Fictionalizing Identity: Race and Religion in Muslim and Christian Scholarship of the

Seventeenth Century

Introduction

“I am a steadfast sentinel,” wrote friar Francisco de Torrejoncillo, “against cruel

Judaism.”1 It is this preamble that Torrejoncillo opens Centinela contra Judíos in 1674.

Centinela is emblematic of Christian anti-Semitic thought. In fact, it is one of the earliest evidences of anti-Semitism in literature and marks a shift from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism.

Anti-Judaism is the opposition to Judaic beliefs and practice, usually from the perspective of a competing belief system such as Christianity and Islam. Conversely, anti-Semitism is the opposition of the Jewish people on the perception of them as a separate race.2 Anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism are not necessarily mutually exclusive. As seen by Torrejoncillo, it is possible to simultaneously oppose Jewish religious practices and classify as a race. The combination of these attitudes underscores the intersection of race and religion during the seventeenth century.

The blurred lines between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism is part of the theological and intellectual evolution from the Middle Ages. Undoubtedly, Christian and Islamic opposition towards the Jews began solely based on religion. The introduction of the concept of race served to justify already existing social discriminations, not create them. Race provided a new avenue to emphasize ‘otherness’. In this sense, race exacerbated what was already an effective method of defining a social hierarchy: religion.

1 Francois Soyer, Popularizing Anti-Semitism in Early Modern Spain and its Empire: Francisco de Torrejoncillo and the Centinela contra Judíos (1674) (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 107. 2 "Medieval Anti-Judaism". In obo in Jewish Studies, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199840731/obo-9780199840731- 0171.xml (accessed 6 Apr. 2020).

Torrejoncillo argued that “nature itself attempted to redeem her reputation by offering evidence in the birth of the Jews that they were monsters of hers and deformed offspring of her perfection not only for their past deed, but also in the propagation of their descendants.”3 In this text, Torrejoncillo is utilizing both anti-Judaism (nature here is presumably understood as Divine intervention, marked the Jews as others) and anti-Semitism (the negative traits are inherited and unchangeable). It is clear that Torrejoncillo gives more credence to the fact that God marked the

Jews as inferior than any scientific reasoning that would emerge the following century.

Some forty years before Torrejoncillo published Centinela, Ahmed ibn Mohammed al-

Maqqari composed what is perhaps the most comprehensive history of al-Andalus (Islamic

Spain) in the early modern period. Unlike Centinela, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain was not written for the sole purpose of defining and villainizing a race. Instead, al-

Maqqari’s History was a homage to al-Andalus, a land that many saw as the pinnacle of the

Islamic world. Within it, however, all al-Maqqari provides insight into the diversity of al-

Andalus and how the ‘other’ was perceived. The less recognizable value of the text is the commentary on different racial, ethnic, and religious groups that inhabited and surrounded al-

Andalus. From al-Maqqari’s narratives, it is evident that he and the scholars he cites are categorical; he regularly organizes groups of people based on their geographical origins and links that to overall quality. He describes the Galicians, an ethnic group from Northwestern Iberia, as prized slaves, implies that African are inferior to Arab-Andalusians, and suggests that

Jews are intellectually deficient when compared to Muslims. Al-Maqqari is not as blatant in his process of ‘othering’ as Torrejoncillo, but he ultimately accomplishes the same result. Through

3 Soyer, Popularizing Anti-Semitism, 237. al-Maqqari, a world emerges in which geographical origins, color, and religion become intimately tied to the institution of and the social hierarchy of al-Andalus.

Both Torrejoncillo and al-Maqqari produced texts that show the implementation of ancient and medieval proto-racial thinking and the advent of a new racialized paradigm that defined the seventeenth century. They reveal the intersection of race, religion, and color that was influenced by previous centuries and eventually cumulated into modern concepts of race. These two scholars also encourage a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences of racial theories in the Christian and Islamic worlds. Comparing the scholarship of Torrejoncillo and al-

Maqqari is relevant as it produces the opportunity to study how racial theories deviated as a result of religion and the seventeenth century socio-political climate. Furthermore, a comparative analysis between the two reveals that race is an evolving concept. There are benefits in studying the concept of race throughout not only time, but between cultures. Beyond the changes over time, the continuities across time and between cultures are among the most important aspects of studying race as it has the most relevance to modernity. The intellectual foundations of both al-

Maqqari and Torrejoncillo extend to the Middle Ages and Antiquity. Likewise, the foundations for modern racial thinking extend to the early modern period during which al-Maqqari and

Torrejoncillo wrote. It is these intellectual links that demonstrates that race was not spontaneously formed in a vacuum without the influence of historical context and previous ideologies. There are precedents that have led to modern concepts of race that challenge the narrative that race spontaneously emerged in the eighteenth century. Race was a concept in which the nascent was the prejudicial practices of Greece and Rome, matured through the

Christian and Islamic rationalization of the Middle Ages, and was sanctioned by the science of the Enlightenment.

Historical Background

Ahmed Ibn Mohammed al-Maqqari was a well renowned polymath from a distinguished family of scholars. It is unknown if he is the descendants of Andalusian Muslims who escaped persecution, but al-Maqqari was connected to influential figures of high prominence in both

Europe and the . Born in Tlemcen, Algeria in 1577, he lived in, and traveled throughout the . He was a devout Muslim who completed multiple pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Mecca. For a period, he lived in Fez (modern day ), which is strongly connected to the history of Islamic slavery and color symbolism. Chouki El Hamel asserts that the connection between slavery and color was not the direct result of Islamic beliefs, arguing that

“racial prejudice as it existed at the time of the Prophet was clearly culturally constructed.”4 This is in reference to the condemnation of racial prejudice by the Prophet in many hadiths. However, the reality of practices does not always coincide with religious beliefs and proto-racial thinking in the Islamic world can be traced to perceptions of Abyssinians known for their dark coloration.

To the Arab world, their color meant something inferior. It was the Islamic state as an institution, not Islam itself, that would create racialize thinking. A similar phenomenon would occur in the

Christian world as well.

While in Fez, al-Maqqari was appointed mufti and imam of the al Qarawiyyin Mosque.

Given its proximity to the coast of Spain and its importance as a cultural center, it can be presumed that al-Maqqari learned much of the history of al-Andalus there. Afterwards he traveled east to . There he relied on the sponsorship of Ahmed Ibn Shahin Ash-

4 Chouki El Hamel, Black Morocco: A , Race, and Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 63. Shahihi, “a wealthy Turk” who was “a liberal patron of literature.”5 It was Ash-Shahihi’s curiosity on the subject that encouraged al-Maqqari to write the History beginning with the Arab conquest and ending with the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609. His work is framed within a religious context. Any success in conquest and advancement in science and art is regarded as a blessing by God. Any perceived failures such as the events of Reconquista were punishment for a lack of faith and devotion to God.

