Jacob Dorman's highly impressive book not only provides a new understanding of Black Israelite religions, but also highlights a broader need to recalibrate prevailing narratives of African American history and culture along a number of axes. Exploring a rich seam of black religious innovation, from Kansas and the Oklahoma Territory in the post-Reconstruction era to interwar Harlem, Dorman rejects “syncretism” as a model for conceptualizing African American culture. Rather than reading Black Israelite faiths as the result of a mechanistic “confrontation between dissimilar, concrete, pure types,” he finds in these religious movements the importance of “individual choices and creativity,” and a “bricolage of impure and porous cultures, not the bipolar encounter between brittle, hostile, or holistic ones” (186–87). There are perhaps echoes here of Ralph Ellison's rejoinder to LeRoi Jones's Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) – that to conceive of black American culture as a “hermetic expression of Negro sensibility” that rubbed up against a wholly alien white culture was “to attempt delicate brain surgery with a switchblade.”Footnote ¹

One did not even need to be black to be a Black Israelite – though it helped – and neither did one need to identify as Jewish. The term denotes a belief that the ancient Israelites were a black people, and, as Dorman's case studies demonstrate, this belief spanned numerous denominations which defined themselves variously as Christian, Jewish and Muslim. It functioned as a counternarrative to the Eurocentric and white-supremacist framing of religion and civilization, and conveyed an inherently political message of pride and self-worth that anticipated the Nation of Islam and the Black Power movement.

Chosen People contributes to a spatial reimagining of African American history, emphasizing the signal importance of the American West as a “promised land” for the post-Reconstruction generation while stretching the domain of black American cultural production across transnational terrain. Dorman traces the Black Israelite phenomenon to the political and religious ferment that grew out of the surge of black migration to Kansas and the Oklahoma Territory in the final decades of the nineteenth century, where the emergence of black towns and hopes of creating black-majority states generated fertile ground for black identification (both metaphorical and literal) with the ancient Israelites’ biblical Exodus. Tracing the career of Prophet William Saunders Crowdy, the founder of a pioneering Black Israelite group named the Church of God and Saints of Christ, Dorman shows that the origins of Black Israelite beliefs and practices were inextricably entwined with a wider, interracial culture of religious innovation on the Great Plains that produced the Holiness and Pentecostal movements during the same era. Moreover, Dorman argues for the interracial and dramatically transnational character of early black Pentecostal religion by insisting that ecstatic styles of worship as far afield as Wales and India contributed just as much to black American Pentecostalism as did the commonly cited “African retentions.”

Harlem, too, figures as a crucial site of Black Israelite innovation. But in exploring the lives and congregations of Rabbis Arnold Josiah Ford and Wentworth Arthur Matthew, Dorman uncovers an added dimension of the “Harlem Renaissance” and once again stretches familiar borders across transnational space. While the interwar intellectual history of Harlem is routinely confined to the literary projects of a small elite, Dorman shows working-class religious life to have been an equally productive incubator of philosophical ideas, cultural practices and political visions. Following the Barbados-born Rabbi Ford's path from Harlem to Ethiopia, he makes a persuasive case that Black Israelite congregations rooted in the Garveyite currents of American cities laid vital groundwork for the emergence of the Rastafari beliefs that would ignite religious life in Jamaica from the 1930s.

Given the large number of German and Eastern European Jews that remained in Harlem during the black influx in the early decades of the twentieth century, it would be interesting to see the interactions between black and white Jews in the neighbourhood given a more sustained exploration. When the book's Conclusion celebrates the “true genius of practitioners of alternative African American religions who delved deep into the treasure house of the Atlantic World and recombined the sparkling cultural artifacts therein” (186), Dorman's enthusiasm for polycultural bricolage as an antiessentialist, humanizing praxis might appear to obscure the exploitative, corrupt and self-aggrandizing behaviours of some of his protagonists, which are noted at points along the way. But Chosen People is a deep and resonant work of scholarship, and one with ramifications that should be felt far beyond the literature on Black Israelites that Dorman has so elegantly and persuasively extended.