African Hebrew Research Articles

Joseph B. Yudin, The Protestant Settlers of Israel: Missionaries, Millenarians, and the African Hebrew Israelites

Joseph B. Yudin, <i>The Protestant Settlers of Israel: Missionaries, Millenarians, and the African Hebrew Israelites</i>

Ben Ammi’s Adaptation of Veganism in the Theology of the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem

Abstract This article will look at the ideology of veganism in the AHIJ. Since the early 1970s their diet has been a core part of their ideology and of their message to the world. Acknowledging that a black/Jewish meat-free diet is far from the exclusive property of the group, let alone a new development on their part, I will argue that it is an expression of the syncretic “bricoleur” nature of Black Israelite thought (Dorman 2013), reflecting, drawing on, and transforming traditions existing in both African American and Jewish thought in and before the twentieth century – principally articulated as a concern for health in the former and a messianic return to the peaceful Edenic existence in the latter. However, Ben Ammi skillfully intertwines it into their theology by arguing that a return to the veganism of the Garden of Eden is part of the community’s redemption of humanity from primordial sin and ultimate overcoming of the curse of death.

“Here I can like watermelon”: culinary redemption among the African Hebrew Israelites

ABSTRACT Every May, the African Hebrew Israelite Community (AHIC), a transnational millenarian group with its headquarters in the Israeli desert town of Dimona, celebrates its most important festival, “New World Passover.” Commemorating their exodus from “the land of the great captivity” (the US) to Israel, the colorful, joyful event has a striking culinary feature: a huge pile of several tons of watermelon is set in the park amidst the celebrants, who feast on the juicy fruit along with their many guests. In this article, based on long-term ethnographic study conducted in Dimona’s “Kfar HaShalom” (Village of Peace), the AHIC spiritual and administrative center, we explore the various meanings attributed by group members to the watermelon as a healthy, tasty marker of the season; as a natural aphrodisiac; and as an expression of the community’s freedom in Israel. We coin the term “culinary redemption” to engage theoretically with these transformations in substance and meaning that are attributed to the watermelon. We argue that the community’s positive manipulations of watermelons, which are otherwise associated with African-American culture in adverse modes, are material and spiritual expressions of the AHIC’s transformation that allows its members to demonstrate their belonging to the land and people of Israel while dealing with and overcoming American and Israeli prejudice and racism.

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

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...

Food for the body and soul: Veganism, righteous male bodies, and culinary redemption in the Kingdom of Yah

This article grapples with the unlikely combination of veganism, righteous black bodies, and servitude as expressed in the “divine holistic culture” of the African Hebrew Israelite Community (AHIC). Based on our ethnography of how the Community re-scripts strong, virile black male bodies from rough brutes to responsible and righteous patriarchs, we show how the Hebrew Israelites’ vegan diet undergirds their Biblically based culture and fuels their salvation project. We propose the term “culinary redemption” to encapsulate the dramatic shift made by the AHIC from a theology based on salvation in the afterlife to a restorative cosmology in the here and now, and suggest that the food and foodways of other subaltern groups also provide powerful material for initiating social justice movements and religious change.

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem and Ben Ammi’s Theology of Marginalisation and Reorientation

This paper will look at the way the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem have utilised the theological narrative of marginalisation in their quest for identity and self-determination. The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are an expatriate black American group who have lived in Israel since 1969, when their spiritual leader, Detroit-born Ben Ammi, received a vision commanding him to take his people back to the Promised Land. Drawing on a long tradition in the African American community that self-identified as the biblical Israelites, the African Hebrew Israelites are marginalised in their status as Americans, as Jews, and as Israelis. We will examine the writings of Ben Ammi in order to demonstrate that this biblically based motif of marginalisation was a key part of his theology, and one which enabled his movement to grow and sustain itself; yet, in comparison with other contemporaneous theological movements, Ben Ammi utilised a specific variant of this motif. Rejecting the more common emphasis on liberation, Ammi argued for an eschatological reorientation around the marginalised. This article will conclude that Ben Ammi’s theology is key to understanding how the community has oriented itself and how it has proved successful in lasting 50 years against both internal disputes and external attacks.

