religions
Article
Slavery, the Hebrew Bible and the Development of Racial
Theories in the Nineteenth Century
Kevin Burrell 1,2
1
2
Department of Religious Studies, Burman University, Lacombe, AB 6730, Canada; kevinburrell@burmanu.ca
Research Fellow in the Department of Old and New Testaments, Matieland, Stellenbosch 7602, South Africa
Abstract: Racial ideas which developed in the modern west were forged with reference to a Christian
worldview and informed by the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Up until Darwin’s scientific
reframing of the origins debate, European and American race scientists were fundamentally Christian
in their orientation. This paper outlines how interpretations of the Hebrew Bible within this Christian
Weltanschauung facilitated the development and articulation of racial theories which burgeoned
in western intellectual discourse up to and during the 19th century. The book of Genesis was a
particular seedbed for identity politics as the origin stories of the Hebrew Bible were plundered in
service of articulating a racial hierarchy which justified both the place of Europeans at the pinnacle
of divine creation and the denigration, bestialization, and enslavement of Africans as the worst
of human filiation. That the racial ethos of the period dictated both the questions exegetes posed
and the conclusions they derived from the text demonstrates that biblical interpretation within this
climate was never an innocuous pursuit, but rather reflected the values and beliefs current in the
social context of the exegete.
Keywords: Hebrew Bible; Old Testament; race; racism; racial theories; race and ethnicity; Curse of
Ham; Hamitic Hypothesis
Citation: Burrell, Kevin. 2021.
Slavery, the Hebrew Bible and the
Development of Racial Theories in the
Nineteenth Century. Religions 12: 742.
https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090742
Academic Editor: Joel Baden
Received: 16 July 2021
Accepted: 2 September 2021
Published: 9 September 2021
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral
with regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional affil-
1. Introduction
Racism, understood as prejudice based on the premise of fundamental biological
differences between human groups, is a phenomenon that developed only in the modern
West (Montagu 1997; Braude 2011). European imperial expansion and colonialization of
foreign territories which began with Portugal and Spain in the latter half of fifteenth century
were the most significant catalysts for the emergence of racial science (Mazzolini 2014;
Horsman 1981). Ultimately, both the imperial prowess of Europe as well as human physical
diversity found explanatory power in the concept of race. By the nineteenth century, race,
both as a popular and a scientific concept, had come to dominate European and American
thought (Gould [1981] 1996; Kidd 2006). Every cultural phenomenon could purportedly be
determined based on race. The Scottish Anatomist Robert Knox epitomizes the significance
that race had acquired in nineteenth century imagination when he confidently asserted:
iations.
that race is in human affairs everything, is simply a fact, the most remarkable, the
most comprehensive, which philosophy has ever announced. Race is everything:
literature, science, art—in a word, civilization depends on it. (Knox 1862, p. v)
Copyright: © 2021 by the author.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
Knox’s positivistic assessment of the racial phenomenon is emblematic of nineteenth
century epistemology which at its core was characterized by “systematic attempts at using
race as the primary or even sole means of explaining the workings of society and politics,
the course of history, the development of culture and civilization, even the nature of
morality itself” (Biddiss 1976, p. 245). But exactly how had race arrived at this threshold?
How did this novel concept come to dominate popular imagination and spawned some
of the greatest intellectual struggles of the period? What were its roots? And how had
4.0/).
Religions 2021, 12, 742. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090742
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions
Religions 2021, 12, 742
2 of 15
race come to take on such a comprehensive and absolute character for Knox and his
contemporaries?
The development of racism has often been framed as a scientific problem, tied to
the emergence of modern biology (e.g., Stanton 1960; Gould [1981] 1996). Its origin is
frequently linked to intellectual secularism or the manifestation of social Darwinism in the
latter half of the nineteenth century (Hickman 2013). In challenging this view, Richard
Popkin (1974b) reminds us that long before the rise of scientific racism, modern philosophy
played a formative role in the manifestation of racial thinking. Emanuel Eze (1997a, 1997b)
suggests the same by highlighting the development of racialist thought in eighteenth
century philosophers. The racial views of David Hume, Emmanuel Kant, and others are
now well documented (Popkin 1974b; Eze 1997b; Bernasconi 2001; Eigen and Larrimore
2006). Kant, for instance, has been called “the real founder of British racism” (Curtin 1964,
p. 377), and Hume’s most unambiguous espousal of racial doctrine has received more than
its fair share of commentary:
I am apt to suspect that the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for
there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There
never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any
individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers
amongst them, no arts, no sciences . . . Not to mention our colonies, there are
negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any
symptoms of ingenuity. (citation in Popkin 1974b, p. 143; Gould [1981] 1996,
pp. 72–73)
Hume’s suspicion is revealing of the fact that eighteenth century philosophers were
actively thinking and writing about race, thus contributing to the establishment of a racial
hierarchy which aggrandized European achievement and denigrated other races, especially
blacks. Beyond philosophy and biology, the development of racism has also been parsed
as a political, social, or economic problem. Several scholars have urged, however, that
endeavors to identify precursors of contemporary racial phenomena have often failed to
adequately examine their principal forebear: theological racism underpinned by biblical
anthropology (Kidd 2006; Livingstone 2008; Hickman 2013; cf. Harrison 1998). Colin Kidd
(2006) makes the case for giving Christianity—“the dominant feature of western cultural
life”—pride of place in the development and articulation of race as a social construct
(p. 19). For the fact that Christianity and modernity are inextricably linked, Kidd identifies
Christian theology as the progenitor of the modern concept of race. Hence, Michael Allen
Gillespie’s emphasis on “the central role that religion and theology played” in the birth of
modernity (Gillespie 2008, p. xi), aptly applies to the formation of the idea of race. Indeed,
because modern philosophy is a child of theology, even philosophy’s contribution to the
canonization of racial doctrine is still an element of Christian cultural discourse. Thus,
rightly classed, race is a modern cultural construct with a religious foundation.
Accordingly, racial ideas which took shape on both sides of the Atlantic between the
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were forged with reference to a Christian worldview
and informed by the Bible, particularly the Old Testament book of Genesis (Kidd 2006;
Livingstone 2008). Up until Darwin’s scientific reframing of the origins debate, European
and American race scientists were fundamentally Christian in their orientation. This paper
outlines how interpretations of the Hebrew Bible within this Christian Weltanschauung
facilitated the development and articulation of a racial hierarchy which placed Europeans
at the pinnacle of divine creation and at the same time legitimized some of the most virulent
expressions of anti-black racism.
