The Emergence of Black Jews in France

Abstract

For the past three decades, Black Jews in France have made their presence manifest. These believers identify as African, West Indian, or biracial, and are either converts or native Jews. They may either assert their faith from within the institutions of French Jewry, or claim their Jewishness without practicing Judaism. They have widely different backgrounds, but share a common need for identity reconstruction. This paper aims to discuss this Africana minority within the broader French Jewish community, taking into account its relation to the majority. What is the positioning of Black Jews as French citizens or residents? How do they perceive themselves when reading the Torah and through the gaze of their fellow White Jews? What is their place within the global Jewish world? Such are the questions this paper will try to address, building on fifteen years of fieldwork in France and assessing their involvement in French Jewry and its impact with regard to participation, integration, legitimacy, and conflicts.

1. Introduction

Judaism is commonly perceived as a religion practiced by groups identifying as White—mostly Ashkenazim and Sephardim. This precludes, in the minds of Jews themselves, the possibility of there existing Jews who are Black, apart from Ethiopian Jews. However, over the past three decades, Black Jews have gained momentum and visibility in Africa, thanks in part to the emergence of new narratives on Black identities, which have been studied by several researchers from various academic disciplines (Dorès 1992, 2003; Anteby-Yemini 2004; Van Slageren 2009; Dorman 2012; Jackson 2013; Parfitt 2013; Bruder 2014; Le Roux 2015; Lis 2015; Parfitt and Semi 2022; Miller 2024). Yet, Jewish believers are not found solely in Africa or Israel; they travel the world and some have settled in France, alongside the Ashkenazi/Sephardic subgroups. As a result, the vibrancy of African Judaism may also be observed in France, where the presence of Black believers has become increasingly visible over the past twenty years, due essentially to their organizing into two main associations, the Fraternité internationale des Juifs noirs (international brotherhood of Black Jews, hereafter FJN) and Ami-Farafina-Israël (hereafter AMIFA). This points to the emergence of a new facet of French Jewry, resulting from these believers’ efforts to make themselves visible both within and outside of synagogues. Yet, apart from my own work (Mokoko Gampiot 2024), there is a dearth of studies on Black Jews and their interactions with Jewish authorities in France. This contribution will therefore discuss the itineraries of converts as well as native-born Jews hailing from Africa or the Caribbean.

This Africana minority shall be described within the broader French Jewish community, taking into account its relation to the majority. What is the positioning of Black Jews as French citizens or residents? How do they perceive themselves when reading the Torah and through the gaze of their fellow White Jews? What is their place within the global Jewish world? Such are the questions I will try to address, building on fifteen years of fieldwork in France and assessing their involvement in French Jewry and its impact with regard to participation, integration, legitimacy, and conflicts. In the four sections that follow, I will first describe the specific profiles of African and Caribbean believers through an analysis of their patterns of conversion experiences and their reasons for embracing Judaism. Secondly, I will show their modes of insertion in French Jewry, their negotiations of their multiple identities and their relations with Jewish institutions in France. The third section will discuss how personal dissatisfaction due to attitudes of rejection has gradually given rise to a collective protest movement with the Black Jewish organizations in France. The last one will describe the insertion of Black Jews in French society.

2. Who Are Black Jews in France? Profiles and Expression

Black Jews in France hail from French-, English- or Portuguese-speaking Africa as well as the Caribbean, North America (the US, Canada) or Israel. All of the 47 respondents have had a higher education, ranging from the second year of college to the Ph.D. The vast majority of my interviewees being members of FJN and AMIFA, they happened to have had access to higher education (like most African immigrants to France since the 1970s), which first triggered and then facilitated the conversion process of those who were not born Jewish, given that a convert needs to be literate in French in order to pass the exams. Those who are not converts come from families where higher education is valued. Most of those who are converts had prior religious background, due to their Christian past, their initial denominations being either Catholic or Protestant, especially Evangelical churches. Their conversion experiences sometimes reflect a very open, religiously diverse family environment, as in the case of a thirty-year-old female interviewee, who has a Buddhist father, a Christian mother, and a Muslim brother. In other instances, the converts’ family background is uniformly Christian. For example, Yvette is a Caribbean French woman whose family tradition is Catholic but who decided to become a Jew despite her family’s reluctance and the priest’s objections. The French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger describes the convert as the figure of the modern believer (Hervieu-Léger 1999), who counters inherited family traditions. The question leading my fieldwork was to identify the reasons behind the conversions of these African and Caribbean believers.

I found five categories of converts, the first of which is made up of people who chose to become Jewish after a personal spiritual quest. A thirty-year-old French African woman who was born in a Catholic family decided to find her own spiritual path. After joining Evangelical churches, she looked to Islam for answers to her quest, but did not find any until she read the books of Maimonides. Many other respondents went through a similar undertaking, searching for answers in books, documentary films, or discussions with Jewish spiritual authorities.

