Gelya Frank - Herskovits African Jewish Diasporas

Identities
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Melville J. Herskovits on the African and Jewish

diasporas: Race, culture and modern anthropology
Gelya Frank
To cite this article: Gelya Frank (2001) Melville J. Herskovits on the African and Jewish
diasporas: Race, culture and modern anthropology, Identities, 8:2, 173-209, DOI:
10.1080/1070289X.2001.9962690
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Melville J. Herskovits on the African and
Jewish Diasporas: Race, Culture and
Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 11:10 28 December 2015
Modern Anthropology
Gelya Frank
Anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits' (1895-1963) work helped to

shape how African-Americans in the United States were viewed and
viewed themselves. By 1930, he challenged the prevailing view that
"Negro" life-ways were only an incomplete and pathological version
of mainstream American culture. In contrast, he contributed a schol-
arly foundation to the claim that elements of African culture had
survived in the Americas. His work supported the New Negro move-
ment and the emergence of pan-African identity. Curiously, however,
Herskovits argued that the Jews, another diasporic group, had no
distinctive culture nor were they a people. This paper reviews the
development of Herskovits' views in relation to: (1) concepts of race
and culture in modern anthropology; (2) public controversies concern-
ing assimilation versus particularism of blacks and Jews in the 1920s
and 1930s; and (3) Herskovits' Jewish identity.
Key Words: History of Anthropology, African-American Studies, Jewish

Studies, Ethnicity, Franz Boas
Identities, Vol. 8(2), pp. 173-209 © 2001 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V.
Reprints available directly from the publisher Published by license under
Photocopying permitted by license only the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint,
part of Gordon and Breach Publishing,
a member of the Taylor & Francis Group.
173
174 Gelya Frank
Their interest in blacks, their positive and sympathetic orientation towards
a group so clearly stigmatized and despised by the American mainstream,
and their support for black advancement in public life cannot be separated
from the ways in which Jews saw themselves in American society and the
ways in which they defined their own history.
—Hasia Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks,
1915-1935 (1995: xiv)
Herskovits—and for that matter, Boas—did not view Jewish and African
American diasporas as producing similar results. Both of them denied the
existence of Jewish particularism (because of diaspora) while valorizing
African American difference (in spite of diaspora). This moment in Amer-
ican anthropology is worth inspecting for the light it sheds on the historical
context in which entanglements of diasporic and disciplinary histories
occur—in this case, the period of mass immigration and the Harlem
Renaissance.
—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Spaces of Dispersal" (1994:341)
Anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, in his long career from the

1920s to the 1960s, used almost every methodological, theoretical,
and rhetorical strategy available to discover and explain cultural
continuities between the black peoples of West Africa and those of
the New World.1 His work provided scholarly support for the emer-
gence of pan-African identity, and he has been called "the founder of
scientific Afroamerican studies" (Simpson 1973: 1). It is curious to
note that Herskovits argued that the Jews, who were also dispersed
across continents, if over a much longer period, were neither a
people nor did they have a distinctive culture. This apparent
paradox prompts us to consider how Herskovits, a leading figure in
his discipline, applied the concepts of race and culture to politically
charged questions of identity in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Boasian definition of culture restricted Herskovits' ability to
theorize about groups that were geographically dispersed across
multiple centers. The Jews' autonomous rule in Ancient Israel ended
with the routing of the Maccabees by the Romans in 63 B.C.E.
Following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by
the Roman emperor Titus in A.D. 70, the Jews took diverse paths
through several continents. They formed distinct communities
following Jewish law as interpreted and compiled by their rabbis
(teachers), while otherwise adopting the life-ways of the dominant
cultures where they settled. Herskovits realized that Jewish identity,
Herskovits on the African and Jewish Diasporas 175
after so many centuries of migration and adaptation, depended
a great deal upon self-ascription and ascription by others, but he was
not able to make theoretical use of his insight. Instead, he saw the
Jews as an anomalous case with regard to his definition of culture. It
would be decades before a concept of ethnicity was introduced that
directly addressed the issues Herskovits had touched on but could
not resolve (Williams 1989; Zenner 1996).
The presence of living societies in West Africa and their offshoots

in the New World allowed Herskovits to do the kind of fieldwork
that was the hallmark of modern anthropology (Stocking 1992b).
Comparative field studies lent a rich empirical grounding to his
theories. Whereas Herskovits' model of the black diaspora was
naturalistic or "tree-like" (Drake 1982), contemporary scholars of the
black, Jewish, Chinese, East Indian, and other diasporas make use of
diverse models that rely on less naturalistic assumptions about
cultural transmission (Clifford 1994; Gilroy 1987,1993; Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett 1994; Tedlock 1996). In the 1920s, however, there were still
communities of Jews who had resided for centuries in Europe—and
in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East—where comparative
field work using Herskovits' naturalistic model might have been
done. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1994) suggests, Herskovits'
inconsistent approach to blacks and Jews calls for a closer look at
the intersection of diasporic and disciplinary histories, an area of
particular interest once we consider that Herskovits was Jewish.
Public debate in the United States in the early 20th century about
immigration and race was framed by the contrasting approaches of
assimilation and particularism. In the early 1920s, Herskovits'
writings displayed an ideological preference for racial and cultural
assimilation for Negroes and Jews. But his physical anthropology
research led him to the pragmatic assessment that assimilation was
much less likely for the Negro population than for the Jewish—des-
pite the fact that nativists regarded Jews, like other immigrants from
the margins of Western Europe, to be racially distinct and inferior to
old American stock. Herskovits was willing to consider a strategy of
particularism in the case of Negroes, but not for Jews. Herskovits'
work can be understood today as a window on the process of "how
Jews became white folks" (Brodkin 1998). Yet "whiteness" was invis-
ible to Herskovits as a category to be examined critically (cf. Allen
1994,1997; Delgado and Stephancic 1997; Frankenberg 1993; Ignatiev
1996; Jacobson 1998; Roediger 1999). Thus, it is important to revisit
how Herskovits, whose politics were liberal and progressive, arrived
276 Gelya Frank
at his contradictory stance on the cultural distinctiveness of blacks
and Jews.
Finally, Herskovits' work invites us to consider how personal
experiences, self-perceptions, and politics may have contributed to
the content of a discipline. Of course, theories can never be predicted
or assumed to be determined by a scholar's ethnicity, race, gender,
or class. Historical methods can be used retrospectively, however, to
examine how experiences of ethnic identity and racial discrimination

may have affected a scholar's work. It seems unlikely that we can
understand Herskovits' positions on the African and Jewish diasporas
without also considering his Jewishness. Born in the United States to
European Jewish parents, Herskovits was thoroughly assimilated in
terms of his education, military service during World War I, and
professional career. Although he experienced anti-Semitism and race
discrimination, he did not wish to see Jews characterized in terms of
difference. Yet he married a Jewish woman who was the daughter
of Eastern European immigrants (Yelvington 2000) and entered a
new academic discipline in which Jews were at the forefront, a point
of controversy raised by critics of founder Franz Boas and his
students (Frank 1997). While Herskovits felt it was important not to
deny that he was a Jew, he insisted that there was nothing distinctive
about the Jews racially or culturally that could justify discriminating
against them.
BACKGROUND CONCEPTS OF RACE AND CULTURE

IN BOASIAN ANTHROPOLOGY
Herskovits built his approach to the African and Jewish diasporas

upon the foundation established by Franz Boas, so it is useful to
review Boas' concepts of race and culture as applied to the two groups.
Boas was born in Germany in 1858 and left his native country in
the late 1880s. This was a period of growing political anti-Semit-
ism, which he knew would limit his professional career, especially
given his tendency to voice his left-liberal political views (Glick
1982; Stocking 1992a). In 1896, Boas founded the first department
of anthropology in the United States, at Columbia University,
entering American academic life at a time when Jews were still
being defined in racial terms (cf. Brodkin 1998; Lewis 1992).
Throughout his career, until his death in 1942, Boas struggled to
define the concepts of race, language, and culture clearly and to dem-
onstrate their mutual independence (Boas 1940; also see Stocking
1974).} Boas' physical anthropology provided an alternative to the
evolutionary viewpoint that had dominated 19th century anthropo-
logy, which ranked cultures in relation to European civilization and
attributed their different levels of advancement to biological differences
among races. His anthropométrie studies of immigrants demonstrated
that measurable traits thought to be characteristic of race (such as the
shape of the head) were not fixed and could change even within
a single generation as a result of new environmental conditions.

