The Soul of Judaism: Jews of African Descent in America

Religion, Race, and Ethnicity Series

by Bruce D. Haynes

A glimpse into the diverse stories of Black Jews in the United States

What makes a Jew? This book traces the history of Jews of African descent in America and the counter-narratives they have put forward as they stake their claims to Jewishness.

The Soul of Judaism offers the first exploration of the full diversity of Black Jews, including bi-racial Jews of both matrilineal and patrilineal descent; adoptees; black converts to Judaism; and Black Hebrews and Israelites, who trace their Jewish roots to Africa and challenge the dominant western paradigm of Jews as white and of European descent.

Blending historical analysis and oral history, Haynes showcases the lives of Black Jews within the Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstruction and Reform movements, as well as the religious approaches that push the boundaries of the common forms of Judaism we know today. He illuminates how in the quest to claim whiteness, American Jews of European descent gained the freedom to express their identity fluidly while African Americans have continued to be seen as a fixed racial group. This book demonstrates that racial ascription has been shaping Jewish selfhood for centuries. Pushing us to reassess the boundaries between race and ethnicity, it offers insight into how Black Jewish individuals strive to assert their dual identities and find acceptance within their respective communities.

Putting to rest the simplistic notion that Jews are white and that Black Jews are therefore a contradiction, the volume argues that we can no longer pigeonhole Black Hebrews and Israelites as exotic, militant, and nationalistic sects outside the boundaries of mainstream Jewish thought and community life. The volume spurs us to consider the significance of the growing population of self-identified Black Jews and its implications for the future of American Jewry.

Genres: Religion, Race, Nonfiction, Judaism, History, Sociology

272 pages, Hardcover

Published August 14, 2018

Reviews

[Leib Mitchell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Book Review
The Soul of Judaism
1/5 stars.
"Seems impossible for bona fide black Jews to to escape taint of the human stains known as Hebrew Israelites."
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Disclosure:

I am a person with African ancestry as well as Jewish status (At least in the eyes of probably about 98% of the Jewish world-- an Orthodox Convert. In fact, I have been writing about these issues for probably the last 6 years on my webpage. "Leib Gershon Mitchell's Jewish Memory Palace.")

There is a lot of discomfort/negative association with having a black identity, and one among the many strategies that some black people use to deal with that is to co-opt someone else's identity.

So, this book is (in part) an academic effort by a black man to study those who do just that.

But in reality, the myth of Divine Election is a universally popular myth, and this is not the first time that some people have tried to coöpt that Jewish notion. It's just coincidence that in these cases the people are black.

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The author is a sociologist, and not a historian/geneticist.

And that could explain why the book seems to be silent/light on the exhaustive genetic studies that show a characteristic Jewish genotype that is present in all Ashkenazim / Sephardim / Mizrahim and absent in all Hebrew Israelites and Falashim. (No matter! In the mind of a sociologist: anything that you don't like can be talked away / "deconstructed.")

As one would expect of a Critical-Race Theory-with-some-features-of-Sociology-text (and let's be clear that that is what this is), the book is chock-full of heavy jargon in order to obscure the fact that the author isn't really talking about anything.

The reader gets an idea right where Haynes is coming from on the 5th page, when he uses the two vapid phrases "intersection with race" and "identity construction." (We are on p.8 before "narrative" shows up and "counternarrative" makes its appearance by p.9)

I know of which I speak (=this topic), and I'd have to say that: this is a pretty silly book.

An example of one among the many REALLY silly statements (p.11): "Thus the reciting of the Torah on the Sabbath was more an act of recitation of a known discourse, based upon the possession of specialized knowledge, than deciphering of a text."

Apparently, this is a book that was published in 2018 about interviews conducted between 1998 and 2003. All between 15 and 20 years before the publication of the book.

There's not one single photo of any of the subjects interviewed, and there's not one interview that goes from start to finish with one person so that we can have an idea of whose opinion we are reading.

It seems like he only quotes about six or seven different people as interviewees, (and I think maybe one of them is Orthodox).