Unlike those who see conversion as a response to their spiritual quest, the second category of converts is composed of people who opted for Judaism because they are convinced they have a calling or a mission. Among these are former pastors of (born-again) Evangelical churches, such as a fifty-year-old French man of Togolese descent who used to pastor an Evangelical congregation of around a hundred members. Attracted to the Hebrew language and civilization, which he studied at the Sorbonne, he decided to renounce his Christian faith and convert to Judaism. He went to Israel, asked for conversion and says that he became a Rabbi there. Yet most of his congregation did not follow him down that path; only his wife and around twenty of his congregants now attend the synagogue of Les Ulis, in the greater Paris area. Another respondent who was a pastor and a doctor in Divinity converted after a series of dreams which he considered highly significant and decisive in his life. He kept dreaming of a white house with a “to let” sign, but with no door to be found. He eventually made the parallel between that house and the synagogue that was to become his place of worship. He designates these dreams as the catalyst to his conversion; he is now a member in a Liberal (Reform Judaism) community.

Yet another interviewee had been a Christian preacher in an Evangelical megachurch. The catalyst for his conversion to Judaism was provided when he discovered and understood a passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans (chapter 11, verses 16 to 24). While preparing a sermon on this passage, he made the decision to be grafted into the root, that is, convert to Judaism through the Consistory of Paris. The fact that Judaism came first as a monotheistic religion is frequently put forward to justify the decision to convert.

In addition to these two categories, a third one comprises the people who discovered their faith while living in Israel, as children of diplomats, students or interns, through daily contact and friendship with Israeli Jews. They are all of African descent, but they have adopted Israel as their homeland, because this is where they discovered Judaism and felt they belonged, from a religious point of view.

Sharing daily life with Jewish people is also a defining trait of the fourth category of respondents, who belong to interracial families. Some converted because they were adopted by Jewish families, which made their conversion a logical choice. Others did so as a result of couple dynamics rather than individual choice: living with Jewish partners, some converted gradually while others decided to do so before marriage so that their offspring may be born Jewish. Although Orthodox Judaism does not regard marriage as a valid motivation for conversion, it is a fact that the latter respondents did their best to align their spiritual itineraries with the conversion standards set by the religious authorities.

The issue of validity is even trickier when conversions are motivated by a sense of belonging that cannot be demonstrated. This is the defining trait of the fifth category of converts, which is made up of Blacks who subjectively identify their ethnic group as part of the Hebrew people and have chosen to convert in order to reconnect with their roots. Among them are Bantus from Central and South Africa, such as Cameroonians, Angolans and Congolese people who grew up in ethnic groups that consider themselves as historically, authentically Hebrew. For them, conversion represents a validation of their subjective identification to the Jewish people. Some respondents from the Caribbean combine the same subjective belief with genealogy, as did one female respondent from Martinique. She told me that her conversion had been triggered by the research she had done on her family tree, thanks to which she discovered that her European ancestors were Jews and not from Brittany as she had believed until then.

Aside from the five categories of converts, some of my respondents are native-born Jews who identify as Black or biracial, while others claim they have Jewish or Hebrew origins, and, as such, refuse to identify as converts—whether or not they practice Judaism within a Jewish community. Among these are Ethiopian Jews, Igbos from Nigeria, Danites from the Ivory Coast or Black Hebrew Israelites. For example, a fifty-four-year-old African American woman who was raised in the Baptist church and has lived in Paris since the nineteen eighties identifies as a member of the Black Jewish tradition, and worships at the synagogue of the rue Copernic (currently in the process of joining Judaïsme en Mouvement, or the French Reform Judaism movement). Like many others who identify as Black Jews, she sees conversion as needless, but insists on being fully part of a community in a synagogue.

At the same time, those who practice Judaism manifest a sentiment of identification with Jewish identity markers. These markers are recognizable tenets of ethnicity, such as the belief a common, mythical ancestor, leading to the ideology of descent; reverence for the Bible, the Kashrut and circumcision; a special relationship with the state of Israel; Hebrew first and sometimes last names; and the memory of the Holocaust. The following section will discuss the ways in which Black Jews—whether native-born or converts—situate themselves vis-à-vis fellow Jews with regard to their appropriation of such identity markers or claims to Jewishness.

3. Black Jews’ Identification to Jewish People and Insertion in French Jewry

Because Jewishness is so closely associated with ethnicity markers, Black native Jews or converts seem to feel compelled to search for legitimacy within French Jewry by means of a quest of an authentically Jewish ancestry. Confronted with the obstacle represented by the ideology of lineage, Black Jews seem to frequently marry Ashkenazim and Sephardim, in response to this injunction. It is so crucial to be able to prove one’s Jewishness via matrilineal descent that Black native Jews or converts often engage in genealogical searches to prove an ancestry which may be real, but also imaginary. All of these profiles of Black Jews share the need to express a Black Jewish identity that appropriates Biblical founding myths to confirm the hypothesis of the preexistence of Black civilizations.

