[PDF] Black Jews In Africa And The Americas eBook

Author : Tudor Parfitt
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 38,12 MB
Release : 2013-02-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0674071506

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Black Jews in Africa and the Americas tells the fascinating story of how the Ashanti, Tutsi, Igbo, Zulu, Beta Israel, Maasai, and many other African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Pursuing medieval and modern European race narratives over a millennium in which not only were Jews cast as black but black Africans were cast as Jews, Tudor Parfitt reveals a complex history of the interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses. For centuries, colonialists, travelers, and missionaries, in an attempt to explain and understand the strange people they encountered on the colonial frontier, labeled an astonishing array of African tribes, languages, and cultures as Hebrew, Jewish, or Israelite. Africans themselves came to adopt these identities as their own, invoking their shared histories of oppression, imagined blood-lines, and common traditional practices as proof of a racial relationship to Jews. Beginning in the post-slavery era, contacts between black Jews in America and their counterparts in Africa created powerful and ever-growing networks of black Jews who struggled against racism and colonialism. A community whose claims are denied by many, black Jews have developed a strong sense of who they are as a unique people. In Parfitt’s telling, forces of prejudice and the desire for new racial, redemptive identities converge, illuminating Jewish and black history alike in novel and unexplored ways.

Author : Bruce D Haynes
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 46,75 MB
Release : 2018-08-14
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1479800635

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A glimpse into the diverse stories of Black Jews in the United States What makes a Jew? This book traces the history of Jews of African descent in America and the counter-narratives they have put forward as they stake their claims to Jewishness. The Soul of Judaism offers the first exploration of the full diversity of Black Jews, including bi-racial Jews of both matrilineal and patrilineal descent; adoptees; black converts to Judaism; and Black Hebrews and Israelites, who trace their Jewish roots to Africa and challenge the dominant western paradigm of Jews as white and of European descent. Blending historical analysis and oral history, Haynes showcases the lives of Black Jews within the Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstruction and Reform movements, as well as the religious approaches that push the boundaries of the common forms of Judaism we know today. He illuminates how in the quest to claim whiteness, American Jews of European descent gained the freedom to express their identity fluidly while African Americans have continued to be seen as a fixed racial group. This book demonstrates that racial ascription has been shaping Jewish selfhood for centuries. Pushing us to reassess the boundaries between race and ethnicity, it offers insight into how Black Jewish individuals strive to assert their dual identities and find acceptance within their respective communities. Putting to rest the simplistic notion that Jews are white and that Black Jews are therefore a contradiction, the volume argues that we can no longer pigeonhole Black Hebrews and Israelites as exotic, militant, and nationalistic sects outside the boundaries of mainstream Jewish thought and community life. The volume spurs us to consider the significance of the growing population of self-identified Black Jews and its implications for the future of American Jewry.

Author : Edith Bruder
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 47,25 MB
Release : 2008-06-05
Category : History
ISBN : 019533356X

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"This book presents, one by one, the different groups of Black Jews in Western central, eastern, and southern Africa and the ways in which they have used and imagined their oral history and traditional customs to construct a distinct Jewish identity. It explores the ways in which Africans have interacted with the ancient mythological sub-strata of both western and African ideas of Judaism."--Résumé de l'éditeur.

Author : Bruce D. Haynes
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 45,32 MB
Release : 2018-08-14
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1479811238

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Explores the full diversity of Black Jews, including bi-racial Jews of both matrilineal and patrilineal descent; adoptees; black converts to Judaism; and Black Hebrews and Israelites, who trace their Jewish roots to Africa and challenge the dominant western paradigm of Jews as white and of European descent. The book showcases the lives of Black Jews, demonstrating that racial ascription has been shaping Jewish selfhood for centuries. It reassesses the boundaries between race and ethnicity, offering insight into how ethnicity can be understood only in relation to racialization and the one-drop rule. Within this context, Black Jewish individuals strive to assert their dual identities and find acceptance within their communities. Putting to rest the notion that Jews are white and the Black Jews are therefore a contradiction, the volume argues that we cannot pigeonhole Black Hebrews and Israelites as exotic, militant, and nationalistic sects outside the boundaries of mainstream Jewish thought and community life. it spurs us to consider the significance of the growing population of self-identified Black Jews and its implications for the future of American Jewry.

