Race and the Enlightenment

Discussion

Loren Goldner:

1.

"It is not often recognized that, prior to the 17th and 18th centuries, the period which Western history calls the Enlightenment, the concept of race did not exist.

It is still less often recognized that the origin of the concept of race, in the last quarter of the 17th century, in very specific social circumstances, was preceded by centuries of a very different vision of Africans 2 and New World Indians, which had to be eradicated before the concept of race could be invented, expressing a new social practice in new social relations.

In the current climate, in which the Enlightenment is under attack from many specious viewpoints, it is important to make it clear from the outset that the thesis of this article is emphatically not that the Enlightenment was "racist", still less that it has validity only for "white European males". It is rather that the concept of race was not accidentally born simultaneously with the Enlightenment, and that the Enlightenment's "ontology", rooted in the new science of the 17th century, created a vision of human beings in nature which inadvertently provided weapons to a new race-based ideology which would have been impossible without the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment, Europeans generally divided the known world between Christians, Jews, Moslems and "heathens"3; beginning around the 1670's, they began to speak of race, and color-coded hierarchies of races."

2.

"It is an anachronistic mistake to see Greek, Roman, Moslem or Chinese attitudes toward the "Other" in the ancient and medieval periods as "racist". For the ancient Greeks, a "barbarian" was someone who did not participate in a polis; the Romans, also, throughout an enormous empire, thought of themselves as citizens of a city, and saw the "Other" in those who were not (J.A. Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism, UNC Pr. 1982, p. 134) . F.M Snowden's Blacks in Anquity, Cambridge 1970, Ch. VIII, documents the absence of "color prejudice" among Greeks and Romans. A more recent and powerful demonstration that the idea of race is a modern invention is I. Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, 1996). "In Greece and Rome, the organizing idea of race was absent so long as the political idea flourished to reconcile the volatile blood relations (kinship)...with the wider demands of the community." (p. 14)

(https://libcom.org/history/race-enlightenment-part-i-anti-semitism-white-supremacy-1492-1676)

Before the Enligthenment

Loren Goldner:

""Race", as blood consciousness, an idea unknown to antiquity and to the Middle Ages 13, first appeared in 15th century anti-Semitism in Spain as a new phenomenon, but still entangled in the old "cosmology" of Christian, Jew, Moslem and heathen14; it then migrated to the New World in the Spanish subjugation of the ("heathen') native American population (and in the further actions of the Inquistion against Jews, both in Spain and the New World). 150 years later, it re-migrated to the newly-emergent British empire, which was picking up the pieces of the decline of Spanish power, (in part by posing as a humane alternative to the widely-believed (and largely true) "black legend" of Spanish cruelty). In the second half of the 17th century, with the defeat (as indicated) of the radical wing of the English Revolution, the triumph of the scientific revolution (above all in Newton, and theorized into a politics by Hobbes), the burgeoning British slave trade, and the revolution of 1688, this evolution culminated in the new idea of race. The collapse of the idea of Adam15, the common ancestor of all human beings, was an unintended side effect of the Enlightenment critique of religion, which was aimed first of all at the social power of the Church and, after the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, at religion generally. But it was also the necessary "epistemological" prelude to the appearance, in the last quarter of the 17th century, of a color coded hierarchy of races. Locke drove out Habakkuk, as Marx said, and Hobbes drove out Shem, Ham and Japhet.16

In the waning phase of more than 200 years of Anglo-American dominance of world capitalism, it is easy to forget that England was a relative latecomer in the 500 years of Western hegemony, and the significance of that latecomer status for ideology. The impulse, conditioned by the Anglo-French Enlightenment, to overlook the entwining of the Enlightenment and racism, is part of the same impulse that downplays the significance of pre-Enlightenment developments in Spain in shaping the modern world.

The initial European experience of proto-racism17 was the appearance of high medieval anti-Semitism, where it had largely receded during the lower Middle Ages (6th-11th centuries). England expelled its Jews in 1290; France did the same in 1305, and Spain, where Jews had prospered for centuries under both Moslem and Christian rule, expelled them in 1492 18. It is interesting to note that this new19 anti-Semitism came into existence at the time of incipient national consciousness20 and also on the eve21 of the feudal breakdown crisis; the accelerating transformation of "Christian kingdoms" into nations eroded the older, tolerated citizenship of Jews (and, in Spain, also Moslems) based on religious identification, often linked to relative self-administration within the confines of the ghetto. In the English, French and Spanish22 cases, (the three major European countries which consolidated national monarchies by the late 15th century, and developed absolutisms in the 16th and 17th centuries) the expulsion of the Jews was also often a pretext for the confiscation of wealth by the heavily-indebted monarchies (often indebted to Jewish money-lenders, as Christians were at least theoretically proscribed from charging interest). In deeply-fragmented Germany and Italy, on the other hand, where early modern national unification was blocked by the medieval legacy of the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy, Jewish expulsion was a local and sporadic phenomenon, and Italy received many Jews expelled from Spain. Thus the correlation between anti-Semitism and the new national consciousness (the latter , like race itself, being unknown in the ancient or medieval worlds23) is one compelling reason to see the appearance of racism as a by-product of early modern developments.24

