Black Jews Research Articles

Invisible Hebrews: Jews in Early America

Invisible Hebrews:Jews in Early America Jennifer Glaser (bio) New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America. Michael Hoberman. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. 296 pp. Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life. Laura Leibman. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012. 416 pp. Black Jews in Africa and the Americas. Tudor Parfitt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. 240 pp. Early in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, Tudor Parfitt relates an anecdote about the false prophet Richard Brothers, a British man who "was convinced initially that the Second Coming would be in 1795, when he would be revealed as Prince of the Hebrews and would lead the Jews back to Palestine along with the 'invisible Hebrews,' the descendants of the Lost Tribes, many of whom lived in England and other (Protestant) parts of northern Europe" (41). Parfitt shares this episode in order to support his argument—one of many in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas—that some "British Protestants [thought they] themselves were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel" (41). The so-called "British Israel" theory, he contends, had a vast effect on colonial projects in Africa and the Americas. While Parfitt and Brothers use the term to allude to the secret Jews (metaphorical kin to the conversos) in their midst, I borrow the suggestive and multivalent idea of "invisible Hebrews" for a related, but slightly different [End Page 201] purpose: to mark the many ways in which Jews were both invisible in and fundamental to early American culture. Like the "invisible Hebrews" in Parfitt's anecdote, Jews in the Americas were not always easy to find, their numbers remaining small throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet they managed to be omnipresent—in Puritan theology and legal theory, transatlantic trade, and in the discourses surrounding otherness, estrangement, and indigeneity in the Atlantic world. This dialectic of Jewish visibility and invisibility haunts the narratives of three recent books that treat the complex world of Jews in early America: Parfitt's aforementioned comparative work on blacks and Jews in Africa and the Americas; Michael Hoberman's New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America; and Laura Arnold Leibman's Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life, recent winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Each of these scholars employs a distinct methodology and a different definition of "America"; however, all three benefit greatly from renewed interest in the figuration of difference and otherness in an early American context, as well as from recent theorizations of what some scholars have called "the Jewish Atlantic." The Jewish presence has always had a spectral role in Atlantic studies. Paul Gilroy opens his germinal work on the black Atlantic by invoking the history of the Jewish diaspora as an always already transnational one with structural parallels to the global history of African dispossession. Nonetheless, despite (or perhaps because of) this inherently transnational character, many scholars have cleaved to national paradigms. As Adam Sutcliffe points out in his important essay on "Jewish History in an Age of Atlanticism," the Jewish encounter with modernity "was marked by a widespread concern among Jews, in response to the implicit quid pro quo of Emancipation, to demonstrate that they saw themselves above all not as a part of a transnational ethno-religious body but as loyal citizens of the states in which they lived" (18). The impetus to demonstrate fealty to the state "has left deep historiographical traces: a nation-by-nation approach has dominated the study of the Jewish past, with a tendency, in comparative work, to posit a hierarchy of advancement in different national communities, with German Jewry generally blazing the trail followed later and more hesitantly by others" (18). Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in moving beyond this nation-centered approach. The study of early modern Jewry, in particular, has begun to complicate [End Page 202] the field's formerly largely Ashkenazic, nation-based emphasis, especially as scholars who focus on the Mediterranean gain a voice in Jewish literary and cultural studies. Scholars of "the Jewish Atlantic" have borrowed a number of terms from studies of the early...

Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature by Jodi Eichler-Levine (review)