In particular, I seek to show how the primeval account of Genesis served as a seedbed
for identity politics as its origin stories were plundered in service of articulating a racial
ideology which vilified or bestialized blackness, and even sought to exclude Africans from
the Genesis genealogies altogether. That the racial ethos of the period dictated both the
questions exegetes posed and the conclusions they derived from the text demonstrates that
biblical interpretation within this climate was never an innocuous pursuit but rather re-
Religions 2021, 12, 742
3 of 15
flected the values and beliefs current in the social context of the exegetes. This hermeneutic,
moreover, served a definitive purpose: to provide moral-theological, and even “scientific”,
justification for the unequal treatment and enslavement of blacks in north-Atlantic societies.
2. The Monogenism–Polygenism Debate
Many narratives of the Hebrew Bible demonstrate how constructions of difference
embraced as divine injunction often facilitated the uncharitable treatment of the Othered—
the Canaanites in the Promised Land as the obvious example. It seems inevitable then that
certain stories of the Christian Old Testament would be harnessed as divine sanction for
a host of abuses against Others, both within and without the Christian orbit. From the
encounters of Europeans with indigenous peoples in the New World, to the trafficking
and exploitation of enslaved Africans, to segregation in America and apartheid in South
Africa, the Christian Old Testament has served as a legitimizing totem for human malignity.
The dispossession of the indigenous peoples of North America by settler colonists, for
example, was in many ways a reification of the ancient Israelite–Canaanite conflict (Cave
1988; Newcomb 2008; Newman 2016). Indigenous “pagans” could be driven out of the
Promised Land by New Israelites wielding Old Testament tales of providential conquests.
In terms of the genealogy of western racism, however, it is the origin stories of the Hebrew
Bible which were central to the formation and transformation of nineteenth century racial
discourse.
Like the other Abrahamic faiths (Judaism and Islam), Christian cosmology was predicated on a literalistic acceptance of the Genesis account of human origin and descent.
The doctrine that biblical Adam and Eve were the foreparents of all human beings was
axiomatic to a Christian conception of salvation history (Livingstone 2008). However,
the astounding variety of human physiological differences which were being widely documented by natural scientists in the Age of Expansion raised questions that European
intellectuals of all caliber were forced to confront. The discovery of greater and greater
human diversity seemed to defy the tripartite racial taxonomy of Shemites, Hamites, and
Japhites deduced from the Mosaic record (Kidd 2006; Livingstone 2010). New speculations
about human origins threatened the very foundation of the Christian worldview in which
Europe had been ensconced for well over a millennium. Was the biblical story of origins, a
prima facie doctrine of Christianity, to be taken literally? Were people groups displaying
such widely diverging somatic characteristics descended from the singular lineage of
biblical Adam, or was their existence to be accounted for by some other means?
These questions would eventually divide western anthropology into two schools of
thought. Monogenism and polygenism were the ideological camps within which intellectual
battles for the right to explain human origins and classify human physical diversity were
fought (Gould [1981] 1996; Livingstone 2008). These two schools were to define the
debate on human origins for some three centuries before eventually being eclipsed by
the Darwinian revolution in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The intellectuals
espousing monogenism and polygenism were the leading scientists of the age, pioneering
new fields such as natural history, geology, physical anthropology, ethnology, among others;
and it is their cogitations about race that first gave definitive shape and form to what was,
prior to the eighteenth century, only a penumbra (Fredrickson 2002). Monogenism, the
established orthodoxy on human origins, maintained that all mankind had descended
from a single set of ancestors roughly four thousand years ago. This belief laid at the very
foundation of Christian theology and was virtually unquestioned prior to the middle of
the seventeenth century (Kidd 2006).
Polygenism, on the other hand, proposed multiple origins as the best solution to
human diversity, but its exponents would lurk in the shadows for centuries, as few had the
temerity to openly advocate views which were seen as heretical and subversive to Christian
orthodoxy (Livingstone 1992, 2008). Monogenists, committed to upholding the authority
of scripture, condemned polygenesis as a pernicious heresy and vigorously defended the
brotherhood of the human race (Kidd 2006; Livingstone 2008).
Religions 2021, 12, 742
4 of 15
2.1. Monogenism and the Racial Order
Monogenists proposed environmental adaption as the primary vehicle driving human variation. This explanation harks back to antiquity. In neoclassical cosmology, the
environmental argument provided a facile rationale for human diversity (Harrison 1999;
Douglas 2008; Jordan 2012). Writers like Herodotus in the 5th century B.C. posited the heat
of the sun as the cause of the “burnt face” of the Aithiops, and Roman writers alike who
commented on the subject had suggested as much (Jordan 2012). Monogenists deployed
the same arguments with increasing sophistication from the seventeenth to the nineteenth
centuries. In their view, skin color, like other physical variation, was externally induced,
superficial, and the product of climatic adaptation (Livingstone 2008).
The most obvious example of this, Africans, were black by reason of the heat from the
torrid zone (Jordan 2012; Douglas 2008). Some monogenists even advanced the view that
black skin could become white under ideal environmental conditions (Popkin 1974b). This
idea—that black skin could become white—reveals the near-universal consensus among
monogenists that white was the aboriginal color of mankind. Though there were a few
notable exceptions, race theorists “took it for granted that the natural state of man is to be
white and that Adam and Noah were white” (Popkin 1974b, p. 134; cf. Mazzolini 2014,
p. 140). Darker skin pigmentation was explained by way of “degeneration”. Non-white
peoples had degenerated from the ideal color by migrating to less-than-ideal climates
(Popkin 1974b). Moving beyond the symbolic association of black and white with good
and evil, a relic of the medieval period (Fredrickson 2002), monogenists now associated
these colors with aesthetics: white was not only the original color of Adam and Noah, but
it was also the most “beautiful”.
The German physician Johann F. Blumenbach (1752–1840), the leading race theorist in
the eighteenth century and the “father” of physical anthropology, gave scientific credibility
to both craniology (the measurement of human skulls) and the term “Caucasian” (Baum
2006; Horsman 1981). He divided humanity into five racial types: Caucasian, American,
Malay, Mongolian, and Ethiopian. In Blumenbach’s aesthetic evaluation the Caucasian
takes pride of place for both the symmetry of the skull as well as for the beauty of white
skin color (Painter 2010). “The white colour holds the first place, such as is that of most
European peoples”, and displays “the most beautiful form of the skull”, he wrote in his
treatise, On the Natural Variety of Mankind (Blumenbach [1775] 1795, pp. 209, 269). In the
third edition of his treatise, Blumenbach famously appropriated the term Caucasian, based
in part on “a most beautiful skull of a Georgian female”, to describe both the beauty and
originality of European peoples (Baum 2006, p. 77):
I have taken the name from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood,
and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean
the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that
region, if anywhere it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the
autochthones [original forms] of mankind. (Blumenbach [1775] 1795, p. 269;
emphasis mine)
For Blumenbach, not only were Adam and Noah white, but their best present-day
representation were Europeans, specifically the people of the Caucasus region who were
reputed for their beauty (Gould [1981] 1996; Baum 2006; Painter 2010; Figal 2014). Crucially,
the biblical account of Noah’s ark landing on Mount Ararat (the lesser Caucasus) influenced Blumenbach’s choice for the aborigines of mankind (Figal 2014). Thus, it was the
temperate climate of “Europe” (or Asia?) that had served as the autochthonous homeland
of the primeval, Urstamm (original stem) of humanity—the Caucasian. Yet the irony of
Blumenbach’s choice for the “fetishized female from the Caucasus” as the ideal representation of European beauty is not lost on Sara Figal (2014) who wryly comments: “Travel
writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century (unreliable, yet widely read) identify the
most beautiful women in the world as the ‘primitive’ Georgians and Circassians from the
Caucasus mountains, additionally noting their high value on the Ottoman slave market”
(p. 163). Absurdly, it was the image of the Georgian female slave which became “the
Religions 2021, 12, 742
5 of 15
unlikely icon for racial theorists”, and “the genealogical source of the European race” (Figal
2014, pp. 163, 165; cf. Baum 2006; Painter 2010). Blumenbach’s aesthetic racial schematization was adopted far and wide and helped to cement the color-coded racial hierarchy in
European and American consciousness.