Thus Boas offered a critique of racial formalism or the classification
of humanity into four or five races that were thought to be essential
and pure, and that it was believed could be corrupted or degenerated
by mixing (Stocking 1968). Boas did not ignore obvious physical
differences between populations and occasionally compared "Whites"
and "Negroes" as two different races. Over his career, he used these
terms to challenge and deconstruct their meaning in common
parlance and to challenge the defamation of marginalized groups,
rather than to reify them in a scientific sense.3 He had to work with
ideas he wanted to repudiate, and to repudiate "race" he had to
name it (cf. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1987; forthcoming). Boas argued
that "racial types" were biologically real phenomena only in direct
family lines and small inbred populations, and that they were plastic
or unstable (i.e., they emerged or disappeared based on historical
conditions). Thousands and thousands of such "racial types" must
have existed at any time in the history of the human species.
Boas' cultural anthropology challenged racist assumptions. He
explained cultural diversity among groups not as the result of their
inherited capacities or race, but of history. The invention of cultural
elements (technology, social organization, and symbols) resulted
from each group's adaptation over time in response to the demands
and resources of a specific geographic environment. The further dis-
tribution of cultural elements was due to the historical processes of
selective borrowing and elaboration. This approach, known as diffu-
sionism, which focused on the distribution of culture traits, was
characteristic of Boas' work in the period from about 1880 to 1920.
From around 1920 to 1930, during the "classical" phase of modern
anthropology, the Boasians focused more on coherence among traits
or elements within a single culture (Stocking 1992b). Herskovits
began his work at this moment of transition in the discipline. Like
Boas, and in contrast to the humanistic and even romantic bent of his
colleagues, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, Herskovits emphasized
a naturalistic, scientific approach to anthropology in his mapping of
178 Gelya Frank
geographic migrations, categorizing the resulting mixtures of racial
types and cultures, and objectively identifying and statistically
analyzing culture elements found in language and artifacts.4
In an essay for a popular audience published in 1923, "Are the
Jews a Race?" Boas debunked the idea that "the Jews are a homogen-
eous race with definite characteristics different from the European
groups among whom they live, and possessed of definite anatomical
and mental traits which are hereditary features of the race" (p. 5). He
challenged the conflation of nation and race in conservative political
thinking, arguing that all nations in the modern political sense (i.e.,
French, German, Italian, Spanish) are characterized by intermixtures
that cross national borders. He wrote: 'There is no Italian race. North
Italians belong with the Swiss, Bavarians, Bohemians and Austrians.
The South Italians are akin to the people of Southern Spain and
Greece" (p. 5). This kind of intermixture existed even in ancient
Palestine, Boas noted, when Jews formed an independent state. Dia-
spora increased the intermixture among them.
A comparison among Jews from all over the world shows them to
have been "highly assimilated" in every instance (Boas 1923: 5). He
argued that while environment must have played some role in the
resemblance of the Jews to their non-Jewish neighbors, such factors
would not be sufficient to account for the degree of this resemblance.
Rather, "the constant infiltration of foreign blood must be taken into
consideration" (p. 6). Thus he noted: "The Jews of North Africa are,
in their essential traits, North Africans. The Jews of Europe are in
their essential traits Europeans, and the black Jews of the East are in
their essential traits members of a dark-pigmented race" (p. 5).
Leonard Glick (1982) argues that Boas limited his focus when writ-
ing about Jews to the fight against racist stereotypes. Boas did not
seem to recognize, in Glick's words, that "being Jewish might in itself
operate as a formative element in a social environment" (p. 557).
That is to say, Boas paid little or no attention to the collective self-
identification of Jews as Jews (see also Boas 1945). But he was clear:
whatever they may be, the Jews are not a race. Thus Boas set the tone
for the discipline, in which ethnographies of the Jews by his students
focused first on challenging racial stereotypes, and only later on culture.
Accordingly, the earliest ethnographies of Jews by the Boasians, in
the 1920s and 1930s, focused on exotic and anomalous communities
that contradicted racial stereotypes, such as the Black Jews of Harlem,
a spin-off of Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement (Landes 1967)
and the caste-structured and racially stratified Jewish community of
Cochin, on the Malabar Coast of India (Mandelbaum 1939). Around
1931, Edward Sapir at Yale encouraged the British-trained anthro-
pologist Hortense Powdermaker to do an ethnography of Hasidic
Jews in New York City (Powdermaker 1966). Powdermaker, a second-
generation American, whose upper- and middle-class family were
Reform Jews of mostly German background, was not interested nor
did she feel linguistically qualified. (When asked by Sapir "Well,
whom do you want to study," she promptly replied: "American

Negroes," p. 131). Sapir, who was Eastern-European born and
Jewish, did influence the research agenda of Yiddish scholar Max
Weinreich, one of the founding scholars of YIVO (the Institute for
Scientific Jewish Studies) and for many years the institute's research
director (Weinreich 1945; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1996). But Weinreich
was not an anthropologist, and his work did not contribute directly
to the discipline. A watershed in anthropology was the publication
of Life is With People (Zborowski and Herzog 1952), a composite study
of shtetl (little town) life in Europe, part of the "cultures at a distance"
project led by Ruth Benedict (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995).
In any case, the Jews did not easily fit Boas' concept of culture as
a temporally and spatially bounded set of traditions shared by a
community with its own language, more or less separable from its
neighbors. Boas' experience with political anti-Semitism in Germany
in the 1880s, when the recent emancipation and civil rights of Jews
were being eroded, affected this definition. He formulated a concept
of culture that was not easily pressed into service to set apart modern
Jews, in Germany or the United States, from their Christian neigh-
bors (Frank 1997; Hauschild 1997; Liss 1995,1996; see also Hollander
1996). Yet, as later argued by Fredrik Barth, who helped to introduce
the concept of ethnicity to anthropology, it was misleading for the
discipline to have begun thinking about distinctions among groups
"in terms of different peoples, with different histories and cultures,
coming together and accommodating themselves to each other, gen-
erally in a colonial setting" (1969: 303). A limitation of the Boasian
approach to culture was its relative inapplicability to multicultural
and particularly urban settings.
For Boas, assimilation was the answer to discrimination against
the Jews and other excluded groups. In his view, the problems of
blacks and Jews, although not identical, were analogous. Thus, while
we do not know the extent to which he intended the following
statement as a scientific prediction or rhetorically, as a lament, Boas
wrote in "The Problem of the American Negro," published in 1921:
180 Gelya Frank
"It would seem that man being what he is, the negro problem will
not disappear in America until the negro blood has been so much
diluted that it will no longer be recognized just as anti-Semitism
will not disappear until the last vestige of the Jew as Jew has dis-
appeared" (p. 395).
MELVILLE HERSKOVITS: "A JEW IS A PERSON W H O CALLS

HIMSELF A JEW, OR W H O IS CALLED JEWISH BY OTHERS"
Herskovits' essay, "When is a Jew a Jew?" published in 1927,

builds on Boas' physical anthropology. He agrees that the Jews are
not a race and goes further to tackle whether or not they have a
culture. He concludes that they do not, only that: "A Jew is a person
who calls himself a Jew, or is called Jewish by others." With this
insight into the ascription and self-ascription of identity, Herskovits
appears to anticipate a concept of ethnicity. But as Brackette Williams
(1989) has written, concepts of ethnicity were not introduced in the
discipline until around 1970, when political anthropologists needed
to replace tribes as the relevant unit of analysis for the new nations
of post-colonial Africa. A concept was required that could deal more
adequately with the interplay of race and culture, history, class, and
the ascription and self-ascription of identity. The need for such a
concept was felt also by anthropologists working in urban settings in
Europe and the United States (Vincent 1974; Glick Schiller 1977).
Herskovits was facing the same conceptual impasse as these later
anthropologists, but he did not actually theorize his insight about the
ascription and self-ascription of identity. Instead he treated the Jews
as a unique historical case—an anomaly—compared to other nations,
religions, cultures, or peoples. Not that he was alone in coming to
such a conclusion. Other scholars cited by Herskovits character-
ized the Jews as "an unusual type of nationality," "a social anomaly,"
"a peculiar people" (1960:1493).
Herskovits drew on personal experience in his essay. He was born
in 1895 in Bellefontaine, Ohio, and was raised in El Paso, Texas, and
Erie, Pennsylvania. His mother was German-Jewish; his father, also
Jewish, was from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, near Prague.5 His
father was a "small-town dry-goods merchant" (Jackson 1986:99). In
1915, Herskovits began studies to become a Reform rabbi at the
Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, but left to enlist in World War I,
although, according to his daughter Jean Herskovits (Yelvington 2001),
he could have had a deferment by staying at the seminary. Later he
took a bachelor's degree in history at the University of Chicago. After
graduate studies with Boas at Columbia, post-graduate research
in New York City, and a brief teaching stint at Howard University,
Herskovits received a professorial appointment at Northwestern
University. There he built the department of anthropology and spent
the rest of his career until he died in 1963. His essay on the Jews,
while consistent with Boasian anthropology, is also a polemic.
Herskovits delivers a challenge to identify any "common denomin-