Despite his expertise on al-Andalus, there is no evidence of al-Maqqari ever traveling to

Spain. His work, however, suggests a sense of nostalgia. This nostalgia was not for a land he knew, but for one that he imagined. To al-Maqqari and the poets he cites, al-Andalus represented the glory and height of the Islamic world. This glory was ultimately ended by the Reconquista in

1492. This notion of Spain as the forbearer of Islamic decline was perhaps felt more profoundly given the political climate of the time. Al-Maqqari was born just six years after the Battle of

Lepanto, during which the Holy League – a composite of multiple Catholic states – defeated the

Ottoman fleet. This brought Ottoman expansion to a halt, an event often credited as the beginning of the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The fact that the Holy League was largely financed by King Philip II of Spain is symbolic of the tenacious relationship between Spain and the Islamic world. The relationship between Christian Spain and Islamic Spain would influence the racial theories of the late Middle Ages and early modern period. A witness to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, it is unsurprising that al-Maqqari found an audience for The History of the

Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain. His work may be regarded as a literary reaction to contemporary events, which was designed to glorify the past of Islamic superiority in Spain. This

5 Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Maqqari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain. Translated by Pascual de Gayangos, (London: W.H. Allen and Co., 1840), xxxiv.

obsession with the past is directly associated with the making of a self-fashioning identity. A shared and unifying history is an essential component in the identity of ethnic groups, religious groups, and ultimately nations. Al-Maqqari’s History was designed as a universal history to console the Islamic world. It was a reminder of a greater time to which Muslims may once again return.

Friar Francisco de Torrejoncillo also lived during a tumultuous time for his faith. His nation of Spain was the leading Catholic kingdom, but Spain had also been at the forefront of the wars in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. The Peace of Westphalia was signed just twenty- six years prior to the first publication of Centinela contra Judios. Seventeenth century Spain was also undergoing a decline in political and economic powers. The Golden Age of Spain was concluding and the blame had to be placed somewhere. Some scholars blamed it “on the pernicious influence of blood laws”.6 These blood statutes specifically targeted the rising influence of conversos in positions of power. The critique of these blood statues likely emerged from the Spanish Black Legend, an anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish propaganda movement beginning in the sixteenth century that claimed that Spaniards were unique in their cruelty and barbarianism. Interestingly, the Black Legend implied that the Spanish were not truly European.

Within the intra-European hierarchy – and because of the history of intermarriage with Jews,

Muslims, conversos, and Moriscos in Spain – the Spanish were often perceived as a different race. In response to the Black Legend, there was a concerted effort to redeem the Spanish reputation through the repeal of blood laws. Torrejoncillo was not among those who believed

6 John Edwards, “The Beginning of the Scientific Theory of Race? Spain 1450-1600,” in From Iberia to Diaspora: Studies in Sephardic History and Culture, ed. Yedida A. Skillman and Norman A. Skillman, (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 1997), 183. this. Instead, he maintained the belief that the decline in Spanish power was due to the presence of Jews and conversos.

However, the greatest influence on Torrejoncillo was perhaps not the inter-Christian and intra-European conflicts, but internal issues within Spain. There was a continuous discourse over the role and rights of conversos, Jews who had converted to Christianity and their descendants.

Conversos were increasingly perceived as encroaching on the church and Christian society. The

Spanish Inquisition was still in practice during the seventeenth century and targeted conversos believed to be crypto-Jews. The fear of Jews feigning being Christian was exacerbated by the belief that through contact and marriage, Jewish blood could enter and corrupt old-Christian bloodlines. Some dissidents did argue that conversion and the Eucharist change the nature of

Jews into the Christian race.7 It is against these people that Torrejoncillo writes. He argues that the nature of Jews is inherited through blood, predetermined by God, and could not be changed through conversion. Therefore, it was not only the Jewish race, but their descendants that posed a threat to the Christian community.

The fifteenth century was the beginning of dramatic changes that reverberated into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the discovery of the New World, the conquest of the Islamic

Kingdom of Granada, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. All occurred in 1492 within rapid succession of one another. That year marks a shift into a new era of religious and racial thinking. Things were further complicated through the introduction of Native Americans, a

7 The Eucharist is a sacrament involving the ingestion of bread and wine, symbolizing the body and blood of Christ. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 declared the doctrine of transubstantiation in which the bread and wine were believed to truly contain the body and blood of Christ. Some converso scholars argue that by ingesting the Eucharist, conversos changed their nature, blood, and race to that of a Christian. people for which there were no records in the Bible. It is that social climate that furthered the discourse on racial and religious purity and the concept of a national Spanish identity.

Torrejoncillo wrote during those times of dramatic change, and that is reflected in his work. He too was an active participant in the discourse of Spanish identity. Yet, he defined not who Spaniards were, but what they were not. This exclusionary tactic was focused on the Jews, a group identified as the “other within” and a perpetual threat in Spain since their arrival in the

Iberian Peninsula. When describing the threat that the Jews pose, Torrejoncillo references a letter written from the Jews of Constantinople to those in Toledo. In it they are given “useful advice with which you shall be able to preserve your property and gain revenge upon the Christians, and the Spanish people in particular.”8 The Jews of Toledo were then commanded to ‘baptize’, but continue to practice Judaism in secrecy. Not only that, but they were also commanded to turn their “sons into doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers…’ and to “make their children members of the clergy and friars so that they may easily defile their temples and desecrate their sacraments and sacrifices.”9 The letter that Torrejoncillo quotes was proven to be a forgery, a propaganda tool used to justify the expulsion of the Jews and legitimized blood purity laws that prevented conversos from entering powerful institutions. To the Old Christians of Spain, this letter would have sparked widespread panic as well as the rise of anti-Semitic beliefs. It would have legitimized the fear in the other who desired to uproot one of the fundamental aspects of Spanish identity.

The way in which Torrejoncillo defines the “other” is informed through the Bible and medical text from Ancient Greece and Rome. Specifically, Christendom focused on ancient texts that discussed reproduction. It was not the scientific racism of the eighteenth century, but these

8 Soyer, Popularizing Anti-Semitism,176. 9 Ibid.,176. ancient texts were considered some of the most advanced work in the medical world. Aristotle's theories on the circulation of blood influenced how the West believed blood, a vector for behavior and even religion, was connected to breast milk which was then passed down to future generations. There was not quite a biological basis to race yet, but a method of ‘othering’ by treating the other as an infectious disease. It is why so many laws, including the Siete Partidas written by King Alfonso X of Spain, included the prohibition of marriage between Christians and

Jews and Moors. It is because marriage is connected to reproduction as well as the preservation of lineages and blood.

Race as a Concept

The complexity of race makes defining it challenging. Some scholars insist on a biological basis, some on color symbolism, and others simply view it as an intensification of other hierarchical systems such as class or ethnicity. For the purpose of this thesis, the concept of race used will be that of historian Benjamin Isaac, who defines it as:

An attitude towards individuals and groups of people which posits a direct and linear connection between physical and mental qualities. It, therefore, attributes to those individuals and groups of people collective traits, physical, mental, and moral, which are constant and unalterable by human will, because they are caused by hereditary factors or external influences, such as climate or geography.10

For race to be apparent, there must be a link between the physical and mental capabilities.