Owing to the lack of straight-through interviews, it's hard to know whether or not he did a cut and paste job on selected bits of the interview to create support for a person that never really existed.

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It appears to me that Haynes went a long way in employing a very expansive definition of "Who is a Jew?" so that he would be able to write a book.

MANY identify as Jewish but are not recognized as such--and if you excluded all such, then this book probably would have been about 40 pages long. (Hebrew Israelites are the classic example of people that are recognized by no legitimate groups of Jews on the face of the Earth. But also such as members of the Israelite Tabernacle or the Church of God and Saints of Christ.)

Not only does Haynes throw in a lot of groups of people that only have self-declaration (as opposed to a tradition/genetic markers) as a basis for being Jewish: He even scrapes into the pool of Africans trying to find a reason to immigrate (to Israel) from their self-created morass (owing to their inability to manage a country): Igbos/ Tutsis/ Abayudaya/ Lemba are shoehorned into having a Jewish connection in order to have enough pages in his book.

"Who is a Jew?" is a question that has been fraught with controversy probably at least for the last 27 centuries (with a nod to the Samaritans), and this book is not going to get any closer to resolving the debate.

Which means that the topic under study (black/Black Jews) can be defined OUT of existence by intellectual prestidigitation--much the same way that it has been defined INTO existence by the same technique.

I would go so far as to say that a person can be a Jew not only variably from one (Orthodox) congregation to another, but he can variably be one within one congregation based on the opinion of whichever Gabbai is officiating services. (This has been my experience MANY times.)

Just by Orthodox lights (I won't even get into these questions for non-Orthodox movements, because this review would never terminate if I did):

1. Is this black person a Jew if he converted Non-Orthodox? NEVER

2. Is this black person a Jew if he converted Orthodox? Depends on the synagogue / minyan / Rabbi/ Gabbai.

3. Can this person come from out of town to a synagogue and be taken it is word that he is a Jew? Black/non-white= NO. White= Yes.

4. Can this black person be recognized as a Jew for purposes of burial? ALMOST ALWAYS.

5. Can this black person be recognized as a Jew for purposes of marriage? YES by almost all Modern Orthodox. NO by between 1/3 and 1/2 of Haredim. (The further you get to the right the closer you get to about 50%)

6. Is Judaism a race?

-In the case that it requires accepting a Reform/Humanistic/secular/atheist born Jew, then NO.

-In the case that it might lead to the acceptance of a Frum From Birth black person as a shidduch, then YES.

-In the case that you don't want to accept their black children into your far-right Haredi School, then YES. (Nissim Black had this experience, and I had it even before he did.)
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So much in this book is frankly false that I'm going to just have to synopsize each chapter and point out the silliest thing (or two) order to keep the review readable.

°°°Introduction:

There are a lot of mom and apple pie banalities about "shared history of oppression" (blah blah blah) that seem to be dog whistling to other Black people--and that's because I've never heard an Orthodox Jew bring up that topic.

Haynes (p.5) talks about the rise and interracial marriages between Jewish women and black men.

Just, no.

a. Anybody with two eyes and moderate powers of observation can see that 98% of all mixed marriages with a black partner involve a white Jewish MAN and a black WOMAN.

b.An article: "Gendered Racial Exclusion among White Internet Daters" states that "Specifically, we see that whites who identified as Jewish were dropped from the analysis of black exclusion because it was a perfect predictor; that is, all white men and women who identified as Jewish excluded blacks as possible dates; all white women who identified as Jewish also excluded Asian men as possible dates."

°°°Chapter 1. In case we didn't know that this book was a Critical Race Theory, the author repeats it for us a little bit more with gems of wisdom such as: "Black Jews thus represent the margin of two dichotomous categories - - one fluid, the other fixed- within a bifurcated system. Indeed, their very presence forces us to reconcile to negating forces, the transcended and the immutable, into a single new construct."

