Zora Neale Hurston was a philosemite. She believed that the Jews had been victims of stereotyping that started with Moses and that was promoted by the Bible and fed to children in Sunday school. Among other things, it produced the fiction of the Eternal Jew, a type unchanged since the time of the Pharaohs.
In fact, Hurston thought, the Jews had evolved, just like everyone else. And they had come to believe, long before other people did, in liberty, individualism, and the rights that define liberal democracies. The Jews were Americans thousands of years before there was an America.
The story of the Jews was extremely important to Hurston, as important as her mission, far better known, to preserve and to celebrate the style, speech, and folklore of the African diaspora—the culture of what she called “the Negro farthest down.” That mission yielded two works of cultural anthropology, “Mules and Men” (1935) and “Tell My Horse” (1938), and the novel on which her reputation is built, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937).
But Hurston devoted a big portion of her literary career—which stretched from 1921, when she published her first short story in a Howard University literary magazine, to 1960, when she died—to trying to write a history of the Jews. This meant, essentially, rewriting the Bible. It was a colossal ambition, and it is striking, although maybe not surprising, how little attention the effort has received in the critical literature on Hurston, of which there are now shelves full. Between 1975, when she was “rediscovered” by Alice Walker, and 2010, more than four hundred doctoral dissertations were written on Hurston. “Their Eyes Were Watching God” has sold more than a million copies, and Oprah Winfrey produced a film adaptation. In Hurston’s lifetime, the most any of her books earned in royalties was $943.75.
Hurston was a grapho-compulsive. In addition to four published novels and three works of nonfiction, which include an autobiography, “Dust Tracks on a Road” (1942), she wrote short stories, poems, plays, essays, reviews, and articles. She also staged concerts and dance performances. By the time she died, she had published more books than any Black woman in history.
And she was a tireless correspondent, possibly because for much of her life, despite three somewhat mysterious marriages, she lived alone. An excellent edition of the correspondence, edited by Carla Kaplan, contains more than five hundred letters, and, since Hurston was not shy about writing to people she had never met (she once asked Winston Churchill to contribute an introduction to one of her books; he politely declined, citing poor health), it is believed that there may be hundreds more letters still out there, no one knows where.
Like most freelance writers, she had a fairly high kill rate. Some pieces were rejected or didn’t work out or for some other reason never appeared in print; her autobiography was expurgated by her publisher; and she wrote some or all of at least five novels that were turned down. Only one of these, “The Life of Herod the Great,” survived in typescript—the others appear to be missing completely. “Herod” has now been published by Amistad in a volume edited by Deborah Plant, an independent scholar. Plant is also the author of a critical biography of Hurston, published in 2007, and the editor of another Hurston manuscript, “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo,’ ” which was published in 2018.
Hurston spent something like fifteen years researching and writing “Herod.” She called it her “great obsession.” This was far more time than she spent on any other book project. She wrote “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” for example, in seven weeks, while she was doing field work in Haiti. The “Herod” typescript was partially burned when, after Hurston’s death, workers who were cleaning out her house set fire to a trunk full of papers. An acquaintance driving past saw the flames, grabbed a hose (Hurston was a famous gardener), and put out the fire.
What we have of “Herod” is therefore far from a complete work. The final chapters in the Amistad edition are fragmentary, and the book ends abruptly, ten years before Herod’s death. Whether this is because those pages were damaged by fire and water or simply because Hurston hadn’t finished yet is unclear. She did write three prefaces and four introductions; Plant prints what she calls “synthesized versions” of these. In general, the editorial apparatus is fairly minimal.
Hurston’s papers are housed at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, and, before this new edition, the “Herod” manuscript was read there by Hurston scholars. Their reports did not make a trip to Gainesville seem urgent. Hurston’s first biographer, Robert Hemenway, wrote, “Zora’s manuscript suffers from poor characterization, pedantic scholarship, and inconsistent style; the whole performance touches the heart by revealing a talent in ruins.” He said it would have been “a minor work.”
