations of Jewishness becomes linked to the abolitionist’s interfering editorial presence.
30When an actual Jew finally appears in the novel in the form of the quack doctor Sampson Gideon, Dabydeen’s staging of the scene foregrounds the disparity between this real Jew and invented images of “the Jew” promoted by the larger society. In a passage that reinterprets the surprised expressions worn by Hogarth’s Jew and slaveboy and the exchange of gazes between the two figures, Mungo (here called Perseus) answers the Montagues’ door to Sampson. Each is profoundly startled by what he encounters in the other:
Perseus opens the door expecting to find a crooked-back and bearded Jew, hook-nosed, darkly complexioned, his hands worn by a lifetime of counting money, like one of the Magi in Galdi’s Adoration that came in the coach with Perseus…Instead, he is confronted by a fresh-faced man, dark-haired, handsome, in his mid-twenties. He beholds Perseus with momentary alarm, as if the door had opened to an inevitable fate. Recovering his composure, he attempts a benign smile and announces himself modestly as Mr Sampson Gideon. He waits politely for Perseus to stop gaping.
(227)
Mungo’s surprise stems from the fact that he himself has absorbed stereotypical images of the Jew from Pringle and Betty, who in an earlier passage had forecasted Sampson’s arrival: “So the Jew came. Dark, fine-boned, exotic in manner. He spoke with a musical foreign lilt” (145).
Upon meeting one another, Mungo and Sampson immediately feel a sense of a kinship, so much so that when Sampson is expelled from the Montagues’ house, he invites Mungo to leave with him. Mungo hesitates, but later follows Sampson to London, where the Jewish doctor shelters him. Although there is a strong rapport between Mungo and Sampson, their camaraderie is diminished somewhat by Mungo’s discovery that in London Sampson is running an asylum for diseased harlots whom he treats by administering poison. Mungo works as Sampson’s assistant in the asylum before Sampson finally departs at Mungo’s urging to serve as a doctor on a slave ship, leaving behind money with which Mungo is to purchase his freedom from the Montagues. Once again, then, we encounter the familiar plot in which the Jew enables the slave’s emancipation and escape from oppressive circumstances.
Through the figure of Sampson Gideon, Dabydeen references an eighteenth-century English discourse about Jews as sexually and morally corrupt. Sampson parodically inhabits many of the traits identified with Jewishness in the English popular imagination: his obscene ministrations to Lady Montague evoke the association of the Jew with a perverted sexuality, while the Jew’s connection to disease and criminality is suggested by Sampson’s work with the syphilitic prostitutes.
31 The mysterious stench that pervades the Montagues’ home during and after her illness also recalls the conventional trope of the Jew’s smell. As this section of the novel continues, Sampson’s ministrations become increasingly invasive and perverted, his degenerate and tainting presence symbolized by the stain left on the carpet by the feces that he has collected from Lady Montague’s body. Both Sampson and Mungo are viewed by Lady Montague as foreign parasites on the body of England: “The Jew and the Negro who attend to her are two who have emerged from the fractures; strange dirty creatures spawned by the passage of time; creatures that thrive in the creases between floorboards, in nooks and chinks, in the cracks that cheapen the richest porcelain. They witness her decay, they feed on her decay, but she will finally withstand their designs, out of inherited strength” (231). Yet Dabydeen also distances Sampson from the archetype of the lecherous, wealthy Jewish merchant by altering his profession to that of a doctor (thereby conflating Hogarth’s Jewish merchant with the quack doctors who attempt to cure Moll in plate 5) and by revising Hogarth’s depiction of Moll as a concubine of the Jew.
32But why give so much attention to constructions of the Jew in a novel whose principal project is to critique the textual and visual portrayal of slaves? I would suggest that Dabydeen indexes these images of the Jew, and especially the view of the Jew as a chameleonic performer of other identities, in order to call attention to the constructedness and performativity of the slave narrator himself. In
A Harlot’s Progress Sampson contributes to the theme of the invention of the Other and foregrounds the unreliability of such constructions; the Jew is an invented figure just as the slave is. This narrative function of the Jew is underscored by the fact that he is a quack doctor, a plot detail that builds on and reinterprets the association between Jews and performativity that we find in Hogarth’s original engraving. In his academic study
Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (1985), Dabydeen notes that plate 2 “is deeply concerned with the way people cover over their true natures, play roles, adopt disguises, and imitate the fashions and the behaviour of their aristocratic superiors, both black and monkey are present as emblems of mimicry” (128–29).
