The Jews of Africa: Lost Tribes. Found Communities. Emerging Faiths

The Jews of Africa: Lost Tribes. Found Communities. Emerging Faiths
Author: Jono David
Publisher:
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2021-03-13
Genre:
ISBN:

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. ***

The Black Jews of Africa

The Black Jews of Africa
Author: Edith Bruder
Publisher:
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2008-06-05
Genre: History
ISBN:

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.

We the Black Jews

We the Black Jews
Author: Yosef Ben-Jochannan
Publisher: Black Classic Press
Total Pages: 518
Release: 1993
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780933121409

Dr. Ben destroys the myth of a "white Jewish race" and the bigotry that has denied the existence of an African Jewish culture. He establishes the legitimacy of contemporary Black Jewish culture in Africa and the diaspora and predates its origin before ancient Nile Valley civilizations.

Jews and Judaism in African History

Jews and Judaism in African History
Author: Richard Hull
Publisher: Markus Wiener Pub
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781558764958

This is a narrative about Jews and Judaism in Africa, from antiquity to the present. Jews have often been a marginalized minority, yet they have played a role in the history of the continent hugely disproportionate to their numbers. They have enriched Africa culturally and economically, serving as innovators and middlemen, government servants and educators. Along the way, they have been victims and victimizers, mercenaries and proxies for others as well as adjuvants in long-distance trade and sustainable development. While some have converted to other religions and been assimilated into indigenous society, most have retained their Jewish identity in various forms. Jews and Judaism have practically disappeared from Africa today but their legacy will surely endure.This book covers topics such as Jews in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt; Jews in the western Mediterranean through the Inquisition; 'New Christians' and the making of the Atlantic world, including the early phases of the modern sugar economy and the slave trade; Jews in Ethiopia from antiquity to the 20th century; Jewish communities in the Muslim world; Morocco and West Africa; Sudanic civilizations from the 11th to the 21st century; Jewish communities in North Africa; Jews in the making of modern South Africa; and, the relationship between modern Israel and Africa.

The Lemba

The Lemba
Author: Magdel Le Roux
Publisher: Unisa Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN:

The Lemba people regard themselves as Jews or Israelites who migrated southwards into Yemen and later as traders into Africa. Many of their rituals suggest a Semitic influence or resemblances, embedded in an African culture. In 2010, the book was also translated into Venda, an indigenous language within South Africa, and has been reprinted due to popular local demand.

The Forgotten Diaspora

The Forgotten Diaspora
Author: Peter Mark
Publisher:
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2011
Genre: Electronic books
ISBN: 9780511987601

"This book traces the history of early seventeenth-century Portuguese Sephardic traders who settled in two communities on Senegal's Petite Côte. There, they lived as public Jews, under the spiritual guidance of a rabbi sent to them by the newly established Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. In Senegal, the Jews were protected from agents of the Inquisition by local Muslim rulers. The Petite Côte communities included several Jews of mixed Portuguese-African heritage as well as African wives, offspring, and servants. The blade weapons trade was an important part of their commercial activities. These merchants participated marginally in the slave trade but fully in the arms trade, illegally supplying West African markets with swords. This blade weapons trade depended on artisans and merchants based in Morocco, Lisbon, and northern Europe and affected warfare in the Sahel and along the Upper Guinea Coast. After members of these communities moved to the United Provinces around 1620, they had a profound influence on relations between black and white Jews in Amsterdam. The study not only discovers previously unknown Jewish communities but by doing so offers a reinterpretation of the dynamics and processes of identity construction throughout the Atlantic world"--

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas
Author: Tudor Parfitt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2013-02-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0674071506

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.

The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel

The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel
Author: Andrew Tobolowsky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2022-03-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1009089137

The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel is the first study to treat the history of claims to an Israelite identity as an ongoing historical phenomenon from biblical times to the present. By treating the Hebrew Bible's accounts of Israel as one of many efforts to construct an Israelite history, rather than source material for later legends, Andrew Tobolowsky brings a long-term comparative approach to biblical and nonbiblical “Israelite” histories. In the process, he sheds new light on how the structure of the twelve tribes tradition enables the creation of so many different visions of Israel, and generates new questions: How can we explain the enduring power of the myth of the twelve tribes of Israel? How does “becoming Israel” work, why has it proven so popular, and how did it change over time? Finally, what can the changing shape of Israel itself reveal about those who claimed it?