Tastes and Tunes of Black Israeli(te)s

This special issue of African and Black Diaspora derives from an intense, on-going conversation among an international cadre of interdisciplinary scholars whose combined theoretical interests and fieldwork experiences are making important contributions to Diaspora Studies. It began early in 2015 as Nir Avieli, Gabriella Djerrahian, Steven Kaplan, Hilla Paz, and I submitted abstracts for a session entitled, ‘Tastes and Tunes of Black Israeli(te)s’ to the program committee for the 8th Biennial ASWAD [Association for the Study of the African Diaspora] Conference. Our session earned a place on the program, and we presented our papers at the conference in Charleston, South Carolina in November of that year. Immediately thereafter we asked Uri Dorchin, Sarah Hankins, John L. Jackson, Jr., Magdel LeRoux, and Hagar Salamon to join in our discussion¹.

Heeding Paul Gilroy’s call to assert the importance of ‘exchanges between blacks and Jews for the future of black Atlantic cultural politics as well as for its history’ (1993, xi), this collection of essays grapples with those historical conjunctures and overlapping diasporic streams regarding people(s) of African heritage who also avow and enact connections to Israel and to Judaism. With a specific focus on food and music, the issue’s eight articles explore and explicate the dynamic cultural practices of Black groups ranging from the Lemba of South Africa to Ethiopian Jewish Israelis, and from Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers to the Chicago-born African Hebrew Israelite Community, that articulate claims for Jewish recognition and inclusion, if not rights of residence and refuge in Israel.

Despite the transgressive inroads made by diasporic thought and postmodern theories by cutting across disciplinary boundaries and challenging long-standing cultural categories, more than 15 years have passed since Katya Gibel Azoulay, (2001) observed that in the United States only scant attention is paid to ‘the multiply inscribed subject produced by the diasporic condition shared by those of Jewish and African descent’ (211). In contrast, Black–Jewish relations have captured considerable popular and scholarly interest, including heady and heartfelt discussions by public intellectuals about conflicts between Blacks and Jews and strategies for mending those rifts (Lerner and West 1995, 1996), as well as more standard academic research into, for example, Blacks’ and Jews’ literary images of each other (Budick 1998; Goffman 2000; Rottenberg 2014), analyses of everyday intergroup encounters in American cities (Goldschmidt 2006; Lee 2002; Shapiro 2006), and comparative (political) histories of Blacks’ and Jews’ respective experiences (Adams and Bracey 1999; Berman 1994; Diner 1995; Salzman and West 1997; Schorsch 2004; Sundquist 2005). Several of these studies highlight borrowings, unequal exchanges, or appropriations between the two groups, especially regarding religion (Baer and Singer 1992; Chireau and Deutsch 2000; Dorman 2013; Jackson 2005, 89–123, 2013), and music (Kun 2005; Melnick 1999; Rogin 1996).

While making critical contributions by illuminating common concerns, intergroup conundrums, and the uneven impact of race (e.g. Brodkin 1997; Greenberg 2013), by positing African-Americans and Jewish Americans as distinct ethnic groups with incommensurable cultures and histories, the comparative approach to Black–Jewish relations has also reinforced the binary logic of America’s color line (pace Douglass 1881; Du Bois [1903] 1939). Black Jews in such a scheme are, if not altogether unimaginable (Kaye/Kantrowitz 2007, 36), a jarring anomaly (Gibel Azoulay 1997, 2001), prompting questions of authenticity and origins: Are Black Jews ‘really’ Black; are they ‘really’ Jewish? Do their claims of dual belongings rest on descent, intermarriage, or conversion (Gibel Azoulay 1997; Haynes 2013; Walker 2001), or on membership in questionable cults or heterodox sects? (Brotz 1964; Fauset [1944] 2014; Jackson 2005, 89–123, 2013, 9; Kurtis 1981, 64 ff.; Landes 1967).