ator" that defines the Jews, and he finds none:
I have often wondered just what, exactly, constitutes a Jew. I call myself
one. Yet neither in training, in tradition, in religious beliefs, nor in culture
am I what might be termed a person any more Jewish than any other
American born and reared in a typical Middle Western milieu. And yet,
when I hear the name bandied about with so much ease, and with the
common assurance that naming a thing constitutes a statement of all its
implications, I sometimes wonder just how one would go about construct-
ing a definition that would hold perhaps a very small bit of water. What
this means, of course, is trying to find some sort of Jewish least common
denominator—the largest classification or the most general trait which can
be thought of as characterizing all Jews. Because, today, I do not believe
such a definition exists—in my case, I have not found one which satis-
fies me. For me the word Jew falls into the category of things of which
one says, "I know what they are, but I can't tell anyone else just how
I know it" (p. 109).
Herskovits dismisses the notion of the Jews as the Chosen People
as a common myth, "one of the stories peoples like to tell of them-
selves" (p. 111). He refutes the claim that the Jews are a race or racial
type as a generalization based on a certain subset of the people—i.e.,
a stereotype, such as that Jews are short and swarthy. He denies
Zionist claims that had "come into vogue" (p. Ill) and argues that
the Jews had not been a self-governing political unit since the final
destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and that most Jews
were likely to continue living outside of Palestine. He cites the patri-
otism of the Jews to the nations in which they live, as evidenced by
the fact that Jews served in the armies on all sides in World War I
("When I am asked by a foreigner what I am, I will answer
'American,' " p . 112). He dismisses outright the idea that Jews are "a
people" ("And if we try to solve the difficulty by calling the Jews
a people rather than a race, or a nation, I am completely at a loss as
to what is meant," p. 112).
According to Herskovits, the Jews cannot be considered a linguistic
group because they share no single language, neither Hebrew, Yiddish,
182 Gelya Frank
nor Ladino. Furthermore, he denies that the Jews have a common
religion. In comparison to Catholicism, he argues, the Jewish religion
is so based on individual thinking, the independence of the syna-
gogues, and diversity among the Ashkenazic and Sephardic groups
that it has no real coherence. Once reared as a Jew, he adds dryly,
even an agnostic is claimed as such. He cites an experience while in
rabbinical school:
I am not affiliated with any sort of a Jewish religious organization, nor do

I hold the beliefs commonly regarded as religious at all. Does this make
me any the less a Jew? I do not believe that it would be said so. Indeed, as
a student at the Hebrew Union College, troubled about some of the larger
theological concepts implied in membership in the rabbinate, I questioned
to some of the older students the propriety of continuing as a prospective
rabbi when I held theses beliefs, which differed with the traditional beliefs
of Judaism and particularly with the opinions of them held by members of
the faculty, especially the president, a noted theologian. Imagine my
intense surprise, when I was advised, "Suppose you do differ with them?
Why can't you interpret these traditions to suit your own beliefs? Can't
you pray to the Social Force, and call that God in your own mind? I don't
believe in a personal God any more than you, but that's the way I look at
it. No one can tell me, as a Jew, what I must believe. And if I differ from
what has been believed, so much the worse for the beliefs" (p. 113).
The most important point with regard to the discipline of anthro-

pology is Herskovits' contention that Jews do not have a distinctive
culture despite their common historical background. Yet he grants
that culture is "the most plausible of any of the terms that are used to
define Jews" (p. 114). He admits that Biblical and rabbinical tradi-
tions have indeed survived, but only among some Jews who "are not
completely acculturated to the cultures of the countries in which we
happen to live" (p. 114). He also grants that there may be some carry-
over in the secular Jewish orientation toward learning, but adds that
not all Jews pursue education nor are they intellectuals ("A Jew is
quite as interested in the cloak and suit trade as he is in learning, and
for every earnest Jewish student in our American universities I will
match you with another as typically acculturated to the prevalent
country-club university pattern as any scion of six generations of
Harvard men," p. 114). He concludes that cultural diffusion and
acculturation have long eliminated anything distinctively Jewish
since the Maccabean period:
From the point of view of material culture, we do things as the people

among whom we happen to be living do them, and we use the same
implements in doing them as they use. Is there any distinctive Jewish type
of architecture as you find, let me say, in Italy? Is there a distinctive Jewish
type of farming, where the Jew farms? Or of commercial practices, where
he is a business man? The Jew has ever taken on the color of the culture in
which he lives, and far from identifying himself with his own typical
culture (whatever there may be of it) he usually tries to become as com-
pletely acculturated as is possible to the culture in which he finds himself
(p. 115).
Herskovits makes the concession that if Jews have anything in

common, it is the sense of being different, a result of persecution
against them. Their common cultural possession is "the tradition of
being a Jew, the feeling which is ground into every Jew from the time
he is old enough to realize that he is somebody different from the
people about him" (p. 115). It may be noted that at this point in his
career Herskovits found Jews and Negroes exactly alike in this regard:
"I have had occasion, in the past few years, to work among Negroes.
And the more closely I have come to know them, the more and more
I have come to see the same typical reactions among them—reactions
which I had before felt were typically Jewish" (p. 115).
In his conclusion, Herskovits sounds something like a postmodern
critic, treating identities as cultural constructs produced through
shared discourses and practices:
A name is a very potent thing. If you call a man by a name, you fix him
immediately as the thing you call him, unless he shows very clearly that
the name does not apply in his case. Might we not, therefore, say that
every Jew has one thing in common with every other Jew—the name of
Jew? If he answers to it—if he calls himself Jewish, then he takes the name
for himself. If others call him that, then he is identified by them with the
Jewish group, and is so identified no matter what protests he may make,
or what time element may separate him from those who accepted the
name. We speak jokingly of Episcopal Jews, of Christian Science Jews, of
Ethical Culture Jews. The name sticks, no matter where they turn. Do we
not claim Disraeli and Heine as Jews, in spite of their conversions? But
suppose, on the other hand, a man is a German Jew, a Turkish Jew, a
Polish Jew, an American Jew? He is a Jew, none the less. He may speak the
language of the country, dress as the other nationals dress, act as they act.
But he is yet a Jew. And the great fact remains that there are all of these
people who feel themselves Jews. To me, it is one of the most fascinating
puzzles imaginable. There is, essentially, when we analyze the situation,
nothing on which one may put his finger. And yet the fact remains. Down
through the ages there have been Jews, as there are today. And I wonder
if a more satisfactory definition can be given than the simple one of:
"A Jew is a person who calls himself a Jew, or who is called Jewish by
others" (p. 177).
184 Gelya Frank
But although he understood that the self-ascription of identity is
a cultural phenomenon, Herskovits was not prepared to treat the
diversity of Jewish identities as a topic for cultural anthropology.
The concept of culture he took from Franz Boas was too naturalistic
for this, and Herskovits' own epistemology as a social scientist was
too positivist (too "nomothetic," or in search of laws) to move cultural
anthropology in the direction that later studies of ethnicity were to take
it (Stocking 1992b). Recent work on Jewish identity, in anthropology

and other disciplines, develops precisely that which Herskovits treats
as a puzzling end-point, the production of multiple Jewish identities
(cf. Azoulay 1997; Behar 1996a; Biale et al. 1998; Boyarin 1992; Boyarin
and Boyarin 1995, 1997; Brodkin 1998; Dominguez 1989; Goldberg
and Krausz 1993; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995,1996,1998; Kugelmass
1992; Lyotard 1990; Prell 1999; Rubin-Dorsky and Fishkin 1996).
Herskovits' work on the Jews was a minor part of his professional
output, and although his work on New World Negroes shows theoret-
ical development, his position on the Jews seems to have been settled—
and settled early.6 When invited to contribute an anthropological
entry to the magisterial volume, The Jews: Their History, Culture, and
Religion, published in 1949, Herskovits submitted his polemic essay,
"When is a Jew a Jew?" The new essay, "Who are the Jews?" differed
from the earlier one by the addition of scholarly citations and adop-
tion of a more cautious tone. In particular, Herskovits included an
extensive section on Jews and race as the focus and culmination of
the essay, undercutting his controversial denial of any real basis for
Jewish cultural identity. Through the third edition of the book in
1960, however, Herskovitz left open the question of how to classify
the Jews apart from demonstrating that they were not a race. That is
to say, even after the Holocaust and the founding of a Jewish state in
Israel, the word from anthropology, per Herskovits, was that the
Jews, while not a race, were also neither a nation nor a people, and
that they had no distinctive culture.
HERSKOVITS' THEORIES O N RACE AND CULTURE

IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
Seeking and explaining the continuities between the diverse cultures

of Negroes in the Americas and of West African societies became the
focus of Herskovits' career. In his own research, and through his
students, he developed theories of acculturation to explain the select-
ive impact of sustained contact with a dominating, colonialist society
on African culture bearers and their offspring in the New World
(Bock 1996: 301). Toward this end, he introduced new descriptive
and explanatory terms such as "cultural tenacity/' "retentions," and
"reinterpretations" (F. S. Herskovits 1966: ix). He came to this approach,
however, only after a conversion from an initially extreme assimila-
tionist position in which he saw no trace of African cultures among
American Negroes. Thus, it is important to look closely at the develop-
ment of Herskovits' views, especially the shift that occurred between

1924 and 1930.
Herskovits finished his doctorate at Columbia University in 1923
with a library dissertation on the topic, "The Cattle Complex in East
Africa." Afterwards, when Herskovits applied for, but failed to gain
funding for fieldwork in Africa, Boas secured for him a three-year
postdoctoral position at Columbia (with an award from the National
Research Council Board of Fellowships in the Biological Sciences) to
conduct an anthropométrie study of Negroes (Jackson 1986; see also
Baker 1998). The study was modeled on the work of Boas (1912),
demonstrating the effects of environment on physical traits of
immigrant populations by comparing foreign-born parents and their
American-born children, showing plasticity in traits that were
presumed to be hereditary and racial. Herskovits' measurements
provided him with a new picture of the racial assimilation of
Negroes in America. The research incidentally gave him an oppor-
tunity to form an impression of the cosmopolitan African-American
community in Harlem and, later, Washington D.C. Then, in the
summers of 1928 and 1929, Herskovits engaged in fieldwork in
Surinam, a former Dutch slave-owning colony. There his views
underwent a paradigm shift as he perceived that African cultural
elements were indeed present among Negroes in the Americas and
were most intact where escaped slaves had been able to establish
communities that were relatively insulated from contact with whites.
Herskovits' Initial Belief in Negro Assimilation
Shortly after beginning the anthropometry project, Herskovits met
philosopher Alain Locke, a founder of the New Negro movement.
In April 1924, Locke asked Herskovits to contribute to a special issue
of Survey Graphic magazine on the topic, "Has the Negro a Unique
Social Pattern?" Subsequently revised and published as a book, The
New Negro (Locke 1925), this collection of essays has been called
"the most important manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance" (Jackson
1986:102). In his opening essay, Locke emphasized the pan-African
286 Gelya Frank
character of the New Negro (noting the Jews as a comparable
example of identity in diaspora and in face of persecution). He
characterized Harlem as the center of a cosmopolitan movement:
Harlem... is the home of the Negro's "Zionism." The pulse of the Negro
world has begun to beat in Harlem. A Negro newspaper carrying news
material in English, French and Spanish, gathered from all quarters of
America, the West Indies and Africa has maintained itself in Harlem for
over five years. Two important magazines, both edited from New York,
maintain their news and circulation consistently on a cosmopolitan scale.
Under American auspices and backing, three pan-African congresses have
been held abroad for the discussion of common interests, colonial ques-
tions and the future cooperative development of Africa. In terms of the
race question as a world problem, the Negro mind has leapt, so to speak,
upon the parapets of prejudice and extended its cramped horizons. In
doing so it has linked up with the growing group consciousness of the
dark-peoples and is gradually learning their common interests. As one of
our writers has recently put it: "It is imperative that we understand the
white world in its relations to the non-white world." As with the Jew,
persecution is making the Negro international (Locke 1968 [1925]: 30).
But in his essay, Herskovits took an extreme assimilationist posi-

tion that undercut the internationalist thrust of Locke's essay and the
other contributions to the book. He made an emphatic argument that
there was "not a trace" of African culture in Harlem. As Walter Jack-
son (1986) writes:
Applying a small-town model of community, Herskovits argued that
Harlem was an American community like any other, boasting YMCAs,
businessmen's associations, Greek-letter fraternities and sororities, gossipy
newspapers, and inhabitants who were hard-working, churchgoing, and
sexually puritanical. Herskovits was particularly eager to debunk the
notion, then popular among black intellectuals such as James Weldon
Johnson, that blacks possessed a "distinctive, inborn cultural genius" that
manifested itself in African and Afro-American art and music. An integral
part of his critique was a rigid insistence upon the discontinuity between
African and Afro-American culture (p. 102).
Herskovits unequivocally affirmed the power of American culture
to absorb and assimilate all racial and social groups. Negroes were
no different in this regard from the Jews: neither had a distinctive
culture of their own, nor any grounds for "race-pride":
That [Negroes] have absorbed the culture of America is too obvious,
almost, to be mentioned. They have absorbed it as all great racial and
social groups in this country have absorbed it. And they face much the
same problems as these groups face. The social ostracism to which they are
subjected is only different in extent from that to which the Jew is subjected.
The fierce reaction of race-pride is quite the same in both groups. But,
whether in Negro or in Jew, the protest avails nothing, apparently. All
racial and social elements in our population who live here long enough
become acculturated, Americanized in the truest sense of the word, even-
tually. They learn our culture and react according to its patterns, against
which all the protestations of the possession of, or of hot desire for, a peculiar
culture mean nothing (Herskovits 1928:678; quoted in Jackson 1986:102).
Herskovits' Physical Anthropology: The American Negro

as a New Racial Type
Herskovits came to shift his emphasis from Negro assimilation to

Africanisms in the Americas after completing his anthropométrie
research, which he conducted in Harlem and, while teaching at
Howard University in the spring of 1925, in West Virginia (Jackson
1986). The data analysis and write-up were finished in 1926 or 1927,
because the following year his book was published, The American
Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing (Herskovits 1928; see also 1930).
Herskovits had compared average measurements of certain physical
traits (such as of height of the face, breadth of the nose, height of the
ear, and darkness of skin color) among a stratified sample of men
ranging genealogically from "Unmixed Negro" to "More White than
Negro." His conclusion was that a new American Negro "racial
type" in the Boasian sense was emerging:
We speak of Negroes in this country, but plainly this is nonsense if we are
employing the word "Negro" in its biological sense. The American Negro
is an amalgam, and the application of the term "Negro" to him is purely
sociological. But the phrase "American Negro" has real biological signific-
ance, and I shall attempt next to show that a physical type has developed
from the mixture represented in his person (1928:17).
Herskovits' measurements showed that this new racial type was
mid-way between white and unmixed Negro in all ways except for
skin color, which he argued had been in the process of darkening
since the first mixtures of Europeans and Africans. He based this
conclusion on data that indicated social selection for skin color in
marriages. In the families in Harlem that he studied, Herskovits
found that the husband was lighter in 29% of the cases, about the
same color in 14.5% of the cases, and darker than the wife in 56.5% of
the cases (1928: 64). Herskovits wrote:
Here, then, in the process of social selection of light women by dark men,
we see the mechanism for the consolidation of the type which has been
188 Gelya Frank
formed by the American Negro. What happens to the light men? They
probably "pass" over into the White group— A woman who is lighter
than a very dark man may herself be dark indeed, while it is not easy for
a very light man to find a wife lighter than himself. But on the whole, this
selective process is going on actively, and if it continues, it will tend to
stabilize the Negro type more and more firmly. Of course, it will make this
type somewhat more Negroid on the average than it is at present, since the
offspring of the women will be darker than they, and the females (we may
disregard the males in this consideration) will again be selected by men
darker than themselves. But the type cannot revert to the African, because
of the large amount of White and American Indian blood that it contains
(Herskovits 1928:65-66).
It appears from the material above that Herskovits theorized

the existence of the new American Negro racial type as a residual
category consisting of those who remained too dark to pass for
white. These findings depend on premises about ethnicity, genetics,
and demographics in the United States that today seem faulty. First,
Herskovits' assumption that light-skinned Negroes would necessar-
ily pass for white minimized the strength of kinship ties, community
membership, and positive ethnic identification by which some would
remain "black" by self-ascription. Second, he focused on only one seg-
ment of population associated with the new racial type, that which was
concentrated within the Negro community as sociologically defined.
He failed to conceptualize the flow of hereditary traits in both direc-
tions, even though his own data indicated that blacks and whites in
the United States were becoming part of a common gene pool.7 He also
failed to anticipate the impact on the Negro population of mixtures
with ethnic and racialized groups other than white (and Native
American), and the prevalence today of individuals who are not only
"biracial" but "multiracial" (Moore 2001). Finally, he assumed that
whites would continue to constitute the majority and the dominant
group in America. He did not consider the possibility of whites becom-
ing assimilated into the non-white population rather than the reverse.
The Impact on Herskovits of Fieldwork in Surinam
Herskovits received funding from Elsie Clews Parsons to make
two trips to Surinam in the summers of 1928 and 1929 with his wife
and collaborator, Frances Herskovits (Jackson 1986). Herskovits
found among the Bush Negroes of Surinam a functionally integrated
West African-style culture that had survived, he realized, because
of the racial segregation and the physical isolation of the black
peasants from the dominant white population and its culture. In a
piece published in the American Anthropologist in 1930, Herskovits
made his about-face on the issue of the survival of African culture in
the Americas, linking the retention of cultural traits by descendants
of Africans to the prime marker of race discrimination, skin color. It
is useful to present Herskovits' argument in his own words:
It is quite possible on the basis of our present knowledge to make a kind

