Noah about to be baptised. In medieval Christianity, Noah's three sons were generally considered as the founders of the populations of the three known continents, Japheth/Europe, Shem/Asia, and Ham/Africa, although a rarer variation held that they represented the three classes of medieval society – the priests (Shem), the warriors (Japheth), and the peasants (Ham). In medieval Christian thought, Ham was considered to be the ancestor of the people of black Africa. So, in racialist arguments, the curse of Ham became a justification for the slavery of the black races. Isaac Newton, in his religious works on the development of religion, wrote
Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chełm Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chełm Elijah Ba'al Shem or Eliyahu Ba'al Shem of Chełm (government of Lublin) (born 1550; died at Chełm, 1583) was a Polish rabbi who served as chief rabbi of Chełm. He also studied Kabbalah, and, according to his descendant Tzvi Ashkenazi, created a golem. He is credited with creating the first golem with a ""shem"" (that is, using a combination of letters from one of the names of God to form a name; Elijah used ""Sefer Yezirah""), so he was known as a "Ba'al Shem." He is the first rabbi in history to be known by