The perspective this book provides on the genesis of American racial
history down to about 1700 may turn out to be both longer and wider
than the reader anticipates. In the end it is centered upon the future
United States, but its point of departure is in the Mediterranean more
than a hundred years before the New World was discovered, and it in-
cludes a good look at the Portuguese and Spanish conquests along the
African coast and in America, with even a side glance at the French
overseas adventures, before falling at last upon the fledgling English
colonies. The ethnic history is multiple, taking in Blacks, Indians, Jews,
and the white Christian dominators themselves, as well as some others,
because it is the book’s underlying premise that the questions it deals
with can best be understood as elements in a broad social drama in which
all these groups come together as the principals. But the drama also
ranges through a perhaps startling variety of subject matters, including
aspects of the history of geographical thought and of religion in the age
of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The various strands keep coming
together in the end, however, and though I hope the reader’s patience
may each time be appeased along the way by the interest each of them
yields for its own sake, their final significance will always prove to be in
the formation of the story as a whole. The book is a complex fabric, but
it is a unified work that should, in its entirety, yield some fresh insights
into problems of race relations and ethnic identity that are still with us
today.
Although the text should largely account for itself, some additional
explanation may be in order here for my having brought in the Jew as
one of the protagonists in a racial history. It will be asked: are the Jews
a race? As a preliminary reply, I must point out that to this day we do
not even know precisely what is meant by the word race, which came
into being only in the era taken in by this book. Indeed, it is one of the
book’s aims to show that, essentially, a race is whatever a wide consensus
takes to be such in a given time and place. In the nineteenth century, the
Jews often were referred to as a “race” by Jew and gentile alike, with no
unfavorable connotation intended. To be sure, the word was sometimes
so widely applied as to be all but meaningless. But at other times it has
narrowed down to a deadly precision, and in two of the most notorious
of such instances — in Nazi Germany, and in Spain and Portugal during
the era that concerns us — the Jews have been victims of a violent and
destructive racism. The question about the Jews as a race is therefore
answerable only in terms of the most qualified historical relativism:
occasionally people have thought them such. But the point, in connection
with this book, is that just as any study dealing with racism in the
twentieth century would have to examine the case of the Jews in Ger-
many among others, so also must this study take in the case of the Jews
and the converses in Spain and Portugal.
This having been said, however, it must be added that the role played
by the Jew in this book is not just diat of one among several actors in a
comparative racial history. For though he disappears from view for long
stretches, he is in a sense the main protagonist. This is so not on any
grounds of ethnic prejudice or favoritism, but out of artistic and philo-
sophical necessity. I have attempted in this work to penetrate beneath the
surfaces of data upon which so many learned works settle, and to achieve
an understanding that I will dare to call poetic. There is a constant effort
here to perceive realities as much as possible from within, an effort that
is facilitated, of course, whenever I can make use of literary records left
by the actors themselves. Now, in the case of two of our main characters
— the Black and the Indian 0 — such firsthand written material does not
really exist from this period. We are forced, for the most part, to adopt
the viewpoint of the oppressive but highly articulate white man. But this
does not mean we are entirely lacking in literary testimony from the view-
* The exception provided by the accounts written in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries by Mexican Indian scribes and historians under Spanish tutelage, discussed
in Chapter 16, is much too qualified by the Spanish influence to alter the point being
made here.
As a European, he has left records as rich as those of the general culture he
represents — indeed, he has done more, for we shall find him taking a central
place among the bearers of a vision out of which the American experience first
emerged. But as an outcast, he has given a voice to the otherwise silent
sufferers from racial oppression in that epoch. Moreover — what is per-
haps the most important point — he represents the sole vehicle whereby
the author, a Jew himself, can legitimately place his own intuition into
the midst of the tilings described here.
A few words should be said on technical matters. Many writers using
English sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are fond of
reproducing quotations in their original spelling, but I have not shared
in this inclination. There is no point to it here, either on grounds of
quaintness, which would merely be distracting, or of a scholarly exacti-
tude that would be appropriate to a source book, which this is not. ( It is
appropriate to reference notes, however, and in those I have used the
original spelling. ) But, on the other hand, I have tried to be pedantic on a
less conventional issue. The nuances of this book have made it seem
necessary to me that I capitalize the word Black, contrary to the prevail-
ing usage, when it refers to a specific people, and to put it in lowercase
when I am referring to persons of that color no matter what their origin
or habitat. In other words, I have written it as “Black” whenever it has
seemed to me an exact synonym for what is meant by the less current
term “Negro.” As a matter of fact, there are numerous places where, to
avoid ambiguity, or for other reasons — such as the fact that it was the
very term being used by the authors discussed in some passages — I have
used the latter word. Some readers may find it objectionable, but it was,
after all, legitimate for many years, and it remains a difficult word to
avoid in a history of this sort.
Author: Ronald Sanders
Format: PDF
Year: 1977
Pages: 211
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