Melville herskovits african retention

Senate Foreign Relations Committee — Media related to Melville J. Herskovits at Wikimedia Commons. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. American anthropologist — Bellefontaine, OhioU. Evanston, IllinoisU. Frances Shapiro.

Early life and education [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Legacy and honors [ edit ]. Works [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. HerskovitsNorthwestern University Library. See Stocking b. The source of this information is an unpublished interview with Melville J. Herskovits' daughter, Jean Herskovits, conducted by Kevin Yelvington Yelvington, personal communication, March 16, Thus, according to Jean Herskovits, the characterization of her paternal grandfather as "Hungarian-Jewish" Jackson ; Yelvington is misleading and incorrect.

Around the same time as his physical anthropological study of the Negro population, Herskovits undertook an initial study of the phenomenon of "looking Jewish" but it was never published. 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 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 Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd edn, Jackson notes that the lines emphasized closely paraphrase Alain Locke's criticism of the extreme assimilationist approach in Herskovits' essay.

See Liss for a fuller exploration of the intellectual relationship between Boas and DuBois. Herskovits' essay, "When is a Jew a Jew? 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. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, eds.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Allen, Theodore W. London: Verso Books. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baker, Lee D. Berkeley: University of California Press. Herskovits' Folkloristic and Anthropological Scholarship, University of Pennsylvania. Barth, Frederik, ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. Bascom, William Russell and Melville J.

Herskovits, eds. Boston: Beacon Press. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. New York: Columbia University Press. The Yale Review, 10 January : The World Tomorrow 6 1 : New York: J. Augustin Publisher. In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology. David Levinson and Melvin Ember, eds. New York: Henry Holt. In Identities. Appiah and H. Gates, Jr.

Boyarin, Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, eds. Clifford, James Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology 9 3 : Cole, Johnnetta B. Gelya Frank and Miles Richardson, eds. Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 10 4 : Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Desai, Gaurav The Invention of Invention. Cultural Critique Diner, Hasia R. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press.

Dominguez, Virginia R. Drake, St. Clair Diaspora Studies and Pan-Africanism. In Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. Joseph E. Harris, ed. American Anthropologist 99 4 : American Anthropologist. New York: William Morrow. Gates, Louis Henry, Jr. Gershenhorn, Jerry Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge. London: Hutchison.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Glick, Leonard B. American Anthropologist In Ethnic Encounters: Identities and Contexts. George Hicks and Philip Leis, eds. North Scituate: Duxbury Press. Greenberg, Joseph H. Herskovits, Frances S. Herskovits Selected Papers in Afroamerican Studiespp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Herskovits, Melville J.

The Modern Quarterly 4 2 : New York: Alfred A. Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. II, 3rd edn. Louis Finkelstein, ed. New York: Harper. Herskovits eds. Frances Herskovits, ed. New York: Random House. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hollander, David A.

Hooks, Bell Postmodern Blackness. Boston: South End Press. New York: Routledge. History of Anthropology, Vol. George W. Kallen, Horace Democracy versus the Melting Pot. The Nation. Zborowski and E. Herzog, eds. New York: Schocken Books. Deborah Dash Moore, ed. Klingenstein, Susanne Jews in the American Academy, New Haven: Yale University Press. Karp, C.

Mullen Kreamer and S. Lavine, eds. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Landes, Ruth Negro Jews in Harlem. Lester, Julius Lovesong: Becoming a Jew. New York: Little, Brown and Company. New York: George Braziller. DuBois: Biography of a Race, Liss, Julia E. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, eds. DuBois, Cultural Anthropology 13 2 : Locke, Alain "Who and What is a Negro?

Angelyn Mitchell, ed. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Locke, Alain, ed. New York: A. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Mandelbaum, David G. Jewish Social Studies 1: London: Verso. New York: Riverhead Books. In Blackframes: Celebration of Black Cinema. Mbye Cham and Claire Andrade-Watkins, eds. Third Text Spring : Los Angeles Times, March 5, A1.

Myrdal, Gunnar [] An American Dilemma, 2 vols. New York: Mc-Graw-Hill. New York: W. Roediger David R. Simpson, George Eaton Melville J. Spiro, Melford Personal communication, May 4 and June Stocking, George W. New York: The Free Press. Tedlock, Barbara Diasporas. In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, Vol. In Jewish Identity. David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz, eds.

