Benjamin H. Isaac Knihy

This groundbreaking work challenges the belief that ancient Greeks and Romans only exhibited "ethnic and cultural" prejudices, revealing a more complex reality of racism in classical antiquity. Benjamin Isaac meticulously traces the intellectual roots of racism back to this era, demonstrating that ancient social prejudices and stereotypes serve as prototypes of racism, or proto-racism. These early forms of discrimination influenced later modern racist ideologies. By examining literature from classical Greece to late antiquity, Isaac uncovers various discriminatory stereotypes and social hatreds that have persisted into modern times. The book is both scholarly and engaging, suggesting that understanding ancient attitudes toward different peoples can illuminate Greco-Roman imperialism, the ideology of enslavement, and the integration or exclusion of foreigners. It also connects these ancient perspectives to the disintegration of the Roman Empire and more recent forms of imperialism. The first section addresses general themes in the history of discrimination, while the second part offers a detailed analysis of proto-racism and specific prejudices against various foreign groups. The concluding chapter focuses on Jews in the ancient world, situating anti-Semitism within a broader historical context.

Is it possible to speak of western racism before the eighteenth century? The term 'racism' is normally only associated with theories, which first appeared in the eighteenth century, about inherent biological differences that made one group superior to another. Here, however, leading historians argue that racism can be traced back to the attitudes of the ancient Greeks to their Persian enemies and that it was adopted, adjusted and re-formulated by Europeans right through until the dawn of the Enlightenment. From Greek teachings on environmental determinism and heredity, through medieval concepts of physiognomy, down to the crystallization of attitudes to Indians, Blacks, Jews and Gypsies in the early modern era, they analyse the various routes by which racist ideas travelled before maturing into murderous ideologies in the modern western world. In so doing this book offers a major reassessment of the place of racism in pre-modern European thought.