Reviewed by: Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature by Jodi Eichler-Levine Amy Fish (bio) Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature, by Jodi Eichler-Levine. New York: New York UP, 2013. Biblical tropes in American literature are so frequent and well established that they may fade into the critical background. Jodi Eichler-Levine’s book reevaluates the persistence and implications of biblical narratives, particularly stories of chosenness and redemptive sacrifice, in stories told to children. Suffer the Little Children emerges from a question posed by Jewish American author Maurice Sendak: “We were the ‘chosen people,’ chosen to be killed?” (qtd. in xiii). Narratives of chosenness give suffering a telos; they turn senseless killings into redemptive sacrifice. Since children are the telos of a community, stories for [End Page 286] children play a key role in narrating violence as chosenness—even as those stories turn the children lost along the way into sacrificial offerings in an Abrahamic mode. Eichler-Levine’s book locates this dynamic in best-selling and prize-winning contemporary children’s books, along with a few influential and still popular postwar texts; while occasionally touching on illustrations, her analysis focuses on written evidence. She argues that “Jewish Americans, African Americans, and black Jews all claim American chosenness by structuring their children’s literature into redemptive, sacrificially driven narratives” (xiii) that conform to “white Protestant mythologies of pilgrim voyages, pioneer crossings, and pseudo-Abrahamic sacrifices of children” (xvi). Explicitly and implicitly religious framings of violence use children, dead and alive, to reconcile racial or ethnic strangeness with US civic belonging, presenting identities “that can be understood according to overarching white Protestant notions of properly contained religiosity and domestic respectability” (xiii). Comparing and connecting Jewish American, African American, and black Jewish texts—these intentionally loose labels referring to the identities of authors or characters—Eichler-Levine applies existing literary and historical scholarship on black-Jewish relations and comparisons to the field of children’s literature. This study builds on work on the racial politics of childhood innocence, seeing the “discourse around young people and their literatures” as “full of attempted harmony” and suppressed differences (xix). Eichler-Levine also asserts the importance of a biblical perspective on American children’s texts and the inherent religiosity of a genre that represents children to remember the past as it speaks to child readers to build the future. The first chapter, “Remembering the Way into Membership,” opens with stories of the American Revolution to establish that “a willingness to sacrifice one’s own life for others’ becomes a way for minorities to remember their way into civic membership” (1). The pairing of Crispus Attucks biographies from 1965 and 2003, both focusing on Attucks’s childhood and celebrating the equating of his childhood enslavement with “taxation without representation,” drives home not only the persistence of figuring citizenship through sacrifice but also the retrenching of that idea through post-9/11 military patriotism. Similarly, both 1950s and contemporary Hanukkah stories present the Maccabees as the ultimate freedom fighters and thus ideal citizens, even proto-Americans. Stephen Krensky’s Hanukkah at Valley Forge (2006), in which George Washington encounters a Jewish soldier lighting candles, learns [End Page 287] about Hanukkah, and deems it suitably Revolutionary, exemplifies the American children’s book as “literary loyalty test” (10). This pattern extends to stories of African American and Jewish American sacrifices in the two world wars. Sacrifice and suffering can also tie communities to each other, as in Jewish American participation in black civil rights struggles. As Good as Anybody: Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Amazing March Toward Freedom, by Richard Michelson (2008), roots the two leaders’ activism and cross-racial understanding in their parallel experiences of childhood suffering. At the same time, As Good as Anybody, which “is written by a Jewish author and has garnered its greatest attention from the Jewish community” (17), exemplifies for Eichler-Levine the tendency of Jews, more than African Americans, to show nostalgia for past black-Jewish friendships and longing to, in Michelson’s words, “heal the rift...

Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness

Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas

Messianism, Secrecy, Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life by Laura Arnold Leibman (review)

