greater immunity from disease (Burton cited statistical studies that he believed supported these differences). We might expect such a catalogue to be attributed to innate physical constitution, in line with the language of race he often employed. But the explanation he gave was not biological; it was cultural: Jewish strength was the consequence of a certain way of life, given shape by the laws laid down by Moses himself:
All the laws attributed to the theistic secularism of Moses were issued with one object—namely that of hardening and tempering the race to an extent which even Sparta ignored. The ancient Jew was more than half a Bedawin and not being an equestrian race his annual journeys to and from Jerusalem were mostly made on foot. His diet was carefully regulated, and his year was a succession of fasts and feasts, as indeed it is now, but not to such an extent as formerly. The results were simply the destruction of all the weaklings and the survival of the fittest.48
The famous phrase with which this statement ends was first used by Herbert Spencer in his 1864 treatise Principles of Biology, as an equivalent for what Darwin called “natural selection”; it seems reasonable to assume that Burton had read Spencer by the time he wrote this passage (although I know of no other evidence that he had). What needs to be noted, however, is that the racial character Burton describes was not some genetic inheritance but the result of a set of cultural practices (even if they were in some degree imaginary); it was because the severe demands that Mosaic law imposed on Jews as a people could not be met by their own weaker members that the aggregate grew strong. This was a view quite in line with the social Darwinism Spencer developed out of evolutionary theory, but it departed from the more purely biological perspective usually associated with post-Darwinian racial thinking.
Although Burton seems not to have expressed this view of Jews before he compiled his essay about them, he very likely had something close to it in mind some years earlier in a favorable, albeit cryptic, declaration about them. Responding to some antisemitic statements he encountered in Brazil (where he served as consul before going to Damascus and Trieste), Burton wrote: “Had I a choice of race, there is none to which I would belong more willingly than the Jewish—of course the white family.”49 The implication that some Jews were not “white” and that these were inferior to the others suggests that Burton already harbored a certain ambivalence toward Jews. Although he does not say so, it seems likely that “strength and energy” were the qualities that drew him to the ones he admired, since he valued these traits wherever he found them and liked to attribute them to himself; recall the comment about desert bandits quoted above from the Personal Narrative: “Who so revolts against society requires an iron mind and an iron body, and these mankind instinctively admires, however misdirected be their energies.”
Clearly, Burton had moved far from this identification by the time he wrote “The Jew”; all the same, even that essay offered a ground for admiring its subjects, namely that the same culture that hardened Jews as a people also fostered in them a moral attitude Burton found worthy of deep respect, the determination to serve God out of pure devotion and not for any personal advantage. Although the ancient Hebrews already interpreted their special relationship to Jehovah as justifying hostility and violence toward other peoples, the same sense of special communal solidarity
inculcated a rare humanity amongst its own members unknown to all other peoples of antiquity: for instance, it allowed the coward to retire from the field before battle, and, strange to say, it inculcated the very highest of moral dogmas. In 250 B.C. Sochaeus, and after him the Pharisees, according to Josephus, taught that God should be served, not for gain, but for love and gratitude: hence his follower Sadik forbade the looking forward to futurity, even as Moses had neglected the doctrine with studious care. Even in the present age of the world such denegation of egotism would be a higher law.50
It may be impossible to decide whether the approval Burton here expressed for allowing cowards to escape battle was genuine or ironic, and similarly whether his association of high moral purity with Jews was at work also in his earlier profession of kinship with them. But finding these ideas in the later essay adds more substance to the evident ambivalence at the core of his dealings with Jews, visible and active even in the moment of his most hostile stance toward them.
Although more difficult to see, a similar complexity can be discerned in his attitude toward black Africans. Burton seems never to have felt any sense of special kinship toward them, but here too the antipathy he often voiced in racial categories needs to be considered alongside some very different judgments. It is worth recalling that Burton appears never to have been bothered by being called a “white Nigger” on account of the relations he sought out with darker-skinned people in India, and it may be that the best path toward understanding his overall relationship to Africa and Africans lies in reversing the usual approach to the question and considering his positive pronouncements before taking up the negative ones. The latter must not be either ignored or underplayed, but the former help to provide a framework within which to see how they fit into his larger mindset.
Burton’s most extensive discussion of black African culture came in the preface he wrote for a collection of West African proverbs and sayings he published in 1865. That he troubled to do the book at all is evidence that he took African culture seriously, and his comments about it are remarkable enough to deserve quotation at length. Invoking the question often (and regrettably) posed in his time, whether “the Negroes are a genuine portion of mankind or not,” Burton went on:
If it is mind that distinguishes men from animals, the question cannot be decided without consulting the languages of the Negroes, for language gives the expression and the manifestation of the mind. Now, as the grammar proves that Negro languages are capable of expressing human thoughts—some of them, through their rich formal development, even with astonishing precision—so specimens of their “Native Literature” [the proverbs] show that the Negroes actually have thoughts to express; that they reflect and reason about things, just as other men. Considered in such a point of view, such specimens may go a long way towards refuting the old-fashioned doctrine of an essential inequality of the Negroes with the rest of mankind, which now and then shows itself, not only in America, but also in Europe.
Such negative judgments had been developed by people who had never heard, or been unable to understand, the speech of black people in their own languages:
But when I was amongst them in their native land, on the soil which the feet of their fathers have trod, and heard them deliver in their own native tongue stirring extempore speeches, adorned with beautiful imagery, and of half an hour’s duration; or when I was writing from their dictation, sometimes two hours in succession, without having to correct a word or alter a construction in twenty or thirty pages; or when in Sierra Leone, I attended examinations of the sons of liberated slaves in Algebra, Geometry, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, etc.—then, I confess, any other idea never entered my mind but that I had to do with real men.
Burton followed this with similar testimonies from others who had been in like situations, and concluded: “The fact is, civilization takes too much upon herself. There is more of equality between the savage and the civilized—the difference being one of quantity, not of quality—than the latter will admit. For man is everywhere commensurate with man. Hence, whilst the average Englishman despises the Yoruba, the Yoruba ‘reciprocates’ with hate and fear.” Burton made a similar observation in a letter to his friend Monckton Milnes: “Those who talk of the benighted African should have seen the envoy who conveyed to the Governor the ultimatum of the Ashanti King. There was not a European on the coast to compare with him in dignity, self-possession and perfect savoir-faire touching the object of his mission.”51
Faced with such declarations as these, it is hard not to be astonished, as well as appalled, by the very different things Burton wrote on other occasions. Here he gave vent to all the standard tropes of anti-black prejudice and polemic: Africans were dirty, smelly, lazy, drunken, violent, bestial, stupid, oversexed, and undisciplined. About East Africans in particular, he wrote that their “stagnation of