Oftentimes, distinct races emerge between groups in which the physical differences are not evident. In cases such as these, fictive physical characteristics are imagined, such as the Jewish odor or tail. Race must also be categorical, inherited, and immutable. To this, I would add that by

10 Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, eds. The Origins of Racism in the West, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 11. virtue of being categorical, race also imposes differential treatments that support social hierarchies. Racial categorization implicitly relies on a superior-inferior dichotomy. This does not mean that racial concepts emerge prior to inequality and social hierarchies. Usually race is preceded by already established forms of discrimination. For instance, among the earliest use of the word ‘race’ in reference to humans was by the French nobility.11 They did not distinguish themselves based on phenotype, but class and social order. Integrated into the concept of class and social order was religion. The French nobility self-fashioned themselves as a different race, separate and superior than serfs and peasants. Yet, class differences and social orders predate the introduction of race in the French vocabulary. Similarly, in medieval Iberia, discrimination and violence against religious groups such as the Jews emerged before race. Therefore, race is a concept used to justify social hierarchy, not create it.

Of all forms of discrimination and biases, race is exceptional in its severity and endurance over time. Race distinguished itself from other embodiments of ‘otherness’ such as xenophobia or ethnocentrism. Unlike them, race links the physical qualities of a group to the mental and moral qualities. It is this connection that makes the concept of race both enduring and hyper-effective. Furthermore, race is deterministic. It removes the free will of individuals to identify themselves as well as the ability to change certain aspects of one’s identity. The physical manifestation of mental and moral qualities – either visually evident like skin color or fictionalized like the Jewish odor and behavior – justified preconceived assumptions. The physical, mental, and moral inferiority

11 Geraldine Heng. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 47.

seemingly reinforce one another, creating a stronger social division within a social hierarchy than class or nationality ever could. For it is possible for one to change class or nationality, but race is viewed as immutable.

Race is hyper-effective because it can be manipulated to exacerbate shifting social and political situations. While definitions and perceptions of race have changed from its structural origins in Antiquity, race has continuously been incorporated into contentious issues in the past such as conversos in medieval Spain and in the present such as nationalism. Geraldine Heng posits that:

The ability of racial logic to stalk and merge with other hierarchical systems – such as class, gender, or sexuality – also means that race can function as class (so that whiteness is the color of medieval nobility), as “ethnicity” and religion (Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia), or as sexuality (seen in the suggestion raised at the height of AIDS hysteria in the 1980s that gay people should be rounded up and cordoned off, in the style of Japanese American internment camps in World War II).12

It is exactly this adaptability of race to merge with other hierarchical systems, in particular religion, that is the basis for this research. The intersection of race and religion is perhaps the most significant intellectual development that codified modern perceptions of race. In other words, the ideology that sustained and expanded racial theories during the Middle Ages and early modern period was religion. Because of this, the history and discourse of race begins in the

Middle Ages with the rise of Christianity and Islam. Consequently:

In many respects the medieval period differs from both antiquity and the early modern period. It reintroduced to Western Christendom many text containing proto-racist ideas; it adopted a material approach to the human being underlying the direct, causal relationship between bodily constitution and moral, behavioral and mental condition; but at the time it mitigated the proto-racial potential by diluting it with Christian humanistic approaches. By allowing the transmission and enabling the reception of these classical

12 Heng, The Invention of Race, 20. texts among the learned, the medieval period played a crucial role in the revival of proto-racist ideas and concepts in the pre-modern world.13

The racial theories cultivated in the Middle Ages greatly influenced both Torrejoncillo and al-

Maqqari. Medieval scholars such as Juan Martínez Silíceo and Ibn Khaldun would go on to determine how seventeenth century scholars perceived racial difference through the lenses of religion. Yet, it was also religion that prevented the expansion of racial thinking into a form more similar to modern concepts of race. Religion, specifically the universalism of Christianity and

Islam, tempered the potential of racial thinking before the science of the early modern period.

13 Eliav-Feldon, The Origins of Racism, 24. Chapter 1: Race and Religion

The Curse of Ham, featured in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible and Old

Testament as a sequel to God’s covenant with Noah, best exemplifies the intersection of race and religion. While neither Torrejoncillo or al-Maqqari directly reference the Curse of Ham, it was the most cited religious narrative used to justify the enslavement of black Africans.

The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth. Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked. When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” He also said, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend the territory of Japheth; may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be his slave.”14

Nowhere is any concept of race mentioned above, and it is Canaan, not Ham (his father) who was cursed. However, since Ham and his brothers are credited for peopling the earth, the curse was interpreted as an inherited trait characteristic of that race that descended from Ham, beginning with his son Canaan. As Ham was believed to be the ancestor of all Africans, the

Curse of Ham was used to justify the enslavement of Africans. This is in part due to the

14 Gen. 9:18-27. New International Version. bastardization of the Hebrew meaning of Ham, taking it to mean dark and black when the more accurate translation is dirt.

Curses are a motif of the Book of Genesis, especially the inheritability of curses. The curses inflicted on Canaan, Adam and Eve, and Cain were punishments for sins that either plagued their descendants or left a physical mark of difference. Before Ham and Canaan, there was Cain who sinned by killing his brother Abel. As punishment, “the Lord put a mark on Cain.”

The text is unclear as to what that mark was, but the marking of “otherness” was also applied to the interpretation of the Curse of Ham. For Canaan, his curse was both inherited by his descendants and a physical mark. Torrejoncillo utilizes these notions of curses on the Jews. Their sin was the murder of Jesus Christ which was transferred to their descendants through blood.

Torrejoncillo, in reference to signs by which Divine Providence differentiates the Jews, claims that the tribe of Manasseh “shouted Sagius eius super nos, & super filios nostros” (His blood

[Jesus’s] is on us and on our children). As a curse, this tribe “with every turn of the new moon, they feel such pains throughout their bodies that blood gushes from the lower parts of their bodies from morning to evening.”15 The sins were passed down to descendants, inconsequential to if those descendants committed sins themselves, and these sins left a physical marker on the descendants.

The link between the Curse of Ham and al-Maqqari is through an intellectual lineage. Al-

Maqqari frequently cites Ibn Khaldun, a Arab historian who wrote The Muqaddimah. Khaldun did not have a concept of race, but his writings are a link between Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the racial thinking of al-Maqqari. In Muqaddimah, Khaldun introduces environmental determinism, the theory that the climate determines not only skin color, but development and

15 Soyer, Popularizing Anti-Semitism, 246. behavior. Khaldun likely extracted this theory from the Greek philosopher Hippocrates as the

Islamic world preserved and transmitted a number of texts from Antiquity to the West. Citing climate theory, Khaldun denounces the Curse of Ham as an explanation for phenotypic differences. Unlike Torrejoncillo, al-Maqqari frequently used environmental determinism when writing about race. Environmental determinism is not a form of racial thinking. However, it did inform future notions of race. Often it was used to justify the superiority of civilizations inside temperate climates, whether that be the Greeks, Arabs, or Israelites. When the concept of race was introduced, the already existing constructs of environmental determinism, such as the inferiority of cultures in Northern or sub-Saharan Africa, allowed for race to become associated with regional differences and phenotypes, not just religion.

