כּוּשִׁי (Kushi) — Cushite; historical term for Black person; now a racial slur

Etymology

The word כּוּשִׁי began as a neutral demonym: an inhabitant of the Kingdom of Cush (כּוּשׁ), a powerful civilization that existed south of Egypt from roughly the 11th century BCE to the 4th century CE, in the region of present-day Sudan and northern Ethiopia. All 24 biblical occurrences of the word use it without negative connotation — Moses married a Cushite woman (Numbers 12:1), and Song of Songs implies that dark skin was considered beautiful: "I am dark and lovely, O daughters of Jerusalem" (1:5). The biblical evidence suggests that ancient Israelites viewed dark-skinned people with neutrality or even admiration.

This changed beginning in the late 4th century BCE, when Judea was absorbed into the Hellenistic world following Alexander's conquests. In Greco-Roman culture, dark-skinned people were associated with servility and were considered naturally inferior. Jewish writers absorbed this prejudice; in Rabbinic literature, כּוּשִׁי is associated with ugliness (Nedarim 9:10), drunkenness (Kiddushin 49b), and a congenital defect (Berakhot 58b). The Rabbis refused to accept that Moses's wife was Black, and Targum Onkelos replaced the word "Cushite" with the Aramaic shapirta ("beautiful one"), as if it were a euphemism. They also offered a theological justification for Black slavery: Ham, ancestor of Cush, had seen his father Noah's nakedness (Genesis Rabbah 36:7).

In the medieval Islamic world, where most Jews lived after the Arab conquests, Black slavery was a major institution and dark-skinned people occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder. The Arabic word ʿabd ("slave"), cognate to Hebrew eved, came to mean simply "Black person." Jewish thinkers in this environment shared these attitudes; Maimonides wrote in the Guide for the Perplexed (3:51) about those he called "Cushites" in terms that placed them below other human beings in the natural hierarchy, comparing them unfavorably even to apes.

In Mandatory Palestine and early Israel, כּוּשִׁי was the unremarkable standard word for a Black person. A Tel Aviv café was named "Three Kushim" in the 1930s, and the confection now called קְרֶמְבּוֹ was commonly called "Kushi head" (ראש כושי). The word appeared in newspaper headlines without quotation marks, and a children's song called "Ten Little Kushim" (a translation of the German Zehn kleine Negerlein) was recorded in 1953 and republished in children's anthologies as late as the 1980s.

The first signs of resistance appeared around 1960, when a reader wrote to Davar describing embarrassment caused to visiting African dignitaries by children shouting "Kushi! Kushi Sambo!" In 1962, Israel's Foreign Ministry requested the suppression of a cartoon called "Kushi Sambo" and began discouraging use of the term. A significant decline in print usage began around 1970, coinciding with the global rise of political correctness in the United States. But it was the arrival of Ethiopian Jewish immigrants — initially under Operation Moses (1984–1985) — that catalyzed the shift. Ethiopian Israelis reported that כּוּשִׁי was among the first Hebrew words they learned, and that it was used to demean them.

Public awareness of the word's harm crystallized in June 1997, when Channel 1 broadcast a report on a military base doctor who refused entry to an Ethiopian-Israeli soldier saying "Kushim are not allowed in the infirmary." Prime Minister Netanyahu condemned the incident. In 2005, a bus driver who said "I don't let Kushim on my bus" to an Ethiopian security guard was sued for defamation; the court ruled against him in 2007 and established a legal precedent that using כּוּשִׁי to insult a person constitutes defamation. The Supreme Court reinforced this in 2011. A 2017 restaurant case in which a 17-year-old waitress wrote "kushim" on an order form resulted in an 80,000-shekel judgment, with the court ruling that harmful intent was irrelevant — the word itself is a known slur. Facebook banned the word on its platform in late 2016.

Key Quotes

"שְׁחוֹרָה אֲנִי וְנָאוָה בְּנוֹת יְרוּשָׁלִָם" — Song of Songs 1:5 (biblical positive depiction of dark skin)

"ודין אלו כדין בעלי חיים שאינם מדברים... ומדרגתם בנמצאות למטה ממדרגת האדם ולמעלה ממדרגת הקוף" — Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed 3:51 (12th-century racist usage)

"הכינוי ׳כושי׳ הוא כינוי משפיל מוכר וידוע ככינוי גנאי לאנשים שעורם כהה" — Justice Aviam Barkai, Tel Aviv Magistrate Court, 2017

Timeline

• c. 900 BCE: כּוּשִׁי appears in Hebrew Bible as neutral demonym for Cushites
• Late 4th century BCE: Hellenistic cultural influence introduces negative valence
• Rabbinic period: Negative associations solidified in Talmudic literature
• Medieval period: Islamic social hierarchy reinforces equation of Black skin with inferiority
• 1930s: Café and confection named using the word in Tel Aviv without controversy
• 1953: Children's song "Ten Little Kushim" recorded and distributed
• 1960: First documented protest by a reader about the word's impact on African visitors
• 1970: Significant decline in print usage begins (parallel to "Negro" decline in English)
• 1984–1985: Ethiopian Jewish immigration (Operation Moses) brings direct affected community
• 1997: Televised incident at military clinic catalyzes public debate
• 2007: Israeli court rules using כּוּשִׁי as insult constitutes legal defamation
• 2011: Supreme Court reinforces ruling in military context
• 2016: Facebook bans the word on its platform
• 2017: Major restaurant defamation judgment; word firmly established as taboo

Related Words

• כּוּשׁ — Cush (the kingdom; also a biblical personal name)
• אֲבִיסִינִי — Abyssinian (earlier alternative term)
• אֶתְיוֹפִּי — Ethiopian (the preferred modern term)