All of Us

Abstract

This chapter goes beyond the ethnographic context of the Bene Ephraim and presents a discussion of their relationship with international Jewish organizations that support ‘emerging’ Jewish communities. The chapter explores what role this support and wider responses to the Bene Ephraim movement on the part of other Jewish communities may have played in the development of Bene Ephraim narratives, practices, and notions of relatedness. We show that though those who rendered economic and religious support to the community strived to avoid affecting what they saw as the ‘natural’ development of the Bene Ephraim Jewishness, they could not help but contribute to the community’s engagement with mainstream Judaism. Nevertheless, we argue that their relationship with the Bene Ephraim and other Judaizing groups demonstrates that in contemporary Judaism the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘marginal’ are mutually implicated, and that this relationship problematizes the perceived divide between ‘recognized’ and ‘emerging’ Jewish communities.