Yah’s Exemplary Soldiers: African Hebrew Israelites in the Israel Defense Forces

This article considers the process of identity formation among soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who were born into the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (AHIJ), more commonly known as the Black Hebrews. The AHIJ are a sect of African Americans who began settling in Israel in 1969 and who identify as direct descendants of the Biblical Israelites. Due to the group’s insular nature, the IDF is the primary state institution in which they fully participate, and their mandatory service is a source of both pride and consternation for community members and leaders. Considering the personal experiences of 14 African Hebrew soldiers who enlisted between 2009 and 2010, the article argues that while the soldiers by and large maintain their distinctive identity during the course of their service, they also internalize some of the language, attitudes, and cultural touchstones of the majority Israeli Jewish population. As a result, they experience a kind of “double consciousness”, the feeling of dislocation first described by the African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois at the turn of the twentieth century.

On Philipides and Schuder's &lt;em&gt;The Village of Peace&lt;/em&gt;

On Philipides and Schuder's The Village of Peace Kameron J. Copeland (bio) The Village of Peace. Directed by Niko Philipides and Ben Schuder. 2014. USA: Affinity Vision Entertainment, 63 minutes. After the peak of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, which culminated in the assassinations of its major leaders, inner-city black communities began to face a new wave of dilemmas. As they struggled to gain rights and define self-identity, these communities faced nihilistic crises in an environment starved of the definitive leadership of the 1960s. Additionally, the urban inner cities to which droves of black Americans fled in an exodus from the South—to escape racism and gain economic opportunities during the Great Migration—became plagued with problems of police brutality, crime, violence, and drug abuse after years of and neglect and marginalization by political institutions. The hostile environment in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement gave rise to the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, whose journey for redemption and liberation in their own migration from their homes in Chicago—and their identities as African Americans—to an isolated village in Dimona, Israel, is detailed in the documentary The Village of Peace (Niko Philipides and Ben Schuder, USA, 2014). In a contemporary era when black youth movements are seeking to fight police brutality while simultaneously liberating themselves by redefining and reviving their cultural heritage and identity, The Village of Peace presents a sociohistorical narrative that showcases the values and origins of a microcosm of the African American community alongside a journey of cultural redefinition that encompasses unique practices of musical expression, veganism, physical fitness, and polygyny. [End Page 120] These observances are presented as solutions to the social and public-health crises faced by black communities in America. Like the many black new religious movements founded in urban Midwestern and Northern cities, the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem sought to heal the ills of their ethnic community by redefining their identity, adopting a new spiritual system to help them to heal and escape a traumatic past. An elderly man of the village, who once migrated from rural Georgia to Chicago as a child during the Great Migration prior to moving to Israel, recalled: growing up being called negroes, but we knew that negroes had no land, had no identity like that. So, now all of a sudden we have a land, language, and a culture . . . that gave us another sense of pride—another sense of joy to know that you are really somebody . . . that really has a place where if you want to leave today and go back, there was a place that you came from. In addition to land, language, and culture, this Hebrew identity also included adhering to the African Hebrew Israelites' interpretation of the laws of the Torah, which among other things prohibits racism, guns, crime, alcoholism, homelessness, and drug use. These regulations govern the self-sufficient village of nearly five thousand African Hebrew Israelites as a means of confronting the public-health and legal crises they once faced in their communities as inhabitants of large American cities. They identify themselves as the biblical Israelites, and their observance of these laws are rooted in self-respect. In coping with past traumatic experiences and expressing their spiritual beliefs and identity, the Hebrew Israelites possess a passion for music expressed through song, dance, and instrumental performance. In a brief clip of black-and-white archive footage featuring some early Hebrew Israelite settlers in Dimona expressing their musical talents, a Hebrew Israelite stated, "Our music is part of our lives; we use music the way doctors use medicine." While music is presented as a healthy revival of traditional African practices, exercise and veganism are also viewed as essential components for maintaining their health. The film explains the dietary practices and the requirement that all individuals exercise at least three times each week, and consume a vegan diet that includes three no-salt days per week and two days in which only raw foods are consumed. The nonvegan lifestyle older members once followed during their early lives as African Americans is described as degenerative and "made for the dead." The [End Page 121] desire to resolve...

Etnografia é, etnografia não é

Usando uma noção de "digital" como uma de suas metáforas principais, uma versão do termo que se apoia na discussão de Kara Keeling sobre o "humanismo digital", este texto argumenta que há algo sobre as não-linearidades que definem a diferença da digitalidade que pode nos ajudar a pensar sobre recalibragens no próprio projeto etnográfico. De uma discussão da representação fílmica de Marlon Riggs de sua própria morte (como uma maneira de falar sobre o não-digital) a uma máquina que usa tecnologia digital para brincar com a temporalidade em transmissões televisivas, este artigo quer perguntar o que a mudança das relações sociais (e realidades existenciais) implicadas na ubiquidade das mídias digitais pode significar para a pesquisa e a escrita etnográficas de hoje. Com os African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem como sujeitos etnográficos centrais, argumento que levar a digitalidade a sério significa redefinir o que a etnografia é e e o que ela não é num momento pós-Writing Culture. Palavras-Chave: Digitalidade; Diáspora; Negritude; Etnografia; Antropologia da mídia

