Although a substantial literature about black–Jewish relations (what Adam Newton termed “blackjewishrelations”)Footnote 1 and Jews' ambivalent and ever-shifting status as not fully white continues to grow (Brodkin, Jacobson, Goldstein),Footnote 2 few analyses have paid attention to black Jews. As the title of her impeccably researched The Black Jews of Africa: History, Religion, Identity suggests, Edith Bruder is one such scholar. Along with Tudor Parfitt of Lost Tribes fame and Emanuela Trevisan-Semi, who wrote the definitive text on Jacques Faitlovitch, Bruder is associated with the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, the leading scholarly institution bringing Jews from diverse backgrounds into the academic spotlight. Across the Atlantic, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Lewis Gordon are also doing important scholarly and community work to increase recognition of and legitimacy for a broader spectrum of Jews, especially those of color. Gordon's Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University, established in 2005, is the first of its kind, but if Bruder's work is any indication, the field will only continue to grow. More than providing the first detailed scholarly account of many of Africa's black Jews and their origins, Bruder makes a compelling case for explaining why these groups are significant not only for Jewish studies, but also for intellectual histories of colonialism, travel, religion, trade, and identity.
Typically when scholarship has addressed black Jews, the focus has been on questions of Jewish identity: are they really Jewish, and if so, according to whose definition? While arguments have been made based on halakhah, culture, religious practice, and, more recently, genetics, Bruder circumvents the question by investigating the symbolism that identifying as Jewish performs for these African groups. Her project takes up the kind of question that rhetoricians find intriguing: not whether Africa's black Jews are Jewish in an ontological way, but rather what their narratives of Jewishness do for their understanding of self, both individual and collective, and others' understandings of them. Drawing on methodologies from fields as varied as “ethnography, phenomenology, history, religious, and cultural studies,” Bruder traces the intellectual and interactive history both of Africans' exposure to “Jewish myths and traditions in multiple forms and a number of situations” (5) and of the historical contexts “that gradually led, within some African societies, to the elaboration of a new Jewish identity connected with that of the [Jewish] Diaspora” (4). She argues that when Africans identify “as Jews and with other Jews, they deny the existence of distinctive categories in popular concepts of Jews and subvert the racist image of blacks”; she adds that their “collective historical and cultural experiences … have led them to assume a shared history with the Jewish people” (7). Throughout the work, Bruder tracks the mythic, narrative elements that coalesced in unique ways to imagine, interpret, and identify Africans as Jews.
Bruder's thorough investigation is divided into three main parts, each with comprehensive footnotes and references to source materials from multiple fields and in several languages. In the first section (Chaps. 1–4), she explores what she terms the “prehistory of African Judaism” by elaborating and explaining the long, mythic history on which many African Jewish identities draw. Her analyses of the Lost Tribes myth, the legend of Solomon and Sheba, the biblical Children of Kush, and the ways in which Ethiopia and Africa have figured prominently in the “Western imaginaire” demonstrate how these narratives function as epistemological tools for understanding “others” (7).
Bruder begins with the myth of the Ten Lost Tribes, tracing it from its first appearance in the Bible, through its elaboration in the apocrypha (15), to its later absorption into Christian narratives. She calls attention to the historical narrative in the biblical text: the Ten Tribes of Israel's northern kingdom were exiled in the eighth century BCE and ostensibly disappeared. Inspired by the prophets' accounts, however, many imagined that, one day, the Ten Tribes would be rediscovered, and with their discovery would come salvation. Bruder attributes the myth's later ubiquity to the elasticity of its epistemic and interpretive function. It provided a way to both name and familiarize the otherwise unknown and fearsome (13), and, not surprisingly, it also became “an essential part of European colonial discourse” (13). Meticulously following its appearance in both Jewish and Christian sources, Bruder notes that the myth, along with Ezekiel's prophecies that “predicted the return of the tribes from the land of Kush,” worked in conjunction with the geographic confusion of the Middle Ages to provide an “authoritative infrastructure for all future speculation concerning the presence of the Ten Tribes in Africa” (24). The legend of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, which provides “a myth of origin” in African traditions and is often “invoked to explain Africa's past” (28), further complicates the symbolic scene. Moreover, Bruder argues that it has “played a major role in the Western perception of the continent,” its history, and its inhabitants “from Ethiopia to Southern Africa” (28). She concludes this section by reiterating that “the connection between the Ten Tribes and Ethiopia and the lineage established by the legend of Solomon and the queen of Sheba made consistent the use of biblical imagery in the African oral cultural milieu…. These allegorical associations converged to form the subterranean architecture of prejudices, beliefs, and ideologies in a collective memory shared by Africans as well as Europeans” (34).