Reviewed by: Messianism, Secrecy, Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life by Laura Arnold Leibman William Pencak (bio) Messianism, Secrecy, Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life. By Laura Arnold Leibman. London and Portland, Or.: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012. xxviixxvii + 388388 pp. When I read on the dust jacket that the doyen of American Jewish historians, Jonathan Sarna, considered this "the most innovative, ambitious and important study of Early American Jewry to appear in the last forty years," and that early American scholar David S. Shields called it "an essential book recovering the founding Jewish contribution to the intellectual history of the Americas," I was never more eager to read a book. I was not disappointed. If anything, I wish I could offer even more superlatives. If there were a Nobel Prize for Jewish historical writing, Laura Arnold Leibman should receive it. What Leibman has done is examine the material culture and connections among transatlantic Jewish Atlantic communities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. She focuses primarily on Amsterdam, Newport, Rhode Island, Curaçao, and Suriname, but she also incorporates London, Recife, New York, Barbados, and Jamaica, among others. Each chapter offers astonishing insights. "Friendly Piranhas" disposes of the myth that Jewish women took their purifying baths in piranha-filled streams or cold northern waters. Elaborate mickva'ot existed in both North and South America, where Jewish women could control their bodies and establish their Jewish identity in a sexually exclusive atmosphere. Similarly, the disproportionate contingents of Jewish men in Masonic lodges enabled Jews to revalue positively the Jewish reputation for covert identities and secrecy, also manifested by the publication of [End Page 329] eighteenth-century novels about Jewish spies, brought about by the need first to live under and then to escape the Inquisition. Taking issue with the standard interpretation that North American Jewry became increasingly rational, ritualistic, and assimilated in the eighteenth century, Leibman effectively shows, both in literature and art, how Atlantic World Jews were heavily influenced by Messianic thought and the Kabbalah. She is expert in showing the "double meanings" of Jewish art and texts, characteristic of Jewish religious life since rabbis began to explore the secrets of the Torah in Biblical times, when the higher meaning was only made known to those who could be trusted to preserve the faith. By reexamining the sermon Rabbi Haym Carigal gave in Newport in 1773, she shows it followed a traditional rather than a modern form and did not endorse colonial resistance to Britain. That would have been foolish, as the Jews of Newport, like New York, were about equally divided between loyalists and patriots, unlike those of Savannah, Charleston, and Philadelphia, who overwhelmingly favored the Revolution. Three of the book's most fascinating chapters concern "Black Jews," "The World to Come," and "Soul Food." Here Leibman shows how demographic and economic conditions affected the way the Jews' slaves, especially children and mistresses, were never quite incorporated fully into the Jewish religion. In Suriname, male Jews were a small and wealthy plantation-owning minority who far outnumbered Jewish women. They ritualized their relationships with black concubines and frequently created families with legal status. In Curaçao, male Jews were merchants and outnumbered women nearly three to one. Transracial family relationships were still possible, but less likely. In Newport, Jewish-black relations were not recognized at all, in keeping with the ban on interracial sexual activity in British North America. Nevertheless, in all three towns, Jews placed racial superiority over conversion. Potential black converts were never fully acknowledged as Jews and were buried in separate graveyards. Jews also worried and argued about which Jews would ascend to heaven. Some forgave apostates as acting under duress where the Inquisition reigned, but others remained instransigent, insisting migration was the only alternative if rites could not be practiced in secret. Finally, "Soul Food"—that is, keeping kosher—held Jews throughout the Atlantic World together because it was frequently hard to get the right sort of food processed or slaughtered correctly. Food, like intermarriage, similar rituals, and commonly shared texts, was a means of preserving international community. Historians of the British Atlantic have not been particularly interested in Judaism...

Religion as Race, Recognition as Democracy

Apartheid South Africa enacted physical, structural, and symbolic forms of violence on racially marked South Africans, and postapartheid South Africa has enacted ambitious—though also limited—laws, policies, and processes to address past injustices. In this article, the author traces the South African political histories of one self-defined group, the Lemba, to understand how the violence they collectively experienced when the apartheid state did not acknowledge their ethnic existence continues to shape their ideas of the promise of democracy to address all past injustices, including the injustice of nonrecognition. The Lemba are known internationally for their participation in DNA tests that indicated their Jewish ancestry. In media discourses, their racialization as black Jews has obscured their racialization as black South Africans: they are presented as seeking solely to become recognized as Jews. The author demonstrates that they have in fact sought recognition as a distinct African ethnic group from the South African state consistently since the 1950s. Lemba recognition efforts show that the violence of nonrecognition is a feature of South African multicultural democracy in addition to being part of the apartheid past. The author argues that the racialization of religion that positions the Lemba as genetic Jews simplifies and distorts their histories and politics of race in South Africa.

