Abravanel writes about Africans in both directions at once

Yitshak Abravanel, a Jewish statesman and biblical commentator of the fifteenth century, wrote about Africans in two directions. He sometimes described them negatively, as his Christian contemporaries did, and he also spoke of them well, drawing both on Talmudic sources and on the Renaissance humanism around him. This matters to a long running charge. Black and Christian scholars have claimed that Jews invented anti Black prejudice through the story of the curse of Ham, in which Noah condemns the descendants of one son to servitude. Schorsch answers that the Jewish source of that curse is an invention of twentieth century Christian polemicists, and that portraying a blind and stubborn anti Black racism as stemming from the Jews simply reaffirms the old stereotype of Jewish theological blindness. The fifteenth century evidence shows complexity in Jewish thinking about Africans at the exact moment the Atlantic trade was beginning.

Christopher Columbus was born at Genoa in the last days of October 1451. He spent years persuading the Spanish crown to pay for a westward crossing to India and got his answer in 1492, sailing from Spain on 3 August and raising the northern coast of Hispaniola on 5 December. On Christmas Eve the Santa Maria went aground. Thirty nine men stayed behind in a stockade called La Navidad, near where Cap-Haitien stands now, and he was back in Europe by March 1493. He returned that November to a burned fort and dead men, killed by the Taino whose welcome had been answered with violence. He crossed three more times and died at Valladolid on 20 May 1506. Haiti observes 5 December as Discovery Day, which is a curious thing for a country to keep. Several hundred thousand Taino were living on this island when he arrived, and within decades forced labour, disease and killing had finished them as a people.

Morne Cybele occupies La Montagne, the steep limestone plateau that rises to 275 metres on La Desirade. The occupied core is small, somewhere between 200 and 300 square metres. The height buys shelter from the strong currents and unpredictable winds that make the surrounding water difficult, and the northern cliffs make the site hard to approach from that side, which cuts both ways for the people living on it. A shell of Cittarium pica taken from the deposit was radiocarbon dated to the middle of the fifteenth century, so the community was in place a few decades before Columbus sailed. That date is what makes the site useful. It shows what people in the eastern Caribbean were doing immediately before the arrival that would define everything written about them afterwards. Morne Souffleur, on the same plateau, belongs to the same pattern. Small, high, difficult to reach, and chosen on purpose.

At the feast of Mary in August 1449 the Emperor Zara Ya'iqob gathered the leaders of the Ethiopian church at the monastery of Dabra Mitmaq in Shoa. Two Egyptian metropolitans came, along with the abbots of Dabra Hayk, Dabra Libanos, Dabra Bizan, Dabra Damo and many other houses. The question was the Sabbath. One monastic party, the House of Ewostatewos, kept the Jewish Saturday and had been refusing ordination from the metropolitan for decades; the rest of the kingdom ignored it. The emperor, who had spent twenty years shut up in the mountain prison at Amba-Gishan before taking the throne in 1434, had thought the matter through and written books about it. The council agreed that both days would be kept and that the Ewostathians would accept ordination again. Ethiopians have observed two Sabbaths ever since. The province that mattered politically lay in the north, near the Red Sea coast the emperor was determined to control.