DuBois was melville herskovits african retention in his praise, but Carter Woodson, the eminent black historian, attacked the use of anthropometry, or physical measurements, to distinguish the races. The very method, he contended, gave support to racism. They could prove that no race was pure, but this did not overthrow racism. Why Herskovits moved from this kind of work to the more fruitful study of the black diaspora in the New World and its origins in Africa, and how he developed an increasing conviction that African culture had in various ways shaped and been retained in American Negro life, is not clear from Gershenhorn's account.

Gershenhorn places this next and major phase of Herskovits's career in the context of the prevalent debate about American identity, and how it was influenced by the huge immigrant waves that were coming to an end in the s. The issue could be phrased in terms of the conflict between the desirability of assimilation or Americanization versus the maintenance of particularist group identity.

This latter was given its most effective formulation by the philosopher Horace Kallen, who argued for "cultural pluralism" and the value of immigrant cultures, for the immigrants themselves and for American life. Herskovits knew Kallen at the New School. At the same time John Dewey and Jane Addams were also defending pluralism and distinctive immigrant culture; it was then a new and radical position to argue that these cultures could influence American culture to its benefit, just as American culture influenced the immigrant.

Where did the American Negro fall in this debate, and where did Herskovits stand? Initially, he stood at the assimilationist end; recall his comments on Jewishness. Africans had become assimilated, and he saw no reason why this was not a salutary development. In this view he was allied with prominent black intellectuals who asserted that the American Negro was an American, forged in America--that the American Negro was indeed the American, connected to no remembered or meaningful past in the Old World, as even the Americans of highest prestige, those of English origin, were.

On the other hand, there were those who argued that a distinctive black culture had been created on these shores, that what had happened to blacks was very different from what had happened to immigrants and to the cultures that Kallen wished to preserve. It was true that blacks, in contrast to European and Asian immigrants, had no serious connection with Africa, their continent of origin; but in the harsh circumstances of American slavery, the anti-assimilationists believed, something new and different and valuable had been created.

There is a subtle and complex interplay between these concepts of assimilation and particularism. They come in both crude and sophisticated forms. There was Marcus Garvey's "back to Africa" movement; but there were also the sentiments of identity of the Harlem Renaissance. Gershenhorn writes that "Herskovits began to feel a dissonance between his assimilationism and the embrace of cultural pluralism by many ofhis intellectual friends, including the Harlem Renaissance writers.

James Weldon Johnson directed Herskovits's attention to a possible African influence on the songs of black Americans. A German musicologist named Erich von Hornbostel entered into a long correspondence with Herskovits on a connection between African and African American "motor behavior. So was there, after all, a memory of Africa incorporated in current African American culture and behavior?

Herskovits decided he would have to study those black diaspora communities in the New World that could be presumed to be closer to Africa, and which might have retained more in the way of African influence than the black communities in the United States. Beginning inand using his summers and leaves from teaching at Northwestern, he and his wife Frances conducted research in Suriname among the "Maroons," black communities in the interior created by escaped slaves; in West Africa the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and in particular Dahomey ; in Haiti; in Trinidad; in Bahia, Brazil.

Herskovits became America's leading white authority on Africa and on black diaspora communities. In the s the Carnegie Corporation began to consider a major research study on American Negroes. Herskovits was approached about conducting it, but he had a reputation for difficulty, and in the end the corporation chose the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, who eventually produced the monumental An American Dilemma.

Herskovits may have played a role in the decision to select Myrdal when he insisted to the Carnegie Corporation that the director of the study, if he was not to be an American, should come from a country without colonies. One aspect of this large study was to commission a number of initial monographs to guide Myrdal. Herskovits was commissioned to write one of these and so was Ralph Bunche, a student of Herskovits.

This provided the occasion for Herskovits to pull together his years ofstudy of African diasporas in the New World and their presumed African homelands, and with great alacrity he wrote the book with which he would be most closely identified, The Myth of the Negro Past. He made an emphatic argument that there was "not a trace" of African culture in Harlem.

As Walter Jackson 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. 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 Herskovits on the African and Jewish Diasporas Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 28 December 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, eventually. 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 ; quoted in Jackson The data analysis and write-up were finished in orbecause the following year his book was published, The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing Herskovits ; see also 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.