Hemenway was a sympathetic biographer. An even more sympathetic biographer, Valerie Boyd, refrained from critical commentary on “Herod” altogether in her book, “Wrapped in Rainbows.” Virginia Lynn Moylan, in “Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade,” described the writing of “Herod,” which was Hurston’s chief preoccupation in those years, and even wrote something about Hurston’s views on the Jews. But she, too, declined to say much about the novel itself.
“Herod” was turned down by Hurston’s publisher, Scribner’s, in 1955. Her editor there, Burroughs Mitchell, known mainly for being the man who rejected three novels by Zora Neale Hurston, explained that the book “does not seem to us to accomplish its intention. I mean to say that it does not vividly recreate the man and his time. . . . There is a wealth of fine material here but somehow it has failed to flow in a clear narrative stream. We think the book would prove difficult reading for the layman.”
Hurston, characteristically, took this in stride. She was accustomed to adversity. Her field work was supported for a few years in the late nineteen-twenties and early thirties by a white patron and by grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, but she lived mainly on her writing. It was her good fortune to be the sort of person whom other people enjoy helping, but she disliked receiving unreciprocated gifts and did not depend on them. She took low-level jobs when she ran out of funds—she once worked as a maid—and sometimes she had to pawn her typewriter to buy food. For many years, she lived on a houseboat. None of her books sold more than five thousand copies in her lifetime.
When Mitchell’s rejection letter came, Hurston was living in Eau Gallie, a tiny town in Florida, in a one-room cabin that she rented for five dollars a week. It was a long way from the Harlem of the nineteen-twenties, where she had cut a flamboyant figure among what she liked to call (although the term was probably not her coinage) the Niggerati. But she’d been born in Alabama and had grown up in Eatonville, Florida, an all-Black town—making her one of very few members of the Harlem Renaissance who was from the American South—and she was a Floridian at heart. She was content in Eau Gallie. “Naturally, I am sorry that you found Herod the Great disappointing,” she replied to Mitchell, “but do not feel concerned about the refusal upon me. I am my old self and can take it easily.”
She continued working on the book. In 1958, it was turned down by another house, David McKay, the publisher of Fodor’s travel guides and Ace Comics. In 1959, she wrote to Harper & Brothers to ask “if you would have any interest in the book I am laboring upon at present—a life of Herod the Great. One reason I approach you is because you will realize that any publisher who offers a life of Herod as it really was, and naturally different from the groundless legends which have been built up around his name has to have courage.” Harper & Brothers was Richard Wright’s publisher—as the reference to “courage” was intended to remind the recipients. But they passed on “Herod.” This was Hurston’s last extant letter.
It’s fair to publish an unfinished book, but it feels a little unfair to judge it. Maybe what we have is not the final version. But, based on what we do have, Hurston’s biographers were not wrong: her voice is missing. There is no poetry in “Herod.” Instead, we are walked stiffly through the career of the man the Romans treated as the king of the client state of Judea, which he governed from 40 B.C.E. until his death, thirty-six years later—an impressive run at a time when one held on to power by preëmptively killing one’s rivals, something the historical Herod was quite good at.
And that is, of course, how most people know him today. In the Gospel of Matthew, it is said that, after Herod, the King of the Jews, learned of the birth of a new King of the Jews, he ordered the slaughter of all male children under two years of age in Bethlehem—the Massacre of the Innocents, a scene that became iconic in Western art. (The Herod in the Bible who beheads John the Baptist to please his stepdaughter Salome and who hands Jesus over to Pontius Pilate was Herod Antipas, Herod the Great’s son. He’s the bad Herod.)
Hurston told a friend that her interest in Herod the Great began when she learned that scholars had doubts about the story in Matthew. It is inconsistent with the account of Jesus’ birth in the other Gospels, and is probably what is known as a “fulfillment citation,” something inserted to validate a prophecy in the Hebrew Bible—in this case, from Jeremiah. It is also prefigured (another Biblical device) by Pharaoh’s order, in Exodus, to kill all male babies born to Hebrew mothers.