At the center of this reconstruction of Black identity is Kemetism, a Pan-African movement that emerged in the 1970s in the USA and calls for a return to the values, beliefs, and religious practices of ancient Egypt, which is represented as the Black African matrix of all monotheistic religions (see Fila-Bakabadio 2016); as such, it surfaces in their understanding and interpretations of the Bible. It is difficult to speculate on the Blackness or Whiteness of Biblical Hebrews; but Tudor Parfitt convincingly theorized that African ethnic groups, while being Christianized, identified with the Lost Tribes of Israel, giving birth to the belief that Hebrews were Black: “Descriptions in the burgeoning travel and missionary literature, of Jews, or descendants of Jews living along the western coast of Africa, were available in the libraries of the United States and Europe from the mid-seventeenth century, and by the end of the eighteenth century some black intellectuals in Europe and the United States undoubtedly knew of them. The supposed substantial presence of Jews in west Africa took on particular importance in the development of black Jewish movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not least because there was a verifiable kernel of fact, supported by this distinguished literature, to which they could attach their aspirations and beliefs, and in the United States particularly, the west coast of Africa was imagined as an important locus of black Jews, including misplaced ‘Falashas’” (Parfitt 2013). Another theory, based on Afrocentric interpretations of the Zohar, contends that the exodus of the Hebrew people out of Egypt occurred in two separate directions: one towards the Land of Canaan in Israel, and the other towards sub-Saharan Africa.1 This hypothesis is also considered by other scholars, such as Jaap van Slageren: “Since the times of Abraham, North Africa has imbibed pagan as well as Hebrew customs. At the same time, Jewish and Egyptian groups went up the Nile towards African territories” (Van Slageren 2009). Discovering Jewish roots, albeit in embracing Kemetic readings of the Bible or the Torah, helps them validate their Jewishness and become closer to other Jews. The former pastor and doctor in Divinity mentioned above, aged thirty when he was interviewed, confidently asserted, “by definition, a Black person is a Jew who’s unaware of it”. At the root of this identification with the Jewish people is the belief in the Blackness of the Hebrew people of the Bible, who they contend were dark-skinned and hailing from Ancient Egypt.

Black nationalism historically emerged in the US and remains marginal in France. Dorman describes African American Jewish groups as operating separately from Rabbinic Judaism and universally recognized Jewish history outside of Africa. For instance, in Harlem in the 1930s, Black Jews combined Black nationalism and an appropriation of the history of the “children of Israel” (Dorman 2012). Howard Brotz analyzed the tension between assimilation and separatism in his study of Black Jewish nationalist movements in the USA (Brotz 1964). Finally, Black Hebrew Israelites are another group who claim to be descendants of the tribe of Judah and emigrated (mostly from Chicago) to Israel where they settled down in 1969 in Dimona, in the Negev desert, under the leadership of Ben Ammi Ben-Israel (born Ben Carter). John Jackson (Jackson 2013) and Michael T. Miller (Miller 2024) give a good illustration of their religious and social life there. While, in the USA, some Black nationalist movements have integrated Judaism as part of their identity claims, France offers a different picture, because Black Jews there are not members of migrant groups like the Ethiopian Jews or the Black Hebrew Israelites practicing separately from other Jews, but individuals engaged in a spiritual quest from within French Jewry, whose African, diasporic, or pan-African identities are upheld in their activism within community organizations aiming to make Black Jews visible in France.

In the words of all respondents, whether born Jews or converts, the consciousness of belonging to the Jewish people, or the mythical identification with the biblical Israel, are justified by Judaism being the source of Christianity and Islam. Biblical figures identified as Black are also extolled, particularly Zipporah, the wife of Moses, who is the most acclaimed character. One of the former evangelical pastors, a man who converted in France and became rabbi in Israel, explains: “It is possible to be both Black and Jewish, because the religious reference in Judaism is Moses, and he married a Madianite. Zipporah was not blonde and blue-eyed, and she wasn’t either a woman with a tan and pale-colored eyes. She was a Kushite, a Black woman. So, if Moses, the religious reference of Judaism, who is at the root of the laws we practice today, married a Black woman, then their children were mixed-race. This means that the question of color and religion is baseless, and you can see that from the very beginning” (Marah, interview given in 2010).

Besides, the archetypal figure of Ruth is seen as an inspiration that justifies the various models of conversion. Another former pastor who told me he had converted and become a rabbi in Israel, identifies with her in the following terms: “I have also felt an attachment to the land [of Israel] and to the [Jewish] people. And I see that as accomplishing in my life the verse from Ruth 1:2, their people is my people, and their God is my God”.

