African Zion : studies in black Judaism / edited by Edith Bruder and Tudor Parfitt.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Bruder, Edith, 1948-

Parfitt, Tudor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Black Hebrews.

Physical Description:

vi, 362 p.

Place of Publication:

Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K. : Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

(De)constructing Black Jews / Tudor Parfitt

The proto-history of Igbo Jewish identity from the colonial period to the Biafra War, 1890-1970 / Edith Bruder

Igbo nationalism and Jewish identities / Johannes Harnischfeger

Israeli foreign policy towards the Igbo / Daniel Lis

The House of Israel: Judaism in Ghana / Janice R. Levi

The Bayajidda legend and Hausa history / Dierk Lange

Lemba traditions: an indispensable tool for interpreting the Old Testament in Africa / Magdel Le Roux

Slouschz and the quest for indigenous African Jews / Emanuela Trevisan Semi

Longing for Jerusalem among the Beta Israel of Ethiopia / Shalva Weil

A colony in Babylon: cooperation and conflict between Black and white Jews in New York, 1930 to 1964 / Jacob S. Dorman

Leading through listening: racial tensions in 1968 New York / Janice W. Fernheimer

Emigrationism, afrocentrism, and Hebrew Israelites in the Promised Land / John L. Jackson, Jr.

Jewish identity among the Bene Ephraim of India / Yulia Egorova.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [325]-357) and index.

Description based on metadata supplied by the publisher and other sources.

ISBN:

1-4438-3868-3