In 15th century Spain, anti-Semitism moved from a late-medieval "communal" phenomenon to a modern ideology of blood consciousness, and it is here that the difference between the one and the other is clearest. But Spain (which actually was still divided between the two major kingdoms of Aragon and Castile until 1469) was preoccupied for centuries with the crusade to reconquer the Iberian peninsula from the Moslems, a crusade which was only completed with the fall of Granada in 1492. The Inquisition began its activities in Spain in 1478, and its targets were first of all Jews and suspected "marranos", or Jews converted to "new Christians" and engaged in clandestine practice of the old ways.

The foundations of the Spanish empire in the New World were laid under the so-called Catholic kings, Ferdinand and Isabel, the sponsors of Columbus. But in 1519, through dynastic marriage, the already powerful Spanish empire became the administrative centre of the largest Western empire since Rome, the Holy Roman Empire of the Habsburg Charles V. To the already considerable Spanish lands were added the Habsburg domains in central Europe, and the Netherlands, and after 1527 two-thirds of Italy fell under Spanish dominion. The Habsburg world empire was the hegemon of European politics, involving itself directly in the internal affairs of all countries (such as France, England, and Scotland) it did not directly control. With the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon, (aunt of Charles V), it appeared briefly that England as well might be integrated by dynastic alliances into the Habsburg sphere. With the marriage of Philip II to Mary Tudor, English queen from 1553 to 1558, this appeared even more likely, expressed first of all in an exponential increase in the persecution of Protestants.

European power politics, including politics in the New World, for more than 150 years after 1492 revolved around the rivalry between Spain and France, a rivalry ultimately won by France by the middle of the 17th century. This history can hardly be sketched here, but it must be kept in mind that England, in 1492 and for a long time thereafter, was a second-tier power undergoing the social transformation that culminated, after 1688, in the overthrow of absolutism, and did not begin serious empire building until the 1620's, and really not until the 1650's, when the revolution had ebbed. The story of relations between Spain and England, from 1530 onward, became completely enmeshed in the international politics of the Protestant Reformation, (which constantly reached into domestic politics), and remained into the 17th century the story of England's attempt to escape the orbit of the Spanish empire. Catholic monarchs such as Mary Tudor (1553-1558) and the Stuarts after 1603 were considered "Spanish" and "Papist"25 and were the targets of popular resentment for that reason. England raided Spanish shipping, sent explorations looking for the mythical Northwest Passage to Asia26 (and thereby began serious trade in the Baltic and with Russia) aided the Dutch rebellion against Spain after 1566 and fought off the Armada of Philip II in 1588, but the English managed to avoid involvement in the ongoing Franco-Spanish wars on the continent, and only after emerging from the first phase of its revolution (1640-1649) was it able to intrude boldly into the scramble for empire with its massive repression in Ireland, in its three successful wars against the Dutch, and its capture of Jamaica. Thus England's serious challenge to Spanish (and Dutch) power in the New World and in the slave trade began only in the mid-17th century, after the turmoil of its (first) revolution, when the slave trade, though already considerable, was nonetheless only one-fourth of the volume it reached in the 18th century, under Anglo-French ascendancy.27 Only after the overthrow of the Stuarts in 1688 (by which time France had replaced Spain as the major Catholic power) , and English successes in the Nine Years' War (1689-1697) and the war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713, fought to prevent a united Franco-Spanish (and Catholic) dynasty under the control of Louis XIV) could England feel itself secure from Spanish and "Papist" interference in its internal politics28

It is this Anglo-Spanish entanglement, overlapping the Reformation and Counter-Reformation wars, the ultimate defeat of English absolutism, and the English, French, Dutch and Spanish rivalry for world domination which "mediate" between the appearance of the first ideas of racial purity and blood consciousness in 15th century Spanish anti-Semitism, their extension to the inhabitants of the New World, and the full articulation of a race theory in the Anglo-French Enlightenment. It is through this history that Jews, Indians and Africans are the successive "Others" in the development of a full-fledged Western racial doctrine.

