New Observer: One of Israel’s most senior rabbis who sits on that country’s supreme rabbinical policy-making council has announced that Africans are “cursed” because they have black skin.
Rabbi Yitzchok Zilberstein sits on the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah (the “Council of [great] Torah Sages”), which is the supreme rabbinical policy-making council of several related prestigious Haredi Jewish intranational organizations.
Rabbis sitting on the Moetzes are the most prestigious rosh yeshivas (“heads”) of yeshivas or Hasidic Rebbes, and are regarded by other Jews as the “Gedolim” (“great/est”) sages of Torah Judaism.
Zilberstein is the spiritual leader of several major congregations in Israel, and his opinion is frequently sought and quoted on all matters of halakha—Jewish law.
Zilberstein’s teachings are hugely popular in Israel, and a collection of his utterances is one of the best-selling such titles in the Jews-only state.
His new comments appear in the Hebrew language Kikar news service, which boasts that it is the “world’s leading ultra-Orthodox website.”
In the article, Zilberstein is asked by a Jew if his marriage can be annulled because his wife hid her racial origin from him.
The questioner revealed that he had married a woman in America who looked “like a westerner” and claimed to be one.
However, after their first child was born with slanted eyes, the Jew confronted his wife who admitted that she had actually been born in China—and had had surgery to make her eyes round.
The Jew—an Orthodox yeshiva student—now wanted to divorce his wife because he had not known she was Chinese, and had apparently thought she was Jewish.
“The problem,” he was quoted in the Kikar news article as saying, is that the “children have slanted eyes” and that he had therefore made a “bad bargain” by marrying her.
The couple had gone on to have two more children, all with slanted eyes. After the third child, the husband decided that he could no longer remain married to the woman, and that no other Jews would want to marry these children.
His wife refused to agree to the divorce, and the Jew then approached the rabbinate with the request that his marriage be annulled.
In his ruling, Rabbi Zilberstein said that one-third of all people in the world, the Chinese, have “slanting eyes,” so he cannot claim that it is a “defect.”
The rabbi was then asked what would be the case if the child born was black (“Negro” as the article called it), and the rabbi said that the law in this case would be different, “because the Negro is cursed with the Curse of Ham” and that his black skin was therefore cursed.
The Curse of Ham refers to an edict issued by Noah in the Book of Genesis. One of Noah’s sons, Ham, sees his father naked and drunk in his tent.
Noah finds out that Ham saw him in this manner, and curses Ham, who becomes the father of the Canaanites.
Even though there is no direct reference to race or skin color in the book of Genesis, the Babylonian Talmud has God curse Ham because he broke a prohibition on sex aboard the ark and “was smitten in his skin” (Talmud, Sanhedrin 108b).
The Midrash—the collection of rabbinical literature which Jewish sages have provided over the centuries as a guide to the Talmud, states that the curse of Ham only applied to his eldest son Cush—and that Cush was an African (Yalkut Shim’oni. Noah Sec. 58). The use of the word “Cush” or “Cushite” is to the present day still a derogatory term for Africans among Jews.
The association of Ham with black skin—and being cursed for it—is therefore a uniquely Jewish religious tradition, and although often dismissed as near fable, is still believed by vast numbers of Jews, as Rabbi Zilberstein’s ruling shows.