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 significance, and I shall attempt next to show that a physical type has developed from the mixture represented in his person 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. 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 Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 28 December 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 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 necessarily 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 segment 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 directions, even though his own data indicated that blacks and whites in the United States were becoming part of a common gene pool.

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 becoming 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 and with his wife and collaborator, Frances Herskovits Jackson 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 Herskovits on the African and Jewish Diasporas Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 28 December piece published in the American Anthropologist inHerskovits melville herskovits african retention 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 judgmentwe 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 elements 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 purposes, 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 ; emphasis added.

Here we find the antithesis of the approach that Herskovits had initially taken regarding Negroes and that he continued to take Gelya Trank regarding the Jews regarding their possession of a distinctive or particular culture: Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 28 December To what extent are cultural elements which are constant in this varied list to be discerned?

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 maintained itself under stress and strain Herskovitsemphasis added.

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 electrified.

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 Washington, D. 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 discusses, a certain amount of "invention" was already melville herskovits african retention in conceptualizing Africa in Western and colonial terms Mudimbe ; see also Desai ; Hobsbawm and Ranger Also invented were the concepts used or introduced by Herskovits—terms such as "assimilation," "acculturation," "amalgamation," "survivals," "syncretism," "cultural tenacity," "retentions," and "reinterpretations"—in order to account for historical continuities in Africa, and between Africa and the Americas Herskovits ; Bascom and Herskovits ; see also Yelvington 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 ; Azoulay ; Dyson ; Gates ; Gilroy ,; Hooks ; Marable ; Mercer; Mullings Herskovits' work contributed to the emergence of pan-Africanism and, by the s, to the widespread self-ascription of blacks as AfroAmericans Cole 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 ,; see also MercerAs James Clifford points out, diaspora studies increasingly must address such postmodern conditions 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 representations 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 s 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. A focus on cultural resistance and cultural survival, on hybridity and transnationalism, recasts the Jews as no longer an anomaly. Clifford 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 Yelvington ; also see Baron ; Gershenhorn The issues with which he struggled, and the contradictions that appear in his work, were part of wider discourses of his time.

He also taught briefly in at the elite black institution, Howard University Jackson 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 Americas, Herskovits threw his hat into the ring to become a key figure in the melville herskovits african retention controversy over the causes and remedies for the social problems among Negroes Cole ; Jackson ; Baker As Cole 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 assimilated to American cultural models or prevented by discrimination and pathological habits from reaching full assimilation. 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 Along with Park, Frazier took a prescriptive 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 Pasthe did not accept the views it expressed.

InMyrdal 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 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 organizations, 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 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 and "genuinely alarmed at the oppression and violence of Jim Crow" Willis 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 In a letter to philanthropist George F.

Peabody inBoas wished to "devise some means of bringing home to the negroes the great achievements of their race" quoted by Willis 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 's there developed something 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 excellent 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 Herskovits was also criticized on political grounds for contributing 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 Not only was the controversy contentious, but positions within it were highly mutable.

But Alain Locke reversed his views and, incriticized 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 Between andLocke 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 Klingenstein Kallen, at the New School for Social Research, advocated cultural pluralism for Jews in America—that is to say, he advocated Jewish particularism.

Melville herskovits african retention

Inhe 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. 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 functioning member of a culturally pluralist community, one had to belong to one of the smaller groups constituting by consent the larger community.

As Klingenstein 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 Klingenstein 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, inCohen 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 Gelya Frank language and still advance the process of civilization quoted in Klingenstein Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 28 December Boas no doubt contributed to Morris Cohen's views on the development of civilization through the mixing among cultures and races.

Klingenstein summarizes Morris Cohen's position, and contrasts 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, language, law and manners. The period from to has been characterized as constituting "two of the melville herskovits african retention blatantly anti-Semitic decades in American history" Diner More recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern European with socialist leanings also supported the struggle of Negroes for civil rights.

Diner notes an article in the Yiddish press, inthat 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? Inthe 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 Herskovits on the African and Jewish Diasporas Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 28 December Jewishness had remained with him and was expressed in terms of his interest in blacks Was Herskovits never confronted by anti-Semitism?

A recent historical note by Kevin Yelvington describes an incident following Herskovits' visit to Howard University. In MayHerskovits wrote to his good friend Margaret Mead about subleasing 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 West th Street was governed by a "race discrimination" policy excluding Jews.

In her letter, quoted by Yelvington 4Mead 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.