In contrast to the dichotomous notions of Black–Jewish identities of twentieth and twenty-first century America, Europeans have long identified connections and overlaps between the swarthy Jews in their midst and Black Africans (see Gilman 1991). As evidenced by German Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger’s assertion that Jews ‘possess a certain anthropological relationship with both Negroes and Mongolians’ (1906, 303; cited in Gilman 2003, 141) in the past, these connections were for the most part accepted as fact. Christian missionaries, European government agents, traders, and settler-colonists scrutinized Africans – their bodies, their rituals, and lifeways – and categorized them according to prevalent religious and ‘scientific’ knowledge (Young 2005). Certain facial features and skin tones, and marriage and family practices were used as further proof that (some) African peoples were Jews – the direct offspring of the Lost Tribes of Israel, if not descendants of Noah’s son, Ham (Bruder 2008; Parfitt 2003; 2012; cf. Brettschneider 2015).

European Protestant missionaries’ mid-nineteenth century ‘discovery’ of the Falasha (a derogatory Amharic word meaning strangers) in remote Ethiopian highland villages, followed by visits by the French Jewish orientalist scholar Joseph Halevy and his student Jacques Faitlovich, confirmed the lore of Black African Lost Tribes. The Beta Israel, as Ethiopian Jews call themselves, worshiped facing Jerusalem, observed Saturday as the Sabbath, celebrated Judaism’s most holy days, implemented some of the laws of kashrut (kosher food and slaughtering) and niddah (menstrual and postpartum taboos), and claimed descent from the Tribe of Dan (Anteby-Yemini 2004b, 146–149; Kaplan 1992; Salamon 1999). Yet unlike Jews throughout the world who prayed, studied, and communicated in Hebrew, Ethiopia’s Jews had no knowledge of that language.² Instead, they used Ge’ez, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, in their sacred texts and daily prayers (Shelemay 1986). Nonetheless, before World War II, a number of rabbis in Europe and the United States advocated for recognition of the Beta Israel as Jews, and discussions continued after 1948 in the new State of Israel. In 1975 Israel’s Chief Rabbinate officially accepted these Ethiopians’ assertions of Jewish ancestry, which made them eligible for aliya, the ascent, or immigration, to Israel.

Hundreds and then thousands of Beta Israel fled the harsh conditions of their country and made the hazardous trek to Sudan (see Ben-Ezer 2005). By 1977 the Israeli government took decisive action by deciding to transport them to Israel, and in 1983 launched ‘Operation Moses’ which covertly airlifted over 6,500 persons from makeshift refugee camps there. After the Sudanese government objected to the Operation and forced its abrupt end, over 14,000 Falasha men, women, and children flocked to Addis Ababa. They were subsequently airlifted en masse to Israel during two days in the spring of 1991. Absorption efforts on the part of the Israeli government and its citizens have resulted in mixed outcomes for the Beta Israel, as racialization, bureaucratic paternalism, and demands for conformity to Jewish rabbinic orthodoxy upset expectations of an easy, joyous homecoming (Anteby-Yemini 2004a; Herzog 1998). Culinary and musical aspects of the experiences of first and second generation Ethiopian-Israelis are explored in this issue by Hagar Salamon and Gabriella Djerrahian.

No parallel ‘discovery’ of self-avowed, practicing Jews was made in Africa’s west, although intrepid observers noted that societies such as the Ashanti and Igbo practiced menstrual and postpartum seclusion and leviratic widow-marriage that resembled Old Testament customs. Reviewing these and other ostensibly Jewish cultural traits in the region, Joseph J. Williams (1930) applied then-current anthropological ideas about diffusion to conclude that ancient Israelites, especially following the 70 CE destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, migrated across Africa and settled. Over the centuries, bits and pieces of Judaic culture took hold even as the Hebrews assimilated into African societies. These assertions both advanced and refuted the Lost Tribes position: Williams’s book offers much evidence in support of a longue durée of Black Judaic populations stretching across Africa; but it also contends that Black Africans and Middle Eastern Jews are of distinct geographical and cultural origins.

