The biblical origins

The “curse” of Ham mythology begins with the Old Testament. The story goes: Ham sees Noah sleeping naked and tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth. His brothers then cover up Noah’s nakedness with a cloth. When Noah wakes, he blesses Shem and Japheth for covering him, but curses Ham’s son Canaan, and thus his whole lineage, to be servants of his brothers.  

King James version - Genesis 9:22-26  
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

Canaan’s associations with Blackness, with Africa, with nations and racial categories do not exist in the Bible’s telling of the story. The initial connections with race and the categorization of people by race comes from retellings and manipulations of this story in the Talmud, medieval Islamic scholarship, and early history texts.  

The myth rears its ugly head

In the Babylonian Talmud, a collection of rabbinic writings that date back to the 6th century, racial distinctions are clearly evident with respect to the sons of Noah. In the rabbinic debates of the 2nd-5th centuries, early scholars were trying to develop an understanding of the peoples of the Earth and of the world around them. They used the only framework they had and knew: the Bible. Attempting to classify people who didn’t fit the somatic image of themselves—in particular, Black people—they rationalized this difference as being a result of the curse.  

Yaakov ven Yitzchak Ashkenazi (1550-1628), an expert in rabbinic literature, wrote (as translated by Paul Isaac Hershon), “Noah said to Ham, ‘Thy children shall be dark and black.’ These are the Ethiopians and the Negroes, which have descended from Ham, on account of the curse.”

In some translations of the Babylonian Talmud, there is an assumption or conflation that Ham was blamed for castrating his father Noah—not just seeing him naked. There are many different versions of the myth, with many different implications about what Ham “did” to Noah upon seeing him naked, from castration and mockery to rape and incest. Regardless of the interpretation, the ends are the same: Ham is no bystander, he is an active agent of sin. Compared to the biblical version, this is a radical revision.  

In a 20th century translation in Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Noah said:

“‘Now I cannot beget the fourth son whose children I would have ordered to serve you and your brothers! Therefore it must be Canaan, your first born, whom they enslave. And since you have disabled me from doing ugly things in blackness of night, Canaan’s children shall be born ugly and black! Moreover, because you twisted your head around to see my nakedness, your grandchildren’s hair shall be twisted into kinks, and their eyes red; again because your lips jested at my misfortune, theirs shall swell; and because you neglected my nakedness, they shall go naked, and their male members shall be shamefully elongated!’ Men of this race are called Negroes, their forefather Canaan commanded them to love theft and fornication, to be banded together in hatred of their master and never to tell the truth.”

This is the seed of the story as we now know it. Ham’s curse of servitude was racialized.  

The tendrils of this implication are wildly pervasive: Blackness, as a result of this story, is a curse, meaning it is associated with sin, with evil. And to widen that scope, the connection between Blackness, sin, and nations—“These are the Ethiopians and the Negroes, which have descended from Ham, on account of the curse”—means that entire nations and communities of Black people are condemned to servitude, and to the assumption that they are, by Godly decree, inferior.    

Ham, race, and the early Islamic world

Evidence of the acceptance of the Hamitic story can be found in the work of early Muslim scholars. In Arabia in the 9th and 10th centuries, the majority of enslaved people were Black Ethiopians whose subjugation was justified because of their Blackness and the negative cultural perceptions that being Black had in Arab culture.  

The racial aspect of the Hamitic curse was adopted in Arabic literature in a manner that allowed race to become associated with slavery and lesser peoples. The so-called “Hamitic curse” was interwoven with social status and pre-existing racial prejudices to justify racial discrimination at odds with the principles of Islam.  

Various scholars such as al-Yaqʿubi and al-Tabari mention the curse of Ham in their histories and incorporate a racialized worldview, wherein the sons of Noah make up distinct racial categories or nations. In Tarikh al-Tabari, the Hamitic myth is used to classify people into good and bad races, Semites and Hamites, reinforcing not only a racial division, but a national one.  

“Nuh awoke from his sleep and learnt what had happened he cursed Kan‘an b. Ham but did not curse Ham. Of his posterity are the qibt, the Habasha, and the Hind. Kan‘an was the first of the sons of Nuh to revert to the ways of the sons of Qabil (Cain) and indulged in distractions and singing and made flutes, drums, guitars and cymbals and obeyed Satan in vain amusements. Nuh divided the earth between his sons, assigning Sam the middle of the earth…and to Ham the land of the west and the coasts (sawahil) [...]. After they had crossed the Nile of Egypt the descendants of Kush son of Ham, namely the Habasha and the Sudan, split in two groups. These were the Zaghawa, HBSH, Qaqu, Marawiyyun, Maranda, Kawkaw and Ghana”
- al-Yaʿqubi

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“Ham begat all those who are black and curly haired, while Japheth begat all those who are full-faced with small eyes, and Shem begat everyone who is handsome of face with beautiful hair. Noah prayed that the hair of Ham’s descendants would not grow beyond their ears, and wherever his descendants met the children of Shem, the latter would enslave them…. Shem begat the Arabs, Persians, and Byzantines, in all of whom there is good. Japheth begat the Turks, Slavs, Gog, and Magog, in none of whom there is good. Ham begat the Copts, Sudanese, and Berbers.”
- al-Tabari

As people of the Middle Ages were sorting out the concepts of nations and continents, arranging them by their peoples and their religions, the concerns of national division became a larger part of the ever-evolving mythology. These decisions are inconsistent among texts and authors, and frequently texts contradict themselves, evidence that this was a changing, chimera of a story.  

By defining “good” nations and “bad” nations, medieval scholars were developing religiously based rationales for racial, ethnic, and religious differences—many rooted anti-Blackness.

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al-Tabari, Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad b. Jarir. The History of Al-Tabari: Prophets and Patriarchs, vol. 2. Translated by William M. Brinner. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986.  

al-Yaʿqubi, Abu l-ʿAbbas Ahmad b. Abi Yaʿqub. Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Edited by J. F. P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981.  

El Hamel, Chouki. Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013.  

Graves, Robert, and Raphael Patai. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964.  

Yitzchak Ashkenazi, Yaakov ben. Tzeénah Ureénah: “Go Ye and See”: A Rabbinical Commentary on Genesis. Translated by Paul Isaac Hershon. London, England: Hodder and Stoughton, 1885.