From Diaspora to Religious Pluralism: African American Judaism in the 20th-Century United States

Abstract

The origin of this article lies in the concurrent existence of multiple religious groups in the United States and the interactions between them. This essay examines the dynamics of religious pluralism through the interaction of two religious groups—African Americans and Jews—in the realms of religion, society, and politics. Among the diverse religious groups in the United States, the growing presence of Jews, bolstered by migration from Germany in the 19th century and from Eastern Europe in the 20th century, introduced new traditions and significantly contributed to the development of religious experimentation among African Americans. The phenomenon of African American communities embracing Judaism exemplifies how religious pluralism and diaspora intersect to produce new forms of religious and cultural identity. These communities challenge traditional notions of both Jewishness and African Americanness, demonstrating the fluidity of identity in diasporic contexts.

1. Diaspora and Religious Pluralism: Intersections and Dynamics

One of the most distinctive features of American society is its religious heterogeneity, a result of the country’s history as a “nation of immigrants”. This diversity reflects the experiences of diasporic communities whose cultural, ethnic, and religious plurality has shaped the nation’s fabric. The United States has long been a laboratory of religious experimentation, where diasporic identities and the ideology of pluralism have intersected to foster both innovation and separatist tendencies. From its colonial and revolutionary beginnings, the American ethos of religious pluralism emerged as a framework for managing diversity, emphasizing coexistence while accommodating the fluid and dynamic identities of diasporic groups. The formula of James Pickard, “If diversity is a fact, then pluralism is an achievement” adequately illustrates the voluntary action and the social and political phenomena that constituted the implementation of religious pluralism in American society (Spickard 2017).

Throughout the 19th century, as diverse religious traditions interacted, pluralism evolved from a mere acknowledgment of difference to a robust ideological and social principle. This evolution facilitated the inclusion of diverse diasporic communities, such as Catholics, Jews, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, each contributing their unique religious perspectives.1 Pluralism, as Alan Brill notes, operates at multiple levels—epistemological, ethical, and mystical—acknowledging the validity of diverse truths and acceptance of difference (Brill 2010). This pluralistic ethos also provided diasporic groups with a platform to negotiate their identities and practices within the broader American religious landscape. Religious pluralism and diaspora are interconnected phenomena, each shaping and being shaped by the other in significant ways.

How modern Americans interpreted arrangements between ethnicity, religion, culture, society, and politics often depended on their conditions in socio-economic inequality. It also depended on how well they understood ideals of democracy and how well they were organized in civil society. What some scholars have called the “free-market” for choosing one’s religious identity, took hold, which opened out substantially to new political implications, and to individualism (Fink and Stark 2007). As developed by John Hicks—a prominent defender of religious pluralism—religious pluralism thus may be viewed as a recent innovation which seeks to provide a theological basis for tolerance despite diversity (Hick 1989, p. 233).

This essay addresses the dynamics of religious pluralism in the interaction among two diasporic groups—African Americans and Jews—in religion, society, and politics. Among the diverse origins of faith groups that exist in the United States, the increasing presence of Jews, augmented by migration from Germany in the 19th century and from Eastern Europe in the 20th century, highlighted newly imported traditions and contributed largely to new forms of religious experimentation (Lipset 1990). The situation of being from another place and, thereby, of being minority “Others”, often stimulates a mode of religious change through heightened self-awareness. As Barbara Metcalf observes, diasporic experiences often inspire heightened religious innovation, where a sense of contrast with the dominant society fosters self-awareness and creative transformation: “The sense of contrast—contrast with a past or contrast with the rest of society—is at the heart of a self-consciousness that shapes religious style” (Metcalf 1996, p. 7). In this context, African Americans’ identification with Judaism exemplifies the interplay between diaspora and religious pluralism. For African Americans, whose collective identity has been shaped by the traumatic legacy of enslavement, the framework of religious pluralism offered a means to construct a self-defined narrative.

I propose to examine here the settings in which the encounter of African Americans with Judaism took place, in studying the mechanisms which are at the origin of the constitution of these movements. This journey of historical, religious, and ethnic affiliation will attempt trace the way in which these groups, on the margins of Jewish history and normative Judaism as well as on the “racial” boundaries of the Jewish people, came to proclaim themselves as being Jewish and accepted as such. My intention is to highlight how factual situations of cultural and religious diversity may lead to individual, social, and political choices in the context of organized and recognized pluralism.

2. “Emancipatory Pluralism”, Diaspora, and Religious Modernity

African Americans internalized the theoretical reflections on religious pluralism with an exceptional combination of history, mythology, religion, and politics. From the 19th century, the appropriation of Jewish history by African Americans followed the path of a search for origins that gave them back an history and allowed them to overthrow the American racist hierarchy of values. The history of Black Jewish movements highlights the dynamic nature of diaspora as a site of religious and cultural transformation.

Today, long-established communities of African Americans have been practicing Judaism from more than 150 years.2 Some of them have Jewish heritage, others identify with Judaism, some have converted to Judaism, and others relate to Judaism through marriage and extended family. In initiating a totally new religious landscape, African American Jews have perfectly illustrated the formula of Martin E. Marty: “Pluralism is the name for dealing with the groups that ‘do’ religion” (Marty 2013).

