On Kevin Drum's blog, Adam Serwer recounts recent conventional wisdom about American history:
White ethnics—Irish, Italians, Jews—were long excluded from whiteness on the grounds that they were racially inferior, but they were integrated into a more inclusive redefinition of whiteness post-World War II.
I used to reply to this:
Indeed, who can forget that stunning scene in Gone With the Wind when Scarlett O'Hara's Irish last name is accidentally revealed, and thus she is immediately sold into slavery.
But, true believers in the wisdom of Noel Ignatiev always reply to the effect: "Hey, dumbass, don't you know Gone With the Wind is fiction?!"
So, as a nonfiction example, above is a Confederate two dollar bill from 1862. The man pictured is Judah P. Benjamin, who served the Confederate government as Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State. And it wasn't just a Confederate thing either: both Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce had previously offered Benjamin a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, an honor he declined each time in order to keep his U.S. Senate seat.
(Benjamin was the second Jewish Senator. The first was his first cousin once removed, David Levy Yulee of Florida, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1845 and resigned in 1861. He served in the Congress of the Confederacy until being imprisoned by the victorious Union forces in 1865.)
(Benjamin was the second Jewish Senator. The first was his first cousin once removed, David Levy Yulee of Florida, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1845 and resigned in 1861. He served in the Congress of the Confederacy until being imprisoned by the victorious Union forces in 1865.)
According to Wikipedia's article on Benjamin:
He was a noted advocate of the interests of the South. According to the author Carl Sandburg, the abolitionist Benjamin Wade of Ohio said the Southern senator was "a Hebrew with Egyptian Principles", as he represented slaveholders.[6] Benjamin replied, "It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate Deity, amidst the thundering and lightnings of Mt. Sinai, the ancestors of my opponent were herding swine in the forests of Great Britain."[7]
Similarly, in 1835, Benjamin Disraeli replied to an attack by Irish Roman Catholic leader Daniel O'Connell:
‘Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.’”
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203 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 203 of 203the South was the more religious then, just as it is now. The North was full of free thinkers, Deists, Unitarians etc, aka "infidels" to the fundamentalist evangelicals.
2. the Bible backs up slavery, and hence the Bible was the biggest weapon of the South in its propaganda war against northern abolitionists.
3. The Curse of Ham, based on the Genesis story of Noah and his sons Shem, Ham and Japheth, and Talmudic interpretations thereof, was extensively used by southern slavers to justify slavery. It was also used to justify serfdom in Europe.
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The curse of Ham is bogus as modern Biblical scholars like David Goldberg point out. No curse of Ham appears in the writings of Moses at all. And there were some northern free thinkers, but there were also plenty of "Bible Thumpers" in the north who supported abolition. It was these "fundamentalists" who in the North AND in Britain spearheaded abolition. Adam Hochchild's "Bury the Chains" documents this well.
The Bible does not "back up" slavery in the sense of endorsing its moral correctness. Quite to the contrary. It recognizes "facts on the ground" as to what people where doing when it was written - such as captives taken in wars, or people going into short-term debt slavery to cover their bills, but there is no moral or spiritual endorsementof slavery. Indeed it condemns wars and violence solely for the purposes of slavery- hence Mosaic laws against the man-stealer, or the admonitions of Paul that Philemon be received as an equal. And the laws of Moses actually laid the basis for an early version of abolition- via the 7 year emancipation and the jubilee.
The Bible was used by some southerners to bolster pro-slavery arguents, buton the other side of the fence, "fundamentalists" north and elsewhere used the same Bible to contradict the southern arguments, including debunking of the Curse of Ham claims.
Atheists thenselves actually are well represented in forced labor regimes as bad as anything undertaken by non-atheists- as the dismal brigades and mass graves of the Soviet Gulags show.
@anon 5/20/12 6:03 PM
. the South was the more religious then, just as it is now. The North was full of free thinkers, Deists, Unitarians etc, aka "infidels" to the fundamentalist evangelicals.
slippery thinking - abolitionists were christian. 'free thinkers' were, as now , narcissistic and selfish, and btw thought blacks inferior based on darinian theory.
Was Beecher a 'free thinker'? Was Wilberforce? Newton?
Let's move on to ill thought out point # 2:
the Bible backs up slavery, and hence the Bible was the biggest weapon of the South
What exactly do you mean, by 'the Bible backs up slavery"?
clear indication you have no idea what the Bible, is or what is contained therein.
I love how you guys at once claim that we're responsible for universalist multiculturalism and, apparently, simultaneously, slavery.
In any event the south started to 'use' Biblical justification to COUNTER the anti-Slavery movement which had its roots in Christianity. There is a big difference, which you apparently cannot grasp.
You have introduced the following phrase: As white as a two-dollar bill.
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