Black Servant, Black Demon: Color Ideology in the Ashburnham Pentateuch

What does the inclusion of Africans or African-Americans do to and for a work? . . . my assumptions had always been that nothing "happens": Africans and their descendants were not, in any sense that matters, there; and when they were there, they were decorative. . . . I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. . . .

--Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

The depiction of slain black children whose white mothers and black fathers mourn in despair and disbelief is a startling scene, one not commonly associated with early medieval culture (see fig. 1). ¹ The illustration showing the Slaying of the Firstborn in the late-sixth-century Ashburnham Pentateuch (Paris, Bibl. Nat., MS nouv. acq. lat. 2334, fol. 65v) is rarely discussed, even though the manuscript is well known in early medieval studies for the question of its origin. ² The focus here is on the depiction of blacks that I believe was necessary to construct a white and Christian identity.

For an art historian of the late twentieth century deciphering this scene, the methodological pitfalls are enormous, the chronological span immense, and the cultural disparities daunting. ³ Yet despite these hurdles, the questions are compelling enough to merit a close study. Why are blacks the objects of God's wrath in this manuscript, when in all other illustrations of the tenth plague the victims are white? Was the use of black-and-white color symbolism different or similar to modern pejorative and often explosive inversions? Was the artist depicting blacks as a racially defined group, or was the color black itself considered pathological, manipulated to cause a desired effect?

The historian must differentiate between a twentieth-century signification of color and race and a sixth-century signification. Our legacy is that of slavery and colonization where people define themselves--or are defined by others--racially by their blood and ancestry. A child, for example, whose mother is white and whose father black is labeled as half white, half black, mixed, or multiracial. This definition of race according to blood percentage, based on antiquated--and historically pejorative--notions of a "pure type," was alien to antiquity. Late Roman society would describe this child as decolore "dark" or "swarthy." ⁴ In other words, the child's skin was darker than the somatic norm of the Roman citizen. A people's relative position to the sun accounted for their skin color; thus, Scythians were too pale from underexposure and Ethiopians too burnt from overexposure. ⁵ In climatic anthropology, black Africans were the darkest in a whole spectrum of people living around the Mediterranean, down the Nile River valley, and as far east as India. Roman xenophobia was geographically widespread and all-inclusive, not limited to the pigmentation of a people's skin. In broadly general terms, the paradigmatic division was between Roman and barbarian. ⁶

The depictions of blacks in the Ashburnham Pentateuch are a complex amalgam of pictorial convention and ideological conviction, showing a paradigmatic shift from the Roman black barbarian to the Christian black demon. The inclusion of blacks in the manuscript is a fascinating and instructive yardstick for assessing color symbolism and ideology in the visual arts between late Roman and early medieval cultures. The artist deployed black-and-white color symbolism, with deep roots in the social mores of late Roman society, to provide a visual exegesis on the Exodus story. The illustration of the tenth plague shows a transitional moment where the representation of blacks, playing upon the fears of sixth-century Christians, acquires sinister associations, laying the groundwork for later depictions of blacks as demons and tormentors of Christ. ^7...