In the culture of Black people and within the social context of early 19th-century America, there was a notable attraction among preachers and prophets to the history of the Hebrew people, who had been persecuted, dispersed, exiled, and enslaved—an experience that appeared to parallel the history of Black people. From the early 1900s, folk preachers became conversant with the Holy Scriptures and spread the doctrine that “the so-called Negroes were really the lost sheep of the House of Israel”. The reading of the Old Testament, specifically the Psalms, Proverbs, and Prophets, widely disseminated by preachers, influenced the cultural framework within which Black people began to construct a collective identity. This compelling sense of identification with the children of Israel, along with the tendency to dwell incessantly upon and relive the stories of the Old Testament, characterized the religious songs of the slaves: songs about Moses and Joshua became the “oral Bible” of the slaves (Bruder 2014, pp. 79–86).

Understanding how the communities of Black Jews established themselves in a few years and attracted numerous followers requires re-situating the social and political context in which they were born. It is important to consider the interaction between the exclusion of African Americans from the political system in the context of the Great Depression of 1929 and the political substitution function played by Black churches, sects, and other religious movements aimed at this population.

In 1866, at the end of the Civil War, Black people obtained civil rights through the Civil Rights Act. During the subsequent ten years, they gained access to the electoral rolls and elected deputies and senators of color. However, in 1877, the newly elected President of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, anxious to conciliate the former ruling classes of the South, withdrew federal troops who had enforced the laws in the Southern states. The legalization of racial segregation in public places and discrimination in most Southern states excluded Blacks from exercising any citizenship rights, not to mention the thousands of lynchings they suffered (Bruder 2023, pp. 121–27).

Their exclusion from the political sphere meant that the religious field replaced many of its functions, favoring the emergence of new forms of religiosity that were more emancipated from the traditions of established Protestant churches. It is within this complex fabric—where social demands, exacerbated Pietism, and a confused desire for autarky intersected—that the first significant demonstrations among Black Americans referencing Judaism and Islam were observed.

Black Jews constitute a minority whose first manifestations date back to the 1920s and 1930s. In the wake of the inaugural break sparked by currents of Afrocentric ideas and in the context of the Great Depression, movements of Black Muslims, Black Jews, and other communities arose alongside a multitude of syncretic sects and para-Christian churches. At the heart of these movements was a desire to reclaim a sense of belonging of their own choosing. By identifying with Judaism, African Americans could assert a connection to a rich and ancient heritage while challenging narratives that confined them to the margins of American society. This blending of diasporic consciousness and religious pluralism underscored the instrumental role of religion in fostering resilience and solidarity among marginalized groups.

From the 1920s onward, African Americans established Jewish communities in cities like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, blending traditional Jewish practices with African American expressions of faith. These decentralized and heterogeneous movements exemplified the creative potential of diaspora, where religious pluralism allowed for the reinvention of inherited traditions. Françoise Champion has termed this type of pluralism rooted in an identity “emancipatory or individualistic”. (Champion 1999) This theorization aligns with Beckford’s definition of “strong [religious] pluralism”, which describes a social and political system that manages religious diversity by granting every religion equal respect and equal opportunities for individuals to practice their own faiths.

The existence of Black Jews became more widely recognized around the 1960s, when several thousand African Americans, primarily confined in American ghettos, claimed to follow the Mosaic law and adhered to Judaism by creating structured communities. Scattered across major cities in the central United States, such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, as well as in smaller cities in the East, a myriad of heterogeneous Black Jewish movements emerged (Landes 1967). While asserting an original Black Jewish faith, these movements were decentralized and diverse in their ideologies and beliefs.

These movements marked the beginnings of a fundamental approach by Black American activists, linking a search for identity—breaking with the humiliations of slavery—to the quest for an ancestral and mythical place of origin. In the context of religious pluralism in the United States, these groups emerged with the perspective of transforming religion into a political power capable of opposing white supremacy. Today, these movements continue to exist, often remaining heterogeneous and heterodox compared to the standards of Judaism.

3. From Collective Memory to Identity Construction

African American Jewish groups are based on the unanimous affirmation of an originally Black Jewish faith and the construction of a Hebrew past. The interdisciplinary concept of “collective memory” emerged within the social sciences through the theories of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1996). The term “collective” that precedes “memory” implies that a process of remembering unfolds within societies, by affirming their past as a diasporic community. Through this process, individuals and collectives establish continuity between the past, present, and future, which in turn shapes their identities, behaviors, attitudes, choices, ideologies, and beliefs.

Two themes dominate the process of collective memory and identity construction among African Americans: the updating of the myth of the “Lost and Found” tribes of Israel, which serves as the basis for a Jewish origin and history, and the creation of a Jewish–Ethiopian genealogy that leads to the self-legitimation of the “Black Jew” category—an ethno-religious absorption/construction that I consider emblematic of a pluralist context. Over time, within the claim of Jewish descent, certain themes have persisted, established fashions, been lost, resurfaced, and outlined permanencies.