°°°Chapter 2. A discussion about earlier classifications of human beings that were made way before the DNA molecule was discovered. The author references Steven J Gould's "Mismeasure of Man." But, he seems to be completely unaware of the Molecular Genetics that matured several decades after Gould that explain that:

a. North Africans and sub-Saharan Africans are two very genetically different things that just happen to occupy the same continent. (Smaller differences in geography create the clear differences between Indo-Dravidians and Indo-Aryans.)

b. There are actual genetic data that can be researched to answer these questions instead of trying to talk them away as socially constructed. (Robert Reich. "Who We Are And How We Got Here.")

Haynes spends a lot of time going over silly ideas that could be dispensed with by later actual genetic data.

°°°Chapter 3. Haynes introduces us to Jodesvanne--which existed roughly between 1665 and 1790.

Since everybody and his brother thinks that he is a Lost Tribe, I can see that this is the author's attempt to create some mechanism with to explain a large number of black people with Jewish blood. (The same effort has been made in the United States to explain how every black American claims Indian blood even though black Americans have always been 40 times more numerous than Native Americans.)

I still just don't know if I'm buying it, because all of the couplings that he describes are (as expected) Jewish men with local women--in which case, there would never be a way to sell them as Jewish based on normative tradition.

°°°Chapter 4. A desultory discussion of the predecessors of today's Hebrew Israelites. (Wentworth Arthur Miller and William Saunders Crowdy.) Commandment Keepers. Hebrew Israelites of USA. Church of God and Saints of Christ. Ethiopian Hebrews. (Capers Funnye et.al). Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. (5000 people, and 0.07% of the population of Israel.)
.

°°°Chapter 5. A number of random stories about black people who have converted to Judaism, even featuring Julius Lester (who already wrote his own book for anybody who was interested). A few stats, but not really a systematic study. Makes the fatal error of including Hebrew Israelites. Again.

°°°Chapter 6. A number of stories about people who have a Jewish parent and a black parent and what their ultimate decision was. (Of course, you have to fish for the stories in between all of the sociological expatiation.)

a. Even though this is in a book on Judaism, mixed race black people have been choosing whether they want to identify as one race or another for a VERY long time and the Jewish case is not necessarily a special case. (We have an entire white side of the family that we just met in a family reunion that broke off about a century ago.)

b. What race you are depends on context (dating and peers/ work/education). I would venture to say that there is no single black person who does not know how to "dial down their blackness" subject to situational constraints.

So, now what?

°°°Chapter 7. A discussion about the reason for the fracture of the black Jewish alliance (that existed for a couple of weeks during the Civil Rights Movement)-- that has also been finished for about three generations now.

I meet Jewish people every single day, and I don't think I've ever met one under the age of 65 that considers black people a natural ally for anything.

(Why the fresh hell would somebody make an alliance with people that are their tenants and housekeepers? Was this alliance something that existed outside of the minds of academics or young Jewish people infected with boredom?)

Of 17 and 18 year old Yeshiva bochurim..... I have yet to meet a *single* one that is aware that black people can be anything except custodial staff at the school. And in the event that they have ever spoken to the custodian, that may be the ••single•• black person with whom they have had a conversation longer than two sentences.

°°°Conclusion. The author describes to us a group of fringe Reform Jews who have taken up causes such as Black Lives Matter. He also describes to us that the international Israelite board of Rabbis has sought formal recognition among Conservative Jews.

I can't really say that this is anything of mass because:

a. It is very easy to find any number of Reforms Jews that are taking up some cause just for the sake of having a cause. (It is my inclination that it was not any Orthodox Jews that were reciting kaddish for dead Arab terrorists on Israel.)

b. There are about 15 members left in the Conservative movement, and the average age is probably about 92.

c. Black Lives Matters has some distinctly Anti-Semitic overtones, so I'm not really sure what these discussed contacts came to.

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Of the book: 212 pages over seven chapters + 1 introduction. That works out to about 27 pages per chapter.

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Verdict: NOT recommended.

I *really* should have learned my lesson many books ago about being so fascinated with a topic that I might like that was published on University label. (That's pretty synonymous with "boring"/"obscurantist")

There are 3 other books that talk about this topic a little bit more honestly.

1. "Chosen People," by Jacob S Dorman. It is an academic book, but it is a little bit more plausible than this one.