Secondly, most if not all Black converts also embrace Israel as part of their religious experience and expression. When I asked a woman convert why she wanted to go to Israel, she answered, “because that’s where it all began”. One male respondent said, “I’ve been to Israel seven times now. Israel is the motherland, like a second home for me”. Another male interviewee, who spent eight years in Israel as a student, said, “For sure, I liked it very much in Israel. I liked everything, the lifestyle, the homeland, the freedom, the state of Israel, the culture of the country, the people, the open-mindedness. I walked the streets telling myself, ‘Wow, now that is a country!’ From the moment I set foot in Israel, I felt, as they say, welcome back home [in English], I felt at home, I felt I was a part of this tiny piece of land”. It may therefore be concluded that Israel is part and parcel of Black Jews’ identification to the Jewish People. While, where other French Jews are concerned, there may be a dual—religious and Zionist—relationship to Israel, among Black native Jews or converts, Israel is unequivocally embraced as their homeland, to the point that some are committed to the Zionist cause. This proves the depth of their desire to belong to the Jewish people.

The third identity marker showing their unconditional loyalty to Judaism is the taking of Jewish names. First and last names represent a means of asserting Jewish origins, as Joëlle Bahloul points out: “the family name, which bears elements of ethnicity, is completed by the first name, giving rise to a whole range of distinction strategies”.2 Blacks who are native-born Jews naturally have Jewish first and last names, such as Emmanuel, Hannah, David, Myriam, Abraham; so do Danites, with last names such as Yayir Kohen and first names such as Isaac, Sarah, or Peniel. Igbo respondents have Igbo names, but they stressed their religious meanings: for instance, Chukwu means “supreme God”, Alo Chukwu, “the notion of God”, Chukwuka, “God is the mightiest”, Chukwuma, “God knows all” or Chukwuyem, “God gave me”. Biracial interviewees also bear Jewish first and last names, and thus say they do not need to prove their Jewishness because they are immediately identified as Ashkenazi or Sephardi.

Names are so important in the parameters of Jewishness that conversion always implies a name change, and the names chosen by African and Caribbean converts are particularly fraught with meaning. Indeed, they display a need for identity reconstruction linked to their yearning to symbolically situate themselves in the Biblical genealogical representations. Hence, female converts typically chose the names Zipporah (an emblematic Biblical figure, for she was Moses’ wife) or Ruth, identifying to her experience as a convert, or Esther, celebrating her willpower. Hannah, Leah, Rachel, or Shulamite are also favorites. Male converts proceed in the same manner, with first names such as Moshe, which was very often borne, or Guershon, the son of Moses, mentioned in the Bible, whose name means, “foreigner”. Also noticeable was the name Pinchas, a descendant of Aaron the priest, mentioned in the Bible for assassinating a prince from one of the tribes of Israel. The interviewee who had chosen this name was a former pastor; he “killed” his Christian identity to become a Jew. This is how he explained it to me: “What I like in this name and this Biblical figure, is the fact of being empowered to become what you were not supposed to become…. Pinchas is the one who was clear-sighted enough to make the right choice, to the point of overthrowing what was established by nature, and this speaks to me because of both my past and my ambition”.

These names testify to the circumstances of their conversions and tell something about the history of this process. For instance, a woman from Guadeloupe mentioned having recurrent dreams where people kept calling her Lévy, which led her to get closer to Jewish milieus; she considered that God had changed her last name. Albert, who is now called Abraham, also stressed the notions of continuity and return to the roots behind the choice of a Hebrew name: “You know, it’s when Jews came to France that they were forced to take local first names. That’s how the first name ‘Abraham’ became ‘Albert’ in French. When I converted, I decided to go back to the origin of the name, ‘Abraham’. In fact, I have had a Jewish name from the start, I didn’t even need to change my first name, because when I told them that my first name is Albert, they kept answering, ‘Abraham’…. As my name is Abraham and we didn’t know what name to give to my wife, someone was inspired and said, ‘Sarah’. This inspired us in turn, and she took it as her conversion name”.

The fourth important marker of Jewish ethnicity is the attachment of individuals to the Hebrew language, which is the official language of the State of Israel since its creation in 1948. Also used for worship and exegesis of the Torah and Talmud, it is perceived, with more or less conviction, as a sacred language. When I asked him how he related to Hebrew, a male convert waxed lyrical: “I fell in love with the language. I translate it and teach it to people that struggled with Hebrew. It also led me to visit the Land of Israel. I discovered that land. At first it was about praying and then I developed an attachment to the land and the people”. A woman convert, member of the Masorti movement, justified learning Hebrew by the study of Scriptures: “For me, learning the language proves two things. It has to do with the Scriptures. Because I want to understand what I’m reading. The problem is that Hebrew texts are translated into French, but in Hebrew a word can be interpreted in a variety of ways but never exactly”. The need to learn the language is part of their training and contributes in the presentation of their Jewish selves in interactions with their fellow Jews who identify as Sephardim or Ashkenazim, whose heritage of trauma they also embrace.