The process of Judaization among African Americans followed the history of Afrocentric political texts, which provided a theoretical basis for identifying ancient Egypt as a great Black civilization.3 The various currents of Afrocentric thought assert that humanity first developed in Africa, not only biologically, as is accepted today, but also in terms of civilization. The earliest African American texts, dating back to 1790, already contained themes that would be repeated in later decades. They asserted that it was from the first purely Black civilization of ancient Egypt that the foundation of all African culture and thought on the continent was formed, constituting an absolute unity of values and civilization. Egyptian ideas and inventions were also posited as the bases of ancient Greek civilization, suggesting that all European development was, in fact, the result of the dispossession of Africans.

Many of these bold assertions mobilized impressive erudition, drawing from biblical, theological, historical, and anthropological sources, often acquired autodidactically by the pioneers of the movement. The liberties taken with historical research and the power of individual fantasy evident in the authors’ remarks reveal the mystical inspiration of “messiahs” and their capacity to produce an ethnic or religious product that met the expectations of the Black population.4 The ideas of Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912), a prophet of Afrocentrism imbued with ethnic nationalism, prefigure those still at the heart of contemporary Afrocentric movements. Blyden, who visited Egypt in 1860, wrote of discovering the pyramids: “This, I thought, was the work of my African ancestors… Feelings overwhelmed me far beyond what I had felt with the most powerful achievements of European genius. I felt a particular heritage in front of the Great Pyramid built… by the sons of Ham, from whom I descend… I had the impression of feeling the influence of those who transmitted civilization to Greece”. (Blyden 1869, p. 71).

The vagueness surrounding the biblical narratives of the exile of the Lost Tribes of Israel, which mention Kush, Ethiopia, and the descent of Noah, have generally been subject to eschatological interpretations over the centuries and played a metahistorical role. The identification of Black people made by preachers, using various biblical passages—including the crucial Psalm 68:31, “…Kush shall stretch out their hands to God”—was interpreted as a prophetic announcement and became the basis for identification with the Ethiopians of the Bible. It is noteworthy that in Talmudic sources, although the Lost Tribes were exiled in Assyria, it was acknowledged that a certain number of them wandered beyond the mountains of Kush [Africa]: “…he took with him the tribes of Judah and Simon, and in a miraculous way they came behind the mountains of darkness which are beyond the rivers of Kush”.

Channeling the energy of social frustration, the appropriation of the Jewish religion by these groups in search of identity led some to conclude that they were the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and, as such, were the authentic Jews—the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The first Afrocentric authors—most of whom were clergymen—subjected the biblical references concerning the descent of Noah to their own linguistic and textual interpretations, establishing that Blacks were descendants of Ham and Kush. In the same movement, they discarded theological references that supported the idea that Africans were the children of Cain or that they were subject to Noah’s curse. Although the Old Testament does not specify that the lineage of Ham, Kush, Canaan, or Nimrod is black, the pioneers of Afrocentrism concluded that the climatic conditions of Africa had transformed them into Aethiops or “burnt faces” (Blyden 1869).

These fantasies combined with the travel stories of Jewish travelers, such as that of Eldad the Danite in the 9th century, the fantastic fables of Prester John in the 11th century, and testimonies from El Idrissi in the 12th century or Leo the African in the 16th century, which mentioned the existence of Jewish communities settled in Africa long nourished both Jewish and Christian imaginations with the myth of the Lost Tribes on the African continent (Bruder 2014, pp. 19–28).

The analogy with the Jewish experience was fully integrated and conceptualized by thinkers of Afrocentrist movements such as W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), Martin Delany (1812–1885), and James A. Horton (1835–1883) (Du Bois 1915; Delany 1880; Horton and Shepperson 1868), who developed diasporic images of Africa while campaigning for racial equality and respect for Black people. Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), nicknamed the “Black Moses”, founded a Pan-Africanism oriented towards the masses and akin to an African-style Zionism between 1920 and 1935. He systematically embraced the dual identification of Blacks with Ethiopians and of Ethiopians with the Hebrews of the Bible. One of the objectives of his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), was the repatriation of Black people of the African Diaspora to Africa and the creation of “a strong and powerful Negro nation in Africa” (see among others, Asante 1988; Appiah 1992; Mudimabe 1988). He launched the famous slogan “Africa for the Africans” and proclaimed that all Africans were Hebrews. The birth of Zionism and the theme of return—central in Judaism—dominated his declarations, as exemplified by his statement: “A new spirit, a new courage has come to us at the same time as it has come to the Jew. When a Jew says, “We will have Palestine”, the same feeling comes to us when we say, ‘We will have Africa’”.

In a succession of mythical elaborations and semantic shifts, the process of collective memory pointed to Ethiopia as the birthplace of African Americans and the locus of the myth of an ancient Black American Judaism before slavery (Cronon 1960).