of chart indicating the extent to which the descendants of Africans
brought to the New World have retained Africanisms in their cultural

behavior. If we consider the intensity of African cultural elements in the
various regions north of Brazil (which I do not include because there are
so few data on which to base judgment), we may say that after Africa itself
it is the Bush Negroes of Suriname who exhibit a civilization which is the
most African. As a matter of fact, unless the observer omitted to take their
language into consideration, and unless he were familiar with small ele-
ments obtained from the whites with whom these people were in contact
while they were in slavery and the Indians whom they drove out of the
Guiana bush, he would assume, at first glance, that their culture was
wholly African. Next to them, on our scale, would be placed their Negro
neighbors on the coastal plains of the Guianas, who, in spite of centuries
of close association with the whites, have retained an amazing amount of
their aboriginal African traditions, many of which are combined in
curious fashion with the traditions of the dominant group. Next on our
scale we should undoubtedly place the peasants of Haiti, especially their
religious life and their folklore, as they present numerous aspects which
would at once be familiar to the Africanist. And associated with them,
although in a lesser degree, would come the inhabitants of neighboring
Santo Domingo. From this point, when we come to the islands of the
British, Dutch, and (sometime) Danish West Indies, the proportion of
African cultural elements drops perceptibly, but in their folklore, in such
matters as the combination of aboriginal African with their Christian
religious practices, and in the curious turns of phrase to be noted in their
tales, we realize that all of African culture has not by any means been lost
to them. Next on our table we should place such isolated groups living
in the United States as the Negroes of the Savannahs of southern Georgia,
or those of the Gullah islands off the Carolina coast, where African
elements of culture are still more tenuous, and then the vast mass of
Negroes of all degrees of racial mixture living in the South of the United
States. Finally, we should come to a group where, to all intents and pur-
poses, there is nothing of the African tradition left, and which consists of
people of varying degrees of Negroid physical type, who only differ
from their white neighbors in the fact that they have more pigmentation
in their skins. The importance of the mere fact that there is a racial type for
which such a list can be made is enormous (Herskovits 1966: 5-6; emphasis
added).
Here we find the antithesis of the approach that Herskovits had
initially taken regarding Negroes (and that he continued to take
190 Gelya Trank
regarding the Jews) regarding their possession of a distinctive or
particular culture:
To what extent are cultural elements which are constant in this varied list
to be discerned? What do the Africans do that the inhabitants of the Negro
quarter of New York City also do? May we find perhaps, on dose examination
that there are some subtle elements left of what was ancestrally possessed? May
not the remnant, if present, consist of some slight intonation, some quirk of
pronunciation, some temperamental predisposition? And if we do find these,

may we ascertain the extent to which they are increasingly present as we
find Negroes removed from white influence. That such factors are to be
discovered is quite possible, and this fact is something to be reckoned with
in all studies of the Negro. And the important part of the matter is that the
discovery of any constants will throw as much light on the behavior of the
African as it will on that of the New World Negro. For in the final analysis,
and in the nature of the case, the most illuminating method of studying the
presence of cultures is by considering conditions in which culture has main-
tained itself under stress and strain (Herskovits 1966:6-7, emphasis added).8
It is important to place Herskovits' reasoning in an historicist

perspective by considering the vectors of mass cultural transmission
in the 1920s, not just in the United States, which was already fairly
well industrialized, but throughout the Americas. Opportunities for
a shared public culture between whites and blacks were more
limited than today. A greater proportion of the general population
lived in rural areas. Newspapers were common, but so was illiteracy.
Although radio was invented, and sound recordings available, not
everyone could afford the equipment, nor were rural areas electri-
fied. Movies were produced and distributed on a much smaller scale
than at present, and television was not yet invented. While Herskovits
did not view the culture of Africans as being biologically inherited,
he did find the skin color of black communities in the Americas to be
correlated with their degree of segregation by race (and, implicitly,
by class). Thus he spoke of color as an index of the degree to which
originally African culture-bearing populations were insulated from
or acculturated to the dominant white society. To see this, he needed
evidently to leave the cosmopolitan settings of Harlem and Washing-
ton, D.C., and travel to Surinam, a remote place where the imprint of
colonialism and slavery after two centuries was more stark.
THEORIES OF DIASPORA: MODERN AND POSTMODERN
Herskovits conceptualized a tree-like model of the African diaspora

to explain the racial and cultural diversity of Negroes in the New
World (Drake 1982). Herskovits' model identified an original source
in West Africa from which cultural elements were dispersed and
transformed over time. The naturalistic premises of diffusionism—
the geographic migration of an identifiable population outward
from a well-defined culture source—led him in the direction that he
took. Yet, as Kevin Yelvington (1999) discusses, a certain amount of
"invention" was already involved in conceptualizing Africa in
Western and colonial terms (Mudimbe 1988; see also Desai 1993;
Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Also invented were the concepts used
or introduced by Herskovits—terms such as "assimilation," "accultura-
tion," "amalgamation," "survivals," "syncretism," "cultural tenacity,"
"retentions," and "reinterpretations"—in order to account for histor-
ical continuities in Africa, and between Africa and the Americas
(Herskovits 1938; Bascom and Herskovits 1958; see also Yelvington
1999). The foundations that Herskovits helped to put in place made
possible the contemporary studies of diverse African-American
identities in the contexts of colonialism, slavery, minority status, and
class oppression (Appiah and Gates 1995; Azoulay 1997; Dyson 1993;
Gates 1995; Gilroy 1987,1993; Hooks 1990; Marable 1995; Mercer 1988,
1990; Mullings 1997).
Herskovits' work contributed to the emergence of pan-Africanism
and, by the 1960s, to the widespread self-ascription of blacks as Afro-
Americans (Cole 1985). Yet his work on the black diaspora had a
different set of underlying assumptions than those of contemporary
theorists, most notably Paul Gilroy's treatment of the Black Atlantic
(1987,1993; see also Mercer 1988,1990). As James Clifford (1994) points
out, diaspora studies increasingly must address such postmodern con-
ditions as: (1) multiple migrations (not just outward from a single source
culture, such as Africa or Ancient Israel, but back and forth, and in
between various diasporic communities); (2) the proliferation of mass
communications, mass transportation, and electronic media (some of these
making it possible to go back in time to places where previous diasporic
communities lived, as in forms of nostalgic tourism, and representa-
tions through film and recorded music); and (3) mutable self-ascription
of ethnic and racial identities (such as the adoption of "black" identity
in Britain in the 1980s by people of both African and East Asian
descent; or the mixture of multiple heritage music influences in the
reemergence of "Jewish" or klezmer music). The cultures produced by
such processes are more and more evidently "invented" than "natural."
Historical discontinuities—the "ruptures of cultural transmission"
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 51)—are now seen as primary sites for
292 Gelya Frank
the analysis of identity, rather than places where the data do not fit a
modal type and must be thrown away. A focus on cultural resistance
and cultural survival, on hybridity and transnationalism, recasts the
Jews as no longer an anomaly. Clifford (1994) cautions readers that,
if anything, diasporas take so many different forms that the Jewish
diaspora should not be taken too hastily as a normative model! The
naturalistic premises of modern anthropology were implicated in
Herskovits' treatment of the black diaspora, in which he asserted

continuities where ruptures were equally in evidence. But it should
not be imagined that Herskovits single-handedly invented or even
introduced the discourse of Africanisms in the Americas (see Yelv-
ington 1999; also see Baron 1994; Gershenhorn 2000). The issues with
which he struggled, and the contradictions that appear in his work,
were part of wider discourses of his time.
DISCOURSES OF ASSIMILATION AND PARTICULARISM IN THE

