by Susan Jacoby
However, masters disapproved of—and often severely punished—slaves who organized their own, secret prayer meetings with slave preachers. The role of the slave preacher in this culture was tricky and dangerous, because he literally had to serve two masters. After the Civil War, one such preacher, Anderson Edwards, talked about his difficulties spreading the Gospel in Texas in the antebellum era. “When I starts preachin’ I couldn’t read or write and had to preach what massa told me and he say tell them niggers iffen they obeys the massa they goes to Heaven but I knowed there’s something better for them, but daren’t tell them ’cept on the sly. That I did lots. I tell ’em iffen they keeps prayin’ the Lord will set ’em free.”18
Another significant piece of autobiographical reflection by a literate slave dealing with the issue of conversion was written by Omar ibn Said (c. 1770–1864), an educated Muslim who was captured in his native Senegal near the end of the eighteenth century. Said’s sketchy fifteen-page autobiography, written in Arabic, has not been made into a Hollywood movie, but its very existence provides a valuable reminder of the long-neglected historical fact that many Africans were not pagans or polytheists but monotheistic Muslims when they made the dreaded Middle Passage in slave ships. Estimates by various scholars of the proportion of Muslims among African-born slaves range from 10 to 20 percent.
The first slaves of Muslim background were brought to South America by the Spaniards in the early sixteenth century. By the time they arrived in the Americas, most had spent some time in Spain, where they were forced to convert to Christianity. One reason the Spanish did not want practicing Muslims as slaves was their fear that African Muslims might convert Indians to their faith. As one scholar notes, colonial rulers surmised that, “if Africans, who knew about horses, converted the Indians and then taught them equine skills, much of the Spaniards’ military advantage would have been lost.”19 (There is something strange about this rationale, because Christianized African slaves would still have known about horses.) In any event, the English colonists who settled in North America a century later were not concerned about Islam and, as already noted, were ambivalent until well into the eighteenth century about whether slaves should be converted to Christianity at all. Muslims captured by slave traders in West Africa were more likely to be literate than other Africans, and Said belonged to this group. The literacy and education of slaves like Said (rooted in their culture’s emphasis on the study of the Quran) often made them favored house slaves, but it was also important that they were literate in Arabic rather than English; Southern planters were as opposed to teaching slaves to read English as the Spanish had been to teaching equestrian warfare to Indians.
Said’s autobiography was first set down in Arabic in 1831 and was translated into English many times. The original manuscript was thought to be lost but was found in a trunk on a plantation in Virginia and bought by a collector, who has displayed it both at Harvard’s Houghton Library and at the International Museum of Muslim Cultures in Jackson, Mississippi.*9 The English translation used by scholars today was originally published in a 1925 issue of The American Historical Review and edited by J. Franklin Jameson (1859–1937), an important figure in American historiography. In the manuscript, Said describes his birth in the region of Futa Toro, near the Senegal River, but does not talk about his youth or explain how he obtained his education. He writes that he was captured by a large army (how large it was, and/or whether it was composed of European Christians or Muslim Arabs, is not apparent) and then describes the Middle Passage. He recalls his first master in Charleston as “a small, weak, and wicked man called Johnson, a complete infidel, who had no fear of God at all.”20 Then Said escapes and is recaptured in Fayetteville, North Carolina, when he enters a Christian church, presumably to say his Muslim prayers in Arabic.
Said’s jailers noticed that he was writing on the walls of his cell in Arabic (an offense for which he might have been killed had the writing been in English). He was then sold to a General James Owen, who recognized him as an educated man, and the educated man remained with the family for the rest of his life. (If he died in 1864—there are no details—he would technically have been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.)
At some point after his purchase by Owen, Said converted to Christianity. Maybe. As one historian notes, “Tension between Said’s critique of Christian slaveholders and his alleged conversion to Christianity runs throughout his autobiography, reflecting a critical dissonance that is missing from the celebratory tone of his [white Christian] biographers.”21 One account in a Christian publication actually describes Said’s exposure to Christian Scripture (translated into Arabic) as a credit to the Christian God, who “causes good to come out of evil by making him [Said] a slave.” Said, however, writes, “I reside in this our country by reason of great necessity. Wicked men took me by violence and sold me to the Christians.”22 Throughout, Said emphasizes the linguistic differences between his current Christian prayers and his old Muslim prayers. Two other surviving excerpts of Said’s writing reveal the complexity of religious conversion under implicit, if not explicit, coercion. One is an Arabic transcription of Psalm 23. Said introduces the psalm with the preface “In the name of God, the merciful and gracious. May God have mercy on the prophet Mohammed.” The second surviving piece of writing contains an English inscription on the back, “The Lord’s Prayer written in Arabic by Uncle Moreau (Omar), a native African, now owned by General Owen of Wilmington, N.C. He is 88 years of age a devoted Christian.” But the text is not the Lord’s Prayer. It is actually a Quranic passage predicting a mass conversion of unbelievers to Islam, in which men will enter into “the region of Allah in companies.”23 The emotional conflict revealed in Said’s brief memoir provides yet another piece of evidence that—at least at the outset—all conversions of slaves are in some sense forced, whether the slave was originally a polytheist or a monotheist, whether the master was cruel or lenient.