A fifth element which looms large in Black Jews’ sentiment of belonging to the Jewish people is the memory of the Holocaust. Among the interviewees, particularly those who are biracial or adopted, the trauma is evidenced in an inherited pain, since this collective form of trauma is transmitted across generations. In the case of respondents who are biracial and/or of Caribbean descent, both the Holocaust and the Transatlantic Slave Trade have shaped their sense of identity.

Finally, among France’s Black Jews one can find appreciation for certain African cultural features that are particularly compatible with the Halakha, or observing Judaic commandments—in particular, the Kashrut and the practice of circumcision. African men are often, if not always, circumcised; therefore, they do not see this religious commandment as an issue when they convert to Judaism, even if there is a specific ritual. Certain respondents have even pointed to this tradition to support their claims to Jewishness. A convert who worships in the Lubavitch community stressed this point: “sometimes I tell myself that we are Jews by virtue of our home culture. I see how European converts in their forties or fifties struggle when it comes to getting circumcised, while we Africans have already been through this”. As for the Kashrut, he said, “I sometimes wonder if our parents did not practice the Kosher ritual. When they slaughtered animals, they let all the blood flow, and then they washed them carefully, because eating rare meat is not really an African custom. They made it a point to have well-done meat”. Several other interviewees insisted that these common points proved that they had a right to identify with the Jewish people.

An original idea has thus gained traction among Black Jews, beyond the diversity of their experiences. It is a process that combines Jewish ethnicity and religious identity. Black Jews identify with the Jewish people and are proud to be part of a religion where they feel at home. In identifying with White fellow Jews, they lay a claim to markers of Jewish ethnicity and therefore can self-define as both Black and Jewish, by means of genealogical strategies affording them a place in the ideological system of matrilineal descent, or by means of intermarriages with Ashkenazim or Sephardim. What now remains to be seen is how Black Jews, whether native or converts, find recognition within existing communities and how they express their modes of integration into French Jewry. How do White Jews perceive them and how are they perceived by them?

In French Jewry, the ethnicization of social interaction places Black Jews at the intersection between Blacks and Whites. Whatever branch of Judaism they belong to, the ethnic markers of the religion function as processes of differentiation or identification and as ethnic boundaries, as Fredrik Barth designated them (Barth 1995). My interviewees have emphasized the hospitality, acceptance, and togetherness they received. The latter is perceived as a factor of individual and collective well-being, and community centers or synagogues as the preferred spaces of expression of this well-being. Friendship also appears as a key factor of Black Jews’ integration into French Jewry. For some, particularly the younger respondents or those who grew up in Jewish communities, the degree of acceptance is such that they express relief in saying they have successfully managed to have other Jews “forget” about their phenotype, which is typical of mainstream French attitudes to race. This is what a female interviewee said about her friends and acquaintances not needing to take into account her African roots: “after some time, color disappears. It’s not something I wear on my sleeve. This being said, I am Togolese, born and raised in Togo and I love Africa. I have African friends from a variety of origins, but I’m not going to be like, ‘this one, that one and the other are Black and oh, have you noticed I’m Black?’” A young Ethiopian Jew in his twenties echoed the same position when explaining with satisfaction that his color goes unnoticed in the community where he grew up: “I have attended the same synagogue ever since I was a baby, I never had anyone glaring at me or any other form of discrimination. I grew up in my community, and I think they don’t see me as a Black man”.

However, outside of the safe spaces and get-togethers where these believers interact with fellow Jews who know them well, they are often exposed to gazes or comments from other Jews that betray doubts about their Jewishness, and in these circumstances, their identification with the Jewish people becomes problematic, regardless of their efforts to be full-fledged Jews. When asked if they had had any unpleasant experience in French Jewry, they often mentioned rejection. First, institutional discrimination on the part of religious authorities was denounced by the respondents, who particularly lamented the narrow-mindedness and strictness of the Israelite Consistory of Paris, which represents the Orthodox branch of Judaism in France. Most of the converts blamed it for the high degree of rejection they experienced, although it must be emphasized that the Paris Consistory is generally adamant towards all would-be converts, regardless of their origins or skin color, as was noted by the French sociologist Sébastien Tank Storper in his studies of Jewish converts: “the official modalities for entering into Jewish identity are a monopoly in the hands of religious institutions that are often extremely intransigent” (Tank-Storper 2013).