1920S: THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF HERSKOVITS' VIEWS
Herskovits' liberal politics and involvement with black issues in

the 1920s have been summarized by historian Hasia Diner (1995).
Like Franz Boas, Herskovits endorsed the politics of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); he
taught courses on blacks in America at Columbia University in the
mid-1920s and at Northwestern University beginning in 1926; he
wrote for the Urban League's magazine Opportunity and other black
publications; and, in 1927, he addressed the Pan-African Congress.
He also taught briefly in 1925 at the elite black institution, Howard
University (Jackson 1986). Thus Herskovits was well aware of the
competing national movements and views then currently debated
about black identity.
Through his work on the survival of African culture in the Amer-
icas, Herskovits threw his hat into the ring to become a key figure in
the public controversy over the causes and remedies for the social
problems among Negroes (Cole 1985; Jackson 1986; Baker 1998). As
Cole (1985) writes, on one side of the controversy were the Boasians
at Columbia University, who were interested in tracing the diffusion
of cultural traits to the New World from Africa. On the other side
were the sociologists gathered around Robert Park at the University
of Chicago, who tended to see the Negro as either already assimilat-
ed to American cultural models or prevented by discrimination and
pathological habits from reaching full assimilation. As Lee Baker
(1998) notes, the latter view was already dominant among black
intellectuals on the faculty at Howard University in 1925 when
Herskovits visited there.
Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, a student of Park who later served
as president of the American Sociological Association and who was
an African-American, viewed "simple Negro folk culture" as an
"incomplete assimilation of Western culture by the Negro masses"
(quoted by Baker 1998: 178). Along with Park, Frazier took a pre-
scriptive stance that recommended assimilation to resolve the social
problems afflicting Negroes in America. This stance was eventually
adopted by Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, who headed the
study of race relations in the United States funded by the Carnegie
Foundation. Although Myrdal used Carnegie Foundation funding to
support the writing and publication of Herskovits' book, The Myth of
the Negro Past (1942), he did not accept the views it expressed.
In 1944, Myrdal put forward his assimilationist views in a massive
two-volume work, An American Dilemma, which, showing disdain
for Boasian cultural relativity, advanced the notion that black culture
was pathological (Baker 1998). Myrdal wrote:
In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is not something
independent of general American culture. It is a distorted development, or
a pathological condition, of the general American Culture. The instability of
the Negro family, the inadequacy of educational facilities for Negroes, the
emotionalism in the Negro church, the insufficiency and unwholesomeness
of Negro recreational activity, the plethora of Negro sociable organiza-
tions, the narrowness of interests of the average Negro, the provincialism
of his political speculation, the high Negro crime rate, the cultivation of
the arts to the neglect of other fields, superstition, personality difficulties,
and other characteristic traits are mainly forms of social pathology which
for the most part, are created by the caste pressure.
This can be said positively: we can assume that it is to the advantage of
American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into
American culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white
Americans... (quoted by Baker 1998:181; emphasis in original by Myrdal).
It is clear that Herskovits liked the role of champion, taking up the
cudgel against those who asserted that oppressed groups were
inferior and incapable of civilization. His liberal democratic ideals
followed those of his mentor Franz Boas, who has been described as
even more active in NAACP politics than Herskovits (Jackson 1986)
and "genuinely alarmed at the oppression and violence of Jim Crow"
(Willis 1972). A speech made by Franz Boas in 1906 at Atlanta
University at the invitation of W. E. B. DuBois, had "an impact of
194 Gelya Frank
lasting importance" on DuBois according to his biographer (Lewis
1993:352).9 Boas informed DuBois of the latest research showing the
primordial role of sub-Saharan cultures in promoting the develop-
ment of ancient civilizations, providing intellectual reinforcement
for DuBois' belief in the historic significance of Africa at a critical
moment in his career. Boas argued that the study of black people and
their folklore might contribute to solving the politics of race in
America by helping "black people overcome their shame in the

African heritage and the slave background, thereby helping to instill
the pride necessary for advancement" (quoted by Willis 1972: 214).
In a letter to philanthropist George F. Peabody in 1918, Boas wished
to "devise some means of bringing home to the negroes the great
achievements of their race" (quoted by Willis 1972:214).
Herskovits' ethnology, like the work of black historians such as
Carter G. Woodson, was criticized by some on academic grounds as
a form of propaganda. The Swedish sociologist Myrdal felt that their
work exaggerated and distorted the facts by placing undue emphasis
on otherwise minor figures and events. In An American Dilemma,
Myrdal commented:
During the New Negro movement of the 1920's there developed some-
thing of an appreciation for modified African music and art. One white
anthropologist, Melville J. Herskovits, has recently rendered yeoman
service to the Negro History propagandists. He has not only made excel-
lent field studies of certain African and West Indian Negro groups, but
has written a general book to glorify African culture generally and show
how it has survived in the American negro community (quoted in Baker
1998:276).
Herskovits was also criticized on political grounds for contribut-

ing a view of Negroes that could be used to subvert black efforts to
achieve social justice. The black American sociologist Frazier, in a
speech to the Harlem Council of Social Agencies, publicly chided
Herskovits that "if whites came to believe that the Negro's social
behavior was rooted in African culture they would lose whatever
sense of guilt they had for keeping the Negro down. Negro crime, for
example, could be explained away as an 'Africanism' rather than as due
to inadequate police and court protection" (quoted by Baker 1998:179).
Not only was the controversy contentious, but positions within it
were highly mutable. Walter Jackson (1986) attributes Herskovits'
shift in scholarly focus from assimilation to Africanisms to his
dialogue with Alain Locke and other members of the New Negro
movement. But Alain Locke reversed his views and, in 1942, criti-
cized Herskovits' work, stating that "if White people came to believe
that Negroes have a strong African heritage, they would think that
Negroes could not assimilate" (quoted by Baker 1998:275). Between
1925 and 1942, Locke and Herskovits had traded positions.
Debates on Jewish assimilation and particularism were no less
lively and contentious. Philosophers Horace Kallen and Morris
Cohen, who were among the first secular Jewish faculty at American
universities, only a generation older than Herskovits, framed the
debate about the relationship of Jews to American society (Klingen-
stein 1991). Kallen, at the New School for Social Research, advocated
cultural pluralism for Jews in America—that is to say, he advocated
Jewish particularism. In 1906, he became a founder of the Menorah
Society, whose goal was to create a modern secular Jewish culture or
"Hebraism" that was distinct from Judaic religion.10 In an important
essay in The Nation, "Democracy Versus the Melting Pot," in 1915,
Kallen stressed the idea of "equality," which he interpreted to mean
not the "same" but having "the right to be different." Kallen was
"fascinated by cultural movements that activated Jewish roots... or
by cultures that were as immediately experiential, folk- and experi-
ence-based, as Yiddish cultures seemed to be" (Klingenstein 1991:
46). He was also an advocate of Zionism, a position re-enforced by
his concept of cultural pluralism, in which dual loyalties were
entirely legitimate and harmonious with democracy. To be a func-
tioning member of a culturally pluralist community, one had to
belong to one of the smaller groups constituting by consent the larger
community. As Klingenstein (1991) summarizes Kallen's view, to be
an American meant that one had to be ethnic.
In contrast, Morris Cohen, at the City College of New York,
championed assimilation as the solution to the Jewish problem and
opposed Jewish particularism through most of his career (Klingen-
stein 1991). Cohen put his faith in the Enlightenment and, like
anthropologist Franz Boas, was involved with the rationalist and
universalist Ethical Culture movement, a non-denominational and
atheistic offshoot of Reform Judaism. In an article published in The
New Republic, in 1919, Cohen denounced Zionism as "tribalism":
A national Jewish Palestine must necessarily mean a state founded on a

peculiar race, a tribal religion and a mystic belief in a peculiar soil,
whereas liberal America stands for separation of church and state, the free
mixing of races, and the fact that men can change their habitation and
196 Gelya Frank
language and still advance the process of civilization (quoted in Klingen-
stein 1991:51).
Boas no doubt contributed to Morris Cohen's views on the devel-
opment of civilization through the mixing among cultures and races.
Klingenstein (1991) summarizes Morris Cohen's position, and con-
trasts it with that of Kallen:
He [Cohen] was convinced that "no great civilization was ever achieved
except by a mixed people freely borrowing from others in religion, lan-
guage, law and manners." And he pointed out in the same article that such
borrowing and mixing had been the case among Jews even at the time
"when they produced the bulk of biblical literature, and they certainly
increased their contribution to civilization when they left Palestine and
mixed with other peoples, as the names Philo, Spinoza, Heine, Karl Marx,
Dr. [Paul] Ehrlich [Mark] Ant[o]kolski, Bergson and [Simon] Flexner
will readily indicate." At this point Cohen is farthest from Kallen, who
held that a contribution to civilization was most valuable when it was
most particular, most itself, and that the degree to which idiosyncrasies
were respected was the indicator of a society's degree of enlightenment
(pp. 51-52).
HERSKOVITS' JEWISHNESS
In this climate of national debate, and while he was writing on