It is also vital to recall, as Americans were forcefully reminded in 2015 by the murders of nine Bible study group members at the historic African American church known as “Mother Emanuel,” in Charleston, South Carolina, that independent black churches were never tolerated in the South under slavery. Mother Emanuel, originally called the Hampstead Church, was founded by freedmen in Charleston in 1818. The original church was burned down in 1822 after a plot by Denmark Vesey, one of its founders, to organize a slave uprising was discovered. In 1834, all black churches were outlawed in South Carolina, and free blacks, like many slaves, worshipped in secret until after the Civil War.
It could be argued that the tangled history of the conversion of slaves is a downbeat note—American exceptionalism in reverse—in what is essentially the story of a new society whose institutions would, however imperfectly, provide for freedom of conscience in a fashion that was still only a dream of certain philosophers in most of the Old World. However, the widespread neglect of the mass conversion of slaves to Christianity in standard nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century histories of American religion provides yet another example of the historical repression of race and racism as factors affecting every aspect of American culture. Far from being the exception that proves the rule of spiritual longing as the essence of all conversion, the Christianization of American slaves took place within a specific secular ideological context—in this instance, the South’s need to justify treating people as property while exposing those same people to a prophet whose appeal, if the New Testament is to be believed, was based on his assertion that all human beings possess equal dignity. Slaves had none of the rights of a purely “spiritual” convert; in their outward religious behavior, as in all things, they could only follow their owners. What were the thoughts of slaves when they heard Jesus’s promise, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10)? Northrup’s sui generis memoir, which has a good deal to say about the uses of Christianity as an instrument of both control and consolation, has almost nothing to
say about his own religious emotions (no doubt because his emotions about having been kidnapped from freedom into slavery were far more important to him than his religious feelings). Some of what we think we know today about slave religion comes from white abolitionists, like Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who made assumptions based on their own faith and on their desire to portray long-suffering, abused slaves as quasi-saints. The largest proportion of what we “know” about African American spirituality dates from after the Civil War, when the black church became the only American institution actually controlled by African Americans. But this fact of American history tells us nothing about the private, spiritual experience of conversion for slaves in the colonial and early republican, antebellum era—any more than Augustine’s Confessions tells us anything about the experience of slaves in Hippo who, when a once-polytheistic master converted to Christianity in late antiquity, found that they, too, had been turned overnight from pagans into Christians.
Today, public opinion polls show that African Americans remain the most religiously devout group in the United States. For both black and white Americans, the historic importance of the black church in the civil rights movement has helped obscure the painful history of how slaves became Christians in the first place. The eventual relationship between the black church and the twentieth-century struggle for civil rights suggests that those seventeenth-century planters were absolutely correct to fear the unvarnished version of the Bible as a possible source of rebellion. That is why the conversion of slaves required that the Bible be mediated—as it never was for white American Protestants—by ecclesiastical and temporal overlords. And that is why generalizations about the spread of religious liberty in the colonial and early republican era must always be qualified by the realization that slaves never really had a choice, once their masters decided that the human beings they owned must adopt a bowdlerized form of Christianity.
•
Nevertheless, anyone who cherishes the secular side of America’s heritage can only take pride in the American tapestry of religious pluralism that emerged during the colonial era. That the informal tapestry would be woven, in only 150 years, into the first government framework based not on the authority of God but on the rights of man, would seem nothing less than a miracle—or, at the very least, a Puritan “wonder”—to anyone with an inclination toward belief in the supernatural. The American colonists had—despite exceptions like the Salem trials, and often against the wishes of church leaders—used the seventeenth century to lay the foundation for a society in which freedom of religious choice (albeit only for the free) would be seen as a natural right rather than the gift of a benevolent ruler. The stage was then set for centuries of religious choice—including both religious proselytizing, conversion, and antireligious movements of all kinds. For once in Western history, these shifts of faith had nothing to do with political power or force. Freethinkers, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, who still lived in such danger in Europe: all were legally free to choose, even if those choices were inevitably affected by some of the same prejudices that had been a matter of law as well as faith in the Old World.
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*1 For a discussion of how this distinction played out in New England, see Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 70–74.
*2 Newsday while its reporters were conducting research for a series of articles, published in 1997 and 1998, on the history of Long Island. I have, in some instances, replaced seventeenth-century spelling with modern usage.