On the other hand, interviewees recurrently described the reactions of their fellow Jews who expressed surprise on discovering a Black person in an otherwise familiar, homogeneous all-Ashkenazi or all-Sephardic environment. As one man in an interracial couple said, “in France, unfortunately, it isn’t commonplace yet. Some of the difficulties we encounter consist in our being seen as curios. They wonder how this can be. We need to help our White fellow Jews outgrow this feeling of wonderment”. But other respondents denounced racist attitudes from White members of their synagogues. As the French sociologist Pierre-Jean Simon explained, “racism avails itself of whatever differences may exist in the anatomy of human groups, as elements of ‘visibility’, but these do not seem absolutely necessary, for it can make them up out of thin air…. Its principle is to create and maintain an unsurmountable, inegalitarian difference so that certain human groups may be arbitrarily banned forever from joining others” (Simon 2006, p. 13). Paradoxically, French Jewry, itself grappling with anti-Semitism, finds itself struggling with the color line when facing fellow believers who cannot transcend their phenotypical differentness to become Ashkenazim or Sephardim.

Consequently, many Black Jews I interviewed shared with me their experiences of rejection and everyday micro-aggressions in places of worship or bookstores. They frequently mentioned being the targets of systematic frisking at the entrances of synagogues, stares and glares when they finally got inside, outspoken expressions of doubt on their Jewishness, unpleasant remarks (e.g., “You probably came here for the food” or “Are you sure you’re Jewish?”) or being deliberately ignored (“you’re there, but no one sees you” or “nobody spoke to me”). In search of a better integration, many left one synagogue for another, while others stopped trying and decided to stay at home to pray. Some declared they had abandoned their faith and become atheists, while others persisted, their Jewish souls hurting, and became involved in community organizing to put an end to their invisibility in both French Jewry and the broader French society. This is what the next section will discuss.

4. Black Jewish Organizations in France: The Fédération Internationale Des Juifs Noirs (FJN) and Am-Israël-Farafina (AMIFA)

Since the 1980s, several grassroots organizations had been created to demand social justice and an end to racism. The most historic one is SOS Racisme, an unofficial branch of the socialist party which was created in the early 1980s. More recent organizations, such as Devoir de mémoire or Les Indigènes de la République, focus more on the need for national reconciliation over France’s colonial past as well as gender issues in both the mainstream and Muslim minorities. The most emblematic is the CRAN (representative council of Black associations), which was founded in 2005 by Patrick Lozès to federate 150 Black organizations scattered over the French territory. Explicitly inspired from the NAACP, it is still fighting race-based discriminations targeting Blacks in France.

Black nationalism is actively combated by the French Republic’s egalitarian, universalist motto, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” which sustains a system of assimilation that melts all racial, ethnic, and religious minorities into a single identity. However, the French sociologists Véronique de Rudder, Christian Poiret, and François Vourc’h note that “[r]acist activities have developed almost unhampered within French society, under the mantle of good conscience offered by the so-called ‘republican model’ … [which amounts to] a system of intimidation forbidding minority groups to launch any social protest movement, while providing them with no means to combat the inequality and oppression they suffer”(de Rudder et al. 2000, p. 186).

Activism for social justice in France is also seen in initiatives by faith-based communities in France, be they Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. Social players are members of clubs, organizations, and faith-based groups, which encourage them to participate in gatherings and sensitize other groups to antisemitism, racism and discrimination thanks to ecumenical cooperation and interethnic coalitions designed with the representatives of the other communities concerned. Besides, some organizations play an active part in intercommunal dialog, particularly between Muslims and Jews or between Blacks and Jews, such as the Alliance judéo-noire, created in 1994. In 1995, the organization took a new name, “Juifs et Africains”, under the leadership of the African philosophers Abdoulaye Barro and Shalem Coulibaly and the European ethnologist and filmmaker Maurice Dorès. The latter was a pioneer in signalling the presence of Black Jews in France in his documentary Black Israel (Dorès 2003); he founded the Amitié judéo-noire (Judeo-Black friendship) in 2004. His other works include the classic book La Beauté de Cham: Mondes Juifs, Mondes Noirs (Dorès 1992).

Personal dissatisfaction due to the dismissive behaviors related above have gradually given rise to a collective protest movement, with Black Jews organizing to raise awareness within French Jewry. Two organizations have become prominent over the past decade: the Fédération internationale des Juifs noirs (FJN) or international federation of Black Jews (founded in 2007 by Guershon Nduwa, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo), and Am-Israël-Farafina3 (AMIFA), founded in 2013 by Hortense Bilé, a native of the Ivory Coast.

