Why Zora Neale Hurston Was Obsessed with the Jews
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.
