veiled4allah: black Zion

In my earlier entry on Islam in the African-American Experience, I commented that a comparison of the black Muslim experience to the black Jewish experience would be instructive.

Following my own advice, I checked out Black Zion from the library. The book is about more than just black Jews, it's really about African-American encounters with Judaism.

The first section deals with black Jews. There are two basic trends here. The first is African-Americans who are born Jewish (for instance, as the child of a marriage between a Jewish mother and an African-American father) or who convert to mainstream Judaism. African-American Jews have usually found it difficult to be accepted by the Jewish congregations they join, while some African-Americans may regard them negatively for their association with white Jews. They find that very few people realize that it is possible to be both African-American and Jewish at the same time. It was interesting to compare this with the experience of African-American converts to orthodox Islam. Although African-American and immigrant Muslim groups often seem to work in parallel rather than in concert, African-American converts to Islam have found much more acceptance from Muslim communities than African-American Jews have found from Jewish communities.

The second trend is black Jewish groups who have their own interpretation of Judaism and declare themselves to be Jewish according to that. These latter groups bear much the same relationship to Judaism as the Nation of Islam does to Islam. They tend to call themselves "Black Hebrews" or "Black Israelites" to distinguish themselves from contemporary Jews. They believe that black people are the true Children of Israel by descent and that white Jews are either the products of intermarriage or (in some interpretations) are imposters who are "not really Jews"; some interpretations also consider whites (including white Jews) to be a separate and inferior creation. This is similar to the NOI's interpretation that black people are the true Muslims and that whites are a separate and inferior creation. Some Black Hebrew groups adhere fairly closely to mainstream Jewish rituals and practice, others follow their own interpretations of the Torah along with the teachings of their founder. Again, this is similar to the NOI and offshoot groups in terms of how much to how little they adhere to orthodox Islamic rituals and practice.

This first section of the book also provides an historical overview of African-American identification with the Jewish people and with Judaism. The stories of the Children of Israel in slavery in Egypt have long had deep resonance for African-American slaves and their descendants. In the last decades of the 1800s, African-American groups developed that mixed Jewish elements into Christian prcatice. The Black Hebrew movement seems to date largely from the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s as do its parallel Black Muslim movements.

The second section of the book looks at the encounters of African-American Muslims with Judaism. Specifically, there is a chapter about the Nation of Islam and its views of Jews and Judaism, and one on a group called the Nubian Islamic Hebrews, who mix Islamic, Jewish, Christian, and New Age doctrines, practices, and symbolism. The chapter on the NOI is very thoughtful and worth reading for those who are interested in this question.

The third section of the book then looks at the encounters of African-American Christians with Judaism. This section is the most eclectic. It includes an essay on African-American Christian interpretations of the Book of Nehemiah in the Bible, an essay on the friendship of Martin Luther King, Jr., with Jewish leaders, a study of African-American congregations who have moved into buildings that formerly served as synagogues but which were deserted as the ethnic and racial make-up of the neighborhoods changed, and a look at Haitian blacks and the role of Jewish characters in Catholic passion plays and Voudoun re-interpretations of these plays.

I highly recommend this book. It is fascinating in itself as well as providing a larger context for understanding such groups as the Nation of Islam in comparison.