Home of the Double-Headed Eagle: The Visionary Vernacular Architecture of Reverend H.D. Dennis and Margaret Dennis

Home of the Double-Headed Eagle:The Visionary Vernacular Architecture of Reverend H.D. Dennis and Margaret Dennis Ali Colleen Neff (bio) [F]orms abstractedly embody the dynamic that identifies cultures and locates among a culture's products those that are best. Deep in forms abides the power by which culture knows, claims, shapes, and conquers the world. When cultures collide, their particular dynamics erupt into visibility. —Henry Glassie, The Spirit of Folk Art I am a black German. A-woo!I am a black Jew. A-woo!I am a black Japanese! —Reverend H.D. Dennis, Vicksburg, Mississippi Vicksburg, Mississippi The Gibraltar of the Confederacy erupts gloriously from the southern tip-edge of the flat Delta flood plain to guard the lush Mississippi cotton empire with its jagged bluffs. This remarkable landscape, according to the 1948 WPA guidebook, materializes with a "wild, rugged contour that has the appearance of distant castles, and . . . the air of a city in perpetual siege." Nearly twenty thousand white tombstones memorialize the bloody and decisive Battle of Vicksburg that ended on the Fourth of July, 1863. Stretched along its highest contours are lush promontories that have provided escape from ravaging floods and overshadowed a century's deployment of Delta cotton by riverboat. Above all, Vicksburg is a city that emerges. Along the edges of these bluffs, in the deep peripheral ravines settled by the descendants of local black sharecroppers, The Home of the Double-Headed Eagle shoots up from a long row of kudzu-covered shotgun shacks and cracked pavement to entangle passersby. A five-foot strip of well-worn earth on either side of the fast road invites the curious and the inspired to make a U-turn and park before this strange landscape. From the windshield of a dusty vehicle traveling 45 MPH down this back road, this roadside shrine looks like a defunct, blurry carnival. Once at rest, the fixed eye discerns the delicate makeup of this acre-wide scene. [End Page 89] Ecstatic, attenuated spires jut twenty feet into the sky in alternating pink, white, red, and yellow brick and painted wood. These are grounded by heavy bases of cinder block, of which varying sizes have been perfectly alternated and aligned in a kind of mix-and-match grid pattern. This flock of spindly sculptures springs from the last patch of flat Delta landscape like the frozen paths of rare birds in flight, executed in multicolored brick, dyed 2 x 4s, and stacks of aligned block letters. Click for larger view View full resolution This visionary architecture is beautiful, strange, thick with meaning, and extraordinary in form. Its thin towers reach up from thick brickwork bases, its bright colors develop on the edge of the traveler's moving landscape, its shape and meaning change with each passing day as the Dennises add to and reconfigure the world around them. Its first name, among many, is "The Home of the Double-Headed Eagle," after the twin totems celebrated by Byzantium, the Holy Roman Empire, and Freemasonry of the Scottish Rite. All photographs courtesy of Tim Gordon and Ali Neff unless noted otherwise. The first-time observer will perceive something immediately holy about these forms. In the tallest reaches of the ensemble, the towers mime the great cathedrals in height and in style as they stretch endlessly into the otherwise impenetrable gray sky. A large five-pointed star and a cutout of an open scroll, the Black Masonic's [End Page 90] hieroglyphic welcome, anchor the assemblage. These are hung snugly at the entrance to an open-air nave decorated with collaged mirrors and found objects and topped with large baskets of silk flowers. Liturgical color wraps the strange shapes that compose the scene: alternating pink, red, white, and gold, flickering like a bright Pentecost candle. An old schoolbus, made to match the spires, glints back into the sun with bits of broken mirror and shiny beads. It faces the highway head-on as if to draw an imaginary crossroads, to the right of the main structure, and is decorated in hand-lettered bible verses, duct tape, and tin foil. The bus is connected to the main structure by a series of...

