ABSTRACT
A few years ago, when on sabbatical at an American university, I was asked to teach a course on medieval Jewish thought. In such a course, two naturally central texts are The Kuzari of Judah Halevi and Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed. In pivotal chapters of the two works, which appear in all relevant anthologies and are taught both because of their content and for didactic reasons, the black appears as subhuman, devoid of intelligence, whose place is somewhere between man and the ape (the Philosopher’s Speech in The Kuzari 1: 1 and the Parable of the King’s Palace, Guide 3: 51). Since this is such a sensitive point at American universities in our era of political correctness, I consulted the head of the department who indeed advised me not to teach these particular texts, to avoid trouble. The concern was that the texts, seemingly so remote and so irrelevant to current experience, would broadcast a message of Judaism as ‘racist’, especially to non-Jewish students, the more so to the blacks among them, creating a most difficult situation that might be exploited in current political struggles.