If white was the ideal color, degeneration theorists held that the farther skin color
deviated from white the uglier it became (Popkin 1974b). Christoph Meiners, Blumenbach’s
colleague, identified two races based on color aesthetics: “white and beautiful”, and “darkskinned and ugly” (Figal 2014, p. 175). Black skin was not only deemed the ugliest, but its
possessors were said to be the farthest degenerated from primeval humanity. Though still
regarded as part of the human family, blacks were its worst representation, often portrayed
as barely above the simian in form and intelligence. The French naturalist Georges Cuvier
(1769–1832), a monogenist and contemporary of Blumenbach, spoke for many when he
remarked that the Black was “the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches
that of the beast and whose intelligence is nowhere great enough to arrive at regular
government” (Cuvier 1997, p. 105). The bestialization of blackness was widespread among
raciologists of both stripes and would only intensify as racial science gained momentum.
To be sure, the degeneration argument based on environmentalism was central to
monogenetic explanations of human divergence (particularly during the eighteenth century), not only because it maintained the essential unity of mankind, but also because it left
open the possibility for the moral and spiritual improvement of degenerate types by means
of Christian conversion. The Negro may be the most degraded and poorest specimen, but
as part of the human brotherhood he could still reap the spiritual benefits of the race (i.e.,
redemption; Gossett 1997). The defense of human unity by monogenists was not born out
of altruistic concern for the Negro, however; it was the greater interest to uphold scriptural
authority that compelled monogenists to view humanity as a brotherhood (Kidd 2006). The
Lutheran clergyman and ardent monogenist John Bachman (1790–1874) could thus affirm
in 1850 that the African was “of our own blood”, yet still maintain that “in intellectual
power” he was “an inferior variety of our species” (in Gossett 1997, p. 63).
Nevertheless, the claim of brotherhood seems to have had at least one unintended
consequence. According to Fredrickson (2002), the “orthodox Christian belief in the unity of
mankind, based on the Bible’s account of Adam and Eve as the progenitors of all humans,
was a powerful obstacle to the development of a coherent and persuasive ideological
racism” (p. 52). That obstacle could not long hold, however, for polygenists were not
satisfied to simply affirm the organic inferiority of the Negro; they were bent on cutting
all affiliation with him. In time, polygenists would remove the African entirely from the
family of Adam, with some stressing the futility of evangelistic efforts by monogenists
(Gossett 1997).
2.2. Polygenism and the Racial Order
Polygenists were fundamentally at odds with the notion of climate as a cause for human physical variation. How could climate alone be responsible for the patent differences
in human physiognomy? How does one account for variation within the same latitude,
such as darker pigmentation of native Indians in America compared to Europeans, and
“Eskimos” with olive skin living in the northernmost zones? And what about the evidence
from centuries of Christian colonization indicating the permanence of skin color in new
environments? For these and many other reasons polygenists eschewed altogether with
the fundament of climate. Inherent and permanent biological differences best explained
human variation, they averred. They advanced the idea of separate and distinct creations
as the cause for the striking distinctions in human appearance.
The “father” of polygeny Isaac La Peyrère, a French Calvinist of Jewish descent who
later converted to Catholicism, published his seminal treatise on polygenist anthropology,
Prae-Adamitae, in 1655. Radically departing from established orthodoxy, La Peyrère argued
that Adam was not the first man to be created; he was merely the father of the Jews. The
Genesis account was therefore not a universal history of mankind but rather the specific
Religions 2021, 12, 742
6 of 15
theological history of the Jews. La Peyrère introduced the idea of “pre-Adamites”, or
“men before Adam” as the best explanation for the variety of mankind existing on the
earth (Popkin 1974a; Livingstone 1992, 2008). Peyrère’s challenge to Christian orthodoxy
raised the possibility that all human beings were not of “one blood” after all, but that the
preadamites were in fact a different creation altogether, somewhere above the beasts but
not quite as “human” as Adam, the first Jew (Livingstone 2008; Fredrickson 2002).
Moreover, for La Peyrère, preadamism helped to resolve many of the perplexing
enigmas in the foundation stories of the Hebrew scriptures, such as where Cain got his wife
(Peyrère found the incest option for the initial peopling of the earth less than satisfying),
the populating of the city he built, and the fact that he was afraid that he would be killed by
hostile hands (Livingstone 2008). Though La Peyrère’s heresy was summarily condemned
and vigorously refuted in the subsequent centuries, his preadamite theory would live on,
being variously picked up by adherents until its flowering in the middle decades of the
nineteenth century (Kidd 2006). In time, Peyrère’s Adam would become the father of the
Caucasian race (and in some iterations to the exclusion of the Jews!), and his preadamites the
progenitors of the black races. Biblical history too, would in due course become Caucasian
history, to the exclusion of the “non-historical” races.
Notwithstanding the survival of polygeny, the notion that there were separate creations posed too radical a challenge to Christian belief in original sin and redemption (Kidd
2006). Defenders of Christian orthodoxy rigorously attempted to stamp out the isolated
embers of polygenetic heterodoxy lest they should become fires. In the middle decades of
nineteenth century, however, and particularly among intellectuals of the American South
committed to the defense of black enslavement, the sparse flames of polygenism would
become a conflagration (Livingstone 2008; Kidd 2006). Advocates of multiple origins,
particularly the naturalists of the American School of Anthropology, would marshal ever
more sophisticated arguments from craniology, phrenology, zoology, geology, archaeology,
and even from scripture to buttress their views of separate and distinct creations. Although
Darwinian evolution in time would permanently change the course of the origins debate,
nineteenth century Christians would appeal increasingly to polygenetic arguments in
support of virulent racial bigotry (Livingstone 2008).