So Hurston started reading ancient sources, notably the Jewish historian Josephus, who is our main source of information about Herod. (Herod was a member of the Edomites, a Semitic people forcibly converted to Judaism in the second century B.C.E.) She suddenly saw “this man I had always thought of as nothing but a mean little butcher, as a highly cultivated, Hellenized non-Jew, the handsomest man of his time, the greatest soldier of Southwest Asia, and ablest administrator, generous both of spirit and materially, ‘Herod the Over-Bold,’ ‘Herod of the sun-like splendor.’ ”
This is the Herod of “Herod,” a superhero of the Levant. He excels at everything, from man-to-man combat to interior design, an impossible combination of rectitude and swagger. When Cleopatra tries to seduce him, he refuses her. He’s a married man! When he has his wife executed, as the real Herod did, his reasoning is unassailable. When Cleopatra’s lover, that dissolute sensualist Mark Antony, sizes him up for a possible same-sex hookup, he can see right away that Herod is not that type. As Hurston describes the moment, “Antony was silently appraising Herod’s masculine perfection, his large, luminous eyes and superb lashes, his muscular limbs well developed by military use. But he did not sense that Herod’s mind would be capable of persuasion.”
The whole book is written like this, in a kind of illustrated-classics prose.
The dialogue is theatrical:
Or:
Some bits are unintentionally comic:
Hurston did acquire a tremendous amount of information about eastern Mediterranean politics in the first century B.C.E. It’s not known exactly where she got it. Moylan, in “Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade,” says that the writer became friendly with a white woman named Sara Lee Creech, who lived in Belle Glade, Florida, and who evidently had a family library where Hurston did some of the research for “Herod.” (Creech was one of the designers of Saralee, the first mass-produced realistic Black doll; Hurston advised on the project. It was sold at Sears.)
But, as Hurston’s editor at Scribner’s complained, the deluge of unfamiliar names and places can swamp the narrative:
What was Hurston trying to do? Could she have been imagining a movie deal? A number of her books had been considered by studios for adaptation. Warner Bros. looked at an advance copy of “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” And, for a couple of months in 1941, she had worked as a “story consultant” for Paramount. In 1951, she wrote to her agent to ask if she had an “in” with Cecil B. DeMille, whose “Samson and Delilah” had been the top-grossing movie of 1949. “I plan to try the LIFE OF HEROD THE GREAT, as a drama,” she wrote, “and it needs Hollywood. It is a great story, really, and needs to be done. The man had everything good, bad and indifferent. Handsome, dashing, a great soldier, a great statesman, a great lover. He dared everything, and usually won.” She wondered whether Orson Welles, with whom she had once worked in the Harlem unit of the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program, and who she understood was down on his luck, might collaborate. She worried a bit about his ego.
It was, after all, the era of the big-screen sword-and-sandal epic. “Samson and Delilah” was followed by “Quo Vadis” (1951), “The Robe” (1953), “The Ten Commandments” (1956), “Ben-Hur” (1959), and “Spartacus” (1960), all huge box-office hits adapted from popular works of historical fiction—an era that came to an end in 1963, when the Elizabeth Taylor–Richard Burton “Cleopatra” failed to clear its bloated budget, nearly wiping out Twentieth Century Fox.
The adventure-story format and corny dialogue in “Herod” would have been a perfect Technicolor fit. We can almost hear Charlton Heston chewing up that line about the bodies of Jewish women. If “Herod” had been made into a movie, our judgment of it would probably be very different. We could regard the novel as basically a screenplay or a storyboard, deliberately simplified, and criticisms about poor characterization and pedantic scholarship would be beside the point.
But, as Hurston must have understood on some level, there was little chance that Hollywood would touch her book, because the key move in her revision of Biblical history was the denial of the divinity of Jesus. “Christianity,” as she explained in a letter to the writer and editor Max Eastman, “was a movement totally within the Jewish people NOT A SUDDEN AND MIRACULOUS HAPPENING AS IS TOLD IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.” Eastman was not Jewish. Cecil B. DeMille was. He was not going to direct a movie that questioned the Christ story.
