Unconscious Racial Bias and the Curse of Japheth

Likutei Maharil, an early twentieth-century Torah commentary by the Hungarian rabbi Yaakov Yehudah Aryeh Leib Frankel, offers insight suggesting that although Canaan is the one who is cursed Japheth–the son regarded as the "progenitor of the Aryan races" – is the true sinner. According to Likutei Maharil, when the Torah says that God "enlarge[d]" (yaf't) Japheth, it means that God's blessing led Japheth to become arrogant and filled with hubris; indeed, Frankel's explanation of the Hebrew root y-f-t suggests that Japheth's very name (Yefet) means "arrogance." Likutei Maharil's teaching captures the attitude of many white people throughout our country's history who arrogantly believed that God had favored them and had condemned Black people to perpetual subjugation.
-Rabbi A. Brian Stoller

From Jerome and Augustine, who saw biblical Ham as typologically the Jew while biologically the black, to the 1930s American graffito "A [n-word] is a Jew turned inside out," these two peoples have been typecast as reflections of one another, and as
substitutes for one another in society's categorization of the Other. Voltaire put it succinctly: "One regards the Jews the same way as one regards the Negroes, as a species of inferior humanity."
-David Goldenberg

It is entirely up to the American people whether they are going to face, and deal with, and embrace the stranger whom they've relied on so long. What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a [n-word] in the first place. Because I'm not a [n-word]; I am a man. But if you think I'm a [n-word], it means you need it. And the question you have to ask yourself – the question the white population in this country needs to ask itself – is...If I'm not the [n-word] here, and you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on...whether or not it's able to ask that question.
-James Baldwin

Discussion Questions by Ariel Tovlev

1. What is the “Curse of Ham”? How has it influenced racism throughout history?
   
2. What is the “Curse of Japheth”? How does the Curse of Japheth flip the tradition-
   al telling of the story of Noah’s nakedness (the “Curse of Ham”)?
   
3. What assumptions did Rabbi Stoller implicitly learn growing up as a wealthy
   white Southerner? What are some assumptions you implicitly learned in your communities? How might you work toward combatting those assumptions?