3. The Formidable Influence of American Polygeny
Though Polygenism first appeared in seventeenth century Europe, it was in the United
States among the anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, geologists, and other natural
scientists of the formidable American School of Ethnology that it would achieve its greatest
influence (Stanton 1960; Gould [1981] 1996). More than any other body of intellectuals,
these scholars were responsible for transforming the “heresy” of polygenesis into orthodoxy.
As Gould writes, polygenesis “was one of the first theories of largely American origin
that won the attention and respect of European scientists” (Gould [1981] 1996, p. 74).
Polygenists of the American School enthusiastically embraced the views of La Peyrère and
“celebrated” him as a heroic martyr of science and free thought (Livingstone 2010, p. 208).
The reputed founder of the American School, Samuel Morton (1799–1851) took the
scientific measurement of skulls where none had gone before him. By the time of his death,
he was in possession of the largest skull collection in the world containing hundreds of
skulls, appropriately called the “American Golgotha” (Gossett 1997, p. 58; Livingstone
2008, p. 174). His aptitude for meticulous measurements and collection of extensive data
describing cranial capacity quickly distinguished him as a reputable authority on race
science. His racial scheme which firmly secured the place of Europeans at the top and that
of Africans at the bottom, was legitimized by “statistical measurements, visual imagery,
and . . . moral cartography” (Livingstone 2008, p. 175).
In his Crania Americana (1839) and his Crania Ægyptiaca (1844), Morton advocated the
permanent and immutable inferiority of the American Indian and the Negro, respectively.
His certitude that the Negro was “an entirely different species” and the “lowest grade”
of the races was buttressed by voluminous statistical measurements (Gossett 1997, p. 59).
Religions 2021, 12, 742
7 of 15
Though Morton’s statistical “finagling” has been scrutinized and refuted by Stephen J.
Gould ([1981] 1996), Morton nonetheless had established the skulls of Europeans to be, by
every measure, the largest in size, cranial capacity, and facial angle, and those of Negroes to
be the smallest by the same measures (Livingstone 2008; Dain 2002). Mortonian polygeny
had an enormous influence at home and “was spreading like wildfire” abroad (Livingstone
2008, p. 142). By the time of his death in 1851, he had “convinced most of the scientific
community” of the statistical validity of his craniometric measurements for determining
racial essences (Gossett 1997, p. 63). Not surprisingly, the Southern slaveholding plantocracy lapped up his findings with alacrity. Morton was so highly regarded by this coterie of
slaveholders that, in 1851, the Charleston Medical Journal eulogized him thus: “We of the
South should consider him as our benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the
negro his true position as an inferior race” (Gibbes 1851, p. 597; in Stanton 1960, p. 144).
Though Morton advanced a “secular preadamism”, which attempted to divorce
science from religion (Livingstone 2008, p. 174), he nevertheless maintained that his “theory
of polygenic origin was not inconsistent with the Bible” (Gossett 1997, p. 63). Multiple
origins, he believed, was in harmony with “the sublime teachings of Genesis” (Stanton
1960, p. 142). Moreover, Morton echoed La Peyrèrian preadamism by supporting the idea
that the Garden of Eden was “a paradise for the Adamic race” and not a “collective centre
for the whole human family” (citation in Stanton 1960, p. 142). For Morton, the Genesis
creation story represented only one branch of the human race—the Adamic branch—while
omitting specific mention of the others (Stanton 1960).
The eminent Swiss-born Geologist Louis Agassiz, who together with Morton is said to
be “the two most famous advocates of polygeny” (Gould [1981] 1996, p. 74), had emigrated
to the United States in the 1840’s and had become a strong supporter and colleague of the
American School. He too defended their polygeny on scriptural grounds. In his article,
“The Diversity of Origin of the Human Race”, appropriately published in The Christian
Examiner, he railed against “the charge so often brought against us”, namely, “that we have
undertaken to undermine our sacred books, to diminish their value, and to derogate from
their holy character”. To the contrary, Agassiz averred, “we deny that, in the views which
we take of these questions, there is anything contradicting the records in Genesis” (Agassiz
1850, p. 111). Though Agassiz claimed that mankind shared a “spiritual and moral unity”
he nonetheless maintained, like Morton, that blacks had a separate origin from whites,
and that Genesis is a history of only the Caucasian race (Kidd 2006, p. 141). According
to Agassiz, “the history in Genesis”, outlines only “the branches of the white race”; the
“colored races” or “non-historical” races are “nowhere” alluded to (Agassiz 1850, p. 111).
Rather, the colored races originated in the various places where they are found.
Decidedly more anti-clerical than Agassiz their friend and colleague, Morton’s two
most ardent disciples, the physician Josiah C. Nott (1804–1873) and the Egyptologist
George R. Gliddon (1809–1857) vigorously championed the polygenic origin of mankind,
the denigration of the black race, and the view that Genesis (albeit allegorical) was solely
about the history of the white race. In 1854, they published their momentous Types of
Mankind, a tome of eight hundred pages which achieved instant success. By 1860, their
bestseller was into its eighth edition and became “the leading American text on human
racial difference” (Gould [1981] 1996, p. 68; cf. Gossett 1997; Young 1994). Nott and
Gliddon’s agenda was unapologetically pro-slavery, anti-clerical, and political (Gossett
1997; Dain 2002). They attacked their clerical opponents as unscientific, superstitious, and
theologically prejudiced, and set out to writing a purely scientist account of racial typology
untrammeled by theological constraints (Gossett 1997; Livingstone 2008).
Throughout their voluminous work they appealed extensively to the new science of
Egyptology. Drawing on ancient Egyptian art and iconography, they sought to prove that
not only biblical chronology, but also biblical anthropology was inaccurate. The monuments
of ancient Egypt, they asserted, proved beyond any reasonable doubt that differentiated
types of mankind were as old as creation itself. Each racial type also demonstrated a
“consequent permanence of moral and intellectual peculiarities”, which affirmed their
Religions 2021, 12, 742
8 of 15
proper place on the “social scale” of “Providence” (Nott and Gliddon 1854, p. 50). In
their hierarchy of creation, “God’s noblest work” is the Caucasian, while the “‘slough of
despond’ in human gradations” can be found in Africa (Nott and Gliddon 1854, p. 191).
