Download or read book Black Jews in Africa and the Americas written by Tudor Parfitt and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-04 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The African Tribe Of Jewish Decent written by Kendrick Callaway and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2022-09-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a widespread belief among the 20 to 30 million Igbo people of Nigeria that the Igbo people originated in ancient Israel. A number of Igbo Jewish communities have recently been established in Nigeria. Although some Igbo have found their way to Israel, the Israeli public is largely unaware of the fact that there are an additional 20 to 30 million Igbo people in Nigeria, who have been referred to by some as The Jews of West Africa. Igbo Jewish identity has significant political implications in Nigeria and Israel. This book offers a well-researched analysis and history of the long-standing and controversial Igbo narrative of possible Jewish origins, thereby creating a new reading of Igbo history. This interdisciplinary research monograph describes different layers of identity and shows step by step through the last 250 years of Igbo history how Jewish identification was part of Igbo identity and cultural practice. The book then shows the place of the Igbo in post-Biafran Nigeria and how, in the ethnically and religiously fragmented state, the judaizing Igbo, encouraged by parts of the Jewish world, are increasingly orienting themselves towards normative Judaism. The author offers a treasure trove of documented information about Nigerian Igbo Jewish identity, their relationship to the State of Israel, and their tragic recent history. For several centuries there have been claims and assertions by both historians and social scientists that this very ingenious ethnic nationality is a lost tribe of Israel? Noting the undeniable cultural, behavioral, religious and linguistic similarities between the Igbos and the Jews, as first officially described in a book written in the late 18th century. This book, The African African Tribe Of Jewish Descent: a tale of two nations connected by history, is an open window to the lives and relationship between these two great nations. Scroll up and add this amazing work to your knowledge catalog.
Download or read book The Black Jews of Africa written by Edith Bruder and published by . This book was released on 2008-06-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last several decades have seen the emergence of a remarkable phenomenon: a Jewish "rebirth" that is occurring throughout Africa. A variety of different ethnic groups proclaim that they are returning to long-forgotten Jewish roots, and African clans trace their lineage to the Lost Tribes of Israel. Africans have encountered Jewish myths and traditions in multiple forms and various ways. The context and circumstances of these encounters have gradually led, within some African societies, to the elaboration of a new Jewish identity connected with that of the Diaspora. This book presents, one by one, the different groups of Black Jews in western, central, eastern, and southern Africa and the ways in which they have used and imagined their oral history and traditional customs to construct a distinct Jewish identity. It explores the ways in which Africans have interacted with the ancient mythological sub-strata of both western and African ideas of Judaism. It particularly seeks to identify and to assess colonial influences and their internalization by African societies in the shaping of new African religious identities. The book also examines how, in the absence of recorded African history, the eminently malleable accounts of Jewish lineage developed by African groups co-exist with the possible historical traces of a Jewish presence in Africa. This elegant and well-researched book goes beyond the well-known case of the Falasha of Ethiopia, examining the trend towards Judaism in Africa at large, and exploring, too, the interdisciplinary concepts of "metaphorical Diaspora," global and transnational identities, and colonization.
Download or read book Genetic Afterlives written by Noah Tamarkin and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-11 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1997, M. E. R. Mathivha, an elder of the black Jewish Lemba people of South Africa, announced to the Lemba Cultural Association that a recent DNA study substantiated their ancestral connections to Jews. Lemba people subsequently leveraged their genetic test results to seek recognition from the post-apartheid government as indigenous Africans with rights to traditional leadership and land, retheorizing genetic ancestry in the process. In Genetic Afterlives, Noah Tamarkin illustrates how Lemba people give their own meanings to the results of DNA tests and employ them to manage competing claims of Jewish ethnic and religious identity, African indigeneity, and South African citizenship. Tamarkin turns away from genetics researchers' results that defined a single story of Lemba peoples' “true” origins and toward Lemba understandings of their own genealogy as multivalent. Guided by Lemba people’s negotiations of their belonging as diasporic Jews, South African citizens, and indigenous Africans, Tamarkin considers new ways to think about belonging that can acknowledge the importance of historical and sacred ties to land without valorizing autochthony, borders, or other technologies of exclusion.