4. Diaspora, Pluralism, and “Who Is Jew?”

The dissemination of information about the Jewish diaspora of Ethiopia—the Falashas (or Beta Israel)—was an important event at the beginning of the 20th century which helped to accelerate the identification of the black American diaspora with the Jewish diaspora (Tölöyan 1996). In 1911, Jacques Faitlovitch, the Zionist ethnologist who was researching the descendants of the Lost Tribes, made his first visit to American Jewish communities. Faitlovitch, who wanted to draw attention to the Falashas, whom he had immediately considered Jewish, worked to ensure that they were recognized in the United States.5 According to Ruth Landes, who first studied the Jews of Harlem between 1920 and 1930, “Faitlovich was disturbed, although skeptical, when the leader of the ‘rabbi’ groups declared that African Hebrew heritage belonged only to blacks and included the Falashas, the Queen of Sheba and the tribes of West Africa’”. (Landes 1967, p. 176).

Nevertheless, as evidenced by the documentation on Black Jews gathered in the Faitlovitch Archives in Tel Aviv, this first visit was followed by two other trips in 1914–1915. The presence of the researcher, on several occasions, among the Blacks of Harlem was of considerable interest for the affiliation of Black Jews to an imaginary Jewish community. The ongoing process of transformation of their identity was without any doubt reinforced by the existence and fate of the Falashas: “…for historical and sentimental reasons. We see there a branch of our people torn from the body of Israel, which fights heroically for its existence”.6

It was in this context that the first ethnologists and missionaries exploring and interpreting Africa concluded that some of the African tribes they encountered in many regions of Africa—the Zulus, the Xhosa, the Hottentots, the Tutsi, the Masai—were Jewish or of Jewish origin (Bruder 2014, p. 51 ff). The European Protestant and Jewish missionaries who first encountered the Falashas had resorted to describing them by “their physical Jewish features” to justify their biological and ethnic kinship with white Jews. If certain reports, such as those of Joseph Halévy and Wolf Leslau, bring the Falashas closer to the indigenous Ethiopian populations, the reports of Aaron Stern and Faitlovitch propagate in the West the idea that the Falashas possessed Jewish traits which differentiated them from their Amhara neighbors. Stern, who visited the Falashas in Ethiopia, wrote: “There are Jewish traits that one cannot mistake when one has already met the descendants of Abraham in London or Berlin”. (Parfitt and Trevisan-Semi 2013, p. XV).

The subject of skin color and “race” raised for the first time during the discovery of the Falashas led to a re-examination of notions of identity and difference. It demonstrated in some way that a black-skinned group could be Jewish, while practicing a marginal form of Judaism and ignoring rabbinical practices. This upheaval of their identity, concomitant with the discovery of the Ethiopian Jews, participated in the creation of a new theoretical concept, that of the “Black Jew”. By associating Jewishness and Africanness, the process of Judaization of the Falashas establishing their kinship, imaginary or real, with the Jewish world reinforced the polymorphous representations of the concept of “Black Jew”. By the invention of a Jewish genealogy—Falasha ancestors in distant Ethiopian villages—Black Jews avoided finding themselves in the necessity of accessing Judaism through conversion and justified an ethnic definition of Jewish identity invested more symbolically.7

5. Are Jews Black?

One of the identification strategies of the construction of the category of “Black Jew” by African Americans is based on the controversial affirmation that “the colored man is the authentic Jew” and on the accumulation of confused and contradictory considerations on the black skin of Jesus and the imposture of the white Jews. These assertions, born with the first Afrocentric currents, have been combined with a set of configurations which shed light on the crossing of distances, both physical and conceptual, undertaken by Black Jews. In the 1970s, Yosef Ben-Jochannen, renowned spokesperson for modern Afrocentrism, long an activist in nationalist associations in Harlem, conveyed in Black Man of the Nile (1972) the thesis of the identification of the Hebrews of the Bible with a black nation. He vehemently asserted in his book We the Black Jews: Witness to the ‘Jewish Race’ Myth (1983) that white Jews were impostors on a historical scale and that the cultural heritage they claimed belonged exclusively to black Africans (Howe 1998; see also Addai-Sebo and Wong 1988). In addition to the freedom taken with historical research and the power of fantasy which shines through in the remarks made by the authors of “wild Afrocentrism”, as Howe defines them, these texts and declarations reveal the most characteristic incongruities which lay the foundations of a communal antagonism between Blacks and Jews. Frances Cress Welsing, a pseudo-researcher renowned for the sensationalism of her comments, explains the animosity most white people appear to have toward people of color:

“I say that white skin is a genetic mutation. Black people can procreate white people. White people can only procreate white people. White people are mutants of black people, Jews being the product of genetic mixing that occurred when white Greek and Roman soldiers invaded Africa and raped the women, who of course were black, Semitic means mulatto. They were therefore considered to be half-black, half-white, as genetically colored people”.

