Culture, Identity

Uncle Tom in the Pale of Settlement


As an American scholar of Jewish culture, I became interested in […] how Jews were and are also, in certain ways, positioned to be American racism’s beneficiaries. How exactly we are – or became – white is encoded in our culture, but also in our daily lives in this country today.

So says Eli Rosenblatt, who has translated into English and annotated Ayzik Meir Dik’s 1868 “Slavery or Serfdom,” the foreword to Dik’s Yiddish edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Dik’s translation Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel deviates from her original in significant ways, not least in that he makes the planter who owns Uncle Tom Jewish.
This may look like a strange move to the contemporary reader, it does to me, but it in translating the novel it is likely that Dik, a popular Yiddish writer, wasn’t thinking about race in America. Nineteenth-century Russia came with its own sets of intricate ethnic and social classifications. The Emancipation Reform of 1861 had recently freed the serfs there and Dik’s readers were Yiddish-speaking Jews who lived alongside, traded with and employed this recently emancipated peasantry. (And were occasionally subject to violence from that same demographic.)
The tectonic plates of national and social orders in the Russian and Hapsburg empires were beginning to shift at that time as ethnic nationalism and other mass movements gained strength. Rosenblatt feels Dik was doing something subversive, radical even, in helping Jews think about how serf emancipation reordered the structure of ethnic and later national, or racial relations.

Hyman Pearlstine’s Family Seder, Charleston, SC 1904. His grandfather Tanchum “Thomas” Pearlstine emigrated from Trzcianne, Poland (Russian Empire) in 1856. Courtesy of the Special Collections, College of Charleston.
Hyman Pearlstine’s Family Seder, Charleston, SC 1904. His grandfather Tanchum “Thomas” Pearlstine emigrated from Trzcianne, Poland (Russian Empire) in 1856. Courtesy of the Special Collections, College of Charleston.
Still, as Jew living in America it is almost impossible not to read Dik’s text and consider the fact that it was written shortly before momentous events that shaped (Ashkenazi) American Jewish identity in relation to Black Americans. More specifically it was written at a time when the enormous wave of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe to the US was just beginning. A journey that was in many ways one toward whiteness and privilege.
It is also hard not to think of this: America has, to generalize very broadly, meant freedom for Jews (at least for those who are white) while it has meant, and continues to mean, some version of the opposite for African-Americans.
In Rosenblatt’s words, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin was both an anti-slavery novel and a springboard for popularizing racist attitudes towards people of African descent.” A wide audience, many of who may have later ended up in the US, would have read this book. As such it’s signpost of sorts along the road to the induction of European Jews in the American racial hierarchy.

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