Download or read book The Jews of Africa Lost Tribes Found Communities Emerging Faiths written by Jono David and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-13 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE JEWS OF AFRICA: LOST TRIBES, FOUND COMMUNITIES, EMERGING FAITHS is a veritable journey into the Jewish communities across the length and breadth of the continent. The eBook features 230 visually stunning and thematically intriguing images by photographer Jono David. THE JEWS OF AFRICA explores, examines, and delineates the Jewish history of Africa in 14 essays contributed by some of the biggest Jewish Africa scholars, rabbis, and esteemed members of African society. The contributors are: historian Dr. Tudor Parfitt / researcher Dr. Shalva Weil / director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre Tali Nates / Head Emissary of the Lubavitch Rebbe for Central Africa Rabbi Shlomo Bentolila / anthropologist Dr. Edith Bruder / the last Jewish resident of Asmara, Eritrea Dr. Samuel Cohen / researcher Dr. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz / Honorary Life President and religious leader of the Windhoek Hebrew Congregation Zvi Gorelick / professor Dr. Magdel Le Roux / chief curator of the Museum of Moroccan Judaism Zhor Rehihil / CEO & Spiritual Leader of the African Jewish Congress Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft / researcher and historian Dr. Remy Ilona / Chief Rabbi of Uganda and member of parliament Rabbi Gershom Sizomu / assistant to the chief rabbi of Tunisia Moché Uzan / with art by expert printmaker Pauline Jakobsberg.=In August 2012, independent photographer, Jono David, set out on an audacious Jewish African journey. His aim was to document the life, culture, and history of the Jewish people from one end of the continent to the other. Over the next 4 years, he would take 8 unique trips totaling some 60 weeks of travel to 30 countries and territories. His adventures led him from the continent's largest communities strewn across Southern Africa to ancient yet vibrant communities in Morocco and Tunisia to emerging Jewish groups in unexpected places like Uganda, Gabon, Cameroon, Ghana, and Madagascar. It is the largest Jewish Africa photographic survey of its kind.=In words and images, THE JEWS OF AFRICA brings the entire journey to life and aims to answer one central question: Who are the Jews of Africa? The answer is as complex and rich as the communities themselves particularly as the phenomenon of the emergence of Jewish communities is gaining rapid and wide traction, notably in West and Central Africa.=*** Purchasers of THE JEWS OF AFRICA will have exclusive access to 4 online bonus galleries featuring some 300+ photographs and numerous anecdotes not featured in the eBook. The photographs are also available to purchasers at a special reduced rate. ***
Download or read book From Babylon to Timbuktu written by Rudolph Windsor and published by Windsor Golden Series Publication. This book was released on 2023-11-02 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jews and the American Slave Trade written by Saul Friedman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semitic manuscripts published in years. This work of so-called scholars received great celebrity from individuals like Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, and Khalid Abdul Muhammed who used the document to claim that Jews dominated both transatlantic and antebellum South slave trades. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades.Jews and the American Slave Trade dissects the questionable historical technique employed in Secret Relationship, offers a detailed response to Farrakhan's charges, and analyzes the impetus behind these charges. He begins with in-depth discussion of the attitudes of ancient peoples, Africans, Arabs, and Jews toward slavery and explores the Jewish role hi colonial European economic life from the Age of Discovery tp Napoleon. His state-by-state analyses describe in detail the institution of slavery in North America from colonial New England to Louisiana. Friedman elucidates the role of American Jews toward the great nineteenth-century moral debate, the positions they took, and explains what shattered the alliance between these two vulnerable minority groups in America.Rooted in incontrovertible historical evidence, provocative without being incendiary, Jews and the American Slave Trade demonstrates that the anti-slavery tradition rooted in the Old Testament translated into powerful prohibitions with respect to any involvement in the slave trade. This brilliant exploration will be of interest to scholars of modern Jewish history, African-American studies, American Jewish history, U.S. history, and minority studies.
