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. But Hurston devoted a big portion of her literary careerβwhich stretched from , when she published her first short story in a Howard University literary magazine, to , when she diedβto 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.
Hurston was a grapho-compulsive. 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.