The Fraternité judéo-noire was created in 2007 in order to consolidate the dialogue between Jews and Blacks. It emerged in a climate of rising demands for more robust anti-racist action on the part of the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires de France (CRAN), one of the civil rights associations mentioned above. Guershon Nduwa had been the secretary of the latter organization before he founded the Fraternité Judéo-Noire with Lawrence Mordekhai Thomas, an African American Jewish academic, Emanuel Yerday, an Ethiopian Israeli, David Lharrar, an Ethiopian Frenchman, and Alexandre Feigenbaum, an Ashkenazi antiracist activist and emeritus professor at the national institute for agronomical research. In 2013, the FJN changed its name to Fédération Internationale des Juifs Noirs, with Guershon Nduwa as president, Daniel Limor (an Israeli) as vice-president, Lawrence Mordekhai Thomas as secretary and Christine Yaltonsky as coordinator and treasurer. The new FJN aims to liaise among Black Jews all over the world and has its headquarters in Nigeria. Nduwa explains that he chose that country because it is home to large numbers of Igbo Jews.

In 2013, another organization was born out of a split in the FJN, due to charges of embezzlement brought against Nduwa: Am-Israël-Farafina. It is chaired by a woman, Hortense Zipporah Bilé, who was born in the Ivory Coast and lived in Israel as a diplomats’ daughter. Her organization is defined as Zionist, pro-Israel and aiming to facilitate rapprochements between Israel and African countries, as the name shows: A-M are the first two letters of the word ‘amitié’, which means friendship in French, I stands for Israel and F-A for Farafina, which is the name of Africa in Bambara, one of the languages of Mali in West Africa. Members are used to calling it AMIFA.

Due to the life experiences of their founders, both organizations critique the lack of integration of Black Jews in France and work for their recognition within the French Jewry. Both Nduwa and Bilé first lived in Israel before they moved to France. They joined respectively the Mouvement juif libéral de France (MJLF), which is part of the Reform Judaism movement, and the Mouvement juif and the Alliance pour un judaïsme traditionnel et moderne (AJTM) led by Rabbi Gabriel Farhi. Their personal experiences and their growing awareness of the difficulties faced by Black Jews in France, both in and outside of the Jewry, led them to join activist movements. In a context where many organizations were created by minority groups such as the Indigènes de la République, Devoir de mémoire or Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires de France (CRAN), Black Jews in France felt the need to speak for themselves by means of community organizations. Both aim to combat discriminations and racism in French society and within synagogues, make Black Jews visible and liaise with Blacks around the world. They have two main goals. On the one hand, theirs is an identity quest which aims to gain recognition among the established authorities of French Judaism (the Consistory, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France) and earn the status of full-fledged Jews. On the other hand, they push for increased visibility in the religious and social landscape of France, thanks to cultural activities, by organizing concerts and conferences, and festive events such as meals, garden parties, gatherings within demonstrations or religious feasts.

All the branches of Judaism coexist within the FJN and AMIFA, insofar as their members may worship at synagogues from the Consistory, the Lubavitch movement, the Masorti or Reform Judaism movements, or even be Jews for Jesus and non-Jews. The Torah and Talmud are the books of reference. Many of the members speak Hebrew and teach it to both members and non-members, organize trips to Israel for both spiritual revitalization and language immersion for Hebrew learners. Their religious practices are centered on the Kashrut: they shop at Kosher supermarkets or order from Kosher catering businesses under the control of Jewish religious instances. However, as mentioned earlier, Black Jews from sub-Saharan African cultures emphasize African culinary practices’ similarities with the Kashrut, particularly the ritual slaughtering of animals and insistence on hygiene in the processing and cooking of food to further demonstrate the validity of identification claims between their ethnic groups and the Jewish people.

These activists ask for dedicated spaces where they could meet, organize training sessions and cultural and intellectual exchanges with other Black Jews from France and elsewhere, in order to stop being unseen and anonymous. The positions of the FJN and AMIFA reveal a need to address the articulations and intersections of race and ethnicity with Jewish matters. More importantly, it is also because these organizations took control of the information and its circulation that the issues faced by Jews of African and Caribbean descent have been receiving more publicity over the past fifteen years. Both organizations also express a need of recognition within the global Jewry, particularly in Jewish institutions and media. Their strategies include attending the communities that they consider to be more inclusive. However, the FJN, striving for a better inclusion of its members in Jewish cultural and religious life, aimed to play a role in it by calling for a community center or synagogue for Blacks in the greater Paris area, in defiance of the French dogma of colorblindness; yet the leader admitted in an interview he gave me in 2024 that for now the project is no longer on the agenda.

5. Expressions of Black Jewishness in the Broader French Society

From the beginning of the third millennium, being Black and Jewish in France has often meant experiencing one’s religion in secret, due to both French Jewry’s indifference and the ignorance of French society. This poses the question of how Black Jews live their lives as Blacks and Jews within the two environments. When asked how their friends and/or families had responded to the news of their Jewishness, the interviewees have emphasized both warm acceptance and rejection. But the strategies they found themselves implementing to face their entourage’s reactions are multiple. On an individual scale, what they say of their interactions with friends, neighbors or colleagues manifests a form of identity crisis resulting from the widespread ignorance of the existence of Black Jews besides the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) and particularly, of the presence of Black Jews in France.