Hurston’s father, John, was a preacher, so she had listened to riffs on Biblical passages growing up, and she collected Black sermons in her work as a cultural anthropologist. She herself began signifying on the Bible from the beginning of her career. In 1926, she wrote a comic one-act play, recasting the story of Noah’s curse of Ham—verses once popularly believed to explain the origins of Black people (although there is nothing in them about skin color). She called her play “The First One.” In 1934, she composed a parable-like piece, “The Fire and the Cloud,” in which Moses, preparing his tomb on Mt. Nebo, has a conversation with a lizard. (It’s a little like a Geico commercial.) And her third novel, “Moses, Man of the Mountain,” published in 1939, is a rewriting of Exodus.
Exodus was important to Black people for obvious reasons: it’s a kind of civil-rights story. Martin Luther King, Jr., alluded to it in his last speech, comparing himself to Moses (“I’ve been to the mountaintop”), and many spirituals (W. E. B. Du Bois called them “sorrow songs,” which Hurston said was “tomfoolery”) adapt its language (“Let my people go”). Hurston’s novel is therefore usually read as an allegory of Emancipation, the flight from Egypt as an escape from the bondage of slavery.
This was certainly one of Hurston’s intentions. She has her Hebrew characters speak in Southern dialect, for instance, and her Moses is a conjure man, a character who draws on traditions outside the Bible, like hoodoo. But she had another intention, too. In her version of Exodus, Moses is not an Israelite. He is an Egyptian nobleman who invents monotheism and imposes it on his Hebrew slaves. “Moses did not care a fig for those Hebrew people,” she explained to one correspondent. “Moses had worked out an idea for a theocratic government, and the Hebrews were just the available laboratory material.”
In her book, the Hebrews resent Moses and the forty years in the wilderness he subjects them to. They are constantly disobeying him and subverting his authority. “Didn’t I always say we was better off in slavery than we would be wandering all over the wilderness following after some stray man that nobody don’t know nothing about?” one character complains. “I told you all a long time ago that we had enough gods in Egypt without messing with some fool religion that nobody don’t know nothing about but Moses.”
This parallels the argument of Sigmund Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism,” which, uncannily, came out the same year as Hurston’s novel. Freud, too, proposed that Moses was an Egyptian prince who invented monotheism (or stole it from Akhenaten). This was not an entirely original theory, and although Freud and Hurston could hardly have known each other’s work, they may have drawn on some of the same scholarly sources. In Freud’s rendition of the Exodus story, the Israelites get so fed up with Moses that they kill him. Hurston doesn’t go that far.
“Moses, Man of the Mountain” was a rehearsal for a chapter in a much bigger book that Hurston turned to after publishing her autobiography: a history of the Jews. The first surviving mention of this project is in a letter written in 1945 to a friend from her Harlem days, Carl Van Vechten. “I want to write the story of the 3000 years struggle of the Jewish people for democracy and the rights of man,” she told him. “Beginning with Sinai, and on to the final destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman emperor Titus . . . there was one long and continuous struggle of the people against the arbitrary rule of the priesthood.” The book was to be called “Under Fire and Cloud.” A few years later, probably in 1947, the year she moved to Scribner’s from her old publisher, Lippincott, she sent her editor a twenty-page proposal for a book called “Just Like Us.” The subtitle is “An Analysis of the Hebrews and the Modern Jews as They Were and Are as Against Our Traditional Conceptions.”
Hurston had expected to work with Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. Perkins was already legendary as the editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and he and Hurston met twice in New York. But he died prematurely, of pneumonia, a few months later—creating one of the great what-ifs in literary history. Perkins may have been the intended recipient of the book proposal. There is no mention of it in Hurston’s correspondence with Mitchell, the editor who replaced him.
The story of the Jews, Hurston says in her pitch, “is much less a religious creed than a most important human document of social struggle and growth. . . . They were fighting and dying in swarms for the things in our own Bill of Rights thousands of years before the discovery of America, and so looked at without the veil of theology, can be said to have been the very first Americans.” Her outline for the book has nine chapters, beginning with Abraham (“the hen-pecked star-gazer”) and including David, Solomon, Herod, Jesus, the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, and the Jewish diaspora. It ends with a chapter called “Summing Up for the Jews and Us.”
