David Brion Davis in NYRB in 1999: ‘In the history of black-Jewish relations, according to this view, the Jewishness of an eighteenth-century slave trader or a later Harlem merchant or landlord was far more meaningful than the Jewishness of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who served in 1964 as voting-registration volunteers in Meridian, Mississippi, before being murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.’

Also: ‘Yet even [Hasia R.] Diner shows great unease in accepting that Jews were motivated by “empathy” and “altruism”; she has consistently put emphasis on motives of Jewish self-interest.’

As well: ‘Jews and sub-Saharan Africans were for Europeans the archetypal outsiders—outsiders who were frequently likened to pigs and maggots whose genes supposedly threatened what fifteenth-century Spaniards began calling “purity of blood.”’

Solidarity between archetypal outsiders is not a given, but sometimes, for whatever reason, the archetypal outsiders take a liking to each other.

(a sf 2261)