2. "Your People Are My People," by Yisroel Juskowicz. It is not academic, and it does have some editorial problems. But he does at least interview a number of black Jewish people from start to finish.

3. "Who We Are And How We Got Here," by Robert rice. He talks about the genetic mechanism of action by which ethnic groups are created.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readers will find a fascinating look at African-American Jews, both those accepted by the larger White American mostly Ashkenazic congregations, those dismissed by this group, and those asserting their identity without need or desire for such acceptance. My only criticism here is that the author adopts a basically Christian perspective in his analysis. This can be seen in how he looks at religion and tries to impose Christian notions of what a religion is onto a Jewish world. It can also be seen in his frequent reference to the "old testament" which is a Christian and somewhat derogatory term for Jewish scriptures.

I wish the author had delved more deeply into the theology of Reconstruction Judaism. While the Reconstruction movement is quite small it often has influence way beyond its numbers. This movement has abandoned the notion of Jews as a chosen people and looks to Judaism as a civilization rather than a religion in the way Christians understand it. Religion is certainly a part of a civilization but only a part and people who arent much interested or concerned with religion can no the less be active participants in a civilization.

Secondly I wished that the author had looked at the Myth of the Jewish Race by Raphael Patai and Jennifer Wing (1975). I know with all the DNA evidence much of it has been superseded. But in the middle of the book there are pictures of Jews from all over the world and the amazing thing is that they mostly look like the people who are their neighbors. Additionally Chapter 7 of this book has this amazing quote:
"Thou must know that we people of Persia are skilled in physiognomy; I saw the woman to be rosy-cheeked, blue eyed and tall statured... and I knew she was a Jewess". [From: The Story of the Weaver who Became a Leech in the Arabian Nights].

It gives you cause to think about race and the Jewish people and that are assumptions may need to be reevaluated.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Fascinating material; I learned some new things, but I wish he’d gotten into depth more on several topics. The Introduction shocked me: there are white people who think or thought that blacks can’t be Jewish, and there are black people who think that whites calling themselves Jewish is a hoax! Both points of view are outrageously offensive. Jews have lived all over the globe for thousands of years and can look like absolutely anything. Clearly a lot more education needs to happen about global Jewry. I also hadn’t heard of the black Jewish movements that were created in the U.S. and are unique, as well as how many areas of Africa have Jewish populations today — which makes total sense, but I hadn’t heard about it before.

I wish the author had braved the offensive black group’s perspective long enough to ask them how they explain the Holocaust if white Jews are a hoax. Of course I wouldn’t want to talk to them either, so from that perspective I can forgive the omission of diving deeper into their beliefs.

Another thing that would have added to the book is a little explanation about the U.S.A. is the only country that thinks of Jews as white. This is due to unfortunate history in which Jews claimed whiteness on purpose in order to gain access to immigration and citizenship. The author neglected o mention that Jews, like blacks, used to be barred from restaurants, hotels, neighborhoods, etc in the U.S., well into the 1960s and 1970s. Elsewhere in the world today, Jews are still considered a non-white race, which would add another layer of complexity to the issues discussed in this book.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best works of sociology teach us new stories and help us to understand those whose worldviews are radically different from our own. However, this only partly describes what the expressive scholarly work “The Soul of Judaism: Jews of African Descent in America” by Bruce D. Haynes (New York University Press) accomplishes. This eye-opening look at the different ways Jews of African descent view themselves not only challenges readers’ thoughts about how Jews identify as white in the New World, it also offers the intriguing perspective of Black Jews who feel they are the true descendants of the biblical chosen people.
See the rest of my review at http://www.thereportergroup.org/Artic...

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a dense book. MANY pages of footnotes - I love that and love reading footnotes.
He made some odd mistakes. Who edited the book? Not a Jew. However, it has masses of good research and interviews. It's one of those books written by a scholar intended for scholars that some people thought would CHANGE the Jewish world. It didn't. But it is very much worth the time.

[Sam Stabler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for Jews of all colors.

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really informative and eye-opening!