This general ignorance of the existence of Black Jews complicates the integration of Black students in Jewish schools, as they find themselves singled out from the rest. Hortense Bilé described the case of a Canadian Black woman who had enrolled her two children in a Jewish school in France but eventually had to return to Montréal for the sake of their mental health. This is corroborated by the ethnographic study conducted by Kimberly Arkin in three Jewish schools in the greater Paris area, which showed how young French Sephardim’s self-perception left no room for the presence of Black classmates in their midst (Arkin 2014, p. 173).

As a matter of fact, while Black individuals’ displaying of their Jewishness elicits expressions of surprise, puzzlement or hostility in Jewish environments, this is also true in professional, social or friendly environments. An Ethiopian-Israelian living in France told me he was scared to tell his best friend, a man of Algerian descent, that he is Jewish for fear of losing him. Two respondents admitted they had lost friends since doing so. Another Ethiopian Jew said: “Many of my friends were unaware that I am Jewish. As I told you, I have just begun awakening and becoming spiritual. That is something they see. Some of them have issues with it, I don’t want to know what exactly their problem is, but I am ready for anything. I have seen some of them trying to use me as a scapegoat—“I’m a Black Jew, I’m the guy you love to hate” [une tête à claques]. These were Black men doing this to me, another Black man”.

This is the context in which most of the respondents said they had to cope with anti-Semitism, coming from Africans, Caribbeans, Arabs or Whites alike. Other interviewees have told me that they had had conflicts with coworkers or employers as a result of their religious identity when they asked for leaves of absence for Jewish holidays. Although France is a secular country, the major Catholic religious holidays are still bank holidays and Jewish or Muslim citizens have a legal right to leaves of absence for the festivals of their respective religions. One respondent said he had lost his job after asking for recognition of his Jewish faith in the workplace.

In public spaces, they are also frequently confronted with expressions of puzzlement or hostility. For instance, on the day of his interview with me, one of my interviewees of African descent was wearing his kippah and this was noticed by an Arab sanitation worker, who called him out with these words, “But why? Why, why? A Black man has no business being Jewish, he should be either a Muslim or a Christian!” (Mokoko Gampiot 2024, p. 209). This incident gives an idea of the microaggressions entailed by the public’s ignorance of the existence of Black Jews in France. The lack of legitimacy also appears in expressions of anti-Semitism in Black milieus, which often emphasize a perceived need to safeguard the Christian heritage.

This also partly explains why many of the respondents have experienced an identity crisis that led them to silence or conceal their Jewishness. Consequently, several ended up hiding the visible signs of their Jewishness, such as the Magen David, the kippah and the tzitzit. An interviewee of Congolese descent discovered Judaism in Israel, where he used to wear a kippah every day. On arriving in France, where he felt the need to convert officially, he decided to stop wearing it in public.

Others, on the contrary, asserted their faith to make it visible to fellow Jews as well as in their social and professional environments, by asking for leaves of absence for Jewish holidays (at their own risk, as mentioned above); by having their friends and families adjust to their Kosher diet; or by displaying signs of their Jewishness (including the Israeli flag.) Such individual initiatives translate their will to be identified as both Black and Jewish by fitting into the cultural norms of the country, even if the display of religious identities in public spaces is, at best, tolerated rather than encouraged in France. In doing so, their departure from a solely racialized minority status reframes Jewishness as a crucial social issue. Ultimately, displaying one’s Jewish faith while Black ends up being a double whammy, as it makes the person a target of both the rampant anti-Semitism and the hostility of French Jewish milieus. In France, bearing or wearing ethnic markers is always risky, as it is commonly considered to be a form of criticism of the Republic’s colorblind universalism. This is especially true of Muslim ethnic markers, but also of Jewish ones.

6. Conclusions

This analysis of the emerging visibility of Black Jews in France has shed light on the plurality of religious itineraries and profiles, reflecting a wide range of motivations which nevertheless share a common aspiration—an identification with the Jewish people that implies assimilating Jewish ethnic markers. Yet, such identification is hampered by a lack of knowledge of the existence of Black Jews, racism and discrimination within French Jewry as well as anti-Semitism within French society. Blacks are not the only converts to Judaism in France, for this is also the case of individuals of European, American or Asian descent (Tank-Storper 2007). But what singles out Black Jews is their gathering into community organizations to express their need to exist in the eyes of Jewish institutions in France (See Mokoko Gampiot and Coquet-Mokoko 2016).