(Howe 1998, p. 222)

This discourse, however imaginative and fantastical it may be, nevertheless appears as predetermined and dependent on a Western normative discourse. The claim by black communities of ethnic affiliation to the Jewish people is linked to figures established in the visual and narrative imagination of the West since the Middle Ages. The theme of skin color and “race” ostensibly put forward by the existence of Black Jews has linked Jews and Blacks, the quintessence of the “Other” in Western representation, since the dawn of time (Bruder 2014, pp. 45–49). As Sandor Gilman defined it, “the very concept of color is a characteristic of otherness, and not a reality, because not only Blacks are black in the formless universe of projection but so are Jews” (Gilman 1986, p. 6). The blackness of the Jews was obvious to the emerging anthropology of the 19th century—so that the Jews were black. In the middle of the 19th century, Robert Knox, curator of the College Museum in Edinburgh, affirmed “the African character of the Jew, his snout-shaped mouth, and his face distinguishing him from other races” (Gilman 1996, p. 214). At the same time, a German anatomist, Petrus Camper, was able to affirm, from a system of measuring the facial angle and its corollary the nasal index, a connection between Africans and Jews by the curve of their nose.8

In an inextricable tangle of distance and proximity, the affirmation of the “blackness” of the Jews by Black Jews infiltrated ideas of a direct filiation between Jews and Blacks.

6. From Interfaith Encounters to Organized Pluralities

With the First World War, Northern factories in search of cheap labor had brought African Americans to the industrial belt of the United States in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Pennsylvania. There existed in large cities a promiscuity of residence and work between Jews and Blacks, at the origin of multiple and complex interactions between the two communities in which the economy, as well as politics, played a determining role (Bruder 2023, pp. 113–23).

The Black Jewish communities with the most structured ideologies appeared after the First World War when the Jewish population left the ghettos to settle in new areas of residence. In the 1920s, thousands of religious Jews remained in New York’s ghettos, particularly in Harlem. Blacks could therefore see Jews alongside them and observe their organization and progressive integration. Faced with the social, economic, and political disorganization of black society, Booker T. Washington—who contributed, alongside E. Blyden and W.E.B. Dubois, to the birth of black consciousness—had drawn up in 1884 a “Jewish model” which recommended imitating the behavior of the Jews. He wrote: “We have a brilliant and striking example of the history of the Jews in this and other countries… If the Negro does not learn more and more to imitate the Jew in these matters, then he cannot hope to succeed”.9

The religious fervor of the Jews of Central Europe could not help but find a resonance in the black soul and visibly had an impact on the inhabitants of the ghettos. In Harlem, black people occasionally worked as shabbos goyim (non-Jews employed by Jews) to perform certain tasks, such as turning on the lights in synagogues during Shabbat. Ulysses Santamaria uses the term “mimetic conversion” to explain this appropriation of the Jewish religion by certain black people from the ghettos, an appropriation which could range from outright annexation to a search for assimilation and recognition by white Jewish communities (Santamaria 1987, pp. 226–27). Some famous examples illustrate this assimilation. As a teenager, the politician Colin Powell worked in a Jewish store in the Bronx and kept lights on for Jewish families as shabbos goyim. It was in this way that he learned Yiddish, which he mastered perfectly, and throughout his political career he was an ardent philosemite. In similar circumstances, Louis Armstrong, placed in a children’s home in New Orleans, was, according to legend, given his first instrument by a Jewish family of Russian origin. The Karnofskys, who had taken a liking to him, gave him the family he lacked by integrating him into their own way of life. Armstrong learned to speak Yiddish fluently and wore a Star of David around his neck throughout his life. After World War II, a new wave of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe, survivors of the Holocaust, settled in Harlem. Their proximity to Blacks and their rapid progress, linked to their powerful cohesion, intensified the wave of affiliation or conversion of Blacks to Judaism.

The concentration of African Americans in northern cities also meant access to political participation and representation. In the 1920s–1930s, the Communist Party in New York or Chicago was particularly active in the Black community; this was also the case of the Democratic Party with Roosevelt and the great liberal coalition of the New Deal, which were places of contact between Blacks and Jews. Among intellectuals, Jews formed a significant portion of the liberals who actively defended African Americans and helped them create organizations to promote their civil rights. Two of the most important African American organizations, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League, were founded with the support of rabbis and Jewish social workers who led the abolitionist movement with Du Bois and liberal white people (Bruder 2023, pp. 171–74).

7. Pluralities Inside Pluralism

Pluralism is generally viewed as relating to different religious groups. Right from the start of their movement, the Black Jews set up sub-groups, using self-definitions, or building categories based on personal issues drawn from empirical observations and feelings, implementing plurality inside pluralism (Lamine 2013). They highlighted the fact that religious pluralism is itself plural as stressed out by Nancy Ammerman: “Plurality in religions begins in fact, with the everyday experiences and dilemmas of ordinary people” (Ammerman 2010).