black and Jewish assimilation and particularism through the 1920s,
Herskovits was certainly working out issues related to his own
Jewish identity. The period from 1915 to 1935 has been characterized
as constituting "two of the most blatantly anti-Semitic decades in
American history" (Diner 1995:13). A key strategy of elite German-
Jews following the lynching in Atlanta of a Jew, Leo Frank, in 1915,
was actively to support the Negro struggle for civil rights through
the NAACP as part of the fight against anti-Semitism (Diner 1995;
Lewis 1992). More recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern European
with socialist leanings also supported the struggle of Negroes for
civil rights. Diner (1995) notes an article in the Yiddish press, in 1925,
that cites approvingly a certain academician's concern with social
justice for blacks. Who could this "Jewish professor at Columbia"
have been, if not Boas or, perhaps more likely, Herskovits?
In 1925, the Morgen journal talked about an unnamed Jewish professor

at Columbia University who was extensively involved in the movement
for black rights. This same professor was not particularly interested in
Jewish affairs, but he confided to correspondent Samuel Bloom that much
Jewishness had remained with him and was expressed in terms of his
interest in blacks (1995:70).
Was Herskovits never confronted by anti-Semitism? A recent
historical note by Kevin Yelvington (2000) describes an incident
following Herskovits' visit to Howard University. In May 1925,
Herskovits wrote to his good friend Margaret Mead about subleas-
ing her New York City apartment, as she was leaving for her doctoral
fieldwork in Samoa and her husband, Luther Cressman, was going

to Europe. Mead, who had previously suggested the arrangement to
Herskovits and his wife Frances, replied immediately, with shock
and dismay, after discovering that her apartment at 419 West 199th
Street was governed by a "race discrimination" policy excluding
Jews. In her letter, quoted by Yelvington (2000: 4), Mead informed
Herskovits that he could not have her apartment:
Dear Mel
I'm in a raging tearing fury. I spent the day with rosy plans of how nice
it would be if you and Fan (should I say that?) To have the aprtment [sic],
filing cabinet et al, and now I discover that we have been residing these
two years in a race-discriminating tenement where it is not possible. I'm
dreadfully sorry, both that you can't have the aprtment [sic] when I'd so
much like to have you have it and also that I ever mentioned it. But of
course, I had no idea, my usually suspicious nature wasn't working for
once. It makes me mad to think that we've been living in such a house.
And it's absolutely cast iron because the main office reserves the right to
refuse any tenants, even of sub-letting.
You know how badly I feel, Mel. Anything either of us can do by way
of house hunting for you we'll be delighted to do.
Damn it, Margaret
Herskovits' response, if he wrote one, is missing. What did he do
with his hurt, frustration, and anger? It is said that Herskovits experi-
enced anti-Semitism at Northwestern University, where he began
teaching in 1927, the only anthropologist in a department of soci-
ology. He was one of the first Jewish faculty members at the Midwest
institution located in Evanston, Illinois, a white suburb of Chicago
not known for its hospitality toward Jews (Simpson 1973; Jackson
1986). Herskovits offered courses on race relations at the Chicago
Hebrew Institute, a Jewish settlement. One such course, "Racial
Differences," sought to compare black and Jewish problems (Diner
1995:149).
Walter Zenner (ms.) claims that the administration of North-
western University had actively discriminated against Jews in the
198 Gelya Frank
1930s and 1940s. Yet Herskovits responded negatively when he was
approached in 1933 by the B'nai Brith Hillel Foundation to support
the establishment at Northwestern of a Jewish social and cultural
center. He expressed his principled antagonism to all forms of parti-
cularism in the university:
While I have no sympathy for those who in any way camouflage their
Jewishness, at the same time my interests have simply taken a path away
from activities which definitely pertain to any group based on locality,
circumstances of birth or religious belief. My own position is that there
is little place on the University campus for organizations of this type
(quoted in Yelvington 2000: 6-7).
As an undergraduate at Northwestern in the 1950s, Walter Zenner

(ms.) felt the absence of Jewishness in the academy. He was drawn to
Herskovits' approach, which seemed more "pluralistic and global"
than that of the sociologists. Herksovits' emphasis on cultural relat-
ivism, and on the survival and retention of African cultural patterns
by the slaves and their descendants in the New World, seemed "to
give an opening for Jewish survival in the late 20th Century" (Zenner
ms.; cf. Herskovits 1972). It disappointed Zenner eventually to dis-
cover Herskovits' lack of interest in, if not aversion to studies of Jews.
He recalls a revealing moment at a gathering of faculty and students
in which Herskovits even "complain[ed] about the lugubrious nature
of a Yiddish tune," played on Midnight Special, a Chicago radio show.
As Yelvington (2000) notes, however, Herskovits allowed his
name to be listed in Wlto's Who in American Jewry and was frequently
approached by Jewish organizations and publications. Herskovits
was not naïve about the fate of Jews in Germany and called on the
director of the Jewish Charities of Chicago, and raised funds, to help
prevent the deportation to Nazi Germany in 1936 of a radical Ger-
man anthropologist who would certainly be sent to a concentration
camp. By the 1950s, Herskovits conveyed the impression of being
"well beyond any need to question his own assimilationism," (Zen-
ner ms.) but perhaps it is fair to describe Herskovits as ambivalent
and defensive. Zenner, who became a leading contributor to Jewish
ethnology, turned with his emerging interests to non-Jewish mentors
at Northwestern, whom he found more receptive and less reactive:
'To them [Francis Hsu, William Bascom and others] the Jewish
religion was just another religion and Jewish culture another way of
life, rather than something around which they had great emotional
involvement."
Anthropologist Erika Bourguignon, a Jewish refugee from Austria
who pursued graduate studies with Herskovits at Northwestern
from 1945 to 1951, felt that Herskovits' concern with African-Ameri-
cans was not unrelated to his Jewishness. Bourguignon comments:
"At the time, in the 1940s, it seemed to me that Herskovits' concerns
with Afroamericans worked for him as some sort of substitute
identification, Blacks substituting for Jews for him (Frank in press)."
Anthropologist Melford Spiro (personal communication, May 4,1999),

agreed with Bourguignon: "Erika and I were classmates at North-
western, where MJH was the perennial chairman of the department.
I always felt that he was ambivalent about his Jewishness, which,
given the period, made him little different from most Jewish aca-
demics. I agree, though, with Erika's notion that his interest in
American blacks was in part a displacement for Jewish concerns."
And, "I have no 'hard' data to support Erika's notion about MJH's
displacement of interest from Jews to Negroes. [But] It's one of those
impressions that one has." (Spiro 1999)
CONCLUSION
Katya Gibel Azoulay (1997: 52) notes: "Herskovits devoted atten-

tion to the Black diaspora and neglected the parallels with the Jew-
ish diaspora." Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1994: 341) comments:
"Herskovits could write Tlie Myth of the Negro Past but could not
imagine a comparable 'myth of the Jewish past/ or rather, the task
was to demonstrate that there was a Negro past and to question
claims made for the Jewish past." To account for the contradiction
in Herskovits' work noted by these scholars, I would paraphrase
Jewish historian Hasia Diner's (1995) epigraph to this article: Melville
}. Herskovits' interest in blacks, his positive and sympathetic orientation
towards a group so clearly stigmatized and despised by the American main-
stream, and his support for black advancement in public life cannot be sep-
arated from the way in which he saw himself as a Jew and saw the Jews in
American society, and from the way in which he defined Jewish history.
Herskovits was an assimilationist who strongly believed in the
promise of the Enlightenment and its universalist principles of just-
ice. Like his mentor Franz Boas, Herskovits felt that Jews and blacks
should be included in a democracy as individuals and not held back
because of their association with a stigmatized and despised group.
In 1916, Boas had written:
200 Gelya Frank
A necessary correlate of justice to all is freedom of individual develop-
ment. This freedom implies two fundamental ideas—one, that each man
is to be treated according to his individual worth, no matter what his
racial, national, or religious affiliations may be; the other, that there should
be no tyranny of public opinion that may shackle the freedom of individual
thought (1945:166).
Herskovits' contradictory approach to the diasporas of blacks and

