Bruce D. Hayes, The Soul of Judaism: Jews of African Descent in America

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 192–194 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.20 Book Review Bruce D. Haynes, The Soul of Judaism: Jews of African Descent in America (New York: New York University Press, 2018) Judith Weisenfeld Princeton University, Princeton, USA In December of 2019 American news media covered two stories featuring Black Jews. Black Hebrew Israelites, some of whom had been in the public eye the previous summer for their clash in Washington, DC, with white Catholic students from Covington High School, again made news when a former member of an Israelite congregation murdered four people in a kosher market in Jersey City, New Jersey. That same month, comedian Tiffany Haddish held a “Black Mitzvah” on her fortieth birthday to affirm her Jewish identity, embraced in adulthood after meeting her Eritrean Jewish father and studying Torah to prepare for the ceremony. These two quite different public representations of Black Judaism highlight the range of communities, experiences, and complex histories sociologist Bruce D. Haynes examines in The Soul of Judaism. Haynes presents his primary goal as exploring the “racial projects” of Jews of African descent. Using the concept sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant defined as linking race as representation to social structures that organize everyday experience through race, Haynes argues that Black Jews challenge hegemonic understandings of Judaism and offer “competing racial projects” that help to expand conceptions of Blackness and Judaism. Far from “the first volume to detail racial projects emerging within the context of religion” (22), as Haynes Judith Weisenfeld 193 claims, the book nevertheless contributes to our understanding of the complexities of interactions among religion, race, and ethnicity in American history. The book’s first four chapters provide broad historical background about the racialization of Jews and of Blacks and explores aspects of the history of Black Judaisms in Africa and the Americas, discussing the Beta Israel, the Church of God and Saints of Christ, the Commandment Keepers, and the Chicago-born African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. Haynes’ account of Black Judaisms in the US synthesizes the work of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, including Jacob Dorman, Tudor Parfitt, Edith Bruder, and John L. Jackson, among others. Haynes offers a useful sense of theological and political variety among the groups that have their origins in America, considers how the labels of Hebrew, Israelite, or Jew support different identity claims, and provides insight into how members of different groups evaluate the religiously grounded racial projects of other Black Hebrew, Israelite, or Jewish groups. The book’s original contributions come with the next two chapters that highlight Haynes’ method of “retrospective ethnography” and feature interviews he conducted in the late 1990s, a period in American history he frames as transformative in terms of the representation of Jews of African descent, situated within the broader context of the emergence of discourses of multiculturalism in the United States and the rise of the internet and its ability to connect people in new ways. In these chapters, he explores religion, race, and ethnicity among Black converts to Judaism and biracial Jews of African descent, offering a rich thematic portrait of identity construction and expression in the context of families and broader racial and religious communities. The variety of voices of Jews of African descent represented in Haynes’ study is the book’s great strength and he allows experiences that represent distinctive and evolving positions to come to the fore, revealing the sometimes-fraught nature of individual identity constructions that challenge prevailing racial and religious norms. The final chapter on “Black-Jewish relations” makes the most explicit use of the fact that the interviews featured in the book were conducted in the late 1990s to examine how Black converts to Judaism, biracial Jews, and Hebrew Israelites “negotiate black anti-Semitism and Jewish racism” (168). Although the context Haynes sets focuses more on public conflicts over antisemitism in Black communities than on discourses of anti-Blackness or expressions of racism among Jews of European descent, the interviewees highlight often difficult negotiations of relationship to Jewish and Black authenticity given the intra-community tensions that were prominent in the period. In the conclusion, Haynes...