The basic polygenic arguments of Nott and Gliddon (and the American School generally) was that nature had permanently fixed the Negro’s place, as it did for all other
races, and hence any attempt to alter what was fixed by supposing the inferior types could
change their station was misguided. As a result, the pernicious notion being increasingly
agitated by abolitionists at home and abroad that the Negro race could be elevated through
emancipation and education was not only altogether futile and a waste of resources but
was in fact an attempt to “arraign Providence” (Nott and Gliddon 1854, p. lii). In defense
of the permanent racial stasis of blacks they claimed:
The monuments of Egypt prove, that Negro races have not, during 4000 years at
least, been able to make a solitary step, in Negro-Land; the modern experiences
of the United States and the West Indies confirm the teaching of the monuments
of history; and our remarks . . . hereafter, seem to render fugacious all probability
of a brighter future for these organically-inferior types. (Nott and Gliddon 1854,
pp. 95–96)
Consequently,
[I]t would seem that the Negroes . . . must remain substantially in the same
benighted state wherein Nature has placed them and in which they have stood,
according to Egyptian monuments, for at least 5000 years. (Nott and Gliddon
1854, p. 189)
According to these architects of human worth nothing but “a miracle”—the “silliest
of desperate suppositions”—could possibly change the Negro’s inherent inferiority (Nott
and Gliddon 1854, p. 191). Again, the thesis of the organic and permanent fixity of black
inferiority served the intents and purposes of slave owners with exceptional force. Indeed,
Nott and Gliddon gave explicit sanction to the southern industry by writing that “the
physical characteristics of a ‘field,’ or agricultural, ‘Nigger’ were understood at Rome 1800
years ago, as thoroughly as by cotton-planters in the State of Alabama, still flourishing
in A.D. 1853” (Nott and Gliddon 1854, p. 252). With such unequivocal endorsements,
little wonder southern states embraced these “scientific” arguments with enthusiasm and
provided generous financial support for such research. Indeed, because slave money
funded many academic institutions and disciplines, for obvious reasons the academy was
obliged to overtly endorse or give an implicit nod to the industry through its silence. Along
the same lines, several scholars have shown the connection between slavery and the growth
of modern industry—from the Industrial Revolution to capitalist enterprises in Europe and
America—suggesting that it was this web of economic entanglement which permitted the
perpetuation of slavery for as long as it did (Williams 1966; Baptist 2014). Scripturalists as
well, many of whom were slave owners themselves, were no less willing to do violence to
the scriptures for economic reasons.
Another weapon in Nott and Gliddon’s ethnological crusade involved the use of
visual representation. To further bolster their claim of black inferiority, they produced a
significant number of visual aids such as maps and sketches to show the close associations
between the Negro and the ape (see Figure 1 for one such example). Still, they were not
content to rely solely on scientific arguments and visual cartography to establish once and
finally the permanence of black inferiority; as we shall see momentarily, they would carry
forward a new and bold exegesis of the biblical text itself.
Religions 2021, 12, 742
9 of 15
Figure 1. Comparison between blacks and apes; Types of Mankind, p. 459.
4. The Bible and Slavery
Monogenists, as we have seen, stressed the unity of the human race. However, slavery
as an institution thrived concurrently with unctuous professions of human unity. How,
then, did monogenists justify the enslavement of Africans, their brothers? Inasmuch as
scripture was always at the forefront of debates about human origin and unity, so too
scripture lay at the heart of disputes regarding slavery (Haynes 2002; Whitford 2009). As
already noted, it was customary for monogenists to affirm the unity of the human race
based on Christian orthodoxy on the one hand, and yet still defend the inferiority of other
races, especially blacks, on the other.
John Henry Hopkins (1792–1868), a northern Episcopal bishop and staunch defender
of slavery wrote, “The Scriptures show me that the negro like all other races, descends
from Noah, and I hold him to be a man and a brother. But though he be my brother it
does not follow that he is my equal”. To this end he inquires rhetorically, “why should not
the African race be subject, and subject in that way to which it is best adapted?” Slavery,
not freedom, Hopkins contends, is the proper place for his Negro brother (Hopkins 1864,
p. 32; emphasis original). Similarly, Bachman, the Lutheran minister and slaveholder, whose
views on black inferiority we have already encountered, was a blistering critic of Samuel
Morton’s polygeny. He argued vociferously in favor of monogenism and the brotherhood
of humanity, and yet at the same time believed that the Negro was justly enslaved for his
own benefit, like a child in need of “protection and support” (Gossett 1997, p. 63). Clearly,
Bachman and other scripturalists who benefited directly or indirectly from the enslavement
of Africans found it of no consequence to deploy scripture in defense of black inferiority.
It is to be noted, however, that not everyone in nineteenth century America who
agreed with the notion of innate black inferiority was a supporter of slavery. Indeed, some
proponents of otherwise overtly racist views of Africans were staunchly opposed to slavery.
Religions 2021, 12, 742
10 of 15
The English surgeon Charles White, a polygenist and strong proponent of black inferiority,
for example, believed that even “men of inferior capacities” (i.e., blacks) were as entitled to
freedom as any Teuton (Stanton 1960, p. 18; cf. Curtin 1964; Hudson 1996). Some could
declaim the inferiority of blacks with aplomb, and in the same breath vehemently denounce
slavery. The pioneering American archaeologist, Ephraim George Squier epitomized this
dichotomy in stating that he had a “precious poor opinion of niggers, or any of the darker
races”, yet he had “a still poorer one of slavery” (in Stanton 1960, pp. 192–93). That said, it
would be hard pressed to find an advocate of slavery who did not also seek to justify black
inferiority.
The Bible itself became a tool in the defense of slavery, especially from the sixteenth
century when “for the first time in the history of mankind, the Europeans introduced
a system of color-based slavery” (Mazzolini 2014, p. 146). Defenders of the institution
wielded biblical accounts of slave regulations found in the Pentateuch, and even drew
upon New Testament examples for the same purpose (Kidd 2006). By far, however, the
most important biblical justification for race slavery was the protean myth of Ham’s Curse
(Braude 1997, 2005; Goldenberg 2003, 2017).
4.1. The Hamitic Hypothesis
Clerical monogenists had long favored the Hamitic myth, rooted in the exegetical
distortion of Genesis 9: 18–27, to justify black inferiority and servitude. While forms of
the myth had circulated in early Christian, Jewish, and Muslim literature, no coherent or
systemic association of Ham with blackness and servitude had developed prior to the late
eighteenth century (Goldenberg 1997; Whitford 2009; Aaron 1995). Kidd (2006) shows
that Ham was not primarily associated with skin color in the medieval period, but rather
stood as a symbol of idolatry and polytheism (p. 75). From another perspective, Benjamin
Braude (2005) demonstrates that the Hamitic Hypothesis has been amazingly fungible,
shifting its form to incorporate various “descendants” of Ham, depending on the social
context and object of vilification. According to Braude, it was the image of the Jew that
was most frequently associated with the benighted son of Ham in the medieval period.
However, this would change dramatically in the nineteenth century: the myth of Ham
would acquire “its most notorious manifestation in antebellum America” (Goldenberg
2017, p. 1), whereas “The thirteenth century depiction of Ham makes him a Jew. The
nineteenth century depiction of Ham makes him a Black” (Braude 2005, p. 80). This shift
was certainly born out of a need to justify slavery in antebellum America, but it was also
specifically the result of concerted exegetical maneuverings of the biblical story.