Jews seems closely related to his assessment that, in the United

States, blacks would be denied the freedom to assimilate fully while
Jews would not. Contemporary students of identity and postmodern
conditions may criticize Herskovits for: (1) his denial of Jewish
culture; and (2) his identification of a New World Negro "racial
type." On both points, an explicit analysis of the relationship
between power and identity was lacking in Herskovits' theorizing.
Scholars since the 1970s have shown the relationship between ethni-
city and the formation of nation-states, in that all nations tend to
become identified with an elite racial type (Williams 1989). While
Herskovits saw himself as fighting against exclusion and devalua-
tion of Negroes and Jews in the dominant culture, his work lacked
the conceptual tools and critical edge needed to challenge head-on
the equation between inclusion and whiteness.
As Johnnetta Cole (1985) writes, Herskovits' work was critically
important for the emergence of black studies and the pan-African
movement that re-emerged in the 1960s, in which "political rhetoric,
at times consciously, drew upon the Herskovitsian notion that the
life-ways of Africa continued in the life-ways of Afro-America"
(p. 123). Herskovits' work depended on a rather strict application of
Boasian concepts of race and culture. And, like Boas, Herskovits
used these concepts in part to answer the Jewish Question as he
experienced it. Thus, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1994: 341) suggests,
examining anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits' different approaches
to the identity of blacks and Jews in America sheds light on "entan-
glements of diasporic and disciplinary histories."
Such an exercise also teaches us that the terms in which the past
thinks about itself change by the time the future arrives. This is true
of identity. If the debate between "assimilation" and "particularism"
has resonance, it is in terms of "inclusion" and "diversity." But even
more, as a result of the historic black struggle, the terms of debate
concern economic justice and civil rights. Mass media, communica-
tions, and travel have disrupted modern anthropology's natural-
istic assumptions about the location of culture and the production
of identities. The increase in multiracial identities in America—and,
importantly, their growing prominence in the nation's vision of itself—
recalls Boas' anticipation of assimilation in America as a blending of
racial types. If the categories "black" and "Jew" remain, they are not
quite as described by Herskovits. The surfacing of Sephardic, Mizrachi,
and Latin American Jewish identities challenges anew the assump-
tion that Jews in America are all white Europeans (e.g. Alcalay 1997;
Behar 1996b, 1996c). The experiences of black Jews and Jewish blacks
(Azoulay 1997; Edelman 1994; Funderburg 1994; Lazarre 1996; Lester
1988; McBride 1996; Thomas 1993,1994,1996) further disrupt assump-
tions about Jews and whiteness, while a close study of how they relate
to existing racial and cultural identities such as "black" and "Jewish"
can serve, as in Herskovits' life and work, as an index to broad struc-
tures of power.
NOTES
Gelya Frank
Departments of Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy
and Anthropology
University of Southern California
1540 Alcazar Street, CHP-133
Los Angeles, CA 90033
<gfrank@hsc.usc.edu>
GELYA FRANK is an associate professor in the Departments of Occupational Science
& Occupational Therapy and Anthropology at the University of Southern California.
She is co-author of Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography (Chandler and
Sharp 1981) and author of Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability,
Biography, and Being Female in America (University of California Press 2000), which has
received the 2000 Eileen Basker Prize of the Society for Medical Anthropology and the
2001 University of Southern California Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award.
Her work has appeared in American Anthropologist, Journal of the American Medical
Association, Social Science and Medicine, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Biography,
Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and Anthropology and Human-
ism Quarterly. She is a past president of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and
former board member of the American Anthropological Association.
Acknowledgements: My thanks to the colleagues who read and commented on this

paper, especially Karen Brodkin, Erika Bourguignon, Virginia Dominguez, Charlotte
Furth, Janet Hoskins, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Nancy C. Lutkehaus, Sidney
W. Mintz, Daniel Perlstein, Nina Glick Schiller, Daniel Segal, Melford Spiro, George
W. Stocking, Jr., Kevin A. Yelvington, Walter Zenner and the anonymous reviewers
tor Identities.
202 Gelya Frank
1. See Greenberg (1971) for a complete bibliography and summary of Herskovits's
career.
2. See Herskovits (1953) for a review of Boas' career by his mature student.
3. Historian of anthropology George Stocking, Jr. (personal communication, March
8, 2001) comments on this point, however: "The problem with Boas, like most
figures in intellectual history, is that his thinking changed somewhat over time.
Writing backward, from today, people want an essential Boas that fits their notion
of what he became for present purposes on this issue, tinged with current rather
than 1900s ideology. As an historian, I am interested in his thought as historical
process, although for some purposes, I, too, sometimes try to find dominant tend-
encies, as in my introduction to The Shaping of American Anthropology (Stocking
1974). In general, however, I feel that people seeking to find in Boas an untarnished
version of current thinking about race and culture are liable to be disappointed by
the historically situated and developing character of his thought—which emerged
within the very context that he critiqued, and was influenced by it. If I had to put
it in a nutshell, though, I would say that Boas circa 1910 (whom I tend to regard
as the classical Boas—if only because he is the one I am most familiar with), still
thought in terms of distinct races at the major races level" (see Stocking 1974:226
for Boas' views circa 1894; Stocking 1968:187 for Boas' views circa 1910).
4. Herskovits' most romantic work is Rebel Destiny (1934), about the Bush Negroes of
Surinam, co-authored with his wife. See Stocking (1992b).
5. The source of this information is an unpublished interview with Melville J. Hersk-
ovits' daughter, Jean Herskovits, conducted by Kevin Yelvington (Yelvington,
personal communication, March 16,2001 ). Thus, according to Jean Herskovits, the
characterization of her paternal grandfather as "Hungarian-Jewish" (Jackson
1986; Yelvington 2000) is misleading and incorrect.
6. Around the same time as his physical anthropological study of the Negro popula-
tion, Herskovits undertook an initial study of the phenomenon of "looking Jew-
ish" but it was never published.
7. It may be relevant to note, however, that genetics was not a fully developed
science. Gene frequencies ("the frequency of occurrence or proportions of different
alleles of a particular gene in a given population") were not empirically identified
until around 1925 and the term, gene pool ("the total genetic information in the
gametes of all the individuals in a population"), did not enter the English language
until around 1945 (Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd edn, 1998).
8. Jackson (1986) notes that the lines emphasized closely paraphrase Alain Locke's
criticism of the extreme assimilationist approach in Herskovits' (1927) essay.
9. See Liss (1998) for a fuller exploration of the intellectual relationship between Boas
and DuBois.
10. Herskovits' essay, "When is a Jew a Jew?" (1927), with its message that there is no
distinctive Jewish culture, was originally rejected by the society's Menorah Journal
before its eventual publication elsewhere (Yelvington 2000). It is completely
consistent with his submission to The New Negro. In both cases, he iconoclastically
took an extreme assimilationist position in flagship publications for the opposing
position.
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ISSN: 1070-289X (Print) 1547-3384 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gide20

Melville J. Herskovits on the African and Jewish

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Anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits' (1895-1963) work helped to

Key Words: History of Anthropology, African-American Studies, Jewish

Anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, in his long career from the

The presence of living societies in West Africa and their offshoots

examine how experiences of ethnic identity and racial discrimination

BACKGROUND CONCEPTS OF RACE AND CULTURE

Herskovits built his approach to the African and Jewish diasporas

a single generation as a result of new environmental conditions.

whom do you want to study," she promptly replied: "American

MELVILLE HERSKOVITS: "A JEW IS A PERSON W H O CALLS

HIMSELF A JEW, OR W H O IS CALLED JEWISH BY OTHERS"

Herskovits' essay, "When is a Jew a Jew?" published in 1927,

Herskovits delivers a challenge to identify any "common denomin-

I am not affiliated with any sort of a Jewish religious organization, nor do

The most important point with regard to the discipline of anthro-

From the point of view of material culture, we do things as the people

Herskovits makes the concession that if Jews have anything in

it (Stocking 1992b). Recent work on Jewish identity, in anthropology

HERSKOVITS' THEORIES O N RACE AND CULTURE

Seeking and explaining the continuities between the diverse cultures

ment of Herskovits' views, especially the shift that occurred between

But in his essay, Herskovits took an extreme assimilationist posi-

Herskovits' Physical Anthropology: The American Negro

Herskovits came to shift his emphasis from Negro assimilation to

It appears from the material above that Herskovits theorized

It is quite possible on the basis of our present knowledge to make a kind

brought to the New World have retained Africanisms in their cultural

pronunciation, some temperamental predisposition? And if we do find these,

It is important to place Herskovits' reasoning in an historicist

THEORIES OF DIASPORA: MODERN AND POSTMODERN

Herskovits conceptualized a tree-like model of the African diaspora

Herskovits' treatment of the black diaspora, in which he asserted

DISCOURSES OF ASSIMILATION AND PARTICULARISM IN THE

Herskovits' liberal politics and involvement with black issues in

America by helping "black people overcome their shame in the

Herskovits was also criticized on political grounds for contribut-

A national Jewish Palestine must necessarily mean a state founded on a

In this climate of national debate, and while he was writing on

In 1925, the Morgen journal talked about an unnamed Jewish professor

fieldwork in Samoa and her husband, Luther Cressman, was going

As an undergraduate at Northwestern in the 1950s, Walter Zenner

Anthropologist Melford Spiro (personal communication, May 4,1999),

Katya Gibel Azoulay (1997: 52) notes: "Herskovits devoted atten-

Herskovits' contradictory approach to the diasporas of blacks and

Jews seems closely related to his assessment that, in the United

Acknowledgements: My thanks to the colleagues who read and commented on this

Willis, William S., Jr.

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