"Black I am and Comely": Blackness and Whiteness as Part of Jewish Racial Discourses From Modern Times to Antiquity - And Where is the Place of the Song of Songs in All This?
Abstract
This contribution deals with the semiotization of the Jewish body in general, and the semiotization of skin colour in particular. Acts of such semiotization might have originated in the Non-Jewish environment and are to a large extent coextensive with the history of anti-Judaism and antiSemitism, but they have also been cherished by Jewish cultures.
Bible scholars seem purposefully to avoid or to dispel any racial connotations implicit in the description of Shulamit's skin colour, generally regarding them as anachronistic to the time of the poem's composition. Nevertheless, in what follows I argue for the necessity to confront the Song of Songs with the existence of forms of (proto)-racism in the Greco-Roman period, takinginto account the research on this topic in the past decade, which undoubtedly deserves a due attention by the Old Testament discipline.