33 In a second academic work, Dabydeen observes that the mask lying on the dressing table in the bottom left corner of plate 2 further signals the theme of mimicry, as does the Jew himself, whose metropolitan clothes and clean-shaven face attest to his acculturation to English society, but whose ill-fitting wig suggests an imperfect performance of Englishness (
Hogarth, Walpole 110–11). As Heidi Kaufman explains, Hogarth’s depiction of the Jew as a poor mimic of Englishness speaks to contemporary anxieties surrounding not only Jewish assimilation and economic power but also “the racial implications of extending citizenship rights to Jewish immigrants” (12–13).
Revisiting Hogarth’s series, Dabydeen’s reinterpretation of the theme of the Jew’s performativity advances a larger commentary on the impossibility of gleaning a stable truth from representations of figures such as
the slave and
the Jew—representations that are overdetermined by racialist and colonialist discourses about England’s internal and external Others. The slave narrative genre as depicted by Dabydeen purports to be an authentic representation of its slave author, but instead supplies a highly constructed tale carefully tailored to appeal to the tastes of its abolitionist audience. Just as Sampson is a quack doctor who trades in invention and dissimulation, Mungo manipulates and deceives his readers: “[Sampson] makes his cures like I make my book but of what use? My book lies. The whores die” (257). Thus, while Hogarth’s presentation of the Jew as an unsuccessful mimic of Englishness engaged eighteenth-century debates about Jewish naturalization, Dabydeen’s reinterpretation of the Jew’s performativity helps to expose from a postcolonial perspective the dominant textual and visual codes that govern representations of the slave.
What Dabydeen’s rereading of Hogarth’s engraving ultimately highlights is the extent to which images of the Jew are linked to other racializing discourses. In Hogarth’s engraving the Black slave boy, like Moll, is a victim of the Jew’s corrupting presence.
34 By contrast, in his novel Dabydeen significantly rewrites the relationship of Black and Jew by aligning them as common targets of English discourse about its racialized Others. The emphasis on discursive regimes in Dabydeen’s
A Harlot’s Progress correlates Blacks and Jews as fellow victims of empire; in Dabydeen’s rendering, much as in Condé’s
Moi, Tituba, Jews are subject to pictorial and narrative misrepresentation just as Blacks are. Notably, Dabydeen locates his Jewish protagonist in England rather than in a colonial setting in which the Jew’s ambivalent role as both agent and victim of empire would be more apparent. At the end of the narrative, Sampson abandons his practice in London to serve as a doctor on a slave ship, a profession that in Hill’s novel is viewed as complicitous in the slave trade but one that in
A Harlot’s Progress is couched in terms of Christian self-sacrifice. Referencing the notorious case of the captain of the
Zong who was tried for throwing 132 living slaves overboard in 1781, the novel posits that the ship’s Jewish doctor is a victim of forcible drowning alongside the slaves.
35Although Dabydeen tends to align Blacks and Jews as fellow victims, his portrayal of the Jew is not without tension. First appearing in the guise of a quack doctor as a trickster figure who operates through deception, Sampson later emerges as a murderer who treats the prostitutes under his care by poisoning them. At the same time, he is a Christlike figure who refuses his fee for treating Lady Montague and abandons his interest in financial profit, repenting of his “trickery” with the cordial by devoting himself to the care of prostitutes and later slaves (259). Mungo himself entertains some doubts about the Jewish doctor:
Why I seek out the Jew? I can’t tell. Is it that he once say to me, “Come follow me”? Is it that from the time I land in England all I hear is curse, but after a while I too believe: vile Jew, rich Jew, rob—and—cheat Jew, Jew carpenter who shave and plane the wood into Christ’s Cross, then charge extra for the nails? Everybody scorn him, is that why I go to meet him, to find a soulmate, two tribes in the same craft and storm that bring us to the same soil, soiling? All I think I am sure of is that the very time I set eyes on him the scales drop, I seem to know right away that I will become his slave.
(250–51)
The possibility of a Black-Jewish alliance is undermined at the end of this passage by Mungo’s assumption that he is destined to become Sampson’s slave. And yet Mungo has nowhere else to go: “I am uncertain of his character, but there is no alternative to slavery in the West Indies, my certain fate by Lord Montague’s determination. My plan is to make some compact and alliance with him, the only alien I am familiar with in the realm, the only address known to me” (253).
