The European Tribe by Caryl Phillips transcends classification as a set genre similar to the way people of African descent elude a single national identity. Phillips depicts his experience as a Black European traveling throughout Europe surveying the xenophobic sentiments of native white Europeans while making thought provoking social commentary on the misconstrued state of European race relations. His collection of essays candidly illustrates the tribal division found in Europe due to its racism, nationalistic views, and insistence upon creating an external class of non-white Europeans. In the midst of his journey, Phillips draws many conclusions concerning the state of outsider groups in the European countries he visits.

In The European Tribe, Phillips accomplishes the daunting task of linking the Jewish experience to epitomize the struggle of Blacks across the European and American Diaspora. In The European Tribe, Phillips admits a detachment with his Black identity. Due to the absence of teaching the works of Blacks in the British schools, Phillips from an early age confesses ignorance of his own identity: “My ignorance probably came about as a result of my education…In British schools I was never offered a text that had been penned by a black person” (Phillips 1). This absence of a racial connection finds a companion in the struggle of the European Jews with which Phillips embraces when growing up. Phillips confirms this later in the book during a retelling of a childhood experience that embraces the atrocities of Jewish people and subsequently allows him to make a connection with his own racial self: “I was about fifteen when Amsterdam first began to fascinate me. There was a programme on television, part of the World at War series…I watched the library footage of the camps and realized both the enormity of the crime [against Jewish people] that was being perpetrated, and the precariousness of my own position in Europe” (Phillips 66). This realization deconstructs Phillips’s ignorance of identity and suggests a greater value for the oppression of not only his own racial origins in Europe, but, also Jewish people as well. Another instance that further supports Phillips’s connection with Jewish people appears in the April 28, 1997 Publishers Weekly article entitled “Caryl Phillips: The Trauma of ‘Broken History.’” In this article, Phillips addresses learning about the Holocaust which he says “made me realize that the definition of belonging or not belonging in a society was something that went well beyond my own personal preoccupations as a black kid in Britain” (Kreilkamp 44). Phillips’s realization reveals a sense of chivalry indicating the importance of the Jewish experience as a direct means of interpreting his and other Blacks’ racial struggles; therefore, allowing him to create a bond between himself and his Black identity with that of Jewish people.

Not only does Phillips use Jewish history and literature to assist him to uncover Black identity, but also he utilizes the group’s turbulent past to erect a parallelism between them and Blacks. Phillips uses many subtleties to impart a sense of cohesion between Jews and Blacks. For instance, wide spread popular beliefs of inferiority reside throughout Europe, concerning the Jew: “Theories were propagated…to try and justify Jewish inferiority. They included the ‘fact’…that Jews have bigger backsides, differently sized and shaped skulls, bigger noses, a greater propensity towards crime, and do not like to mix” (Phillips 68-69). A similar portrayal for Blacks emerges in Phillips’ writing, when he visits a room dedicated to fascism in the Anne Frank House: “To the side of this photograph was one of young German children being made to run their hands over the ‘misshapen’, ‘big-lipped, bumpy-headed skull’ of a Negro” (Phillips 69-70). Thus, the former and latter quotes describe the negative stereotypes of Jewish and Black people as a means of perpetuating their inferiority. Another example of these two European minority groups sharing analogous stances materialize in the reluctance the Dutch have toward migrate Black and Jewish workers: “Non-Europeans are not wanted. In many ways the black man, while not replacing the Jew as an object of abuse, is more visible, and an equally vulnerable target for Fascist propaganda” (Phillips 70). Phillips unmistakably advocates the Black-Jewish experience as closely related. This sentiment is co-signed by Edward Shapiro, author of the online article, Blacks and Jews Entangled, who states:

Jews have supposed that they, more than any other group, could and did empathize with the plight of blacks, and that blacks recognized this. Jewish newspapers early in the twentieth century compared the black movement out of the South to the exodus from Egypt, noted that both blacks and Jews lived in ghettos, and described anti-black riots in the South as pogroms. Even European Jews voiced compassion for the American black. Uncle Tom's Cabin was translated into both Yiddish and Hebrew. (Shapiro)

A final testament to these groups’ connection sets root in a comment Phillips makes to display the directness of the Black-Jewish experience, “For those on the right (and some in the centre and on the left too) the Jew is still Europe’s nigger” (Phillips 53). The Jewish and Black experience is defined by many negative attributes, lacking brevity in its dismissal. Caryl Phillips periodically sprinkles historical as well as personal nuisances to capture the significance of a struggle shared by Blacks and Jews alike.

So is the “European death” all that awaits Blacks and Jews who abandon their history and are abandoned by the selfish and indifferent Europeans (Phillips 51)? To be frank – yes. Well, at least from Phillips’ point of view. Europe, historically, has persecuted or enslaved Blacks and Jews for its own intent and purposes. Phillips hints to this idea while discussing Venice in The European Tribe. Phillips uses an unconventional method of portraying this historically rich European city by comparing it to its Shakespearian cameo in Othello. By the end of Phillips description, he convincingly establishes the Black-Jewish connection by conveying the disillusionment minorities of Europe share when they believe that they have been accepted as equals in a society that is not and will never be their own.

Works Cited Baldwin, James, Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White, The New York Times on the Web, April 9, 1967 Kreilkamp, Ivan, Caryl Phillips: The Trauma of ‘Broken History’, Publishers Weekly April 27, 1997, Vol. 244 Issue 17 Phillips, Caryl, The European Tribe, Vintage Books, New York: 1987 Shapiro, Edward J, Blacks and Jews Entangled, First Things online, August / September 1994,

Derek Butts & Jordan Smith

Also by Jordan:

Rendition of Maturity