If we can attribute one of the first concrete manifestations of black Judaism to William Saunders Crowdy around 1896, it was from 1915 that the first organized black Jewish communities appeared which named their members Black Jews. In New York, between 1919 and 1931, eight black Jewish synagogues were founded in Harlem, and the rabbis, most of them self-proclaimed, adopted Jewish names. These groups were strongly marked by the charisma of their leaders, who exerted a sort of fascination on their members and systematized the myth of an Ethiopian origin.10 These decentralized and heterogeneous groups were characterized by a very personal interpretation and a rudimentary knowledge of Orthodox Jewish law and customs. This was the time when much of Harlem’s Jewish population emigrated to new areas while black people partly replaced them.11

The first Black Jewish congregation was created in New York in 1924 by Josiah Ford, who in some ways re-crystallized the African nationalist program of Garvey and the U.N.I.A (Universal Negro Improvement Association). Towards the end of 1924, Ford first founded the Moorist Zionist Church, which quickly split in two, giving birth to the congregation Beth B’nai Abraham (House of the Sons of Abraham), to which some white Jews from Harlem lent their patronage. Claiming that Africans were the authentic “Hebrews”, Ford came to reject the designation Jew, recalling that the Queen of Sheba was Ethiopian, and that Solomon had said “I am Ethiopian”. He himself claimed to be of Ethiopian and princely origin and contributed largely to the invention of a glorious past linked to a future of freedom. He gathered evidence of the identity or close similarity of Hebrew to the Hausa language or Ethiopian, and constantly asserted that black Africa had founded Judaism, Egypt, and, indirectly, Europe. Declaring himself the custodian of the Hebrew knowledge of Africans, he even claimed a hereditary right to the office of rabbi (Landes 1967, pp. 181–83).

The best-known congregation in Harlem was The Commandment Keepers Congregation of the Living God (which was also called The Royal Order of Ethiopian Hebrews), created in the 1920s, which contributed greatly to the creation and perpetuation of the myth of their Ethiopian ancestry. This congregation existed legally from 1930 and the New York Court recognized its right to call itself Jewish (Idem, p. 183). Wentworth A. Matthew, its leader, having spent his youth in the West Indies like many members of the community, claimed Ethiopian origin. When he arrived in New York, he was in contact with white Jewish circles, met Ford, who “ordained” him, and became “Rabbi” Matthew. He shared with Ford the view that “those who are called negroes were in fact the children of the House of Israel”, and he set out his views in a work, The Anthropology of the Ethiopian Hebrews and their Relationship to the Fairer Jews, aimed at members of the community.12

Matthew established his Synagogue as well as a rabbinical school, The Ethiopian Hebrew Rabbinical School of Religion, which trained rabbis while propagating the theme of the continuity of historical links between black Americans and the Falashas.13 In 1929, the group had around a hundred members, mainly women; it reached 175 members in 1930, including six white Jews.14 Subsequently, the number of members only increased, reaching 800 members in 1949 and 1100 according to Matthew himself in 1957 (Ehrman 1959, p. 267). The movement had reached the figure of 8000 people across the United States in the late 1950s.

The openness brought by religious pluralism favored the emergence of many other Black Jewish communities. Even if The Commandment Keepers was undoubtedly the most important and best structured movement of Black Jews, there were other congregations in Harlem in the 1920s that intended to connect with the Ethiopian Judaism and the Falashas. In the Congregation Hashabah Yisroel in Brooklyn, or the The Tabernacle of Israel in Bedford–Stuyvesant, men wore turbans, and rings in their nostrils, and sometimes they carried spears. They mixed some orthodox practices with resurgences of African animist practices and evoked a myth of origins based on royal descent, Lions of Judah, and Abyssinian princes.15 The various trends of African American Judaism stand out for the concept of “solidarity without consensus” suggested by Lamine, inaugurating micro-level pluralities within pluralism (Lamine 2013).

By the 1960s, Chicago was the second-largest city in the United States for its black Jewish community; there were five large congregations and half a dozen smaller ones.16 Among the multitude of heterodox black Jewish movements that developed in Chicago at this time, an important group, the Abeta Hebrew Israel Cultural Center, professed an ideology based primarily on the notion of the “return” of African Americans to the land of their ancestors. On an exclusively black racial Judaism, Carter Ben Ammi, the spiritual leader of these Hebrew Israelites had, following a divine revelation, the certainty that the Africans were descendants of the Tribe of Judah exiled in Africa at the time of the dispersion. He affirmed that the time had come for them to return to their homeland and that white America had always falsified the history of Africa, and he violently rejected its political power. In May 1967, three Abeta leaders, including Ben Ammi, flew to Liberia to settle on the African continent, quickly followed by two hundred other Hebrew Israelites who left the United States with the pioneering plan of becoming farmers. The experience was brief, lasting only two years, due to economic difficulties and integration problems. In 1969, the community made the decision to regroup in Israel and claimed the right to Israeli nationality under the Law of Return. The Israeli government, not being of this opinion, decreed that the request of the Hebrew Israelites was devoid of legitimacy and refused them the advantages attached to immigration to the Holy Land. Following negotiations over their status between the American and Israeli governments, the Hebrew Israelites eventually settled in the towns of Dimona and Arad in the Negev. They established a way of life like that of the Kibbutz, as well as an educational program that combined the spiritual values of their community with the teaching of modern Hebrew and Israeli civic instruction, grafting adaptations such as a sectarian-type hierarchy and the practice of polygamy. Upon his arrival, Ben Ammi proclaimed that only Hebrew Israelites—and not white Jews—were the “true heirs of Israel”, that only blacks were Hebrews, and that the black race was the only original Hebrew race (Felton 1974, pp. 12–16). Since then, the situation has changed in the direction of their integration.

