1 p. 300. 1943
2 p. viii-xii. 1935. The irony of this affair is that it was not a Negro, but a white man who answered her advertisement, and passed himself off as black, thus, her longings were not satisfied.
Chapter One
MIXED MARRIAGES AS SEEN BY THE LAW -- ANCIENT AND EARLY HISTORIC
“Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.” Deuteronomy, 7:3.
RULING classes and stronger peoples from time immemorial have prohibited marriage of their members with groups they considered socially inferior. Their object was three-fold: To have a permanently “inferior” group whose labor could be exploited at a minimum of cost; to be able to cohabit freely with the women of the weaker groups, and thus breed more of the latter to be exploited; and to sustain their ego and their morale by having an under-privileged class to look down upon.
This procedure was not at all racial. Black and brown peoples have used it against other blacks and browns; whites against whites; yellows against yellows; blacks and browns against whites; and whites against blacks and browns. It was simply and solely a case of the strong against the weak.
The Code of Manu, one of the oldest law-books of the world forbade the marriage of a Brahman, or “twice-born’ ‘individual, with a Sudra, or artisan. Should a Brahman woman so far forget herself as to have a child by a Sudra, the child sank to the Chandala caste, “the lowest of mortals,” who was so despised that if he sat on a seat used by a Brahman he was to have his buttocks slit. Manu also considered a woman who had red, or golden hair, inferior, and marriage with her by any of the three upper castes was forbidden (Chap. Ill, 8). A Brahman was sometimes black and a Sudra sometimes fair, and both might have had a Negro strain. Social position, not color, was the criterion. Caste distinctions in marriage still prevail in India.
The ancient Egyptians must undoubtedly have forbidden marriage with the Jews because when the latter first arrived in Egypt as visitors, and not yet slaves, the Egyptians thought it “an abomination” to break bread with them (Genesis, 42:32). In spite of the high favor shown to Joseph, the Egyptians regarded the Jews as “an abomination” when they came to settle in Egypt because they were shepherds, and relegated them to Goshen (Genesis, 45:34). The Egyptians, like the Jews, were then of mixed white and Negro strain.
Four centuries later when the Jews arrived in Palestine and had conquered that land they followed the example set by Abraham of non-marriage with the peoples there. The latter, however, were according to the Bible of the same original stock as the Jews, namely, the family of Noah. But true to the policy of the conqueror the Jews reserved the right to cohabit with and make concubines of the virgins of the beaten Canaanites, after killing the mothers and the fathers (Numbers, 31:17,18; Deuteronomy 7:2,3).
But these prohibitions against marriage did not work. Some very prominent Hebrews married “strange women.” Samson married Delilah, a Philistine; Boaz married Ruth, a Moabitess, ancestress of David; David married Maachah, a Geshurite and Bathsheba, a Hittite; Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter and had so many other non-Jewish wives that there was a revolt against him led by Jeroboam (1 Kings, Chaps. 11-14). He even appears to have lost his throne because of them (Eccles. 1:12). Ahab married Jezebel of Sidon. In fact there was once so general an intermarriage of the Jews with the Canaanites, Hittites, and other peoples, that, according to the Bible, Jehovah sold them into bondage to the king of Mesopotamia for eight years (Judges 3:5-8).
Moses, it is true, married an Ethiopian woman and Joseph, an Egyptian one, but both had been adopted by those people and had been cut off from contact with their own. Later, when Moses found himself again among his people he was roundly scolded by Aaron and Miriam, his brother and sister, because his wife was non-Jewish (Numbers 12:1-16).
The mixing of Jews with non-Jews went on in spite of all laws. After the return from the Babylonian captivity, we find the prophet, Nehemiah, telling how he cursed those who had “transgressed against our God” by taking non-Jewish wives, and how he smote such, pulled their hair, and broke up their families (Neh. 31;17,18). The prophet Ezra, too, in a fit of fanaticism, tore his garment and his beard at seeing how the “holy seed” of Israel had married with the Canaanites, a people of similar “race,” and gives a list of the Jews he compelled to leave their wives and children because the latter had not been born into the faith (Ezra, Chaps. 9 & 10).
Purity of religion, not of “race,” was the motive behind these restrictions because the Jews who had been very much mixed before they left Egypt were much more so in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. The idea behind the objection was that the child of parents who were of mixed faiths might have ideas of his own about religion. Such children were barred from entering “the congregation of the Lord,” even when they were mixed with favored nations as the Egyptian and the Edomite (Deut. 23:8). For instance there was the case of Shelomith, a Jewish woman, who had a son by an Egyptian. This son, while still in the wilderness, had an argument and a fight with a Jew over religion and was ordered stoned to death by Moses (Leviticus 24;10.14).
As regards marriage with Gentiles there are still orthodox Jews who feel as strongly against it as did the prophets of Israel.
Mixed Marriages in Rome
In Rome, there were severe laws against the marriage of patricians, or aristocrats, with plebians,1 a people of the same color, but of the working class. There was also the bar of nationality. However, in 444 B.C., the plebians won the right to marry with the patricians through the Canuleian Law but the restrictions against the non-Roman continued into the Christian era. If say, a white Roman had a child by a white Englishwoman, the child was regarded precisely as was one of a white Virginian and a Negro woman in slavery days. Such offspring even though white were called Hybridae, or mixed-blood, the same term used for mules. If the English mother were free, her child ranked just one degree above a slave; if she were a slave, her child also was a slave. The same held true if a black Roman married an Ethiopian.
No matter how high-born the foreigner, he or she could not contract a legal marriage with a Roman. Gibbon says, “The blood of a king could never mingle in legitimate nuptials with the blood of a Roman, and the name of Stranger degraded Cleopatra and Berenice to live the concubines of Mark Anthony and Titus.”2 Cleopatra was queen of Egypt; and Berenice, the wife of King Herod, who had been captured by Titus in the conquest of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
With the coming of Christianity in Rome, the ban against marriage took a religious turn. Northern whites, as the Scandinavians, Germans, and English, could not marry a Christian Roman, white or black, because they were regarded as heathens. For instance, an Irishman could contract such a marriage because the Irish were Christians. “There was,” says Oswald Spengler, “not the slightest difficulty about an Irishman in Constantinople marrying a Negress if both were Christians.”3
There was such an absence of color prejudice that when Pope Vitalian (657-672 A.D.) wanted someone to head the Church in England and become the first archbishop of Canterbury, he selected a Negro, Hadrian.4 When Hadrian declined and suggested another, the Pope sent Hadrian along as practical supervisor of Theodore who had been given the post.
The Emperor Justinian married his Negro cook to a noble Roman lady, an honor that would have been denied a German or Russian prince.5 The white princes of the North, says Gibbon, were very eager to contract marriage with the aristocrats of the South, which latter undoubtedly included some mulattoes and blacks. Liuprand, bishop of Cremona, who saw the Roman Emperor, Nicephorus Phocas, said that he was in color a Negro.5b The Emperor Constantine, says Gibbon, was so opposed to unions of Christians with even the white kings of the North that he had the prohibition written in “irrevocable law” on “the altar of St. Sophia,” Christendom’s then most exalted shrine.
In his decree Constantine used language on national and religious dissimilarities which resembles that of certain scientists and legislators of our day when speaking of “race.” He said, to quote Gibbon, “Every animal, says the discreet emperor,