Black Jews in Africa and the Americas / Tudor Parfitt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Parfitt, Tudor.

Series:

The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jews--Africa--History.

Jews.

African Americans--Relations with Jews.

African Americans.

African American Jews--History.

African American Jews.

Africa--History.

Africa.

Africa--Colonial influence--History.

Africa--Ethnic relations.

United States--Ethnic relations.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 225 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas tells the fascinating story of how the Ashanti, Tutsi, Igbo, Zulu, Beta Israel, Maasai, and many other African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Pursuing medieval and modern European race narratives over a millennium in which not only were Jews cast as black but black Africans were cast as Jews, Tudor Parfitt reveals a complex history of the interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses. For centuries, colonialists, travelers, and missionaries, in an attempt to explain and understand the strange people they encountered on the colonial frontier, labeled an astonishing array of African tribes, languages, and cultures as Hebrew, Jewish, or Israelite. Africans themselves came to adopt these identities as their own, invoking their shared histories of oppression, imagined blood-lines, and common traditional practices as proof of a racial relationship to Jews. Beginning in the post-slavery era, contacts between black Jews in America and their counterparts in Africa created powerful and ever-growing networks of black Jews who struggled against racism and colonialism. A community whose claims are denied by many, black Jews have developed a strong sense of who they are as a unique people. In Parfitt's telling, forces of prejudice and the desire for new racial, redemptive identities converge, illuminating Jewish and black history alike in novel and unexplored ways.

Contents:

The color of Jews

Lost tribes of Israel in Africa

Ham's children

Judaic practices and superior stock

Half white and half black

The emergence of Black Jews in the United States

Divine geography and Israelite identities

The internalization of the Israelite myth

History, genetics, and indigenous Black African Jews.

Notes:

Formerly CIP.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674071506

0674071506

9780674067905

0674067908

OCLC:

1013936561