The story of the relationship between Jews and blacks characterizes much about race relations through the 21st century. The story is told again and again of the positive relationships blacks and Jews should and, indeed, have had at times in American history: our combined narratives of oppression, our struggles for social justice and demands to be respected as legitimate parts of American society.
We also hear the converse story: how, despite their similarities, Jews and blacks have continually failed to come together, how the Jews became white and turned their backs on blacks as they became part of the mainstream. Author and critic James Baldwin described the tension as follows: “The Jew has been taught – and, too often, accepts – the legend of Negro inferiority; and the Negro, on the other hand, has found nothing in his experience with Jews to counteract the legend of Semitic greed.”
This story of the relationship between Jews and blacks has been told as a narrative of the failure to forge a partnership in the face of oppression. As all old stories with entrenched sides, perhaps the problem lies more in the way we are telling these stories than with history itself.
Many scholars trace the tension back to the days of the slave trade. Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam’s The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, argues that “Jews carved for themselves a monumental culpability in the slave trade,” and many Jews deny all culpability. Neither claim, recent scholarship attests, has much truth in it. Jews, like Catholics and Protestants, were no better or worse than most during the era of slavery. And like those of other religions, Jewish slave masters passed their religion onto their slaves, creating what Walter Isaac, a doctoral student at Temple University calls “African-American Judaism.”
The story of African-American Judaism is just beginning to be told. Mr. Isaac believes that, at this point, his job is simply to tell the story, to get the history and the facts straight, before anything else can happen. The story goes back to the very roots of Judaism, as its Diaspora spread throughout the Middle East to North, Central and West Africa. Though some continue living in Africa to this day, much of the resultant communities were decimated during the slave trade or uprooted to America. One of the more recent twists started with the many children were borne of sexual relations between master and slave. These so-called “mulatto Jews,” Isaac notes, were the subject of a large discourse in the antebellum and Reconstruction North and South. A number of synagogue and personal documents contain references to questions about the authenticity of their Jewishness: Could you train them in Jewish law? Could you let them in the synagogues? Could they be buried in the cemetery? Next to their masters?
Though many 19th-century American Jews were involved with black Jews, Isaac argues that the new wave of European Jews who came in the following decades had no conception of the entire phenomenon. They dismissed the communities out of hand, partially out of confusion, and partially out of a deep desire to pass as part of the white American mainstream.
Isaac is not alone in his quest to reconstruct the history of black Jewry. The Institute for Jewish and Community Studies, an independent group in San Francisco, has just published In Every Tongue: The Racial and Ethnic Diversity of the Jewish People. Authored by Diane Tobin, Gary Tobin and Scott Rubin, the volume attests to the enduring presence and importance of African-American and other diverse forms of Judaism. It is one of the first studies of Jewish demographics to lay all the numbers on the line and count black Jews as part of the diverse American Jewish community. They conclude that out of the 6 million Jews currently alive in America, nearly 500,000, more than eight percent, are black, Latino, Asian or Native American, with about 100,000 of them being African-American.
The erasure of black Jews is a much more immediate problem than this deep history of migration and language. Even in discussions in communities and on campuses about the relationships between blacks and Jews, the very existence of black Jews is not mentioned.
When Isaac first moved to Philadelphia, he asked the local Jewish Federation where he could learn about African-American Jews in the city. The woman there said she didn’t know about any black Jews in Philadelphia, or anywhere for that matter. Upon arriving in the city, Isaac drove up and down the main thoroughfare of Broad Street and immediately found several black Jewish congregations. These congregations exist throughout America, from the three in Isaacs’ hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, to the one up the road from where I wrote this essay in Harlem, New York.
The existence of these unrecognized congregations is yet another reminder of the absurdity and injustice of refusing to acknowledge black Jewish communities. As long as we continue to tell two distinct histories of blacks and Jews, we will never come to terms with our troubled past, present or future.
We will, furthermore, not understand what Judaism itself is. Dialoguing with African-Americans inside the Jewish community will bring to light varied and divergent practices and rituals. The point will not be to claim that these practices are as “authentic” as any other kind of Judaism, but rather that their existence challenges our very notions of what authenticity in Judaism means.
We must therefore begin, as Isaac suggests, to learn the history, the facts, and the stories of African-American Judaism. In this complicated confluence of race, religion and history, we may yet find space to begin a conversation about the realities, challenges, and aspirations of minority voices in the Jewish world in this country and and in the wider world.
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I very much want to thank Walter Isaac for his time in speaking to me in preparation for this article. Recent scholarly work on the subject of blacks and Jews by Jonathan Schorsch and Eric Sundquist helped me frame some of the questions, as did edited volumes by Jack Salzman and Cornel West, Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch, and V.P. Franklin et al.