In 1754, the English Bishop Thomas Newton (1704–1782) penned “one of the most
important defenses of the Curse of Ham ever written” (Whitford 2009, p. 141). The decisive
and influential publication, Dissertation on the Prophecies, would have both immediate and
far-reaching consequences for the exegesis of Genesis 9: 18–25. David Whitford (2009)
has indicated that this seminal Dissertation, above all else, influenced later articulation
and promulgation of the myth of Ham’s curse in a host of publications, “from exegetical
works, to abolitionist parodies of proslavery tracts, to the Encyclopedia Britannica, to the
United States Congressional Record” (p. 160). Exegetically manipulating the text, Newton
“corrected” the reading of Genesis 9: 25 to unambiguously place the curse on Ham instead
of on Canaan, and he affirmed the prophetic fulfillment of the curse in the enslavement of
Africans. According to Newton, the curse upon Ham and his posterity is an “extraordinary
prophecy”, “both wonderful and instructive” which has been “shown to be fulfilled from
the earliest times to the present” (Newton [1754] 1832, pp. iii, 14). He explained the
historical fulfillment thus:
The whole continent of Africa was peopled principally by the children of Ham;
and for how many ages have the better parts of that country lain under the dominions of the Romans, and then of the Saracens, and now of the Turks! In what
wickedness, ignorance, barbarity, slavery, misery, live most of the inhabitants!
And of the poor negroes how many hundreds every year are sold and bought
Religions 2021, 12, 742
11 of 15
like beasts in the market, and are conveyed from one quarter of the world to do
the work of beasts in another! (Newton [1754] 1832, p.12)
Newton hesitantly attributes the blackness of Hamites to the curse. He writes, “We
might almost as well say (as some have said) that the complexion of the blacks was
in consequence of Noah’s curse” (Newton [1754] 1832, p. 12). Subsequent to Newton,
theologians of all stripes affirmed his exegetical conclusions, and were not in the least
hesitant in associating black skin color with the curse of Noah. By the nineteenth century,
the literature propounding the blackness of Ham was voluminous. For these exegetes the
prophecies of Noah had been fulfilled with exactitude.
Hopkins, the Episcopal bishop of Vermont whom we have already met, was a prominent defender of slavery. In 1864, he wrote an exhaustive outline of biblical evidence in
support of slavery entitled A scriptural, ecclesiastical, and historical view of slavery. Of import,
Hopkins appeals to “Bishop Newton, whose well-known work upon the Prophecies” is
“selected by the Church for students in Theology” and therefore “a safe guide of ministerial
opinion” (Hopkins 1864, p. 70). Hopkins sanctioned the justice of Southern slavery by
appealing to the curse of Noah: “the Deity pronounced the curse of slavery upon the
posterity of Ham” resulting in “the total degradation of Ham, in the slave-region of Africa”
(Hopkins 1864, pp. 67, 69). The curse against Ham, he suggested, had been fulfilled with
tremendous accuracy: “And all history proves how accurately the prediction has been
accomplished, even to the present day” (Hopkins 1864, pp. 7, 19). On the moral question
of slavery, he concludes, “there was necessarily no sin whatever” (Hopkins 1864, p. 45).
Similarly, the clergyman Josiah Priest published his influential Slavery, as It Relates to
the Negro in 1843 filled with theological arguments in favor of black slavery. Appropriately
giving deference to “Bishop Newton” on the exegesis of Ham’s tale, Priest adjudicated
the morality of slavery thus: “wherefore we come to the conclusion, that it is not sinful to
enslave the negro race” (Priest 1843, pp. 86–87; cf. Whitford 2009, p. 164). Though nearly
universally defended by Southern clergy, the Curse of Ham would undergo yet another
radical metamorphosis in the latter half of the nineteenth century, thanks to the restless
efforts of the two firebrands of the American School.
4.2. The New Hamitic Myth
As we have seen, Nott and Gliddon were bent on refuting the unity of the human race
by resorting to scientific arguments. However, the myth of Ham’s blackness stood as a
formidable obstacle to their agenda. They decided to attack the problem at the source: they
would demonstrate that the biblical text bore no such evidence of Ham’s curse. In a word,
they would seek to loosen Newton’s exegetical stranglehold on the story of Ham. Another
significant point impinging upon Ham’s blackness had to do with the fact that the new field
of Egyptology was revealing ancient Egypt to be a highly sophisticated civilization; one
which many believed at the time was the forerunner of western civilization (Young 1994).
However, because the curse of Ham was predicated on the idea that all Hamites, including
the ancient Egyptians, were black—and therefore incapable of high civilization—there was
a particular urgency to set the record straight. “The immediate solution”, as Robert Young
(1994) points out, “was to make Egypt white” (p. 159).
The American School launched a sustained challenge to the long-established ecclesiastical position popular among monogenists that Ham was cursed with black skin, and
they set about to reclaim Ham for the white race. The American School expended no
little effort—through lectures and publications—to reform the blackness of the ancient
Egyptians and hence to “to prove beyond possible doubt, that the Ancient Egyptian race
were Caucasians” (Nott 1844, p. 16; cf. Young 1994; Trafton 2004; Bernal 1987). As for the
notion that Hamites had been cursed with black skin, they engaged the biblical account
directly. Providing a necessary corrective to the Genesis 9 story, Gliddon claimed that
Canaan,
was not physically changed in consequence of the curse. He ever remained a white
man, as did, and do, all his many descendants. No scriptural production can
Religions 2021, 12, 742
12 of 15
be found, that would support an hypothesis so absurd, as that, in consequence
of the curse, Canaan was transmuted into a negro . . . If then with the curse
branded on Canaan, and on his whole posterity, the Almighty did not see fit to
change his skin, his hair, bones, or any portion of his physical structure, how
unjust, how baseless is that theory (unsupported by a line of Scripture, and in
diametrical opposition to monumental and historical testimony), which would
make Canaan’s immediate progenitor, Ham, the father of the Negroes! or his
apparently blameless brother, Mizraim, an Ethiopian! (Gliddon 1850, p. 41;
emphases original)
Taking their exegesis to its logical conclusion, Nott and Gliddon affirmed, as did
Morton and Agassiz, that the author of Genesis “omits Negro races altogether, from his
tripartite classification of humanity under the symbolic appellatives of ‘Shem, Ham, and
Japheth’” (Nott and Gliddon 1854, p. 249). Not only are Negroes never mentioned in the
Pentateuch, but they would further claim that “the Negro races are never alluded to in
ancient Jewish literature” and that “Ethiopia” was “a false interpretation of the Hebrew
KUSh, which always means Southern Arabia, and nothing but the Cushite-Arabian race”
(Nott and Gliddon 1854, p. 253). Morton too had claimed that the ancient Ethiopians had
“no affinity, even in the remotest times, to the Negro race” and that “The valley of the Nile,
both in Egypt and in Nubia, was originally peopled by a branch of the Caucasian race”
(Morton 1844, pp. 43, 65). His disciples affirmed both with even greater zeal. Consequently,
not only were the ancient Egyptians reclaimed for the white race, but even the ancient
Ethiopians (Cushites) were brought into the Caucasian fold, effectively removing Negroes
from ancient Jewish literature, and completely dislodging them from the environs of ancient
Near Eastern civilizations. As I have written elsewhere, “under the polygenists of the
American School, the long-standing association of blackness-African-slavery-Hamites was
spun upon its head” (Burrell 2020, p. 49).