This is evident in al-Maqqari’s phenotypic classifications. To defend al-Andalus and

Africa, al-Maqqari cites two poets, one from each region. Al-mu'tamid Ibn ‘Abbád, the last ruler of the kingdom of Seville, wrote to Yusef ibn Tashfín, the Berber ruler of the Almoravid

Empire, who defeated King Afonso VI of Castile and Leon at the battle of Sagrajas (1086). In his letter, Al-mu'tamid told Yusef that his “departure has changed our days into nights.”16 In response, Yusef, in his presumed ignorance of poetic symbolism, asked “What does he ask for?

Does he not say he wants us to send him black and white slave girls?”17 The story serves a twofold purpose. First, it is meant to show the disparity between the regions of al-Andalus and

Northern Africa. The former produced higher quality literature, art, and culture in comparison to

Northern Africa. Yusef’s inability to comprehend the symbolism of Al-mu'tamid’s letter is itself an allusion to the cultural inferiority of North Africans in relation to al-Andalus. On the other hand, Yusef’s response clearly illustrates the color symbolism in use in the Islamic world.

16 Al-Maqqari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties, 36. 17 Ibid., 36.

The Historical Context of the Curse of Ham

The Curse of Ham was not always associated with Black Africans. The curse was first used to justify with serfs being descendants of Ham and nobles being the descendants of

Japheth. Logically, this explains the etymology of the word race. It first emerged as a method of distinction between the French nobility and the peasant class. However, the word did not have the same connotations as it does in the modern era. Nevertheless, it still conveyed elements of distinction that were inherited when the word became associated with separating humans based on religious and phenotypic differences. In the early modern period, with the rise of nations and a greater emphasis placed on phenotypic features, the use of the word race shifted from class to other cultural markers such as religion, color, food, bathing practices, and dress. Other terminology, such as gens and natio, was used interchangeably with race in the early modern period. The interchanging of these words reveals how race was perceived at the time. It was more akin to how ethnicity is used today. The Hamitic story of Noah’s son peopling the earth is the story of how the first, gentes, nationes, and races came to be.

While the Bible is considered a narrative text, it was believed to hold certain truths of the world. One such truth was the explanation of the different people of the Earth. After the Flood, it was believed that Noah’s sons populated the Earth, even the accursed Ham. Japheth received

Europe, Shem received Asia, including the region of Arabia, and Ham received Africa. In

Europe, Noah’s sons were associated with the three social orders: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. More significantly, they became representatives of different races and it was the Black race that became representative of the social order that worked. Slavery became associated with color in the Islamic world before the Christian world. As such, the treatment and perceptions of black slaves differed between the two religions. Nevertheless, both cite the Curse of Ham as the basis for the subjugation of Black Africans. The curse is a tradition shared among all three Abrahamic religions. In fact, “reference to the Hamitic curse can be found in early

Judaic literature (predating Islam).”18

A Babylonian Talmud created circa 500 AD quotes Noah as cursing Canaan and his descendants with black skin, kinky hair, swollen lips, and elongated members for the males.

More than this though, Canaan’s descendants were cursed to “love theft and fornication, to be banded together in hatred of their master and never to tell the truth.”19 It is the non-physical aspects of the curse that is the most relevant to future scholars because those aspects influence behavior. The prejudice of a different skin color is the result of cultural norms and the almost ubiquitous belief in the color black being a negative attribute. However, to then assign behaviors that are universally condemned, such as thievery, to a group of people intensifies pre-existing notions of inferiority. It also justified enslavement. This justification, recorded in 500 AD continued into the 19th century when slavery was defended on the basis that it was an institution that controlled the behavioral deficiencies of Blacks, not so much the phenotypic ones.

The exegesis of “The Sons of Noah'' is linked to how the world was perceived. As aforementioned, the color black was typically associated with negative concepts such as sin or death. As early as Ancient Egypt, material culture revealed an awareness of color variation among humans. Color symbolism based on skin tones, however, was an ancient Greek concept that was inherited by the Islamic and Christian worlds. It was Arab conquerors of Spain who first introduced texts from Antiquity with notions of color symbolism and climate theory. The Arab world acted as transmitters and linked Antiquity to the Middle Ages. In ancient Greece and

18 Hamel, Black Morocco, 64. 19 Ibid., 65. Rome, the color black and by association Black people were associated with death. Suetonius, an ancient Roman historian and author of The Twelve Caesars, wrote that emperor Caligula's death was foreshadowed by a performance where “scenes from the lower world were represented by

Egyptians and Ethiopians.” It is important to note that Ethiopians marked the extreme edge of the known world and their physical difference combined with geographical distance marked them as the symbol for exoticism.

Centuries later, Ethiopians – an encompassing term for Blacks – continued to be used as symbols of death and sin in the Middle Ages. In Book 8 of Orderic Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical

History, Priest Walchelin witnessed a procession of tortured ghosts. Within the procession,

“came bearers carrying biers on which sat dwarfs with huge heads followed by two Ethiopians carrying a trunk on which was tied a priest named Stephen…”. The Ethiopians in this scene were not fellow victims, but active participants in the gruesome scene from purgatory. This trope of

Blacks as symbols of death, sin, and demons held religious connotations that were unique to the

Middle Ages. Stories such as Priest Walchelin would have been recited in local churches across

Europe. While the main purpose was to deter sinning, it also communicated the belief that

“Ethiopians'' were something to be feared. This fear was then transmitted to people who likely never had interactions with Black Africans. The widespread indoctrination against Black

Africans in the Christian world did not occur in the literary debates of the elites, but in the

Church where dissemination was easier. A similar technique was practiced by Torrejoncillo, who published in Spanish, not the traditional Latin reserved for scholars.

During the Middle Ages, it was believed that not only did the color black still hold negative connotations, but that it was designed so by God. The color variation of Blacks only served as a marker and reinforcement of differentiation in a way that religious identity lacked. Religious identity was not always as evident as skin color, especially when assimilation unified clothing practices. It was this concern over differentiating religious groups that inspired the first occasion in which Christian doctrine forced Jews to wear the Star of David, centuries before the

Nazi’s regime implemented the practice. In his accounts of the clothing habits of al-Andalus, al-

Maqqari notes that “yellow headwear is reserved for the Jews, who, on no occasion, are allowed to use any other”.20 Therefore, both Christianity and Islam created visual markers of religious differences when phenotypic ones failed. Phenotype, however, would still remain relevant.

It was with the growth of the Islamic world that “we begin to see an emphasis on skin color as a marker of differentiation among people.” A concept that was inherited from ancient

Greece and popularized by Muslims was environmental determinism. Often associated with eurocentrism, environmental determinism, as a reminder, is the belief that the climate and environment determine the development and behavior of societies. Al-Maqqari and Torrejoncillo used concepts such as environmental determinism and color symbolism to create a definite social hierarchy. For al-Maqqari, this hierarchy placed Muslims, Arabs, and Andalusians as superior.

For Torrejoncillo, the hierarchy placed conversos and Jews below Old Christians and Spaniards.