The second section (Chaps. 5–7) explores “the variety of interactions between blackness and Judaism from prejudices to reality.” Chapter 5 focuses on the symbolic linking of Africans and Jews as inferior others in the Christian European imagination. Chapter 6 traces the birth and evolution of the Hamitic hypothesis, the idea that “anything of value found in Africa was brought there by the Hamites, who were allegedly a branch of the Caucasian race” (52). Her analysis of the ways in which these myths aided and abetted colonialism, all the while shaping Africans' understanding of their own mythic origins, is lucid and insightful. On the one hand, these mythic layers provided the lens through which colonists viewed and understood Africans, and, ultimately, because Africans were exposed to these ideas through contact with missionaries, these narratives also provided the lens through which Africans saw and understood themselves. For those who are unfamiliar with black Jewish identities in the American cultural milieu, Chapter 7 provides a broad and deep background to understanding how the rise of Afrocentrism strongly influenced African American religious movements as varied as those incorporating Ethiopianism, Judaism, and Rastafarianism, as well as Africans' adoption of similar religious identity models to provide a counter to racist conceptions of blacks. She concludes this section with the powerful observation that “[p]resent-day African Jewish identity construction is situated at the crossroads of a double legacy: that of Black American Judaism in its various forms, and the real or imaginary historical contacts of Judaism, in ancient times, with African peoples” (93).
The third section (Chaps. 8–10) “reveals the historical background of Jewish traces or influences in Black Africa” (8). In Chapter 8, Bruder ambitiously attempts to “disentangle—in regions with little written history—the true from the likely and the unlikely” (99), and consequently, she surveys the historical traces of Jews in Africa, based on numerous recorded accounts, probable trade routes, historical maps, and genealogies of Jewish descent. Because so much of her analysis details possible migration and trade routes that follow expansive territory, both geographic and historical, and because the names of peoples and places evolved over time, it would have been helpful if she had included more visuals to aid the reader. Yet, beyond the map that follows the table of contents at the book's beginning, there is only one map in this chapter (105). This minor critique, however, does not diminish the comprehensive account that Bruder provides. Chapters 9 and 10 survey a variety of African groups who claim different relationships to and identities as Jews: the Zakhor Jews of Timbuktu, Mali; the Igbo of Nigeria; the House of Israel of Ghana; the Tutsi-Hebrews of Havilah; the Cape Verde-Israel Friendship Society; the Abayudaya of Uganda; the Lemba of South Africa and Zimbabwe; the Jews of Rusape, Zimbabwe; and the “Descendents of David” of Madagascar. What is particularly noteworthy is Bruder's scrupulous attention, as she treats each group and its narratives on its own terms. Her analysis demonstrates that while all groups share some elements of mythic history, each differs in its particular interaction with and interpretation of those elements, given its own specific history, both real and imagined.
In her epilogue, Bruder considers the way in which temporal factors have contributed to the large number of Judaizing movements in Africa at this time. She suggests that globalization and the Internet have contributed to both the acceleration and the extension of Lost Tribes and related ideas. This rapid pace and expansion, in turn, facilitates “the crystallization of Jewish consciousness from one group to another” and allows “emerging groups to be accepted by Western Jewry almost simultaneously with their own decision to think of themselves as Jews” (188). Like the African American Jews whose identifications follow a similar model, albeit earlier in history, Bruder contends the African Jews' “encounter with Judaism is often related to resistance to white supremacy and frustration of blocked goal fulfillment” (191), and, ultimately, she is “inclined to consider” these groups as “counter-societies that reflect important transitions in people's lives” (192). Clearly, the discursive choice to identify with or as Jews does important work for these Africans, by enabling change and innovation at a “cosmic, social, and supra-individual level through the restoration of a real or imagined past social order” (196).
Bruder's work provides an excellent, well-researched introduction to black Jews in Africa and the mythic foundations on which these identity innovations are based. Poised to become the definitive text on African Jews, this book does scholarly heavy lifting to break new ground that will provide a foundation for what promises to become a rich field of study all its own. Scholars in Jewish studies will learn a great deal from considering how Africans' identifications as Jews influences the perception and performance of Jewishness in other parts of the Diaspora, regardless of whether other Jews recognize these Africans as legitimate Jews.