Download or read book Journey to the Vanished City written by Tudor Parfitt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2000-04-04 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a mixture of travel, adventure, and scholarship, historian Tudor Parfitt sets out in search of answers to a fascinating ethnological puzzle: is the Lemba tribe of Southern Africa really one of the lost tribes of Israel, descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba? Beginning in the Lemba villages in South Africa, where he witnesses customs such as food taboos and circumcision rites that seem part of Jewish tradition, Parfitt retraces the supposed path of the Lembas' through Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Tanzania, taking in sights like Zanzibar and the remains of the stone city Great Zimbabwe. The story of his eccentric travels, a blend of the ancient allure of King Solomon's mines and Prester John with contemporary Africa in all its beauty and brutality, makes for an irresistible glimpse at a various and rapidly changing continent. And in a new epilogue, Parfitt discusses recent DNA evidence that, amazingly, lends credence to the Lemba's tribal myth.
Download or read book DNA Tradition written by Yaakov Kleiman and published by Devora Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did the Twelve Tribes of Israel really exist? Are the scattered groups of modern Jews really the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews of the Bible? This extraordinary book chronicles the latest discoveries in the cutting-edge field of Molecular Population Genetics that add empirical evidence and scientific confirmation to Biblical tradition.
Download or read book The Chosen Few written by Maristella Botticini and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein show that, contrary to previous explanations, this transformation was driven not by anti-Jewish persecution and legal restrictions, but rather by changes within Judaism itself after 70 CE--most importantly, the rise of a new norm that required every Jewish male to read and study the Torah and to send his sons to school. Over the next six centuries, those Jews who found the norms of Judaism too costly to obey converted to other religions, making world Jewry shrink. Later, when urbanization and commercial expansion in the newly established Muslim Caliphates increased the demand for occupations in which literacy was an advantage, the Jews found themselves literate in a world of almost universal illiteracy. From then forward, almost all Jews entered crafts and trade, and many of them began moving in search of business opportunities, creating a worldwide Diaspora in the process.
Download or read book Jews in South Africa written by Richard Mendelsohn and published by . This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This richly illustrated story the first comprehensive history to appear in over 50 years includes a wide range of historically important photographs, many long unseen, and encompasses a broad swathe of Jewish life, from the bimah and the boardroom to the bowling green. Beginning with the first Jewish immigrants to South Africa, and depicting the fragility of the early foundations and the shifting fortunes of this infant community, the book traces its development to robust maturity amidst turbulent social and political currents. These include the strident antisemitism of the 1930s, the moral dilemmas of the apartheid era, the subsequent turbulent transition towards a non-racial democracy, the birth of the New South Africa and the fresh challenges and promise that have followed in its wake up to the present day. The Jews in South Africa will be of great interest to every member of the Jewish community living both in South Africa and in their adoptive countries, as well as for all wishing to learn more about this highly energetic and innovative community whose contribution in many spheres of life has so greatly influenced and enriched the history of South Africa.
Download or read book The Lost Tribes of Israel written by Tudor Parfitt and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson Limited. This book was released on 2002 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tudor Parfitt examines a myth which is based on one of the world's oldest mysteries - what happened to the lost tribes of Israel? Christians and Jews alike have attached great importance to the legendary fate of these tribes which has had a remarkable impact on their ideologies throughout history. Each tribe of Israel claimed descent from one of the twelve sons of Jacob and the land of Israel was eventually divided up between them. Following a schism which formed after the death of Solomon, ten of the tribes set up an independent northern kingdom, whilst those of Judah and Levi set up a separate southern kingdom. In 721BC the ten northern tribes were ethnically cleansed by the Assyrians and the Bible states they were placed: in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan and in the city of Medes. The Bible also foretold that one day they would be reunited with the southern tribes in the final redemption of the people of Israel. Their subsequent history became a tapestry of legend and hearsay. The belief persisted that they had been lost in some remote part of the world and there were countless suggestions and claims as to where.
Download or read book Jewish Identity Among the Igbo of Nigeria written by Daniel Lis and published by . This book was released on 2014-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the 20 to 30 million Igbo people in Nigeria there is a widespread belief that the Igbo originated in ancient Israel. Recently a number of Igbo Jewish communities have been established in Nigeria. Although some Igbo have made their way to Israel, the Israeli public is largely unaware of the fact that that there are in addition of 20 to 30 million people in Nigeria that are called by some, 'the Jews of West Africa.' This book offers for the first time an in-depth study and a genealogical history of the Igbo's long term narrative of a possible Jewish origin.
