The Lemba

The Lemba

Author: Magdel Le Roux

Publisher: Unisa Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13:

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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.


Black Jews in Africa and the Americas

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas

Author: Tudor Parfitt

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-02-04

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0674071506

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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 African Tribe Of Jewish Decent

The African Tribe Of Jewish Decent

Author: Kendrick Callaway

Publisher: Independently Published

Published: 2022-09-23

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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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.


The Black Jews of Africa

The Black Jews of Africa

Author: Edith Bruder

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-06-05

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 019533356X

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"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."--Résumé de l'éditeur.


African Zion

African Zion

Author: Edith Bruder

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2012-03-15

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1443838683

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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.


A Lost Tribe: Russian-speaking Jews in South Africa Today

A Lost Tribe: Russian-speaking Jews in South Africa Today

Author: Boris Gorelik

Publisher: Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, University of Cape Town

Published: 2010-09-01

Total Pages: 26

ISBN-13: 0799224685

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There is a group of Jews in South Africa that has been almost overlooked by local Jewish organisations. In fact they are not even viewed as an entity, but rather as an aggregate of individuals whose number is unknown. These are the Russian-speaking Jews from the former Soviet Union- South African Jewry's 'lost tribe'. Unlike Israel, Germany or the United States, South Africa did not experience the influx of hundreds of thousands of Soviet and post-Soviet Jews in the 1970s to 1990s. That is probably a reason why neither researchers nor journalists has ever considered them as a South African phenomenon. In addition, unlike those Jews from the ex-USSR in Israel, Germany or the United States, in South Africa they have not formed their own communities and do not play a prominent part in the existing ones. In fact, they usually appear to be unwilling to involve themselves with South African Jewish organisations. They keep their distance and are not as religious or Zionist as their locally-born counterparts and are generally not community oriented. To some observers they may even appear to be more Russian than Jewish. Generally speaking, ex-USSR emigres are not clearly bound to their Jewish identity. They might be Jews but do they manifest any 'Jewishness'?


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

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

Author: Jono David

Publisher:

Published: 2021-03-13

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13:

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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 Travelling Rabbi

The Travelling Rabbi

Author: Moshe Silberhaft

Publisher: Jacana Media

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1431405981

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Annotation Tracing the journeys of the Travelling Rabbi, this book highlights Rabbi Silberhafts invaluable work in Africa, from caring for the graves of the forgotten and performing wedding ceremonies to providing kosher food and religious insight to various communities. Including numerous storiessome tragic, others humorous, but always fascinatingthis memoir is a celebration of the resilient people he encounters and a permanent record of the Jewish communities and personalities who would otherwise be forgotten.


Genetic Afterlives

Genetic Afterlives

Author: Noah Tamarkin

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-09-11

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1478012307

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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.