In Hurston’s account, Herod and Jesus Hellenized Judaism. They transformed it from a regime of prohibitions—traditionally, there are six hundred and thirteen Mosaic laws in the Pentateuch—into an ethics of brotherhood and equality. Their enemy was not the Romans but the rabbis. Both men were condemned by the Sanhedrin. “To say that the Jews killed Christ is an infinitely worse crime than the Crucifixion,” Hurston says. “He was executed because they loved Him, not hated Him.” Christianity grew naturally out of the Jewish experience. An immaculate conception was not necessary.
Part of the Jewish stereotype is quarrelsomeness and a tendency to question authority, but, in Hurston’s view, that is precisely what makes the Jews “like us.” It is “the talk-back characteristics of the Americans and all democracies,” as she put it. What priests called the Jews’ wickedness “merely consisted in insisting on having something to say about the disposal of their lives, irregardless of who their ruler might be, or how sacred he might consider himself.” The more you study the Jews, she wrote, “the more you realize that they were just like us, hell bent for the rights of man and brash about it.” This remarkable document has never been published, but it is the key to understanding Hurston’s “obsession” with Herod. In her interpretation of history, Herod is the hinge between Old Testament Judaism and what became Christianity.
Two things about “Just Like Us” stand out. The first is that it scarcely refers to race or gender. Hurston is not saying that she identifies with Jews as a Black person who has suffered from stereotyping and discrimination, and she is not saying that she understands them as a woman who has been subordinated in a patriarchal society. She is saying that she identifies with Jews as an American. The “us” in her title is Americans.
The second thing that stands out is how personal the document is. The brash, self-determining, self-reliant figure Hurston conjures up as the prototype of the Jew is Hurston herself, a woman who would not let others tell her how to live. What has made this personality trait complicated for contemporary readers of Hurston is that she did not mean that white people could not tell her how to live. White people were not her problem. She believed that she understood the degrees of their racism and their hypocrisy perfectly. She knew how to deal with them. The people whose guidance she resisted were the friends of Black people, the liberals. Her rabbis were the race leaders of the N.A.A.C.P. Her Sanhedrin was the Supreme Court of the United States.
Hurston thought that Northern liberals assigned Black people a role, and she refused to play it. “I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it,” she wrote in 1928, a sentiment that she repeated throughout her life. She sometimes signed letters to white friends “Your pickaninny.” She saw no point in complaining about slavery. “Slavery,” she said, “is the price I paid for civilization.”
She regarded the N.A.A.C.P. as an organization of Northern liberals, like Du Bois, who was the editor of its journal, The Crisis, and Alain Locke, the Harlem Renaissance’s impresario—people who believed that, as Hurston described it, “any Negro who graduated from a white school automatically became a national leader and as such could give opinions on anything at all in which the word Negro occurred.”
Most of these self-appointed race leaders, she felt, knew nothing about the experience of Southern Blacks—the experience she had tried to teach them about in “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” a book that prominent Black writers like Locke and Richard Wright dismissed as unserious, “folklore fiction.” The N.A.A.C.P. “will remain a self-constituted dictatorship so long as it does not ask and receive a mandate from the entire Negro population of the United States,” she wrote, in an essay that remained unpublished until 2022.
As for the Supreme Court, she saw the decision in Brown v. Board of Education as a top-down order telling people how to live. “How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?” she wrote in a letter published in the Orlando Sentinel. Brown was a trial balloon, she suggested: “If it goes off fairly well, a precedent has been established. Govt by fiat can replace the Constitution.” It was an opinion shared by a lot of white Southerners.
Hurston wrote the Sentinel letter the same week she learned that Scribner’s was rejecting the Herod book. She may have been feeling a little feisty. But the letter is not anomalous. In the nineteen-fifties, she worked on behalf of segregationist politicians, whom she supported for other reasons, notably their anti-Communism.
Hurston was opposed to discrimination. She had Black friends and white friends. She seems to have shared the view of many whites that the races lived separately because they preferred things that way. If that was so, then why the need for the enormous stack of state and municipal laws mandating segregation?
Somehow, the fact that Jim Crow was itself a top-down, de-jure affair—Black people were not given a choice where to attend school or to sit on the bus—failed to register with Hurston. The Herod book doesn’t make her attitude about segregation less myopic and self-centered. But it helps us understand a little better where it came from. ♦
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