8. Jewish Missionary Movements: Inclusivism and Universalism

Even if the mythical constructions of previous communities persisted, some of these communities subsequently distinguished themselves from their elders by a more religious definition of their identity; the teaching of Hebrew was seen as carrying Hebrew values.

At the beginning of 1967, the creation of the United Leaders’ Council of Hebrew Israelites (ULCHI) brought together four groups of Black Jews under the leadership of their rabbis, who had formed, with the help of a few white rabbis, the association The Chicago Fellowship of Racial Jews to program education for black Jewish communities.17 In the same vein, in 1965, a group of young black and white Jews was formed, Hatza’ad Harishon, whose aim was to raise the educational level of Black people and to facilitate their access to a Jewish culture (Bruder 2023, pp. 182–85). These events call for active understanding across the lines of difference. This is characterized as religious pluralism by Diana L. Eck in her elaborate analysis of the American society, where she emphasized the need for a concerted effort to build up pluralistic societies in America (Eck 2002).

The creation of “The Lost Tribes Committees” at the birth of the State of Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s brought additional ferment to Black Jewish congregations. This is the time when numerous movements and associations were formed in Israel and abroad to support the nidhei Yisrael, an expression used at that time to designate the Ten Lost Tribes, with the project of creating the conditions for a return to Judaism or emigration to Israel.18 These movements were created and supported by influential figures such as the founding President of the State of Israel Yitzhak ben Zvi or Nahoum Slouschz, one of the first Zionists, a great traveler who spent a good part of his life in search of the Lost Tribes. Although of different Zionist affiliations, these characters had in common a vision that was both romantic and universalist of Judaism, “considered to be an open religion, with diverse nuances making no distinction between peoples and skin colors”, rather than “an ‘ethnic religion’, the expression of a unique people”, and they viewed the creation of the State of Israel as the fulfillment of the prophecies of Isaiah, Zephaniah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah.19 This kind of concept has been developed more recently by Raphael Jospe, a Haifa University professor, who defined as ethical pluralism a universal ethic combined with a pluralism, taking into consideration the multiplicity of human subjectivity. In combining a universal ethic with pluralism, while remaining with a traditional textual approach, his reflexions are similar to those of many of the non-Jewish liberal theologians (Raphael 2007).

One such missionary movement, called The Mosaic Law for One World, was formed in New York in 1944 by David Horowitz and Eliezer Schindler. As evidenced by their correspondence, in 1947, Faïtlovich gave him his support. Horowitz himself was in contact with the American Pro-Falasha Committee and had integrated the Falasha issue into his organization’s program. Horowitz’s missionary work began in California, known for the great diversity of its sects. At first it was not very successful, but then it spread to other regions of the United States, where conversions took place, including that of an entire village in Michigan.20 The Mosaic Law for one World association, which defined itself as “an international movement for the dissemination of the Decalogue both within and beyond the boundaries of Jewishness”, managed to establish links with Jewish groups of Israel as the Canaanite Movement, but gained little support from rabbis and Jewish laity, probably because of the type of Judaism it advocated. However, it succeeded in spreading its message among the African American Judaizing movements of Harlem.21

The utopian tendency of a universal Judaism which emanated from the Lost Tribes Committees could only irrigate and invigorate the self-generated Judaizing movements of the United States, by providing them with additional legitimacy coming from the Jews themselves, directly with current events in history.

African Americans and American Jews have had a unique relationship, whose ambiguities are multiple. Hasia Diner describes how, from the beginning of the 20th century, relations between Blacks and Jews were characterized by the action/reaction binomial: action for the Jews, reaction for the Blacks, in a way reinstating the colonist/colonized relationship. Since the Civil Rights Movement, which brought them together in the 1950s and 1960s in the face of an American establishment in which racism and anti-Semitism constituted the same cause, relations between Jews and Blacks experienced growing tensions and dissensions to reach fundamental breaking points.22 The anti-Semitic campaign of Jesse Jackson in 1983, the incrimination of Jews by Louis Farrakhan between 1983 and 1992, the position taken by the Black Panthers in favor of the PLO in the Arab Israeli question, and the current violent antisemitic manifestations due to the Israeli–Hamas war on 7 October 2023, did not prevent, despite their virulence and intensity, the communities of Black Jews from attracting new followers and developing.23 There is no exact estimate of the number of Black Jews in the United States, the most likely estimate being 50,000 members. The study of the great diversity of the communities of Black Jews—emanation of plurality within pluralism—which are attached to the Reform branches, conservative and sometimes orthodox American Judaism, remains to be done.24 Rabbi Shlomo Levy, an African American Jew, rabbi of the New York Community Beth Elohim, who practices a Judaism that he defines as being between orthodoxy and conservatism, says: “We exist both in our religious communities and in largely white communities. Some of us converted to Judaism, others are from mixed marriages, and others have practiced this way of life for generations. The diversity within our community has as many nuances as the colors of the rainbow”. In 1995, a number of these communities came together within the National Alliance of Black Jews under the leadership of Rabbi Capers Funnye, spiritual leader of Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, located in Chicago. The formation of an organized community structure, capable of negotiating its place within global society and with state institutions, appears to mark a stage in the evolution of hitherto fragmented communities of Black Jews.

