>You are indeed thinking of Gore Vidal's review of the Thern book. I don't
>have the review in front of me, but Vidal was talking about the problems
>encountered when translating the Talmud in the late nineteenth/early
>twentieth century. The translators did not want to use the racial epiphet
>(sp?) in the text, I think they substituted the word "kushite."
Here's the excerpt; the article is available on the Nation's web site (www.thenation.com):
>As one reads this curiously insistent racist tract, one begins to sense
>that there is some sort of demonic spirit on the scene, unacknowledged
>but ever-present, as the Therns make their endless case. Reading
>Thern-prose, somewhat more demure than Abbey's table-rant, I was put in
>uneasy mind of kindly old Dr. Maimonides. In Book III, chapter 51 of his
>Guide for the Perplexed (copyright 1190 C.E.), the revered codifier of
>the Talmud lists those who cannot begin to acknowledge, much less
>worship, the true God. Among those nonhumans are "some of the Turks [he
>means Mongols] and the nomads in the North and the Blacks and the nomads
>in the South, and those who resemble them in our climates. And their
>nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion
>they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among
>existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey,
>because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a
>monkey does." When this celebrated book was translated into English
>early this century, the translators were embarrassed, as well they
>should have been, by the racism. So instead of using the word "black" or
>"Negro," they went back to the Hebrew word for blacks--Kushim, which
>they transliterated as Kushites--a previously unknown and unidentifiable
>tribe for Anglophones and so easily despised.
Doug