Both used elements of religion to buttress their arguments.

Al-Maqqari’s History idealized al-Andalus. In doing so it created a hierarchy between

Muslims, Jews, and Christians, as well as an internal hierarchy within the Islamic world. To al-

Maqqari, not all Muslims were created equal. The geographic location greatly determined the behavior and skills of a group of people. Arab and Andalusian Muslims were superior in intellect, skill, and art to North African Muslims. The perception of Northern Africa is itself a racial category. Categorizing the geographical regions of the Islamic world played a major role

20 Al-Maqqari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties, 116. in the work of Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), who greatly influenced al-Maqqari’s own work. A good example of al-Maqqari’s treatment of this theme is a dispute over the superiority of Africa and al-Andalus. Even though he presented quotations supporting both regions, al-Maqqari provided more evidence giving support for al-Andalus. He references Sheikh Ash-shakandí of Córdoba claiming that to “make Africa superior than Andalus” was to “make the left hand better than the right, and that night is brighter than the day… to make great what God Almighty created small, and to lead astray what He decreed should be a guide.”21 Ash-shakandi later claims that he

“belonged to a family of noble and generous people; a race whose march is proclaimed by innumerable minarets.”22 Race in this context is not a matter of skin color, but of geography and

God’s will. According to al-Maqqari, it is God that makes certain people superior to others by placing them in more favorable parts of the world. The quality of a culture is predetermined and subjected to God's will.

Race in the Islamic world was connected to notions of geographical origins and this is reflected in the terminology used to describe slaves. Slavery in the Islamic world was diverse in both skin tones and terminology. The word for slave is abd. Yet that term was not consistently applied to white slaves. Slavic slaves were known as Saqāliba. According to al-

Maqqari, the geographical origins of slaves determined their quality. This application of environmental determinism is emphasized when al-Maqqari describes Galicians as “brave, strong, handsome, and well made; in general the slaves of this nation are very much prized, and one will scarcely meet in Andalus with a handsome, well made, and active slave who is not from this country.”23 Muslims in Spain also received large amounts of slaves from Sclavonia (Eastern

21 Al-Maqqari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties, 33. 22 Ibid., 33. 23 Ibid., 75. Europe) through the Franks. The distinction between slaves based on skin tone and the linking of skin tones to quality is a fundamentally racist thought.

Torrejoncillo’s text was also fundamentally racist, but rather than linking skin tones to quality, he racialized religions. He linked religious identity to morality. Torrejoncillo described the Jews as a race made unequal by God. Torrejoncillo uses the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as the moment in Jewish history in which the Jews become irredeemable and a distinct race. It was not their geographical origins, but their actions that made them inferior. It is a recurring theme that it is the actions and behavior that defines a race and that physical attributes manifest only as a result of those actions. This ‘curse’ in a manner of speaking is an echo of the Curse of Ham. The descendants inherit the sins of their ancestors. The inheritance of sin is both a Christian ideology and a tenet of race. With the death of Jesus Christ, the Jews lost all honor as “nobility is an honour inherited from one’s ancestors and a virtue of lineage acquired alongside others specifics to an individual.”24 Honor in seventeenth century Spain was an important aspect of Spanish identity. The claim that Jews lost their honor is also a claim that Jews could not be Spanish.

Torrejoncillo is defining who could be a true Christian, but also who could be a true Spaniard.

During the seventeenth century, these two concepts were not mutually exclusive.

Al-Maqqari, in order to demonstrate the cultural superiority of al-Andalus, used an intellectual basis for race. While Torrejoncillo does imply the intellectual inferiority of Jews, he is more devoted to phenotypic differences. Unlike the color variation between white Europeans,

Berbers, and Arabs, the Jews and their descendants were not as physically discernable.

Therefore, Jews were often attributed exaggerated and extreme phenotypes. Torrejoncillo’s

Centinela contra Judios details the popular Jewish physical stereotypes of the time including the

24 Soyer, Popularizing Anti-Semitism, 263. tails, a protruding nose, and menstruating men. These fictionalized physical distinctions were a punishment for the past and continuous crimes of the Jews. Torrejoncillo linked the physical qualities of Jews to morality the external phenotypes corresponded to the internal nature of the race. This concept of racial thinking persisted well past the seventeenth century.

Torrejoncillo however, was not the first to create racist stereotypes about Jews. He simply consolidated them into a widely distributed book. The origins of the racialization of Jews in Spain began much earlier. Anti-Jewish sentiments reached as far back as Visigothic rule. The transformation from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism is disputed, but by 1449 there is a case of institutionalized anti-Semitism in Toledo, Spain. In 1449, Toledo rebelled against the crown.

While in rebellion the city issued the first blood statute law, banning conversos from serving in city offices. In the following decades, individual universities, city offices, and churches implemented these laws. The significance of these laws was the importance placed on blood.

Blood was the vector in which Jewish characteristics were transmitted. This introduction of blood into racial theories was the beginning of scientific racism. Torrejoncillo credits the “lack of respect for the statues of the purity of blood” as motivation for writing his book.25 By citing the importance of blood, Torrejoncillo is evidence of a merging between religious based racism and scientific based racism. Clearly Torrejoncillo saw race as a religious based phenomenon. Al-

Maqqari similarly saw race connected to religion, but more so the religion of people attached to certain geographical locations. The intersection of race and religion complicated its application, but also made it more functional. By using or hinting at religious differences when referencing race, both al-Maqqari and Torrejoncillo became credible to their audience and legitimized differentiation in the Christian and Islamic worlds.

25 Ibid., 110. Chapter 2: Comparative Race

The connection between the Middle Ages and modern perceptions of race is not always discernible. In fact, this is a challenge for the entire field of medieval studies: proving the relevance of events and beliefs centuries in the past. The events of the following early modern period seemingly take more precedence simply because of their proximity to us. However, the

Middle Ages serve as a catalyst for concepts that steamrolled throughout time to create the modern world. The Middle Ages also serve as a point of comparison to study both consistency and change of human behavior over time. It is tempting to designate race as a recent concept that emerged solely within the context of the and the discovery of the New

World. Admittedly, race was institutionalized with the rise of scientific racism beginning in the seventeenth century with notable figures such as Robert Boyle, Henri de Boulainvilliers, Carl

Linnaeus, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach dominating the discourse. Yet, institutionalization is not a prerequisite to the definition of race, merely a common manifestation of it. In the Middle

Ages, race held more religious and ethnic undertones than phenotypic. The foundations for race existed already in the Middle Ages.

Race has maintained some vestigial elements throughout time. The most steadfast element is the link between physical characteristics and mental and moral characteristics. While some aspects of race endure, it is the plurality of race that allows for a comparison between the

Middle Ages and al-Maqqari and Torrejoncillo. It also resolves the issues of anachronism in studying race. By acknowledging that race can take multiple forms, it allows for a comparative analysis of racial thinking from the seventeenth century to the modern day. This comparative approach makes it possible to discern if these early notions of race had any bearing on the race of the early modern world. Max S. Hering Torres stresses “the need to study racisms in the plural,” in order to study the history of race as a “linear process (from the purity of blood to the

Holocaust) without historical differentiations”26 Therefore it would be more accurate to study the history of race as the histories of racisms.