This “new” exegesis of white Hamites and Cushites would be picked up and reflected
in a host of disciplines like Egyptology, archaeology, anthropology, ancient Near Eastern
history, and of course, biblical scholarship (cf. Bernal 1987; O’Connor and Reid 2003). Thus,
when in 1891 the British Orientalist Archibald Sayce wrote his influential Races of the Old
Testament he asserted that biblical Cush or Ethiopia was “inhabited for the most part by a
white race whose physical characteristics connect them with the Egyptians” (Sayce 1891,
p. 51). Likewise, based on biometric analysis of ancient Near Eastern skulls, the celebrated
Egyptologist and Archaeologist Flinders Petrie reached the “simple conclusion that North
Africa, Egypt, and Syria were occupied by allied tribes of a European character” (Petrie
1901, p. 250). By the time the great British Ethnologist Charles G. Seligman wrote his
Races of Africa in 1930 he could claim with gravity that “the civilizations of Africa, are the
civilizations of the Hamites” (Seligman 1930, p. 96).
Furthermore, once American polygenism took root in the second half of the nineteenth
century, a host of theological works on preadamism began to appear, including the 1860
publication of Isabelle Dunkan’s Pre-Adamite man: or the story of our old planet and its inhabitants as told by scripture and science; Paschal B. Randolph’s Pre-Adamite Man: Demonstrating
the Existence of the Human Race in 1863; Dominick McCausland’s Adam and the Adamite; or,
the harmony of scripture and ethnology in 1864; and Alexander Winchell’s Preadamites; or a
demonstration of the existence of men before Adam in 1878. No longer in need of Ham’s curse
to justify black slavery, revisionist preadamism found new exegetical grounds to achieve
the same ends. Preadamite advocates assaulted the Genesis origin stories with abandon in
order to bestialize blacks and demonstrate black inferiority, and especially to disparage
miscegenation between blacks and whites in view of the new reality of an emancipated
black population of some four million (Livingstone 2008).
Black preadamites could appear as the cursed Cain and his progeny, or the fallen,
miscegenating Nephilim of Genesis 6; and even stranger yet, the nachash—the crafty serpent
that engaged in miscegenetic sexual temptation with Eve (Kidd 2006; Livingstone 2008;
Stokes 1998). The cursed Ham was now replaced by the cursed nachash, or the cursed Cain,
Religions 2021, 12, 742
13 of 15
or the Cursed Nephilim, or even cursed Nimrod—the exegetical outcomes seemed endless.
As Livingstone (2008) writes, “The power of pre-adamism, in one form or another, to serve
the interests of race hatred and the language of gross racial abuse evidently acquired a
considerable following during the second half of the nineteenth century . . . the basic thrust
of the scheme was to bestialize the African and to provide warrant for a fixation with
blood purity” (p. 197). Here again, the Genesis stories provided fodder for racial othering,
exclusion, and oppression.
5. Conclusions
The foregoing has demonstrated that the origin of racism was first and foremost a
scripture problem. The earliest efforts to define a racial hierarchy were carried forward
by European and American intellectuals espousing one of two theistic explanations of
human origins. Monogenists and polygenists sought to define human origin and filiation
with reference to sacred anthropology—whether affirming or contesting it. Though they
vehemently disagreed in their views regarding Mosaic cosmology, both groups employed
scriptural interpretation towards invidious ends. As we have seen, the establishment of
a racial order which placed Europeans at the very top and blacks at the bottom rested
on distorted and self-serving interpretations of the origin stories of Hebrew Bible. The
vilification and bestialization of blackness, whether on biblical or “scientific” grounds,
served the ultimate purpose of justifying black enslavement and oppression. Thus, from its
theological origins to our contemporary arena, the tale of race has revealed the vicissitudes
of human hatred and malice. That story is still playing out and its denouement remains
uncertain.
To be sure, the monogenism–polygenism dialectic has left an indelible stamp on
“man’s most dangerous myth”; and so too did interpretations of the foundation stories
of the Hebrew scriptures. Recognition of this modern history of interpretation should
give pause to anyone who regard care for his fellow human as a sacred duty. That the
foundation book of Judaism and Christianity could be so grossly misappropriated in the
service of racial hatred and identity politics, shows that far from being an innocuous
exercise, interpretations of the Bible are often commentary on the values and commitments
of the wider society. This was true in nineteenth century racial politics, and it remains true
in twenty-first century racial politics—if the recent and ongoing racial reckoning is any
indication. The faithful exegete will responsibly appropriate sacred traditions.
Funding: This research received no external funding.
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement: Not applicable.
Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
References
Aaron, David H. 1995. Early Rabbinic Exegesis on Noah’s Son Ham and the So-Called ‘Hamitic Myth’. Journal of the American Academy
of Religion 63: 721–59. [CrossRef]
Agassiz, Louis. 1850. The Diversity of Origin of the Human Race. The Christian Examiner 49: 110–45.
Baptist, Edward E. 2014. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.
Baum, Bruce D. 2006. The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity. New York: New York University Press.
Bernal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Bernasconi, Robert. 2001. Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race. In Race. Edited
by Robert Bernasconi. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 11–36.
Biddiss, Michael D. 1976. The Politics of Anatomy: Dr. Robert Knox and Victorian Racism. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 69:
245–50. [CrossRef]
Blumenbach, Johann F. 1795. On the Natural Variety of Mankind. In Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 3rd ed.
Edited by Thomas Bendyshe. Göttingen: Vandenhoek. First published 1775.
Religions 2021, 12, 742
14 of 15
Braude, Benjamin. 1997. The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early
Modern Periods. The William and Mary Quarterly 54: 103–42. [CrossRef]
Braude, Benjamin. 2005. Michelangelo and the Curse of Ham: From a Typology of Jew-Hatred to a Genealogy of Racism. In Writing
Race across the Atlantic World: Medieval to Modern. Edited by Philip D. Beidler and Gary Taylor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
pp. 79–92.
Braude, Benjamin. 2011. How Racism Arose in Europe and Why It Did Not in the Near East. In Racism in the Modern World: Historical
Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation. Edited by Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 41–64.
