Black Jews in Africa and the Americas

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas PDF Author: Tudor Parfitt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674071506
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
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.

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas PDF Author: Tudor Parfitt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674071506
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Black Jews of Africa

The Black Jews of Africa PDF Author: Edith Bruder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019533356X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
"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.

The Soul of Judaism

The Soul of Judaism PDF Author: Bruce D. Haynes
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479811238
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
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.

The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times

The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times PDF Author: Reeva Spector Simon
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231507593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
Despite considerable research on the Jewish diaspora in the Middle East and North Africa since 1800, there has until now been no comprehensive synthesis that illuminates both the differences and commonalities in Jewish experience across a range of countries and cultures. This lacuna in both Jewish and Middle Eastern studies is due partly to the fact that in general histories of the region, Jews have been omitted from the standard narrative. As part of the religious and ethnic mosaic that was traditional Islamic society, Jews were but one among numerous minorities and so have lacked a systematic treatment. Addressing this important oversight, this volume documents the variety and diversity of Jewish life in the region over the last two hundred years. It explains the changes that affected the communities under Islamic rule during its "golden age" and describes the processes of modernization that enabled the Jews to play a pivotal role in their respective countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first half of the book is thematic, covering topics ranging from languages to economic life and from religion and music to the world of women. The second half is a country-by-country survey that covers Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, the Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.

Genetic Afterlives

Genetic Afterlives PDF Author: Noah Tamarkin
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012307
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
In 1997, M. E. R. Mathivha, an elder of the black Jewish Lemba people of South Africa, announced to the Lemba Cultural Association that a recent DNA study substantiated their ancestral connections to Jews. Lemba people subsequently leveraged their genetic test results to seek recognition from the post-apartheid government as indigenous Africans with rights to traditional leadership and land, retheorizing genetic ancestry in the process. In Genetic Afterlives, Noah Tamarkin illustrates how Lemba people give their own meanings to the results of DNA tests and employ them to manage competing claims of Jewish ethnic and religious identity, African indigeneity, and South African citizenship. Tamarkin turns away from genetics researchers' results that defined a single story of Lemba peoples' “true” origins and toward Lemba understandings of their own genealogy as multivalent. Guided by Lemba people’s negotiations of their belonging as diasporic Jews, South African citizens, and indigenous Africans, Tamarkin considers new ways to think about belonging that can acknowledge the importance of historical and sacred ties to land without valorizing autochthony, borders, or other technologies of exclusion.

The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa

The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa PDF Author: Reeva Spector Simon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000227944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Incorporating published and archival material, this volume fills an important gap in the history of the Jewish experience during World War II, describing how the war affected Jews living along the southern rim of the Mediterranean and the Levant, from Morocco to Iran. Surviving the Nazi slaughter did not mean that Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa were unaffected by the war: there was constant anti-Semitic propaganda and general economic deprivation; communities were bombed; and Jews suffered because of the anti-Semitic Vichy regulations that left them unemployed, homeless, and subject to forced labor and deportation to labor camps. Nevertheless, they fought for the Allies and assisted the Americans and the British in the invasion of North Africa. These men and women were community leaders and average people who, despite their dire economic circumstances, worked with the refugees attempting to escape the Nazis via North Africa, Turkey, or Iran and connected with international aid agencies during and after the war. By 1945, no Jewish community had been left untouched, and many were financially decimated, a situation that would have serious repercussions on the future of Jews in the region. Covering the entire Middle East and North Africa region, this book on World War II is a key resource for students, scholars, and general readers interested in Jewish history, World War II, and Middle East history.

Jews and Judaism in African History

Jews and Judaism in African History PDF Author: Richard Hull
Publisher: Markus Wiener Pub
ISBN: 9781558764958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This is a narrative about Jews and Judaism in Africa, from antiquity to the present. Jews have often been a marginalized minority, yet they have played a role in the history of the continent hugely disproportionate to their numbers. They have enriched Africa culturally and economically, serving as innovators and middlemen, government servants and educators. Along the way, they have been victims and victimizers, mercenaries and proxies for others as well as adjuvants in long-distance trade and sustainable development. While some have converted to other religions and been assimilated into indigenous society, most have retained their Jewish identity in various forms. Jews and Judaism have practically disappeared from Africa today but their legacy will surely endure.This book covers topics such as Jews in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt; Jews in the western Mediterranean through the Inquisition; 'New Christians' and the making of the Atlantic world, including the early phases of the modern sugar economy and the slave trade; Jews in Ethiopia from antiquity to the 20th century; Jewish communities in the Muslim world; Morocco and West Africa; Sudanic civilizations from the 11th to the 21st century; Jewish communities in North Africa; Jews in the making of modern South Africa; and, the relationship between modern Israel and Africa.

The Holocaust and North Africa

The Holocaust and North Africa PDF Author: Aomar Boum
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503607062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
The Holocaust is usually understood as a European story. Yet, this pivotal episode unfolded across North Africa and reverberated through politics, literature, memoir, and memory—Muslim as well as Jewish—in the post-war years. The Holocaust and North Africa offers the first English-language study of the unfolding events in North Africa, pushing at the boundaries of Holocaust Studies and North African Studies, and suggesting, powerfully, that neither is complete without the other. The essays in this volume reconstruct the implementation of race laws and forced labor across the Maghreb during World War II and consider the Holocaust as a North African local affair, which took diverse form from town to town and city to city. They explore how the Holocaust ruptured Muslim–Jewish relations, setting the stage for an entirely new post-war reality. Commentaries by leading scholars of Holocaust history complete the picture, reflecting on why the history of the Holocaust and North Africa has been so widely ignored—and what we have to gain by understanding it in all its nuances. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

We the Black Jews

We the Black Jews PDF Author: Yosef Ben-Jochannan
Publisher: Black Classic Press
ISBN: 9780933121409
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
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.

Community and Conscience

Community and Conscience PDF Author: Gideon Shimoni
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584653295
Category : Apartheid
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
The first thorough account of South African Jewish religious, political, and educational institutions in relation to the apartheid regime.