The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (review)

Reviewed by: The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror Jennifer L. Heller The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror. By Alyson M. Cole. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2007. Alyson M. Cole's first book examines the rhetorical campaign against traditionally "victimized" groups in American culture. The campaign, which Cole argues has escalated over the past three decades, both blames victims for avoiding personal responsibility for their choices (and, writ large, for the perpetuation of affirmative action laws, the welfare state and other emasculating influences in American society) and, ironically, reclaims the status of "victim" for True Victims, i.e., those who have missed out on the privileges of victimization because they do not fall into a protected class. With attention to overtones of anxieties related to race and especially gender, Cole investigates the growing body of literature in which "victim-hatred" crosses into "victim-envy" (20) and which inevitably "participates in the phenomenon it criticizes" (22). The book begins with an overview of oft-heard complaints from recent authors in the "anti-victimist" mold—most notably Dinesh D'Souza and Alan Dershowitz—but proceeds quickly to primary sources for its analysis of the ways in which would-be victims situate themselves as over and against the victim identities that conspire against their expressions of independence and individuality. In two related chapters, Cole addresses anti-victimist campaigns as they figure in post-second-wave feminist writings and therapeutic literature, respectively. In response to hard-fought battles over society's tendency to "blame the victims" of abuse and rape, she suggests, contemporary authors such as Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia have emphatically resisted what they see as the attempt to gain power through powerlessness. Most interesting and a bit out of place is the provocative fourth chapter on Black Power veteran Julius Lester's conversion from "militant black anti-Semite to Jewish critic of black anti-Semitism" (80). Rich in psychosexual analysis, this chapter frames Lester's appropriation of his Jewish heritage (through his great-grandfather) as a "search for a pure victim position" (80-81), as evidenced by Lester's intense interest in the Holocaust and in the narrative of Jews as survivors. Cole reads Lester's autobiographical Lovesong: On Becoming a Jew (1988) as an attempt to publicly separate himself not only from his militant anti-Semitic past but also from his blackness. Writes Cole: By leaping into the void and becoming a Jew (i.e., symbolically non-black) Lester may also suppose he is becoming a better 'black,' for he imagines that as a black Jew he preserves his role as the eternal outsider, the role he claims other African Americans have abandoned. He therefore employs Jewish identity not only for the purpose of making his blackness fade but also because the hybrid of the black [End Page 231] Jew will secure for him the status of ultimate pariah, forever hung between two worlds… (91). With this passage, Cole connects the chapter to the book's general argument about the simultaneous rejection and appropriation of various components of victim identity; however, the chapter presents such a methodological and theoretical departure from the rest of the book that it probably deserves separate treatment in an independent piece. The book concludes with a chapter on the rhetoric of the 9/11 attacks as emblematic of a national attempt to frame victimhood in terms of a "manly heroism that is deeply ambivalent about suffering and sacrifice" (162). Here Cole discusses Mel Gibson's popular movie The Passion of the Christ (2004) as the latest iteration of American Christianity's pursuit of more masculine images of Jesus that lend themselves well to the "war on terror" and the myth of American exceptionalism that drives our "millennial struggle for freedom" (167)—freedom not just from terror but from the victimists who undermine national strength and unity. The Cult of True Victimhood weaves together current themes from religious studies, rhetoric, and cultural studies that provide a useful explanation of the linguistic stances that inform American discussions of victimhood. Jennifer L. Heller University of Kansas Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American...

The Black Jew with the Blond Heart: Friedrich Gundolf, Elisabeth Salomon, and Conservative Bohemianism in Weimar Germany

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Black Jew with the Blond Heart: Friedrich Gundolf, Elisabeth Salomon, and Conservative Bohemianism in Weimar Germany*Ann GoldbergAnn GoldbergUniversity of California, Riverside Search for more articles by this author University of California, RiversidePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 79, Number 2June 2007 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/519316 Views: 46Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2007 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jean-Frédéric Schaub La catégorie « études coloniales » est-elle indispensable ?, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63, no.33 (May 2017): 623–646.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0395264900023349

Black Jew in the Motherland

Translated by Carolyn Vines and the author Negerjood in moederland (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 2004) is the first novel published by Ellen Ombre (b. 1948, Paramaribo, Suriname). Ombre is a well-k...