Today, questions about the ancestries of African Jewish groups, including the 135,000 first, second, and third generation Ethiopian-Israelis (Anteby-Yemini 2004b, 146), continue to percolate (Zianga 2013). With twenty-first century advances in biotechnology and genetic research, the genomic map of human populations has expanded and become even more precise regarding the prevalence of certain genetic markers. African-Americans and African–Britons have embraced DNA testing as a means for securing information about their ancestry (Nelson 2008), while Jews in the U.S. and in Israel, in addition to tracing their lineages, are donating DNA in hopes of finding cures for what are termed ‘Jewish genetic diseases’ (Kahn 2005).³

Early on in the process of mapping the ‘Jewish genome’, geneticists delineated the Cohen Model Haplotype (CMH) which is prevalent among Jewish men, particularly those identifying as kohanim, the lineage of priests of the Jerusalem Temple (Hammer et al. 1997). Suddenly a new form of evidence became available to check the plausibility of claims to a Jewish heritage (Abu El-Haj 2012, 25). Most rabbis, however, consider genetics a minor factor when determining Jewish identity (Kahn 2005, 184), and most geneticists acknowledge that ‘Jewish genetic markers’ are ambiguous and not unique to Jews (Nebel et al. 2000).

The Lemba of South Africa, whose culture evidences ‘Hebrewisms’, embraced the opportunity for DNA testing to prove the veracity of an oral tradition that speaks of Hebrew ancestors having arrived centuries ago from abroad. Magdel LeRoux’s article in this issue analyzes Lemba food and musical practices that express that tradition. Although their ‘incidence of the Cohen Modal Haplotype is much the same as to be found in Jewish populations’ (Parfitt 2003, 113; see also Parfitt and Egorova 2005; Thomas et al. 2000), the Lemba have not (yet) been officially recognized as Jews by the Israeli rabbinate nor by the state. Conversely, genetic tests among Ethiopian-Israelis reveal ‘little if anything in common with other Jewish groups’, and no one has called for a new investigation or reevaluation of their Jewish status (Parfitt and Egorova 2005, 204).⁴

Until 2005, just about all of Israel’s African-descended residents were Black Bedouins, Ethiopian Jews, or members of the African Hebrew Israelite Community who first arrived from the U.S. via Liberia in the early 1970s (see Markowitz, Helman, and Shir-Vertesh 2003) and whose food practices are analyzed in this issue by Avieli and Markowitz. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Israel also housed several hundred non-Jewish African undocumented worker-migrants and refugees, whose gatherings in a Tel Aviv nightclub are the focus of Uri Dorchin’s article. Due to harsh conditions in Eritrea and Sudan, just a decade later over 50,000 East Africans fled to Egypt and made the dangerous journey through the Sinai peninsula to cross Israel’s ‘lax border’ (Sabar 2010, 43). Israel, which greatly encourages and invests in aliya (Jewish immigration) but dissuades immigration of non-Jews by having established no laws or procedures for naturalization, has ironically become a reluctant land of refuge (Yaron, Hashimshony-Yaffe, and Campbell 2013). In this fraught situation, Steven Kaplan conducted fieldwork in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem where he discerned how Eritrean refugees and Ethiopian residents developed dynamics of inclusion and exclusion through food preparation and commensality. Sarah Hankins’s study in Tel Aviv reveals how asylum-seekers use food and song to integrate their experiences of exile with those of the Jewish people, even as they perform themselves as distinctly African.

Surely the people whose culinary products and musical performances are highlighted in this issue defy grouping into one fixed category; some are African Israelites; some are Africans in Israel, some are Black Israelis, and some are, or aspire to identify and be identified according to all these ethnonyms. Incorporating diasporic Africans’ emphasis on freedom and solidarity with Judaism’s long-standing commitment to the Laws of Moses, ‘Tastes and Tunes of Black Israeli(te)s’ focuses attention on Black and Jewish and Israeli bodies coming together to share in substance, esthetics, history, and vision as they prepare and consume food, and perform dance and songs.