The possible associations between medieval and modern forms of race are perhaps best exemplified through comparing medieval race to the most prominent images of racism in the western world: the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Holocaust. These events marked the chronological period during which religious and scientific racism dominated racial thinking. The comparison between the “othering” of Jews and Black Africans is a medieval creation. Fray

Prudencio de Sandoval, a contemporary of Torrejoncillo, wrote in his biography of Charles V that Jewishness was comparable to Negritude.27 The racial thinking towards the Jews was based on religion, while for Blacks it was phenotypical. However, both were symbols of what the

Spanish burgeoning national identity were attempting to exclude. If Prudencio de Sandoval saw a value in comparing the two separate forms of racism, then it serves a historical value in studying how Sandoval, Torrejoncillo, and others like them conceptualized different types of races.

The racism of the Holocaust is the standard event in studying religious racism. It is also a model that serves as the closest comparison to medieval Iberia. This is not an attempt to equivocate medieval Iberia to Nazi Germany. Nor is it suggesting that the Nazis directly adopted racial practice from medieval Spain. Yet, there are continuities that would be a disservice to ignore. These continuities speak more to the nature of racial thinking than it does to a direct intellectual adoption. The fact that the subjects of the German and Iberian models both happen to

26 Max S. Hering Torres, Maria Elena Martinez, and David Nirenberg, eds. Race and Blood in the Iberian World, (Zürich: Lit Verlag GmbH & Co., 2012), 11. 27 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and the German Models (New : Leo Baeck Institute, 1982), 16. be Jews only serve to highlight just how race intersected with religion in the Middle Ages, the early modern period, and the twentieth century.

The Holocaust was a genocidal campaign carried out by Nazi Germany during the twentieth century. Resulting in the deaths of over twelve million people, the Holocaust reveals the heinous potential of race when combined with bioplitical objectives. The Holocaust became the standard example of modern-day racism, unique in its extremism and fervent reliance on eugenics. Yet, there is precedent to fundamental Nazi tenets in 15th century Iberia. John

Edwards argues that the earliest recorded case of scientific racism was the first blood statute law passed in Toledo 1449.28 This law was established in the notion of blood purity and prohibited conversos from serving on the city council. These blood statues emerged throughout the peninsula in individual institutions and targeted conversos, descendants of those who converted to Christianity. Significantly, these laws were more dedicated to targeting New Christians, not so much non-Christians. This distinction implies that the concern, while based in religion, was also due to the immutable nature of one’s race which was inherited by biological factors such as bodily fluids. It also reveals the believed threat that New Christians pose as corruptors of the lineages of Old Christians.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi wrote of a comparative history between the anti-Semitism of medieval Christian Iberia and modern secular Nazi Germany.29 In comparing these two models, he concluded that the “Germans did not learn about ‘purity of blood’ from the Iberian precedent.

Limpieza de Sangre in Spain and Portugal, and racial anti-Semitism in modern Germany, were independent and indigenous developments, the latter oblivious of the former.”30 The similarities

28 Edwards, “The Beginning of the Scientific Theory of Race”, 185. 29 Yershalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism, 5. 30 Edwards, “The Beginning of the Scientific Theory of Race”, 188. between the two models speaks less about a direct intellectual lineage and more to the nature of race. If there is not a question of whether the Germans inherited their ideologies from medieval

Iberia, then the question should be why did both develop similar interpretations of race. It is likely because both used the pretense of race as a defensive measure against the “others within”.

The political context of both regions matters in the evolution of racial thinking and anti-

Semitism. The declining influence of Spain has already been discussed as a contribution to the rise of anti-Semitic sentiments. Similarly, the same political decline occurred in Germany in the decades leading up to the Holocaust.

Once again, however, race does not spontaneously emerge in a vacuum. Anti-Semitism existed in Germany since the Middle Age. Significantly, it gained popularity during the Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries when Jewish settlements were attacked and burned as the crusaders traveled to the East. These communities were depicted as the religious other despite not being the intended targets. R.I. Moore argued that the racial mentalities that appear in the

15th and 16th centuries are the causation of earlier development. He claims that between 1050

AD and 1200 AD:

Persecution became habitual. That is to say that not simply that individuals were subject to violence, but that deliberate and socially-sanctioned violence began to be directed, through established governmental, judicial, and social institutions, against groups of people defined by general characteristics, such as race, religion, or way of life, and that membership of such groups in itself came to be regarded as justifying these attacks.31

Undoubtedly, these events of the Middle Ages influence the trajectory of the evolution of race in

Germany. More relevant perhaps is the rise of nationalism in Germany. Germany was among the last European states to become a nation in 1871. As such, they had a relatively late rise of nationalism when compared to Spain which arguably became a state in 1492. This chronological

31 Ibid., 188. difference in nationalism explains why anti-Semitism in Germany regained popularity in the early 1800s when nationalistic fervor was growing. Spain, which came to terms with its national identity centuries earlier, experienced its height of anti-Semitism much earlier as a result. The popular paradigms of the early modern period (religion) and the modern period (science) played a role in the different methods in which the Jews were racialized in Spain and Germany, respectively.

Both Spain and Germany saw race as a mixture of biological and cultural factors. The importance of biology should not be underscored in how race was conceptualized. Race was not only a group's biological disposition, but also a method in which their disposition could spread to others whether through reproduction or exposure. Blood and bodily fluid – and by extension the threat of transmission – were cornerstones of racial thinking for both the Spanish and German model which is best exemplified laws curtailing interreligious marriage breastfeeding and wet nurses.

In 1943, the “Reich Ministry of Justice reported to Adolf Hitler that a Jewish woman sold her milk to a pediatrician without revealing her racial origins.”32 The exposure of German children’s exposure to Jewish breast milk was regarded similarly to how infectious diseases are described. German children, as a vulnerable portion of the population, were more susceptible to being infected with ‘Jewishness’ as though it was contagious. In the age of science and eugenics,

Jewishness, a characteristic based in religion, was seen as transmittable. The theory itself is illogical, but it was legitimized through falsified scientific methods. By treating Jews as a disease, the Nazis were able to dehumanize them and presented them as a problem to be eradicated, much like the measles or smallpox.