Arriving in London, Mungo is surprised to find Sampson living in extremely humble conditions in a stable, and he comes to the conclusion that Sampson is no charlatan: “The truth is that he gave up all his worldly ambition so as to wait upon the most despised of women” (259). Sampson’s relationship with Mungo is certainly benevolent; Mungo notes that “he looks upon me not as a foreigner but as a fellow man” (261). Ultimately, however, unlike Condé or Hill, Dabydeen is less interested in the Jew’s ethical status than he is in discursive traditions that portray the Jew as criminal, corrupt, and duplicitous and in the fundamentally deceptive character of representation itself.
36 Indeed, the very possibility of passing ethical judgments is forestalled in the novel by the indeterminacy of the narrative and Dabydeen’s insistence on the necessary incompleteness of the tale.
37 Dabydeen is not so much concerned, then, with implicating the Jew in the crime of slavery or with ethical questions in their conventional form as he is with questions of representation in a world in which “truth itself was hostage to the designs of stockjobbers, another commodity changing hands at a price” (199).
In Condé’s and Dabydeen’s neoslave narratives, the predominantly identificatory and sympathetic presentations of port Jews resist dichotomous formulations by presenting Black and Jewish histories as intersecting, porous, and overlapping. By introducing the figure of the port Jew, these novels confound racial binaries and deepen the neoslave narrative’s engagement with the politics of representation, thereby reinvigorating the genre. At the same time, the narrative function to which these slavery novels consign their Jewish protagonists introduces certain tensions into this revisionary project.
In her discussion of Dickens’s depiction of Fagin in
Oliver Twist, Juliet Steyn observes that “
Jew in mid-nineteenth century Britain is a category available and ripe for exploitation…Both Dickens and [his illustrator] Cruikshank called upon a rich repertoire of signs, attributes, and references through which to identify Fagin and represent and typify the Jew. Physiognomy and other external signs such as clothes, language, and social and hygienic codes (odor) were used to mean
Jew” (45–46). It is upon this same semiotic tradition that the slavery fiction and drama considered in this chapter draws. In the case of Condé and Dabydeen, they do so deliberately and parodically. Instead of being a fully fledged character, Condé’s Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo, with his misshapen physique and pointed red beard, is the embodiment of the demonic Jew. Condé playfully converts Benjamin’s negative Jewish physical features into attributes in order to call attention to the discursive character of Tituba’s own purported ugliness. Where Condé appears less self-reflexive is in associating Benjamin with an ethical principle that serves to expose the inhumanity of the Christian plantocracy and further the slave protagonist’s emancipation. Her persistent association of Jewishness with a higher moral sensibility—an association that we find in Walcott’s
Drums and Colours and Hill’s
The Book of Negroes as well—evinces a philosemitism that exerts its own constraints on the narrative while echoing apologist historiography of the Jewish Atlantic.
Like Moi, Tituba, Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress aligns Blacks and Jews as fellow victims of the discursive regimes of empire, indexing images of both the slave and the Jew in order to highlight the invented status of these figures. Dabydeen presents us with a compendium of conflicting visual and textual signs that defy our desire to locate the slave’s—or the Jew’s—authentic truth. What Dabydeen’s novel reveals is not character per se but rather the dominant textual and visual structures of signification through which England’s anxieties about itself are projected onto its internal and external Others. In A Harlot’s Progress the highly performative figure of “the Jew” becomes emblematic of the discursive rather than mimetic character of slave narratives and the profound unreliability of representations of the Other.
Condé and especially Dabydeen thus demonstrate how the neoslave narrative’s analysis of the representational regimes of slavery can be enriched through an engagement with historical constructions of Jewish as well as Black Others. Yet, as a result of this strategy, their isolated presentations of the figure of the Jew remain firmly within the bounds of well-established discourses about Jewishness, referencing a series of highly conventional images of Jews as persecuted and wandering, wealthy and materialistic, sexually voracious and perverted, duplicitous and criminal. Indeed, as we have seen, their Jewish protagonists are essentially compilations of these stereotypes. Moreover, the purpose of the emblematic Jewish figures that they incorporate is to advance the slavery plot rather than to occasion an investigation of Jewish subjectivity. The peculiarity of these works of slavery literature, then, is that some of the most deeply familiar and reductive tropes about Jewishness are what enable their innovative reconfigurations of the slave narrative genre.