A few words on tastes and tunes: Food and music are both, each in their own way, transformative human endeavors. Food, the making of raw and cooked dishes from plants and animals and their by-products, nourishes the body, while music, the creation of harmonic and rhythmic patterns from sounds, has at least since Plato, been considered nourishment for the soul. In the first volume of the Mythologiques, Claude Levi-Strauss (1970) noted that in its specific transformations from natural substance to cultural fare, and from exosomatic to endosomatic, food expresses and explains the cultural subconscious. In the fourth and final volume of the Mythologiques (1981) Levi-Strauss explored music and concluded that it (the sound aspect), together with myth (the meaning aspect), comprise the twin features of language, the necessary medium of human thought. Like language, cuisine and music are characteristics of all human societies, and rely on specific culturally determined possibilities: music derives from pre-selected pitches and rhythms, and food is based upon established ingredients and what is permitted and what is taboo, and the presentation and order of meals.

In addition to their cultural-structural similarities, food and music both perform crucial functions for individuals, group identities, and sociability. Eating, as Mintz and DuBois have stated, ‘is perhaps the most essential of all human activities, and one with which most of social life is entwined’ (2002, 102), including connections to the supernatural (Feeley-Harnik 1995). Music, while not essential to the survival of physical bodies, is a powerful means for the formation and transmission of group identity and affect, group synchronization, and the collective expression of emotion, particularly religious catharsis (Cross 2001, 37). Both food and music are avenues of personal expression and social participation; they are different and often complementary cultural practices that integrate physical, emotional, and cognitive experiences (King and Jensen 1995).

Just as important, through the very preferences and prohibitions, manners and styles that food and music express, these universal cultural products necessarily discriminate and exclude (Bourdieu 1984). Certain food taboos preclude commensality with people outside of the group, and some kinds of music, particularly those reserved for communicating with the supernatural, are forbidden to the ears of outsiders. Food and music thereby serve to reinforce seemingly impenetrable social barriers. Yet at the very same time, they also possess the ability to transcend boundaries and travel, to touch and enter foreign bodies. Specific eating practices, dishes, dances, and melodies thereby come in contact with others. Some are ignored, some are appropriated or adopted; some undergo alterations, creolizations, and hybridizations. Although at times, new blends and forms challenge and entrench ideas and practices, they can also alter and enrich traditional culinary and musical repertoires.

The articles that comprise this special issue explore music, food, and culinary practices which present different manifestations of Africanness, Blackness, Jewishness, and Israeliness as they separate and merge in the quotidian of everyday lives. Therein, they reinforce notions of similarity and difference while also providing occasions for innovation which expand expression of diasporic identities, interpretations of the past, and visions for the future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Unfortunately, Hilla Paz was unable to continue.

2 As Sander Gilman succinctly notes, ‘Hebrew becomes the identifying marker of Jewish particularity at the frontier’ (2003, 30).

3 Approximately one in four Ashkenazi Jews is a genetic carrier of at least one of these diseases which include Cystic Fibrosis, Fanconi anemia, Gaucher disease, and Tay-Sachs.

4 Although negative findings have not been manipulated to challenge the Beta Israel’s Jewishness, McGonigle and Herman (2015) report that the State of Israel might begin to demand DNA samples from Russian, or FSU (former Soviet Union) young people seeking to join all expenses-paid Birthright tours and/or claiming their rights to Israeli citizenship via the Law of Return. While Israelis in general conceive of themselves as ‘white’, their whiteness tends more to beige and brown than to the ivory tones of northern Slavs, and Israelis are as suspicious of the Jewish origins of people who are ‘too white’ as they are of those who are Black (see Kaplan 2002).