32 Ibid., 187. These sentiments, despite vastly different notions of how diseases were spread, were echoed centuries earlier. Friar Francisco de Torrejoncillo wrote that:

In the palaces of the monarchs and many princes, the wet-nurses chosen to feed their offspring should be Old Christian women because it is not appropriate that the children of princes should be fed with Jewish slime. That milk, coming from infected persons, will not engender anything but perverse inclinations. This is proven in what an old soldier from Naples, who was worthy of credit, related. He witnessed the judaizing of a Neapolitan nobleman of the purest lineage but who had been breastfed by a Jewish wet-nurse. The man was punished and handed over to the secular arm. In the city of Valladolid, thirty years ago, they burnt alive as a judaizer a Don Lope de Vera, a native of the town of San Clemente in La Mancha. It was confirmed that the man was from an illustrious bloodline and discovered that the wet-nurse who had fed him was from an infected bloodline.33

Cases such as these could be cited centuries before Torrejoncillo wrote. There are records from medieval Iberia in which Jewish and converso women were placed on trial for attempting to infect babies of Old Christian lineages as wet nurses. In the case of Nazi Germany and pre- modern Iberia, Jewishness was transferred through biological means, giving credit to the origins, or at the very least the basis of scientific racism predating the Age of Enlightenment. Both cases are based on biological factors in which breast milk can act as a vector for Jewish behavior and morality. Jewishness is perceived as an infection. The science used by Torrejoncillo and his contemporaries was not as advanced as the science propagated by the Nazis, but the science of today should not be superimposed on the science of the Middle Ages and seventeenth century. It is important to note that the manner in which Torrejoncillo and others regarded Jewishness was akin to scientific observations. It was simply that these observations were tempered by religious beliefs.

The similarities between the two models are indicative of an enduring attribute of race. It is not just the existence of a racial other that is the threat; it is the possibility of them infecting

33Soyer, Popularizing Anti-Semitism, 269-270. those believed to be racially pure. Torrejoncillo’s language is telling. He describes the gruesome fates of two men who were breastfed as babies by Jewish women. He made sure to highlight that these men came from “illustrious” and pure Old Christian backgrounds meaning the introduction of Jewishness was not through their births, but through external exposure. The damnation of an

Old Christian child was purposefully used to incite his audience against the Jews. Torrejoncillo uses their background to make their fates even more tragic. They had the potential of being pure, but through the actions of Jewish women, they inevitably descended into perverse inclinations and judaizing.

Furthermore, Torrejoncillo often depicts the actions of Jewish women corrupting

Christian children as intentional. These women, seemingly aware of their actions, are attempting to deconstruct Christendom from the inside. The fate of the infected children appears predetermined once they are infected and the notion of free will is obsolete in Torrejoncillo’s thinking. Torrejoncillo uses the image of Christian children as a symbol of Christianity itself.

Therefore, whenever he described attacks against Christianity by Jews, it is through the corruption, torture, or death of a Christian child. When explaining the expulsion of Jews from

France, Torrejoncillo claims it was because of the discovery that Jews, “in order to ridicule the person of Christ, they murdered a Christian child every year, crucifying him and inflicting upon him the same sufferings and injury.”34 The crucifixion of a Christian child is symbolic of the original sin for which the Jews have been cursed for: the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Through this, the sins of the Jews continue to be passed down through generation, their savage behavior not subject to change. The use of an innocent child is not an attack on an individual, but

Christendom as a whole.

34 Soyer, Popularizing Anti-Semitism,118. The differences between the Spanish and German models emphasize the plurality of race.

Both are set within the context of Jewish women breastfeeding non-Jewish children, but the

German response is rooted almost exclusively in secular science and culture, while Torrejoncillo merges science with religion. In the crimes of the Christian men he uses, the children infected with Jewishness grew up to be judaizers. That is especially characteristic of the thinking of

Torrejoncillo time in which there is an intersection of biology and religion. These men, through their exposure to the biological vectors of Jews, were turned against Christianity. While one only became a judaizer, the other practiced perverse inclination. It is clear that there is no distinction between the rejection of Christianity and perverse inclinations. This is the ultimate threat that

Torrejoncillo projects the Jews as, the forebears of the end of Christianity. Positioning these interactions between Jews and Christians as such, Torrejoncillo analogizes the destruction of the

Christian faith to the destruction of pure children. The parallels between the race of pre-modern

Iberian and following early modern and modern era is not contained to only Nazi Germany. The

Atlantic Slave Trade provide further points of comparison that are distinctive from the

Holocaust.

Color Symbolism and the New World

Color symbolism, especially in the United States, is seen as an important signifier of race.

This is a consequence of the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade which solidified the relationship between skin color and slavery in the West. The connection was formed much earlier in the Arab world. Beliefs in Black inferiority, unlike anti-Semitism, were always grounded in phenotypic differences rather than religious ones. As American author Toni Morrison explains, Black slaves “unlike many others in the world’s history, were visible to a fault. And they had inherited, among other things, a long history of the meaning of color. It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive color, it was that this color meant something.”35 Morrison argues that the meaning of this color was readily employed during the eighteenth century. As aforementioned, however, color symbolism far predates the eighteenth century and even the

Middle Ages. The Atlantic Slave Trade depended on color symbolism along with notions of polygenesis, monogenesis, uplift suasion, and the protection of blak souls through conversion.

None of these concepts were truly new during the eighteenth century. Their origins can be traced to at least the Middle Ages.

The history of color symbolism and how it evolved over time with the introduction of

Abrahamic religions has already been explored in this research. Discourse over the origins of humans, like with color symbolism, existed in Antiquity. Romans questioned the possibility of polygenesis, the belief that different races have different origins. This was especially applicable to the Ethiopians, who, although Romans held knowledge of their relative location, represented the unknown and the far edge of human settlements. The spread of Christianity curtailed notions of polygenesis because of the heretical implications, but arguments over it never truly left medieval Europe. In this regard, notions of Christian universalism curtailed the potential of race because it comes in direct conflict with core Christian doctrines. Mainly that all men are descendents of Adam and Eve. There were some attempts to subvert questions of polygenesis through degenerative theories, the belief that Europeans represented the original form of mankind and thus the closest to the image of God. All other races degenerated, usually due to climate, from the original form.

35 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, (Harvard University Press, 1992), 48-49. Even St. Augustine of Hippo engaged in the discourse of polygenesis in The City of God.

He questions the existence of Antipodes, a fable race that was believed to live on the opposite side of the Earth and who some believed to not be descended from Adam and Eve. Using the concept of biblical inerrancy, St. Augustine denounces Antipodes,

For Scripture, which proves the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, gives no false information; and it is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man.36

According to St. Augustine, despite his fallacy in geography, there is no possibility of different races emerging from different origins. The degenerative theory is the dominant belief in racial origin, besides the Curse of Ham, until the rise of scientific racism. It is only then that there is an increase in the belief of polygenesis.

There is value in comparing the Atlantic Slave Trade with the Islamic Slave Trade. The

Islamic Slave Trade preceded the Atlantic slave trade by many centuries and did not necessarily trade in only one phenotype or religion. Both institutions were guided by religious texts. Slavery was sanctioned and a common occurrence in both the Bible and the Quran. The curse of Ham would become the main source cited in the Bible used to support the Atlantic Slave Trade. The

Hamitic curse was also used in Islam but was supported by other Islamic traditions. In Islam the

“Qur’an not only does not support this practice [slavery] but actually places a high priority on manumitting slaves with the ultimate objective of abolishing slavery.”37 It was described as a noble deed to introduce slaves to Islam and release them from service. However, what is written in the Qur’an was not the reality in practice. The main point of distinction between the Atlantic

36 St. Augustine of Hippo The City of God Chapter Nine 37 Hamel, Black Morocco, 17. Slave Trade and the Islamic Slave Trade is defined along gender lines. The Arab Trade Slave was disproportionately women, suggestive of sex slaves and concubines.38 Males were the preference of the Atlantic Slave Trade indicating the need for labor that emerged in the plantations of the New World. The Quran itself does not sanction concubines. Rather, it was a tradition that predate Islam and was widely practice in the Arab world. As a way to legitimize these traditions, Islamic scholars interpreted the following verse:

And if you have reason to fear that you might not act equitably towards orphans, then marry from among [other] women such as are lawful to you [even] two, or three, or four: but if you have reason to fear that you might not be able to treat them with equal fairness, then [only] one – or [from among] those whom you rightfully possess ( ma malakat aymanukum ). This will make it more likely that you will not deviate from the right course (4:3).39

Islamic scholars interpreted this to mean that was legal “as long as the woman is a slave and not a free Muslim woman.”40 This interpretation explains the long standing practice of concubines. It also explains the discrepancy in gender in the Islamic Slave Trade.