The 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain created a massive Jewish diaspora in Portugal29, North Africa, Italy, the Netherlands, the Ottoman empire, and ultimately in the New World.30 But even more significant, for our purposes, were the large-scale conversions of Jews into so-called "New Christians", conversions which allowed Jews to remain in Spain and Portugal, while still leaving them vulnerable to the Inquisition and the blood purity laws.31 The New Christians were therefore able not only to arrive in the New World in different monastic orders such as the Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits; they were probably involved in the better part of the Spanish high culture of the 16th century siglo de oro32. Finally, Jewish messianic ideas, mixed with such currents as the Joachimite millenarianism discussed earlier, filtered into the Christian communist utopias which some religious orders, above all the Franciscans33, attempted to build in the New World with the indigenous peoples subjugated by the Spanish and Portuguese empires. The most notorious were the Spiritual Franciscans in Mexico, who came to the conclusion that Europe was too decadent for their ideal of "apostolic poverty", learned Nahuatl and planned a communist utopia with the Indians, until they were discovered and repressed by the Church34, but similar messianic utopias were advocated or enacted by the Jesuits in Peru and Paraguay, or in the prophetic sermons of the Jesuit Antonio Vieira in Brazil.35

One should not idealize these currents, nor exaggerate their weight in the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, but neither should they be judged with anachronistic criteria of the present. They were all crushed, defeated or marginalized by the opposition of local colonial elites with no scruples about massacre and forced labor36. They did not question the evangelization of the New World, nor the empires themselves, nor did they doubt that Christianity was the unique Truth; few thought that they had anything to learn from indigenous cosmologies.37 No one in the 16th century, from either the Christian or Moslem Mediterranean world, where slavery had been practiced (without a color code) for centuries, called slavery as an institution into question38, and they were no different. They sought the support of the monarchs to curb the cruelty of the local elites, a support which, when obtained, mainly remained a dead letter in practice. The point is rather that their messianic utopias did include Indians and Africans and that their ethnocentrism was universalist in the medieval monotheist sense of Christian/ Jewish/ Moslem vs. heathen, not yet a racial doctrine.

An important transition from the era of Spanish and Portuguese dominance in the 16th century to the emergence of northern European (English, French and Dutch) empires and control of the slave trade in the 17th century is the belief that the New World inhabitants were descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. It is here that the connection is made between the Spanish expulsion of the Jews, the diaspora of Jews and New Christians in different New World projects, and the ultimate appearance of the Enlightenment doctrine of race.

The encounter with the New World shook European culture after 1492 as profoundly as the Copernican revolution after 1543, if not moreso. The flood of cosmography, travel accounts, new plants and animals, and above all previously unknown peoples and cultures stretched the doors of perception past the breaking point. Europe had notions, however fantastic, of the Old World civilizations such as Islam, India and China; it had notions, however fantastic, of ancient Egypt, and the empires of Alexander and the Caesars; it had within its own borders Celts, Slavs and other peoples whose existence converged on various current ideas of the "primitive". Even encountering peoples such as the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas, however exotic they may have seemed39, still did not challenge a concept of "civilization" they knew from Old World experience. But nothing they could mine from tradition quite prepared them for the encounter with "primitives", "peoples without the state", in the Caribbean, the Amazon or later in North America. To situate such peoples for themselves, they could only draw on the legacies of the two strands of Greco-Roman classicism and Judeo-Christian monotheism. Columbus, as was indicated earlier, knew at the mouth of the Pernambuco in 1498 that he was near the garden of Eden, and for more than 150 years Europeans would debate whether the New World peoples were the Lost Tribes of Israel, the descendants of Ham, the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the Biblical Ophir, descendants of a Phoenician voyage, the survivors of lost Atlantis, the descendants of Gog and Magog, or the peoples of King Arthur's island of Avalon.40 The Renaissance had for half a century before the discoveries been excavating a vast lode of the lost, or half-buried legacy of classical antiquity; the heretical currents which prepared the way for the Reformation had been reviving the idea (against the whole weight of the Church) of the "original community" and the "apostolic poverty" of Christ and the disciples, and this mass of cultural memory came rising to the surface, like a sunken cathedral, just in time to provide the "imagination" for the encounter with a previously unknown continent. When, 150 years later, the new tools of scientific and rational critique had turned the battle of the "ancients and the moderns" in favor of the latter, and had destroyed this "epistemological grid" provided by tradition, the West could invent the pseudo-scientific idea of race.

The theory that the inhabitants of the New World were descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel is, once again, the link between anti-Semitism in Spain and the beginnings of race theory in the rising English, French and Dutch world empires of the 17th century. Europe had the historical experience of Africans; the new race theoriy first emerged out of the debate about the Indians. The Lost Tribes theory was first articulated by various Spanish writers on the New World in the 16th century, and, as indicated, some of the Franciscan New Christians were struck by Old Testament parallels in Aztec culture.41 But the theory first created a sensation when systematized by the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel (a marrano and teacher of Spinoza) in his 1650 book Esperanza de Israel (Hope of Israel).

