From a review of "Racism: A Short History"
He reports that scholarship has found "no evidence that dark skin color served as the basis of invidious distinctions anywhere in the ancient world." Neither did "color-coded, white-over-black" racism come with ancient roots. "In fact," Fredrickson notes, "there was a definite tendency toward Negrophilia in parts of northern and western Europe in the late Middle Ages... . the common presumption that dark pigmentation inspired instant revulsion on the part of light-skinned Europeans is, if not completely false, at least highly misleading."
Rather, Fredrickson reports, Muslim slaveholders in Iberia bear the blame for first imparting to Christian Europeans the notion that blacks were inferior to whites and properly suited to slavery - making the conversion in modern times of many blacks to Islam a strange historical irony. Similarly, ancient animosity toward Jews, Fredrickson states, is often misunderstood. "Anti-Judaism was endemic to Christianity from the beginning," he writes, while adding that since Christianity's founders "were themselves Jews, it would have been difficult for early Christians to claim that there was something inherently defective about Jewish blood or ancestry."
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