Author : Edith Bruder
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 33,3 MB
Release : 2012-03-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1443838683

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Over the last hundred years, in Africa and the United States, through a variety of religious encounters, some black African societies adopted – or perhaps rediscovered – a Judaic religious identity. African Zion grows out of a joined interest in these diversified encounters with Judaism, their common substrata and divergences, their exogenous or endogenous characteristics, the entry or re-entry of these people into the contemporary world as Jews and the necessity of reshaping the standard accounts of their collective experience. In various loci the bonds with Judaism of black Jews were often forged in the harshest circumstances and grew out of experiences of slavery, exile, colonial subjugation, political ethnic conflicts and apartheid. For the African peoples who identify as Jews and with other Jews, identification with biblical Israel assumes symbolical significance. This book presents the way in which the religious identification of African American Jews and African black Jews – “real”, ideal or imaginary – has been represented, conceptualized and reconfigured over the last century or so. These essays grow out of a concern to understand Black encounters with Judaism, Jews and putative Hebrew/Israelite origins and are intended to illuminate their developments in the medley of race, ethnicity, and religion of the African and African American religious experience. They reflect the geographical and historic mosaic of black Judaism, permeated as it is with different “meanings”, both contemporary and historical.

Author : James E. Landing
Publisher :
Page : 552 pages
File Size : 47,40 MB
Release : 2002
Category : History
ISBN :

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Throughout most black societies today, there are Jews who are not accepted by the worldwide community of Rabbinic Jews. They are known as Black Jews, and the movement they represent is known as Black Judaism. Originating in the post-Civil War southern states, the early leaders of this movement were motivated by oppression and racism to migrate north. They came into contact with Rabbinic Jews and the Judaism they represented, but Black Jews and Black Judaism were rejected. Black Judaism continued to spread and reached the continent of Africa where it became an integral part of the Independent Black Church Movement and an active component of the various struggles for independence. From New York it spread to Latin America, especially the West Indies, and is known there in its most varied form as "Rastafarianism." During the turbulent days of the Civil Rights era, an uneasy alliance developed between some Black Jews and Rabbinic Jews, but again rejection soon followed. Black Judaism has never been a large movement in numbers of adherents, but its influence far exceeds its numbers, making it recognizable, as Landing shows in this book, as one of the most important social movements in African-American history. "There is limited existing literature on the topic and Landing's book offers a much needed analysis of this little known religious phenomenon. The work includes an extensive annotated bibliography and photographic supplement. Recommended for academic and research libraries." -- Association of Jewish Libraries, September/October 2004

Author : Saul Friedman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 15,19 MB
Release : 2017-09-29
Category : History
ISBN : 1351510762

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The Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semitic manuscripts published in years. This work of so-called scholars received great celebrity from individuals like Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, and Khalid Abdul Muhammed who used the document to claim that Jews dominated both transatlantic and antebellum South slave trades. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades.Jews and the American Slave Trade dissects the questionable historical technique employed in Secret Relationship, offers a detailed response to Farrakhan's charges, and analyzes the impetus behind these charges. He begins with in-depth discussion of the attitudes of ancient peoples, Africans, Arabs, and Jews toward slavery and explores the Jewish role hi colonial European economic life from the Age of Discovery tp Napoleon. His state-by-state analyses describe in detail the institution of slavery in North America from colonial New England to Louisiana. Friedman elucidates the role of American Jews toward the great nineteenth-century moral debate, the positions they took, and explains what shattered the alliance between these two vulnerable minority groups in America.Rooted in incontrovertible historical evidence, provocative without being incendiary, Jews and the American Slave Trade demonstrates that the anti-slavery tradition rooted in the Old Testament translated into powerful prohibitions with respect to any involvement in the slave trade. This brilliant exploration will be of interest to scholars of modern Jewish history, African-American studies, American Jewish history, U.S. history, and minority studies.

Author : Jack Salzman
Publisher : George Braziller Publishers
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 48,61 MB
Release : 1992
Category : Religion
ISBN :

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While no single volume can fully explain this issue, Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews provides us with a means to challenge, and perhaps even to verify, our sense of the past - and in so doing to better understand the present. Fifteen critical essays by leading historians, scholars, and political and religious figures of this century provide historical overviews of the relationships between African Americans and American Jews. They also represent the diverse attitudes within the two groups, and reflect the multiple voices that have themselves shaped these attitudes. A visual essay that follows links texts and images of more than one hundred works of art and artifacts, first seen in an exhibit at The Jewish Museum, to explore the historical places at which the paths of African Americans and American Jews have crossed in meaningful ways during this century.

Author : Yosef Ben-Jochannan
Publisher : Black Classic Press
Page : 518 pages
File Size : 18,78 MB
Release : 1993
Category : History
ISBN : 9780933121409

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Dr. Ben destroys the myth of a "white Jewish race" and the bigotry that has denied the existence of an African Jewish culture. He establishes the legitimacy of contemporary Black Jewish culture in Africa and the diaspora and predates its origin before ancient Nile Valley civilizations.

Author : Marc Dollinger
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 49,55 MB
Release : 2024-04-02
Category : History
ISBN : 147982688X

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"Black Power, Jewish Politics expands with this revised edition that includes the controversial new preface, an additional chapter connecting the book's themes to the national reckoning on race, and a foreword by Jews of Color Initiative founder Ilana Kaufman that all reflect on Blacks, Jews, race, white supremacy, and the civil rights movement"--