The Ethiopian Jewish scholar Ephraim Isaac's "Genesis, Judaism and 'the Sons of Ham' " appeared in the journal Slavery and Abolition (May 1980). Three years had passed before I realize that I had oversimplified in a misleading way Talmudic racial attitudes.
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But my reading at the time of Talmudic translations and secondary discussions in English led me to emphasize the significance of a few post-biblical folkloric motifs unfavorable to Ham, including one suggesting he was smitten in the skin or "blackened in his face as a punishment" for the sin of sexual depravity on the Ark. Noah's other son, Cush-identified as the father of African peoples-is also not cursed. Instead, Noah's curse falls on Ham's son, Canaan, identified as the progenitor of the people later conquered by the Israelites. Ham-who had already been blessed-is not cursed. My fateful generalization was that "there is no denying that the Babylonian Talmud was the first source to read Negrophobic content" into the Bible story of the disrespectful behavior of Noah's son, Ham, and the resulting curse (Genesis 9:18). I concluded, on balance, that biblical attitudes were favorable to the beauty and valor of dark-skinned peoples, some of whom fought for or in alliance with Jews. I began a chapter with a long discussion of the ancient Jewish kingdoms, with Egypt and Sudan extending into East Africa. Though never published as a book, the dissertation had significant influence-to the good, I like to think-on the study of what Ben Halpern called "the classic American minorities." Yet it also included one page among seven hundred that has caused me considerable embarrassment. At UCLA, my doctoral dissertation on Black-Jewish relations grew out of undergraduate gestation in those days when "Negro" was a polite term for African American.
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