Burrell, Kevin. 2020. Cushites in the Hebrew Bible: Negotiating Ethnic Identity in the Past and Present. Leiden: Brill.
Cave, Alfred A. 1988. Canaanites in a Promised Land: The American Indian and the Providential Theory of Empire. American Indian
Quarterly 12: 277–97. [CrossRef]
Curtin, Philip D. 1964. The Image of Africa. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Cuvier, Georges Léopold. 1997. Varieties of the Human Species. In Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Edited by Emmanuel C. Eze.
Cambridge: Blackwell, pp. 104–8.
Dain, Bruce R. 2002. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Douglas, Bronwen. 2008. Climate to Crania: Science and the Racialization of Human Difference. In Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the
Science of Race 1750–1940. Edited by Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard. Acton: ANU Press, pp. 33–96.
Eigen, Sara, and Mark Larrimore, eds. 2006. The German Invention of Race. New York: SUNY Press.
Eze, Emmanuel C. 1997a. The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology. In Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical
Reader. Edited by Emmanuel C. Eze. Cambridge: Blackwell, pp. 103–40.
Eze, Emmanuel. C., ed. 1997b. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Figal, Sara. 2014. The Caucasian Slave Race: Beautiful Circassians and the Hybrid Origin of European Identity. In Reproduction, Race,
and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences. Edited by Susanne Lettow. New York: SUNY Press, pp. 163–86.
Fredrickson, George M. 2002. Racism: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gibbes, Robert. W. 1851. Death of Samuel George Morton, M.D. Charleston Medical Journal VI: 594–98.
Gillespie, Michael Allen. 2008. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gliddon, George R. 1850. Ancient Egypt: Her Monuments, Hieroglyphics, History and Archæology, and Other Subjects Connected with
Hieroglyphical Literature. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson.
Goldenberg, David M. 1997. The Curse of Ham: A Case of Rabbinic Racism? In Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of
Black-Jewish Relations in the United States. Edited by Jack Salzman and Cornel West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–52.
Goldenberg, David M. 2003. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Goldenberg, David M. 2017. Black and Slave: The Origins and History of the Curse of Ham. Boston: De Gruyter.
Gossett, Thomas F. 1997. Race: The History of an Idea in America, new ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1996. The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and exp. ed. New York: W. W. Norton & and Company. First published 1981.
Harrison, Mark. 1999. Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Harrison, Peter. 1998. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haynes, Stephen R. 2002. Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hickman, Jared. 2013. Douglass Unbound. Nineteenth-Century Literature 68: 323–62. [CrossRef]
Hopkins, John Henry. 1864. A Scriptural, Ecclesiastical, and Historical View of Slavery: From the Days of the Patriarch Abraham, to the
Nineteenth Century. New York: W. L. Pooley and Co.
Horsman, Reginald. 1981. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Hudson, Nicholas. 1996. From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought. Eighteenth-Century
Studies 29: 247–64. [CrossRef]
Jordan, Winthrop D. 2012. White over Black: American Attitudes towards the Negro, 1550–1812, 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
Kidd, Colin. 2006. The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Knox, Robert. 1862. The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. London:
Henry Renshaw.
Livingstone, David N. 1992. The Preadamite Theory and the Marriage of Science and Religion. Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society 82: i-78. [CrossRef]
Livingstone, David N. 2008. Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Livingstone, David N. 2010. Cultural Politics and the Racial Cartographics of Human Origins. Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 35: 204–21. [CrossRef]
Mazzolini, Renato G. 2014. Skin Color and the Origin of Physical Anthropology (1640–1850). In Reproduction, Race, and Gender in
Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences. Edited by Susanne Lettow. New York: SUNY Press, pp. 131–61.
Religions 2021, 12, 742
15 of 15
Montagu, Ashley. 1997. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 6th ed. Walnut Creek: Altamira.
Morton, Samuel G. 1844. Crania Ægyptiaca; or, Observations on Egyptian Ethnography, Derived from Anatomy, History and the Monuments.
Philadelphia: John Penington.
Newcomb, Steven T. 2008. Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Golden: Fulcrum.
Newman, Judith H. 2016. Tracing the Use of the Bible in Colonial Land Claims in North America. In The Bible in Political Debate: What
Does It Really Say? Edited by Frances Flannery and Rodney Alan Werline. London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, pp. 127–40.
Newton, Thomas. 1832. Dissertations on the Prophecies, Which Have Remarkably Been Fulfilled, and at this Time Are Fulfilling in the World,
new ed. London: Longman and Co. First published 1754.
Nott, Josiah C. 1844. Two Lectures on the Connection between the Biblical and Physical History of Man. Mobile: Dade and Thompson.
Nott, Josiah C., and George R. Gliddon. 1854. Types of Mankind. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Company.
O’Connor, David B., and Andrew Reid. 2003. Introduction—Locating Ancient Egypt in Africa: Modern Theories, Past Realities. In
Ancient Egypt in Africa. Edited by David B. O’Connor and Andrew Reid. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, pp. 1–21.
Painter, Nell Irvin. 2010. The History of White People. New York: W.W. Norton.
Petrie, W. M. Flinders. 1901. The Races of Early Egypt. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 31: 248–55.
[CrossRef]
Popkin, Richard H. 1974a. The Development of Religious Scepticism and the Influence of Isaac la Peyrère’s Pre-Adamism and Bible
Criticism. In Classical Influences on European Culture, A.D. 1500–1700. Edited by Robert Ralph Bolgar. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 271–80.
Popkin, Richard H. 1974b. The Philosophical Basis of Modern Racism. In Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts: Essays Presented to Herbert W.
Schneider. Edited by Herbert W. Schneider, Craig Walton and John P. Anton. Athens: Ohio University Press, pp. 126–65.
Priest, Josiah. 1843. Slavery, as It Relates to the Negro, or African Race, Examined in the Light of Circumstances, History and Holy Scriptures.
Albany: C. van Benthuysen and Co.
Sayce, Archibald H. 1891. The Races of the Old Testament. London: Horace Hart.
Seligman, Charles G. 1930. Races of Africa. London: T. Butterworth.
Stanton, William R. 1960. The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–1859. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Stokes, Mason. 1998. Someone’s in the Garden with Eve: Race, Religion, and the American Fall. American Quarterly 50: 718–44.
[CrossRef]
Trafton, Scott. 2004. Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania. Durham: Duke University Press.
Whitford, David M. 2009. The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justifications for Slavery. Farnham: Ashgate.
Williams, Eric E. 1966. Capitalism and Slavery. New York: Capricorn Books.
Young, Robert. 1994. Egypt in America: Black Athena, Racism and Colonial Discourse. In Racism, Modernity and Identity: On the Western
Front. Edited by Ali Rattansi and Sallie Westwood. London: Polity Press, pp. 150–69.