Download or read book My Promised Land written by Ari Shavit and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND THE ECONOMIST Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award An authoritative and deeply personal narrative history of the State of Israel, by one of the most influential journalists writing about the Middle East today Not since Thomas L. Friedman’s groundbreaking From Beirut to Jerusalem has a book captured the essence and the beating heart of the Middle East as keenly and dynamically as My Promised Land. Facing unprecedented internal and external pressures, Israel today is at a moment of existential crisis. Ari Shavit draws on interviews, historical documents, private diaries, and letters, as well as his own family’s story, illuminating the pivotal moments of the Zionist century to tell a riveting narrative that is larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and national, both deeply human and of profound historical dimension. We meet Shavit’s great-grandfather, a British Zionist who in 1897 visited the Holy Land on a Thomas Cook tour and understood that it was the way of the future for his people; the idealist young farmer who bought land from his Arab neighbor in the 1920s to grow the Jaffa oranges that would create Palestine’s booming economy; the visionary youth group leader who, in the 1940s, transformed Masada from the neglected ruins of an extremist sect into a powerful symbol for Zionism; the Palestinian who as a young man in 1948 was driven with his family from his home during the expulsion from Lydda; the immigrant orphans of Europe’s Holocaust, who took on menial work and focused on raising their children to become the leaders of the new state; the pragmatic engineer who was instrumental in developing Israel’s nuclear program in the 1960s, in the only interview he ever gave; the zealous religious Zionists who started the settler movement in the 1970s; the dot-com entrepreneurs and young men and women behind Tel-Aviv’s booming club scene; and today’s architects of Israel’s foreign policy with Iran, whose nuclear threat looms ominously over the tiny country. As it examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, My Promised Land asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can Israel survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is currently facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. The result is a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape. Praise for My Promised Land “This book will sweep you up in its narrative force and not let go of you until it is done. [Shavit’s] accomplishment is so unlikely, so total . . . that it makes you believe anything is possible, even, God help us, peace in the Middle East.”—Simon Schama, Financial Times “[A] must-read book.”—Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times “Important and powerful . . . the least tendentious book about Israel I have ever read.”—Leon Wieseltier, The New York Times Book Review “Spellbinding . . . Shavit’s prophetic voice carries lessons that all sides need to hear.”—The Economist “One of the most nuanced and challenging books written on Israel in years.”—The Wall Street Journal
Download or read book Jacob s Legacy written by David B. Goldstein and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who are the Jews? Where did they come from? What is the connection between an ancient Jewish priest in Jerusalem and today's Israeli sunbather on the beaches of Tel Aviv? These questions stand at the heart of this engaging book. Geneticist David Goldstein analyzes modern DNA studies of Jewish populations and examines the intersections of these scientific findings with the history (both biblical and modern) and oral tradition of the Jews. With a special gift for translating complex scientific concepts into language understandable to all, Goldstein delivers an accessible, personal, and fascinating book that tells the history of a group of people through the lens of genetics. In a series of detective-style stories, Goldstein explores the priestly lineage of Jewish males as manifested by Y chromosomes; the Jewish lineage claims of the Lemba, an obscure black South African tribe; the differences in maternal and paternal genetic heritage among Jewish populations; and much more. The author also grapples with the medical and ethical implications of our rapidly growing command of the human genomic landscape. The study of genetics has not only changed the study of Jewish history, Goldstein shows, it has altered notions of Jewish identity and even our understanding of what makes a people a people.
Download or read book Community and Conscience written by Gideon Shimoni and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2003 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first thorough account of South African Jewish religious, political, and educational institutions in relation to the apartheid regime.
Download or read book A Tribute for the Negro written by Wilson Armistead and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 1848 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Tribute for the Negro: Being a Vindication of the Moral, Intellectual, and Religious Capabilities of the Coloured Portion of Mankind; with Particular Reference to the African Race Authored by Wilson Armistead