*3 The possibility of equal rights for Jews, however, never occurred to Carroll—in sharp contrast to many of the other signers of the Declaration of Independence. In his old age, he wrote that when he signed the Declaration he “had in view not only our independence of England, but the toleration of all sects professing the Christian religion, and communicating to them all equal rights.” This passage from Carroll’s memoirs is quoted by Russell Nye in The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 198.
*4 Saint Peter’s is the oldest Catholic parish in New York State. The current church, a historic landmark at the corner of Barclay and (what else?) Church Streets in the financial district, was completed in 1840, replacing the earlier structure.
*5 There are many different and sometimes conflicting versions of this affair, including those written by Voltaire and official Catholic Church historians, but there is no disagreement about the charges in the indictment or the sentence of the court. Catholic historians have often tried to minimize the role of the church, noting that the prosecution was carried out by secular authorities. That, of course, is exactly the point: the secular authorities were carrying out an old religion-based law rooted in the primacy of Catholicism and the assumption of the legal respect due religion.
*6 Family histories of this sort, though they may not have been typical, strongly undercut generalizations like Benzion Netanyahu’s regarding the disappearance of Judaism among Spanish and Portuguese Conversos.
*7 Königsberg, then a part of Prussia, was ceded to the Soviet Union by Germany at the end of World War II and is now Kaliningrad.
*8 The notorious Jewish “quotas” instituted by all Ivy League universities, including Columbia, in the early twentieth century were based not on religion but on ethnicity—something Seixas, as a descendant of Sephardic Jews, would have understood all too well. From around 1900 to the 1950s, Ivy League admissions officers were less interested in whether an applicant described himself as Protestant on his application than in his name and the country in which his parents were born—both giveaways of Jewishness. Both my grandfather Jacoby and my uncle, born in 1903, were graduates of Columbia College. My father, however, was born in 1914, and by the time he was ready to enter college, in 1931, Jewish “quotas” were firmly in place at Columbia. He went to Dartmouth College, which did institute its own quotas and kept them until the mid-1930s. There was also considerable discrimination against Catholic applicants by elite universities.
*9 The history of the manuscript appears in an essay by Patrick E. Horn in Documenting the American South, a project of the University of North Carolina (http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/omarsaid/summary.html).
· PART V ·
THE JEWISH CONVERSION QUESTION:
WHERE CHRISTIANITY STUMPED ITS TOE
14
HEINRICH HEINE (1797–1856): CONVICTIONLESS CONVERSION
PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON’S LETTER to the Jewish community of Newport, in which he emphasized that the new United States government required “only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens,” was written in the same decade of the eighteenth century as the birth of Heinrich Heine, who could never reconcile his attachment to German culture with having been born a Jew. Heine’s life—whether he became a poet or not—would have unfolded in a very different fashion had he grown up in a society in which a Jew could claim full rights as a citizen without converting to Christianity. This baby, born at the height of the Enlightenment, did become the most beloved poet in Germany after Goethe—so beloved that the Nazis would have trouble expunging his verse, much of it set to music, from the national memory. All of the great composers of German Lieder—including Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, and Mendelssohn—drew on Heine’s poems for their lyrics.
Pages of poetry, like prose, burn at 451 degrees Fahrenheit, but it is more difficult (as both Stalin and Hitler found) to wipe out the memory of lyric verse that resounds as a song, either figuratively or, as in Heine’s case, literally, in the individual as well as collective cultural consciousness. His books were naturally among the thousands of volumes burned in Berlin by the Nazis in 1933, but the last words—among the most quoted throughout the world since that time of horror—were his: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.”*1 One can only wish that there was a monument, somewhere, coupling Heine’s observation with Sebastia
n Castellio’s encomium on the execution of Servetus: “Who burns a man does not defend a doctrine, but only burns a man.”
Heine’s life also offers an exemplary narrative of religious conversion undertaken for purely utilitarian, worldly purposes. His was a change of religious affiliation that could hardly be called a change of faith, since Heine made it clear in his writings that he had no more faith in any form of Christianity than in the Judaism of his birth. His decision to embrace nominal Lutheranism was informed by a tangled, tormented relationship with his own Jewish background and German culture—a defining conflict shared by many German Jews, and especially by intellectuals, from his generation through the pre-Nazi decades of the twentieth century. Had fifteenth-century Spanish Conversos been able to write about their conversions without fearing for their lives should they reveal any ambivalence, we might know how Paul of Burgos really felt about his change of faith. Instead, we know only how others viewed him. Conversions in Heine’s culture, however, may be viewed both from the inside out and the outside in—although each vantage point seems lodged within a hall of mirrors rather than a stable landscape.