Slavery was widely practiced in the Islamic world and by the time al-Maqqari was writing in the seventeenth century, the northern coast of Africa was the major center for exporting African slaves. Not all slaves in the Arab world were created equal. This belief was made evident through al-Maqqari’s categorical analysis that Galicians, a people found in

Northwest Spain, were the best slaves. Furthermore, not all Blacks were seen as equal either as

“it is clear that by the seventeenth century there was a differentiation between Hartani (a black person or a free black) and asuqi or ismakh (a black slave).”41 The diverse terminology is

38 Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves : The Other Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 4. 39 Hamel, Black Morocco, 23. 40 Ibid., 24. 41 Ibid., 111. reflexive of a diverse population of Black Morocco. This leads to another important aspect of race in the Islamic world. There were attempts to differentiate the diversity of Africa, at least in

Northern Africa. Unlike the widespread generalization of African ethnic groups by the West,

African ethnicity in the Islamic world greatly influenced how they defined racial groups. Another important aspect of the Islamic Slave Trade was the liberties of slaves. It was not uncommon for slaves in the Islamic world to rise to prominence. Baybars, the Muslim hero of the Seventh

Crusade the leader of the first major defeat against the Mongols, was a Sultan of Egypt and

Syria. He was also a , a word describing white slaves typically captured from the steppe lands of Europe. Despite his status as a slave, he rose to a position of power, signifying a difference between the Islamic Slave Trade and the Atlantic Slave Trade.

The Atlantic Slave Trade originated from the which first made expeditions down the coast of West Africa in the fifteenth century. At the time, the quality of slaves was not tied to ethnic groups in Africa as much as the most accessible. Therefore, Black

Africans from West and Central Africa made up the majority of the slave population. Combined with the enslavement of Native Americans, the discourse on race shifted in the Christian world away from religion to phenotypes. Religion still featured prominently, but it was within the context of conversion more than a religious based perception of race. Around this time, Europe began to see Africans exclusively as the only source of slaves. This is likely a correlation to chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara who wrote the biography of Prince Henry the Navigator, a

Portuguese explorer who made the first expeditions down the coast of Africa and returned with

African slaves. In The Chronicle and Discovery of Guinea, Zurara creates the notion that black and white, and by extension black and white people, are in direct opposition to one another. Ibram X. Kendi describes The Chronicle as “implicitly obscuring his Grand master’s monetary decision to exclusively trade in African slaves.”42 Moreover, “Zurara distinguished the

Portuguese by framing their African slave-trading ventures as missionary expeditions. Prince

Henry’s competitors could not play that mind game as effectively as he did, in all likelihood because they still traded so many Eastern Europeans”.43 The implications here is that by framing the African slavery in the context of conversion, Zurara created a new relationship between race and slavery. There are still religious elements of race seen here, inherited from the Middle Ages, but it is shifting to be more reflective of changing slave practices. The new relationship between race and slavery was easily transferable to the New World only decades later. As a result, when

Slavic groups became less accessible, Europe followed Zurara’s new ideology and began to “see the natural Slav(e) not as white, but Black”.44

42 Ibram X.Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016) 43 Ibid., 23. 44 Ibid., 23. Conclusion

Anthropologists have already defined race as a social construct. Some scholars have interpreted that to mean that studying race therefore has no relevance. Yet, wealth, gender and class are also social constructs that rarely receive the same level of criticism in research. This is because race is an awkward discussion to have, It is a shameful chapter in the history of mankind. However, simply because it is a social construct does not mean that race does not have physical and real consequences. It is the legacy of race that creates an obligation to study it within the full historical context. One way to confront the racism of today is by studying the racism of the past. By deconstructing it to the social constructions from which it emerged. Not as evidence that humans are incapable of changing over time, but as evidence that these racial concepts of rarely constant, even if they are often inherited.

Francisco de Torrejoncillo and Ahmed ibn Mohammed al-Maqqari are embodiments of how racial thinking can both remain constant, and simultaneously evolve. However, it is the elements of continuity that are the most important is studying race over time. These men were juxtaposed between two important periods in the evolution of race: the proto racial thinking of

Antiquity which was preserved and transmitted to Spain through the Arab world, and the rise of scientific racism of the eighteenth century which is the form of racism most recognizable to us today. As a result, these men, and the seventeenth century in general, act as an important link in the history of race. It is a transitional period in which religion evolves into science and race and racism becomes globalized. The modern concepts of race would not exist without this historically important period.

Ultimately, the history of race is not complete without mention of religion. Christianity and Islam were the the central focus of this research, but they are b no means the only contributors to the development of racial thinking. These religions were chosen because

Christianity and Islam by far have had the greatest influence on modern concepts of race. Even though race today is largely disconnected from its religious origins, the intersection of race and religion resulted in many modern day forms of racial thinking. The difference between how the two religions perceive race is noteworthy of itself and is reflective of the cultural influence, not factual influences, that race is based upon. In the Christian world, race was synonymous with purity, in particular purity of blood and religious lineages. Furthermore there was a greater dependence on biblical contextualization and justification of race.

In the Islamic world, race was linked to slavery and servitude much earlier than in the

Christian world. Language was also critical in creating a hierarchy between slaves, , saqaliba, and abd were words for slaves that encapsulate both color and quality. Race functioned primarily in the realm of the sexual as seen through the prevalence of using slaves as concubines.

Furthermore in the Islamic world, one’s place of birth was tied to race as seen through the berberization of Northern Africa. Lastly, hybrid dynasties revealed a complexity to race. Abd al-

Rhaman III, a caliph of Cordoba, despite his high status was of mixed Christian and Muslim ancestry. He infamously dyed his red beard black to appear more Arab.

However, it is not the differences, but the similarities that are the main point of this thesis. Both Torrejoncillo and al-Maqqari used religion as a principal factor in defining the

‘other’ as a race. Both also utilized race as a method to defend a culture perceived to be under threat. Race is a reactive concept often propagated as a means of protecting a culture. It is this pretense of defending against the ‘other’ that made and continues to make race and racism an appeal practice. To understand the origins of race and its evolution, it is important to study how the intersection of race and religion codified new concepts of race. Bibliography

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