Jews as Historians of the Black American Experience

Between the 1930s and late 1970s, Jews were highly prominent among scholars of African American history and culture. Although early twentieth-century black scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter Woodson created the sub-discipline of African American Studies, by the Depression era they had been joined by Jewish-born anthropologists and historians such as Melville Herskovitz and Herbert Aptheker. These scholars, I argue, helped to shape the research agenda and methodological foundations of the study of black history.

During the post-World War II era up to the middle 1970s, the Jewish role only intensified. For much of this period Jews enjoyed comparatively far greater access to mainstream university positions than black colleagues. I argue that Jews used this access to function as surrogate scholars, whose work began the gradual process of incorporating the black experience into the broader American history curriculum. While not all the work of these postwar Jewish historians would today be regarded as progressive, judged in the context of its time it constitutes a remarkable effort on the part of outsiders to comprehend the historical experience of another, still more marginalized group.

The key questions are why Jewish scholars became so overrepresented, whether Jewish interpretations of black history displayed a coherent ideological pattern, and whether Jewish scholars of black studies were self-consciously aware of the role Jewishness played in their work. By examining the work itself, the institutional networks that linked Jewish students of black history, and through memoirs and interviews, this presentation ventures answers to these questions.