Gil Ribak’s Crude Creatures: Confronting Representations of Black People in Yiddish Culture seeks to overturn a comfortable notion about Jewish history. According to a view proffered by both scholars and Jewish leaders, American Jews were not only less discriminatory towards Black people than other Americans, but also, due to historical experiences of oppression as well as Jewish ethical principles, allies with Black people in their struggle for liberation; when Jewish immigrants from Europe arrived in America, they recognized the plight of Black Americans as akin to their own and, consequently, viewed them as kindred spirits deserving of support. This narrative was touted during the Civil Rights era, perhaps due to the visibility of some Jewish people in the struggle for racial equality.
Ribak argues for a significantly more nuanced account of how Jewish people both conceived of and treated African Americans. In Crude Creatures, he discusses selections from adaptations of traditional Jewish texts, periodicals, literature, travelogues, and theater (primarily in Yiddish) from the late-nineteenth century through 1929. He finds that, broadly speaking, Jewish people upheld (rather than challenged) contemporary racial hierarchies and stereotypes. While they decried violence against Black people such as lynchings and, to some extent, Black peoples’ social exclusion, they largely did not argue for full social equality or the rejection of prominent racist stereotypes.
In the first chapter, Ribak argues that Eastern European Jews, who rarely encountered Black people in their daily life, formed an impression of Black people from written texts. For example, the 1856 Yiddish novel Island of the Sea, written by the widely read Vilnius-based writer Isaac Mayer Dik, describes African mothers who sell their little children as slaves for a pittance and contains harrowing descriptions of the slave trade. It condemns the slave trade as inhumane while considering Black Africans “primitive.” Thus, Jews were also not a “blank slate” in their attitudes towards Black people when they arrived in America. Yiddish periodicals, while intended to educate Jews about European spheres of learning, also spread pseudoscientific racism.
Thus, as the second chapter of this book shows, many Jewish immigrants to America arrived with stereotyped impressions of the Black people who often became their new neighbors and customers. Jews generally felt the same negativity toward African Americans that they had felt toward the European peasantry. Both were stereotyped as having low intelligence and an affinity for violence and hypersexuality.
. The third chapter explores how the Yiddish newspapers across the political spectrum presented issues of labor organizing and anti-Black violence. Newspapers regularly used the word “pogrom” to describe anti-Black violence, a term that has led scholars to assume racial solidarity. As Ribak states, “the ideal of racial equality and nondiscrimination would remain central among Jewish labor organizers and socialists, alongside remarks that highlighted African Americans’ alleged backwardness and inferiority.” Social intermingling was uncommon as Jews were pressured to maintain the dominant racial social hierarchy which slotted them (somewhat uncomfortably) as “white.”
Chapter four examines the Yiddish theater, which included both Black singers and white Jewish actors in blackface. This discussion, while enlightening, would have been improved by a more detailed account of the actors in Yiddish theater. The fifth chapter explores images of Black people in Yiddish fiction, including translations of European literature into Yiddish. Ribak analyzes what Yiddish translators added to their translations of texts from other languages, as well as what they omitted.
Crude Creatures appears at a time of considerable racial, economic, and political tension in America. It questions the notion that the oppressed and marginalized are easy allies of other oppressed and marginalized people, or that the shared experience of discrimination can overcome entrenched social inequities. It is thus both an insightful study of an important period of Jewish history and call for moral self-reflection.
Brian Hillman is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University.