Noirs et Juifs : les Black Jews aux États-Unis. Genèse d'un mouvement judaïsant au XXe siècle

Blacks and Jews : Black Jews In the United States. Genesis of a Judaic Movement in the 20th Century. In the America of the Great Depression in the 1930s, several thousands of Blacks from the ghettos self-claimed that they were Jews. This article will follow the process through which these societies gradually came to identify themselves with the historical, religious and ethnical background of Judaism. It examines how this identity change, linked to the existence the Falashas of Ethiopia gave rise to a new theoretical frame of 'Black Jew'.

De la soupe au poulet pour nourrir l’âme des Noirs: la négociation d’une identité chez les Afro-américains convertis au judaïsme

The author examines African-American converts to Judaism and the delicate negotiation of an identity as both black and Jewish in the United States. A group often neglected by scholars of both African-American religion and Jewish studies, these persons who occupy a cultural space in both “black” and “Jewish” communities challenge the rigid socially imposed categories of “black” and “Jewish” that can alternatively refer to ethnic, racial, religious and political loyalties. Drawing on personal narratives from black Jews by choice, the author addresses the process of negotiating an identity with regard to external pressure from the greater Jewish and African American communities. In order to comprehend the way in which this negotiation takes place, the author will explore three factors: (1) the reaction from the black community to black Jews by choice; (2) the reaction from the largely white Jewish community; and (3) the way that black Jews perceive and respond to these outside influences.

The construction of the Beta Israel identity

Competing narrative discourses still define the early origins of the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews or black Jews of Ethiopia). A difficulty with reconstructing the past of Judaism in Ethiopia is that written records, though scarce, claim for themselves the 'unquestioned' role of narrating, controlling, containing and policing what can be said about the identities of the Beta Israel. This arrogance of written records is however constantly subverted by the oral sources of the history of the origin of the Beta Israel. The oral sources imply a multiplicity of versions of the same story, and their use in this article suggests that the question of the use of narrative discourse in attempting to name the identities of the Beta Israel in a context of social crisis is a process potentially subject to different interpretations in different historical periods.

Becoming a black Jew: cultural racism and anti‐racism in contemporary Israel

Many scholars consider ‘identity’ and ‘identity politics’ to be among the most important means for cultural minority groups to challenge a discriminatory reality. Others caution that these processes might result in the polarisation of differences, potentially fuelling hatred, harsh conflict, exclusion and even violence. The tension between these two views is presented in this article through an examination of the way young Ethiopian Jews whose parents immigrated to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s have developed their own particular identity precisely in the course of and as a result of the encounter with Israeli society and its mechanisms of exclusion, discrimination, and control. The state declared a policy of assimilation, but in practice relegated the new arrivals to a status of inferiority and marginality. As a result, young Ethiopian Jews reconstructed a new, complex and hybrid Israeli identity, in which blackness is one important element. This unique identity is presented in the paper as a crucial response by the youths to a discriminatory reality of cultural racism. However, the essay also raises doubts concerning their success in minimising their subjugation and in ‘de‐racialising’ Israel.

Constructing black Jews: genetic tests and the Lemba--the 'black Jews' of South Africa.

This commentary examines the use of Y-chromosome testing to reconstruct a genetic ancestry for the Lemba, a group in southern Africa that has long considered itself Jewish. The commentary looks especially at the reasons why this project drew such attention from the mainstream media.

