Black Hebrew Israelites From America To The Promised Land

The New Ship of Zion explores the dynamic Diaspora dimensions of the African Hebrew Israelites, a spiritual movement of African Americans who have traced their roots to Zion. With the successful establishment of thriving model communities in Israel and Ghana they have built up a framework for repatriation to the motherland. The resulting constructions of ethnic and cultural identity are the subjects of this book. It also sheds light on the ideological concepts of other communities that travel the same waters as the New Ship of Zion, such as the Rastafarians.

The Black Hebrew Israelite movement claims that African Americans are descendants of the Ancient Israelites and has slowly become a significant force in African American religion. This Element provides a general overview of the BHI movement, its diverse history/ies, ideologies, and practices. The Element shows how different factions and trends have taken the forefront at different periods over its 140-year history, leading to the current situation where diverse iterations of the movement exist alongside each other, sharing some core concepts while differing widely. In particular, the questions of how and why BHI has become a potent and attractive movement in recent years are addressed, arguing that it fulfils a specific religious need to do with identity and teleology, and represents a new and persistent form of Abrahamic religion.

Named Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE Winnter of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association Winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize Winner of the 2014 Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions Jacob S. Dorman offers new insights into the rise of Black Israelite religions in America, faiths ranging from Judaism to Islam to Rastafarianism all of which believe that the ancient Hebrew Israelites were Black and that contemporary African Americans are their descendants. Dorman traces the influence of Israelite practices and philosophies in the Holiness Christianity movement of the 1890s and the emergence of the Pentecostal movement in 1906. An examination of Black interactions with white Jews under slavery shows that the original impetus for Christian Israelite movements was not a desire to practice Judaism but rather a studied attempt to recreate the early Christian church, following the strictures of the Hebrew Scriptures. A second wave of Black Israelite synagogues arose during the Great Migration of African Americans and West Indians to cities in the North. One of the most fascinating of the Black Israelite pioneers was Arnold Josiah Ford, a Barbadian musician who moved to Harlem, joined Marcus Garvey's Black Nationalist movement, started his own synagogue, and led African Americans to resettle in Ethiopia in 1930. The effort failed, but the Black Israelite theology had captured the imagination of settlers who returned to Jamaica and transmitted it to Leonard Howell, one of the founders of Rastafarianism and himself a member of Harlem's religious subculture. After Ford's resettlement effort, the Black Israelite movement was carried forward in the U.S. by several Harlem rabbis, including Wentworth Arthur Matthew, another West Indian, who creatively combined elements of Judaism, Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, the British Anglo-Israelite movement, Afro-Caribbean faiths, and occult kabbalah. Drawing on interviews, newspapers, and a wealth of hitherto untapped archival sources, Dorman provides a vivid portrait of Black Israelites, showing them to be a transnational movement that fought racism and its erasure of people of color from European-derived religions. Chosen People argues for a new way of understanding cultural formation, not in terms of genealogical metaphors of -survivals, - or syncretism, but rather as a -polycultural- cutting and pasting from a transnational array of ideas, books, rituals, and social networks.

As a preteen Black male growing up in Mount Vernon, New York, there were a series of moments, incidents and wounds that caused me to retreat inward in despair and escape into a world of imagination. For five years I protected my family secrets from authority figures, affluent Whites and middle class Blacks while attending an unforgiving gifted-track magnet school program that itself was embroiled in suburban drama. It was my imagination that shielded me from the slights of others, that enabled my survival and academic success. It took everything I had to get myself into college and out to Pittsburgh, but more was in store before I could finally begin to break from my past. "Boy @ The Window" is a coming-of-age story about the universal search for understanding on how any one of us becomes the person they are despite-or because of-the odds. It's a memoir intertwined with my own search for redemption, trust, love, success-for a life worth living. "Boy @ The Window" is about one of the most important lessons of all: what it takes to overcome inhumanity in order to become whole and human again.

This book explores contemporary inflections of blackness in Israel and foreground them in the historical geographies of Europe, the Middle East, and North America. The contributors engage with expressions and appropriations of modern forms of blackness for boundary-making, boundary-breaking, and boundary-re-making in contemporary Israel, underscoring the deep historical roots of contemporary understandings of race, blackness, and Jewishness. Allowing a new perspective on the sociology of Israel and the realm of black studies, this volume reveals a highly nuanced portrait of the phenomenon of blackness, one that is located at the nexus of global, regional, national and local dimensions. While race has been discussed as it pertains to Judaism at large, and Israeli society in particular, blackness as a conceptual tool divorced from phenotype, skin tone and even music has yet to be explored. Grounded in ethnographic research, the study demonstrates that many ethno-racial groups that constitute Israeli society intimately engage with blackness as it is repeatedly and explicitly addressed by a wide array of social actors. Enhancing our understanding of the politics of identity, rights, and victimhood embedded within the rhetoric of blackness in contemporary Israel, this book will be of interest to scholars of blackness, globalization, immigration, and diaspora.

Over the last hundred years, in Africa and the United States, through a variety of religious encounters, some black African societies adopted – or perhaps rediscovered – a Judaic religious identity. African Zion grows out of a joined interest in these diversified encounters with Judaism, their common substrata and divergences, their exogenous or endogenous characteristics, the entry or re-entry of these people into the contemporary world as Jews and the necessity of reshaping the standard accounts of their collective experience. In various loci the bonds with Judaism of black Jews were often forged in the harshest circumstances and grew out of experiences of slavery, exile, colonial subjugation, political ethnic conflicts and apartheid. For the African peoples who identify as Jews and with other Jews, identification with biblical Israel assumes symbolical significance. This book presents the way in which the religious identification of African American Jews and African black Jews – “real”, ideal or imaginary – has been represented, conceptualized and reconfigured over the last century or so. These essays grow out of a concern to understand Black encounters with Judaism, Jews and putative Hebrew/Israelite origins and are intended to illuminate their developments in the medley of race, ethnicity, and religion of the African and African American religious experience. They reflect the geographical and historic mosaic of black Judaism, permeated as it is with different “meanings”, both contemporary and historical.