Ever wondered about the genesis of the devastating and patently faulty belief that, based on the story of Noah’s curse in Genesis 9, blacks have been afflicted with eternal servitude? Here is a book that ably traces the history and development of the Curse of Ham.

According to the book, the nascence of the belief is two black skin etiologies, one, ark-based (chapters two and three), the other, tent-based (chapter four). Prominent among the ark-based etiologies are the rabbinic etiology and its Muslim derivative. The rabbinic tale, alluded to later by the western scholar Guillaume de Postel but with an added rationale and application to the Ethiopians, claims that during the flood Noah’s son, Ham, was turned black for breaking, alongside the dog and the raven, a divinely installed hiatus on sexual engagement while in the ark. The Muslim derivative similarly depicts black skin as punishment for Ham’s engagement in sexual intercourse with his wife against the intent of the gender apartheid implemented by Noah in the ark. The tent-based etiology finds representation in, among others, Ibn Masud (d. 653): “Noah was bathing and saw his son [Ham] looking at him and said to him, ‘Are you watching me bathe? May God change your color!’ And he is the ancestor of the Sudan (i.e., the blacks).”

Alignment with the biblical story, totally absent in the rabbinic tale (Ham wasn’t the one cursed and the venue of his infraction was not the ark), sort of present in the tent-based etiologies at least in as far as the venue is concerned, is also present to some extent in a 3^rd-4^th century work (Cave of Treasure) (chapter five) where there is the recognition that it was Canaan who was cursed, not Ham. Cave of Treasures extends the reach of the curse to cover Canaan’s descendants who were thought to include dark skinned Africans. According to Goldenberg, this marks the first time that blackness is explicitly associated with servitude.

The next stage in the development of the Curse of Ham was the introduction of the idea of a dual impact of the curse (aka dual Curse of Ham) resulting in both servitude and blackness (chapter six). The character turned black was Canaan in the case of Christian authors [e.g., Ibn al-Tayyib: He was commenting on the biblical curse of slavery, to which he added that when Noah cursed Canaan with slavery, “Canaan’s body became black”] and Jewish authors [e.g., Yemenis Nathaniel ibn Yesha’ya’s commentary on “And let Canaan be his slave” (Gen 9:26): “They will be black and ugly and God’s presence will not rest on them”] and Ham in the case of Muslim authors [e.g., The Persian Bahr al-favaid speaks of Noah “invoking evil” on Ham “so that his face was blackened”]. According to Goldenberg, the Ham/Canaan dichotomy is explained by the religions’ different bases for the Curse of Ham interpretation. The Jewish and Christian accounts are closely linked to the biblical narrative which names Canaan as the object of Noah’s curse. The Muslim stories, on the other hand, are not linked in these ways to the biblical text, nor were they based on a direct encounter with the Bible, which was considered corrupt.

The Curse of Ham did not appear in Europe in its dual form until the 16^th century (chapter eight). Prior to that it showed up in its non-dual form (chapter seven) in, among other writings, Chronicles of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea (1453) and Rabbi Moses Arragel of Castile (1384) who in his comments on Gen 9:25 (And Canaan was a slave of slaves) wrote: “some say these are the Black Moors who are everywhere captives.” Even though the dual curse as it appears in Europe [e.g., Diego de Yepes, a bishop in Spain, wrote that environment is not the cause of the change in color, but Noah’s curse of Ham, which changed him from red to black] resembles Muslim writings in that it is similarly Ham-centric, Goldenberg argues that the vast majority of Europeans writers of the 16^th and 17^th centuries were not directly influenced by the Muslim Noah narratives, but were reflecting an accepted Christian hermeneutic tradition of the dual Curse of Ham

Beginning in the 1700’s, the curse of Ham of the dual variety, emerged finally and most vociferously in America as justification for the enslavement of blacks (chapter nine). Use of the Curse of Ham to justify black slavery as opposed to explaining dark skin ended up being much greater in America than in Europe