For almost thirty years, Tudor Parfitt has been a trailblazer in the discipline of Black African Jewish Studies (a field which, some may claim, he founded almost single-handedly). He has also published widely in areas such as Jewish genetics, Lost Tribes narratives, and Judeo-Islamic relations. Now, in a volume based on the Higgins lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 2011, Parfitt offers a kind of summing-up of a once-esoteric subject that, in his words, has ‘touched a nerve’ (p. xiii) in the (occidental) Jewish world: Jews of color in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.

In Part One, ‘The Color of Jews’, Parfitt explores the shared historical genealogies of Jews and black Africans, specifically the ways in which Jews came to be considered as ‘black’. In Part Two, ‘Lost Tribes of Israel in Africa’, the author demonstrates how black Africans and Jews were inextricably linked in the premodern Christian imagination as ‘fundamental others’ (p. 3). He does this by highlighting the major (somewhat dubious) sources of information that led to the formation of these attitudes, such Eldad Hadani, Prester John, and Leo Africanus.

Part Three, ‘Ham's Children’, discusses the so-called ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ that Parfitt has treated at length elsewhere, most notably (and, in the opinion of this reviewer, more thoroughly) in another recent volume he edited with Edith Bruder, African Zion: Studies in Black Judaism (2012). This part of the book focuses on perceptions according to which black skin was the result of the infamous curse by Noah on Canaan and his descendants. In particular, it outlines a number of the sinister justifications used for slavery that were based on this biblical passage.

Part Four, ‘Judaic Practices and Superior Stock’, presents a flip-side of the Hamitic equation by outlining the equally biased, though less nefarious, attitudes of colonial administrators and explorers vis-à-vis ethnic groups such as the Fulani, Soninke, Ashanti, Igbo, and others. Parfitt points out how the former sought to explain the natives' curious customs, such as circumcision and menstrual seclusion, by linking them with a supposed Hebraic/Israelite lineage – a lineage that transformed these customs from curious to praiseworthy. Part Five, ‘Half White, Half Black’, expounds on this angle, detailing how many Europeans thought that the supposed Israelite origins of specific African tribes would enable easier cooperation between these tribes and the colonial authorities. Also discussed in this chapter are the Anglo-Israelite movement and legendary figures such as Captain Francis Gardner and John Colenso, both of whom wrote on similarities between Zulu and Israelite customs.

Part Six, ‘Emergence of Black Jews in the United States’, demonstrates how black slaves ‘increasingly imagined themselves as Israelites, toiling in a North American Egypt, brutalized by North American pharaohs’ (p. 74). This chapter also highlights the symbolic importance of Ethiopia in the North American black experience. Part Seven, ‘Divine Geography and Israelite Identities’, shows how ‘the Israelite trope was a means by which Africans could turn the Bible back on their colonial masters’ (p. 103). Indeed, during the time leading up to the abolishment of the slave trade in the mid-nineteenth century, the symbolic power of these tropes only increased, as diverse African ethnic groups (not to mention many abolitionists) used such metahistories for establishing common bonds of memory. Part Eight, ‘Internalization of the Israelite myth’, further explores this theme, presenting case studies of Cushitic Israelite groups such as the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda, the so-called ‘Tutsi Jews’ of Rwanda, Burundi, and Eastern Congo, as well as other Judaising movements.

Part Nine, ‘History, Genetics, and Indigenous Black African Jews’, offers a kind of conclusion to the entire book and is by far the most interesting chapter. Parfitt deftly tackles the sensitive topic of the occidental Jewish world's ‘discovery’ of the Jews of Ethiopia and sheds light on the controversies surrounding the recent DNA testing undertaken to probe the veracity of the Ethiopians’ claims. In addition, there are interesting discussions in this chapter on the contested Jewish genealogy of the Lemba people of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Mozambique, although this topic has been treated at length by Parfitt elsewhere (see, for example, ‘The Lemba: An African Judaising Tribe’, in Judaising Movements: Studies in the Margins of Judaism (2002). Along those lines, the last part of this chapter clearly explicates how Israel's rabbinical authorities, while not the equivalent of the Vatican, are still the key to acceptance of groups like the Lemba and Ethiopian Jews by klal yisrael, the worldwide Jewish people.

As Parfitt demonstrates once again, these largely self-defining and self-identifying African Jewish groups are, in the absence of universal recognition, nonetheless changing the way the world thinks about Judaism and Jewishness. This book provides an excellent overview of those changes in their particular historical and subcultural contexts.