their place in society and customs that controlled their occupations, educa-
tion, and participation in the life of the nations in which they lived.

Given the ideological claims that Western civilization makes for itself,
the presence of Black and Jewish people in Western societies has been a du-
bious circumstance, at best. Individual members of both groups have pros-
pered, to be sure; some have risen to political fame or economic fortune
and, to the extent that the societies have offered opportunities for educa-
tional advancement and economic prosperity, their Black citizens to some
degree and their Jewish citizens to a greater one have been able to take a
share of these advantages. As a group, however, both peoples remain
among--but apart from--the societies in which they find themselves.
Their participation, where it is not marginal--as it is for many Black citi-
zens in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States--is always
subject, for Black and Jewish people alike, to the uncertainties that derive
from being considered as an essentially alien element in an otherwise ho-
mogeneous societal environment.

This alien status in which Black and Jewish people inevitably find them-
selves is not one that is created by their individual virtues or their lack of
them. It stems solely from the fact that, whatever else they might be, Black
and Jewish people are identifiable members--unless individuals have the
opportunity and elect to renounce their heritage--of two minority groups
whose fortunes and fate are considered to be ancillary at best and inimical
at worst to the interests of the rest of Western society's members. Whatever
else they might achieve, Black and Jewish individuals are never permitted,
unless they consciously choose to ignore the obvious, to think of them-
selves or to engage in the affairs of the societies in which they live and work
other than as members of two groups whose place in the society is suspect.
It is a stigma that Western societies have imposed, in various blunt to subtle
ways, with an unfailing consistency for over three hundred years. Its blunt-
est application was experienced by the Jews of Europe in the horror that the
world now knows as the Holocaust ¹ --the effort to annihilate European
Jewry that took place from 1939 to 1944.

In spite of this sordid history, the record of Western civilization contin-
ues to be recounted as though it represents an unbroken saga of the highest
in human ideals and achievement. In colleges and universities in the
United States and at the secondary school level in the United Kingdom, for
example, students are obliged to take at least one course that, in some man-
ner, deals with the history of Western culture. This curriculum requirement
rests on the unarguable proposition that every educated person ought to be
exposed to the events and ideas that have shaped and that undergird the in-
stitutions and values of her or his society. It also rests on the tacit belief that
the achievements of Western civilization--beginning with the Greeks and
extending in a virtually unbroken sequence over the past two and a half
millennia, in art and architecture, philosophy, science, music, military

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