In January 2006, two institutions, The Institute for Jewish and Community Research and Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation of San Francisco, funded a trip to Nigeria. Their representatives aimed to meet the different communities of Igbos, who declare themselves to be of Jewish ancestry, and to consolidate their adherence to Judaism by offering them the opportunity to join a recent structure, The Pan African Jewish Alliance (PAJA). More recently, in February 2023, an initiative from Kulanu, a Jewish non-profit organization based in New York which financially and culturally supports new Jews around the world, has enabled the creation of SAJA (Sub-Saharan Jewish Alliance), and the meeting of ten African Jewish communities in Abidjan from Tanzania, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon, and Ivory Coast with a clear message of about a united Black Jewry.25

9. Diaspora, Religious Pluralism, and Black Judaism

The emergence of African American Judaism has expanded the discourse on religious pluralism, challenging both Jewish and non-Jewish communities to reconsider racial and cultural assumptions about religious identity. This dynamic underscores the role of diasporas in reshaping religious boundaries and practices. The phenomenon of African American communities embracing Judaism exemplifies how religious pluralism and diaspora intersect to produce new forms of religious and cultural identity. These communities defy traditional notions of both Jewishness and African Americanness, demonstrating the fluidity of identity in diasporic contexts. By navigating between legitimacy, cultural adaptation, and socio-political resistance, African American Jewish groups highlight the transformative power of pluralism in fostering inclusive and dynamic religious landscapes.

While confronting social, cultural, and political discrimination, the United States religious context allowed African Americans to find in the Old Testament and in Judaism resources to temper their own dissatisfaction and rehabilitate their dignity. Drawing upon their collective historical experiences with the Hebrews of the Old Testament, as well as their own cultural resources, they promoted a new understanding of the biblical text inspired by their situation. The religious, ethnic, and historical incorporation of Judaism by African Americans groups irreversibly transformed the course of their history. Refreshing the universalist conception of Judaism which was that of the prophets of the Bible, through a series of events and interactions, groups of African Americans—until then on the margins of Jewish history—have gradually transformed into Jews, by initiating a redefinition of their identity and affirming a Jewish lineage.

The construction of religious identities that emerged in the early stages of globalization may need to be rethought and replaced with outlooks that embrace hybridity and pursue a universalist vision. Contacts and exchanges between Blacks and Judaism reflect the development of various conceptions of Judaism and the movement of men and metaphors in a pluralistic context. African American Jews are now part of millions of people who do not match with Jewish conventional criteria but who nevertheless consider themselves to be practicing Jews, sometimes accepting conversion, sometimes not. Following Anthony P. Cohen’s concept of communities, I will take a constructivist approach—considering that the creation of African American affiliation to Judaism is “symbolically constructed” (Cohen 1993). Dealing with a system of values, norms, and codes that provides a sense of identity for its members, it can be approached as a phenomenon of culture linked to the historical and political consciousness of these communities, meaningfully constructed by diasporic people through their symbolic resources. Even if the seeds for such a phenomenon have been ingrained a long time ago, affiliation with Judaism can legitimately be classified as a marker of the creation of a modern individual subject in a global dimension. By finding in Jewish identity an important source for sustaining spiritual, moral, and political power, the construction of belonging to Judaism has come to be a primordial aspect of African American identity deliberately turned towards the future. African American Jews’ behavior claims that they are not stuck within the boundaries of their identity and assumes a strong global inclination.

In recent decades, globalization, with its repercussions on the mobility of individuals and ideas, has modified the notion of “society of origin” and has called into question hegemonic discourses, while modifying religious, cultural, economic, and political perspectives. These developments have permeated systems of thought, inspiring and nourishing them at the same time. From the 1970s, French new philosophical, literary, and social theories have brought about a turning point in the conception of the minority condition and of identity. The development of a cultural identity nourished by differences has initiated profound transformations of relationship to the origin, space, and movement, highlighting a heterogeneous and hybrid vision of cultural signifiers. In the United States, the Cultural Studies movement associated with the notion of “traveling cultures” and its encounter with the French Theory in the 1980s contributed to this. Following the French post-structuralism, thinkers such as Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida have led to a reassessment of notions of identity and ethnicity, while in the United States, authors such as Hall, Clifford, and Bhabha have reevaluated the notion of identity as freedom. They have developed an alternative vision of Black identity, associating it with moving references and multiple values, rather than with a closed universe (Hall 1999, pp. 1–18; Clifford 1999, pp. 302–38; Homi 1994). Stuart Hall, who is of Jamaican origin, comments on these changes of perspectives: “What is important are the significant ruptures—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, grouped around a different whole hypotheses and themes”. (Hall 1980, p. 53) Rejecting identity closure and essentialism, the reflections of these authors promote a culture/religion made of connections and crossings, which cross national and ethnic boundaries, totally related to diasporas and pluralism.