Menasseh's book told of a Jewish traveler in South America who was convinced that there were Hebrew words in the language of his Indian guide, and who concluded from conversation with the guide that "a lost tribe of Israelites still lived in the South American highland"42, and therefore went to meet them. The traveller returned to Amsterdam and told his tale to Menasseh ben Israel, where its messianic overtones in 1648 fit into the overall apocalyptic climate of the end of the Thirty Years' War, the most radical phase of the English revolution (where the Fifth Monarchy Men were at the peak of their influence), and a massive pogrom against Jews in the Ukraine43. Menasseh's book came to the attention of Cromwell, who met him in 1655 to consider the readmission of Jews to England44, which began the following year.

But in the very year of Menasseh's meeting with Cromwell, another book appeared in Europe that marked the final phase of the pre-Enlightenment debate on the meaning of the New World peoples. This was Isaac La Peyrere's Pre-Adamitae (The Pre-Adamites)45. Using the most advanced methods of the new Biblical criticism, La Peyrere's book seized on internal inconsistencies in scripture to argue that the Bible itself proves that there were people before Adam. For La Peyrere this meant the overthrow of the Bible's monogenecist explanation of the origins of humanity (and therefore of the peoples of the New World), and the truth of a polygenecist view of multiple origins. La Peyrere's book was denounced all over Europe by Catholics, Protestants and Jews. (No one dared to defend it publicly until Voltaire, a century later, and he was still an isolated voice). La Peyrere was arrested a few months after Pre-Adamitae appeared, was threatened with the gravest consequences, and had to convert to Catholicism and go to Rome to personally apologize to the Pope to exculpate himself.46 Nevertheless, his book became popular with the radical milieus of the period, such as the remnants of the defeated left wing of the English Revolution. The Digger Gerard Winstanley, like many others, saw in Pre-Adamitae support for a completely allegorical reading of the Bible.47

La Peyrere's book had been daringly radical Bible criticism in the mid-17th century, and he saw all peoples, Adamites and pre-Adamites, saved in the messianic recapture of Jerusalem. But others seized on his demolition of the authority of the monogenecist account in scripture and used it to justify the newly-emerging racist color code. In 1680, in Virginia, the minister Morgan Godwin, in a work called Negro's and Indians Advocate, polemicized against people in the American colonies who were using polygenecist arguments influenced by La Peyrere to deny that blacks and Indians were human. In 1774, Edward Long's History of Jamaica used polygenecist theory to precisely this end. In 1844, Alexander von Hulmboldt, the German scientist, argued in the first volume of his book Kosmos that it was necessary to uphold the monogenecist theory against evidence "as the safe means of avoiding classifying people as superior and inferior".

The death of Adam, together with the defeat of the English radicals, had by the 1650's closed the Joachimite cycle, and ended the debate that had begun in 1492. The triumph of the moderns over the ancients meant that the models and the "epistemological grid" of both Greco-Roman classicism and Judeo-Christian messianism were exploded, either for interpreting new peoples or for interpreting the motion of bodies in space. The epicenter of the West was now the Anglo-French rivalry for world empire. The first phase of political economy began, and one of its first practitioners, Sir William Petty, wrote the first known treatises proposing a world hierarchy of races, The Scale of Creatures (1676). Petty groped toward the definition of an "intermediate stage" between man and animal, in which he could locate the "savage":

Quote:

- "Of man itself there seems to be several species, To say nothing of Gyants & Pygmies or of that sort of small men who have little speech... For of these sorts of men, I venture to say nothing, but that 'tis very possible there may be Races and generations of such"48 "...there be others (differences-L.G.) more considerable, that is, between the Guiny Negroes & the Middle Europeans; & of Negroes between those of Guiny and those who live about the Cape of Good Hope, which last are the Most beastlike of all the Souls (?Sorts) of Men whith whom our Travellers arre well acquainted. I say that the Europeans do not only differ from the aforementioned Africans in Collour...but also...in Naturall Manners, & in the internall Qualities of their Minds."

Here were the unanticipated extrapolations of LaPeyrere's radical Biblical criticism. Here is one of the founders of political economy also founding an unprecedented color-coded world hierarchy of races. A truly modern figure, indeed. Henceforth, as the Atlantic slave trade rose exponentially to its 18th century peak, the naturalistic world view of the Enlightenment could impose itself, sadly tied in so many cases to such an "epistemological grid"50. The New World Indian was no longer a possible descendant of the Lost Tribes; rather, as the Puritans said, "Satan had possessed the Indian until he became virtually a beast". Where there had once been the kingdom of Prester John, there now was only the Guinea coast, the Bight of Benin and the Middle Passage.

Henceforth, the concept of race could be invented."

((https://libcom.org/history/race-enlightenment-part-i-anti-semitism-white-supremacy-1492-1676))

More information

• "Part Two, in the next issue, will deal with the appearance of the new concept of race itself, beginning in the 1670's, in the first phase of the Anglo-French Enlightenment."