Indigenous African Jewishness and Religion as a Site of Knowledge Production

Abstract

Lemba people became internationally known as black Jews and a lost tribe of Israel after they participated in genetic studies in the 1980s and 1990s that aimed to substantiate their oral history of descent from Jews. The publicity that the studies generated, which included BBC, NOVA, and Discovery Channel documentaries, in turn generated interest in the Lemba among American Jews and among some African American Israelites. Each reached out to Lemba people to find connection and to offer guidance on particular kinds of Jewish religious practice; at the same time, Lemba people also began to connect with South Africa's white Jewish community. Each of these kinds of connections generated distinct narratives about race and religion, and about the parameters of Judaism. Based on ethnographic research with Lemba people in South Africa between 2004 and 2016, this paper considers Lemba narratives of their encounters with American Jews, African American Israelites, and South African Jews, and their reflections on their relationships to Judaism and Christianity. It pays particular attention to the ways that some Lemba people have embraced an indigenous African Jewishness, and the shifting interplay of religion, race, and culture that inform such a subject position. The paper joins recent calls to rethink Jewishness and Judaism in Africa in a way that centers the black majority of African Jews, and that takes their religious innovations seriously and on its own terms instead of as a litmus test to prove or disprove their Jewish authenticity (Brettschneider 2015). It argues that Lemba indigenous African Jewishness opens up new ways to think about the history and future of Judaism in Africa, and further, that it raises new questions about the work of religion as a site of knowledge production about Africa.