The Black Jews of Harlem: Representation, Identity, and Race, 1920-1939

This article examines journalism on Harlem's Black Jews in Ashkenazic and African American newspapers in the interwar years. While Jewish reporters approached Black Jews incredulously and enquired about their true origins, black papers described them in matter-of-fact tones. These disparate journalistic attitudes reflected the two communities' different understandings of the connection between "black" and "Jew." They also stemmed from the unequal opportunities facing the groups during a period of transformation in American ethnoracial classifications. Jews, on the cusp of "becoming white" in mainstream eyes, sought to distinguish themselves from black people, while blacks, confined to the base of the racial hierarchy, received the sects with racial solidarity.

Black Atlantics, White Indians, and Jews: Locations, Locutions, and Syncretic Identities in the Fiction of Achmat Dangor and Others

Narratives of migration, diaspora, settlement and naming on and around the 'Cape of Storms' burst the bounds of apartheid racial classifications or, indeed, of anti-apartheid categories.

‘Black Jew ‐ white Negro’ anti‐Semitism and the construction of cross‐racial stereotypes

The relationship between anti‐Semitism and anti‐black racism in Europe has been largely neglected by scholars. The article examines one facet of this problematic by exploring the ways in which after c.1860 the rise of modern anti‐Semitism was accompanied by stereotypes that racialized the Jews through associating them with the most ‘primitive’ racial modality, the black African. Against a background of deepening political anti‐Semitism, colonial racism, Social Darwinism and eugenics, the Jews were perceived as a danger both through their impurity and biological mixing with blacks (hybridity being a source of degeneration), as well as through their ability to retain their own racial purity while manipulating black ‘interbreeding’ with Europeans, an infernal conspiracy to weaken the white race and to achieve racial dominance.

Y Chromosomes Traveling South: The Cohen Modal Haplotype and the Origins of the Lemba—the “Black Jews of Southern Africa”

The Lemba are a traditionally endogamous group speaking a variety of Bantu languages who live in a number of locations in southern Africa. They claim descent from Jews who came to Africa from "Sena." "Sena" is variously identified by them as Sanaa in Yemen, Judea, Egypt, or Ethiopia. A previous study using Y-chromosome markers suggested both a Bantu and a Semitic contribution to the Lemba gene pool, a suggestion that is not inconsistent with Lemba oral tradition. To provide a more detailed picture of the Lemba paternal genetic heritage, we analyzed 399 Y chromosomes for six microsatellites and six biallelic markers in six populations (Lemba, Bantu, Yemeni-Hadramaut, Yemeni-Sena, Sephardic Jews, and Ashkenazic Jews). The high resolution afforded by the markers shows that Lemba Y chromosomes are clearly divided into Semitic and Bantu clades. Interestingly, one of the Lemba clans carries, at a very high frequency, a particular Y-chromosome type termed the "Cohen modal haplotype," which is known to be characteristic of the paternally inherited Jewish priesthood and is thought, more generally, to be a potential signature haplotype of Judaic origin. The Bantu Y-chromosome samples are predominantly (>80%) YAP+ and include a modal haplotype at high frequency. Assuming a rapid expansion of the eastern Bantu, we used variation in microsatellite alleles in YAP+ sY81-G Bantu Y chromosomes to calculate a rough date, 3,000-5,000 years before the present, for the start of their expansion.

Black Jews in the Northern Province: a study of ethnic identity in South Africa

The article examines ways in which the Lemba people of the Northern Province of South Africa have used their oral history and traditional customs associated with distant Semitic origins in Yemen, to claim a modern Jewish identity in racially divided South Africa. While Lemba live in Mozambique and Zimbabwe as well as in South Africa, it is only in the latter that belief in a Jewish origin is found. The article seeks to show that early white missionaries and colonial officials propagated a Semitic identity for the Lemba and in their writings emphasized the differences between the Lemba and their African neighbours through comparisons of Lemba customs with Jewish communities in Europe. Such writings contributed to an ethos of a distinct identity, through which, via the establishment of the Lemba Cultural Association, middle-class Lemba intellectuals sought to promote the Lemba. This was achieved in a situation where the apartheid regime in South Africa pursued a divide and rule policy which allowed the Bantustans to discriminate against ethnic minorities under their control.