“Here I can like watermelon”: culinary redemption among the African Hebrew Israelites

ABSTRACT

Every May, the African Hebrew Israelite Community (AHIC), a transnational millenarian group with its headquarters in the Israeli desert town of Dimona, celebrates its most important festival, “New World Passover.” Commemorating their exodus from “the land of the great captivity” (the US) to Israel, the colorful, joyful event has a striking culinary feature: a huge pile of several tons of watermelon is set in the park amidst the celebrants, who feast on the juicy fruit along with their many guests. In this article, based on long-term ethnographic study conducted in Dimona’s “Kfar HaShalom” (Village of Peace), the AHIC spiritual and administrative center, we explore the various meanings attributed by group members to the watermelon as a healthy, tasty marker of the season; as a natural aphrodisiac; and as an expression of the community’s freedom in Israel. We coin the term “culinary redemption” to engage theoretically with these transformations in substance and meaning that are attributed to the watermelon. We argue that the community’s positive manipulations of watermelons, which are otherwise associated with African-American culture in adverse modes, are material and spiritual expressions of the AHIC’s transformation that allows its members to demonstrate their belonging to the land and people of Israel while dealing with and overcoming American and Israeli prejudice and racism.

KEYWORDS:

• African Hebrew Israelite community
• Black Hebrews
• food
• prejudice
• watermelon
• culinary redemption

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Either together or separately, we have participated in New World Passover celebrations since the mid-1990s almost yearly.

2. YouTube video,“Ben Ammi’s Own Words Why He Left America”, November 2002.

3. During the 1970s and into the ‘80s the AHIC was known as the Original Black Hebrew Israelite Nation and proclaimed that they were the only legitimate heirs to the Land of Israel (see Michaeli 2000, 74–75; Singer 2000, 67; Jackson 2013, 227–30; also Landes 1967; Chireau 2000, 24–28); it was part of their divine mission to ignore and replace the Jewish state. Since the early 1990s discourses of black preeminence in Israel and supercessionist rhetoric have all but ceased. See Djerrahian (2015) for an analysis of the changing meanings of blackness in Israel.

4. This is a very sensitive season, as untimely rain, extreme heat or locusts attack might damage and even destroy the harvest. Jewish Passover is therefore rich with food symbolism, with the Matzah, or unleavened bread, its ubiquitous key symbol, standing for the biblical story of Exodus (when the Israelites needed to leave in a hurry and had no time to leaven their bread) but also making for a ritualistic and perhaps a magic means aimed at protecting the harvest (and see Avieli 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [795/16]; Israel Science Foundation [795/16].

Notes on contributors

Nir Avieli

Nir Avieli is an associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University, and former president (2016-2019) of the Israeli Anthropological Association.  Nir has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the central Vietnamese town of Hoi An since 1998, and his book, Rice Talks: Food and Community in a Vietnamese Town (2012) is a culinary ethnography of Hoi-An. He conducted further ethnographic research in Thailand, India, Singapore and Israel. His book Food and Power in Israel (2018) is based on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in Israel since the late 1990's. Currently, with Fran Markowitz, he is completing an ethnographic study titled “Food for the Body and Soul” on the vegan soul food of the African Hebrew Israelite Community, and preparing a new research project on leisure in Greece.

Fran Markowitz

Fran Markowitz is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University.  Having conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the US, in israel, in Russia, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina with populations as diverse as Russian-speaking Jewish immigrant families, post-Soviet Russian teenagers, Bosnian returned war refugees and African Hebrew Israelites, her many publications address interests in community, identity,  religion and culture change, diasporas, and race and racialization.  She is currently completing “Food for the Body and Soul” with Nir Avieli and continuing her work on Almost-Peace and Almost-War in Israel.