ZORA NEALE HURSTON'S CHOSEN PEOPLE

What a long-unpublished novel reveals about her magnificent obsession.

- LOUIS MENAND

Zora ora 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.

The story of the Jews was extremely important to Hurston, as important as her mission, far better known, to preserve and to celebrate the style, speech, and folklore of the African diaspora― the culture of what she called "the Negro farthest down." That mission yielded two works of cultural anthropology, "Mules and Men" (1935) and "Tell My Horse" (1938), and the novel on which her reputation is built, "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937).

But Hurston devoted a big portion of her literary career-which stretched from 1921, when she published her first short story in a Howard University literary magazine, to 1960, when she diedto 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. Between 1975, when she was "rediscovered" by Alice Walker, and 2010, more than four hundred doctoral dissertations were written on Hurston. "Their Eyes Were Watching God" has sold more than a million copies, and Oprah Winfrey produced a film adaptation. In Hurston's lifetime, the most any of her books earned in royalties was $943.75.