Slavery food, soul food, salvation food: veganism and identity in the African Hebrew Israelite Community

ABSTRACTThis paper reviews the transformation of meaning of food items central to African American fare from symbols of slavery to means of salvation as the African Hebrew Israelite Community (AHIC) live out their Biblically inspired lifestyle and perfect the vegan diet at its core. Although originating in Chicago in the late 1960s, for over 40 years the institutional and residential base of this transnational millenarian community has been in the Israeli desert town of Dimona. Based on long-term ethnographic acquaintance with their foodways in Israel and in the US, our analysis follows the AHIC’s eclectic incorporation of circulating religious, political, and scientific theories into their Bible-based cosmological-nutritional tenets of regenerative health and spiritual salvation. We argue that their ‘Edenic Diet’ reacts to the traumatic history of African Americans as slaves and as a discriminated against minority in the US, by serving as a means in their struggle for place and acceptance in modern Israel and an active component in their social and spiritual plans for the future.

Major Prophets

Major Prophets Christopher T. Begg, Joseph E. Jensen, Thomas Hieke, Fred W. Guyette, and Martin Kessler 1006. [Isaiah] Valerie Briegeman, "'I Will Make Boys Their Princes': A Womanist Reading of Children in the Book of Isaiah," Womanist Interpretations, 311-27 [see #1176]. In this essay, B. adds to a growing body of literature on children in the world of the Bible with a discussion of how, in the Book of Isaiah, Israel is symbolically portrayed as a wayward child who needs punishment for correction. In this connection, B. highlights the danger of a literal reading of the text that may lead contemporary readers to conclude that the Bible condones child abuse. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 1007. [Isaiah] Hallvard Hagelia, "Divine Election in the Book of Isaiah," Studies in Isaiah, 67-95 [see #1262]. In this survey I seek to demonstrate that divine election is a central theme in the Book of Isaiah. Election is expressed there sometimes with certain particular terms, but very often in other ways as well, i.e., without recourse to specific election terminology. Election theology is found throughout the book, in all three of its main parts, and is connected with other central Isaianic theological themes, e.g., creation theology. The theme is mostly used in a positive sense, being elected, but also sometimes negatively, of non-election. Those elected in Isaiah include Abraham, David, the promised land, the people itself, Jerusalem, the Remnant, and even non-Israelites, who are all somehow divinely elected, or better, appointed. The election theme in the Book of Isaiah is colored by the different editorial and historical stages of the book's development represented by eighth-century Proto-, sixth-century Deutero-, and fifth-century Trito-Isaiah, which relates the theme to the rebuilding of the city of Jerusalem and the temple, even as it seems to downplay the promise of the land now that the people are back in that promised land. Overall, the election theme contributes to the theological and literary coherence of the Book of Isaiah. Even though specific election terminology is not equally distributed throughout the book, with such terminology being more prominent in Deutero- and Trito- than in Proto-Isaiah, election theology itself is clearly present in all three segments of the book. [Adapted from author's summary and conclusion, pp. 94-95—C.T.B.] 1008. [Isaiah] Knut Holter, "Some Interpretative Experiences with Isaiah in Africa," Studies in Isaiah, 181-99 [see #1262]. In this essay, H. explores how the Book of Isaiah is understood and applied by translators, pastors, and preachers, as well as academic scholars in an African context. He starts with an examination of the translation of the song of the seraphs in Isa 6:3 into the Malagasy language as a case that illustrates how chosen words from the target language become embued with a new meaning in the context of a Bible translation. Turning next to popular interpretations of the Bible, he discusses two English Bible translations that come with notes reflecting an African perspective, i.e., the Roman Catholic The African Bible [End Page 314] and the Prayer and Deliverance Bible. Of these, the former, he finds, reflects a Roman Catholic interpretative strategy of inculturation with a positive stance toward African traditional religion as well as socio-critical concerns. The latter translation, for its part, features 190 pages of study notes and a 160-page postscript by Dr. Daniel Olukoya (Nigeria) and is influenced by Pentecostalism and a focus on spiritual warfare and the power of God. In a comparative study of the two Bibles, H. examines how various texts of the Book of Isaiah are interpreted in each as referring to prostitution and witchcraft. He concludes that the two Bible translations reflect a tendency to read the Bible "both out of" and "into" (p. 195) traditional African religious and cultural experiences and concerns. In his consideration of African Hebrew Bible exegesis, H. surveys doctoral dissertations, monographs, articles and anthologies concerning the Book of Isaiah. He concludes that some of these studies focus on parallels between the Book of Isaiah and Africa, whereas others fail to acknowledge the context of...

Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. By Jackson John L., Jr.

In this work, John Jackson sets for himself three goals and objectives, namely: “to capture a bit of the design and architecture of the Kingdom's intricately interwoven beliefs, along with the journeys of some of its believers, to make some small sense of the complicated ways in which the AHIJ (African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem) practices and practitioners rehearse and recalibrate a set of ongoing questions about the links between race and spirituality, and to highlight emergent concerns about the challenges of conducting social research today, even and especially research on groups already researching themselves” (12–13). One of the first questions many readers are sure to have is, “how generalizable is this project to Black Jews?” According to Jackson, even though many black Jews claim nothing in common with the AHIJ, their story often resonates with the tales of African Hebrew Israelites, which increases the relevance of this work and should force us to think more broadly about the ways history and race affect Israel and Judaism.

Review: Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem

Review: Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem

Thin description: ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are often dismissed as a cult for their beliefs that African Americans are descendants of the ancient Israelites and that veganism leads to immortality. But John L. Jackson questions what fringe means in a world where cultural practices of every stripe circulate freely on the Internet. In this poignant and sophisticated examination of the limits of ethnography, the reader is invited into the visionary, sometimes vexing world of the AHIJ. Jackson challenges what Clifford Geertz called the thick description of anthropological research through a multidisciplinary investigation of how the AHIJ use media and technology to define their public image in the twenty-first century.Moving far beyond the modest witness of nineteenth-century scientific discourse or the thick descriptions of twentieth-century anthropology, Jackson insists that Geertzian thickness is an impossibility, especially in a world where the anthropologist's subject is a self-aware subject--one who crafts his own autoethnography while critically consuming the ethnographer's offerings. Thin Description takes as its topic a group situated along the fault lines of several diasporas--African, American, Jewish--and provides an anthropological account of how race, religion, and ethnographic representation must be understood anew in the twenty-first century lest we reenact old mistakes in the study of black humanity.

The Strange Immortalities of Race

The Strange Immortalities of Race

ETHNOGRAPHY IS, ETHNOGRAPHY AIN’T

Using a notion of “the digital” as one of its master metaphors, a version of the term reliant on Kara Keeling's discussion of “digital humanism,” this piece argues that there is something about the nonlinearities defining digitality's difference that might help us to think about recalibrations in the ethnographic project itself. From a discussion of Marlon Riggs's filmic depiction of his own death (as one way to talk about the nondigital) to a machine that uses digital technology to play with temporality in broadcast television, this article wants to ask what the changing social relations (and existential realities) predicated on the ubiquity of digital media might mean for ethnographic research and writing today. With the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem as central ethnographic subjects, I argue that taking digitality seriously means redefining some of what ethnography is and ain't in a post–Writing Culture moment.

Soul Citizenship: The Black Hebrews and the State of Israel

Based on the experiences of the Black Hebrews in Israel, this article introduces "soul citizenship," an alternate discourse that asserts the right of individuals and groups to match their self–defined identities with existing states. After years of living in the Jewish State as an illegal yet tolerated presence, the African Hebrew Israelite Community (AHIC) gained temporary residence status, or according to the postnational model of membership, de facto citizenship. Nonetheless, having reformulated their claims in terms of Jewish cultural pluralism instead of race, the Black Hebrews continue to demand full Israeli citizenship. Rejecting postnational splits among identity, legal status, and territory, their soulful claims suggest a model of citizenship that opens new space for misplaced peopled) to gain membership in the states that meet their cultural aspirations and nourish their souls. [Keywords: citizenship, Black Hebrews, Israel, diasporas]

(Still) Sacrificing for Salvation: Millenarian Motherhood Reconsidered

The author considers the inherent contradiction between sacrifice and salvation as articulated and practiced by female Saints in what the African Hebrew Israelite Community (AHIC)—or the Black Hebrews—refer to as their Kingdom of God. Toward the aim of understanding how and why these women reconcile daily sacrifices with the millenarian belief that they have found salvation, it presents Black Hebrew women's life stories as dialogic encounters with Old Testament personages and the grand redemption narrative of the Bible coupled with their reflections on what awaits women of African descent in white- and Christian-dominated America.