Book Review: “In the Shadow of Moses”

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Williams F.S. Miles’ most recent book, “In the Shadow of Moses: New Jewish Movements in Africa and the Diaspora,” examines Judaism in Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, France, Gabon, Ghana, Israel and Uganda, and asks what the role of black Africans is in the redefinition of Judaism and Jewish identity in the 21st century.

 

Miles, a member of Providence’s Temple Emanu-El and a political science professor at Northeastern University, is the author of two previous books on African-Jewish connections: “Jews of Nigeria: An Afro-Judaic Odyssey” (Markus Wiener, 2013) and “Afro-Judaic Encounters: From Timbuktu to the Indian Ocean and Beyond” (Markus Wiener, 2014).

“In the Shadow of Moses” (Tsehai Publishers, 2016), which Miles co-edited with Daniel Lis and Tudor Parfitt, presents the research of 12 scholars, including Miles. In the opening chapter, “African Judaism and New Religious Movements: Repainting the ‘White House’ of Judaism,” Miles frames contemporary African and black communities that practice Judaism as New Jewish Movements, and situates what he terms the “extraordinary flourishing of African and African Diaspora Judaism” within the established literature on faiths that have more recently arisen.

By focusing on populations in Nigeria (specifically the Igbo) and Madagascar that claim Israelite ancestry through Lost Tribe descent, Miles illustrates how New Jewish Movements often involve a transition from mainstream Christian denominations (such as Protestantism or Catholicism) to “Messianic Judaism” (a Jesus-centric faith, involving the adoption of Jewish rituals, observances and holidays, that Jews would recognize as Christianity), and finally to normative Judaism. He also points to the centrality of Israel for emerging African Jewish communities, whose members are generally decidedly inspired by and unambiguously supportive of the Jewish state.

The number of Igbo who have embraced normative Judaism – and here, as in his previous writings, Miles labels these Jewishly-identified Igbo “Jubos” – is now in the thousands, and there are dozens of synagogues in Nigeria. In comparison, Jewish practice in Madagascar is quite contained. Miles does not provide figures for Judaism in Madagascar in this volume, but in a 2017 article on Malagasy Judaism in the journal “Anthropology Today,” he wrote of  “a total population of only a couple of hundred Malagasy practicing normative Judaism.”

Now numbering about 140,000 in Israel, Ethiopian Jews are by far the largest of any Jewish community connected to sub-Saharan Africa. Israeli scholars Steven Kaplan and Hagar Salamon speculated in a 1998 paper for the Institute for Jewish Policy Research that Ethiopian Jews “may be per capita the most talked about and written about group in the world.” This is likely still the case some 20 years later.

In Chapter 10, “Building Bridges: Ethiopian Israelis Take a Second Look at Ethiopia,” Len Lyons, an independent scholar from Newton, Massachusetts, investigates “where Ethiopian Israelis themselves, both past and present, believe their home to be.” Even in Ethiopia, the Beta Israel community saw distant Jerusalem as its home. However, though the state of Israel has quite possibly “done more to support the Ethiopian community than any country has ever done for an immigrant group,” Ethiopian Jews, many of whom have adopted a black racial identity along with their Jewish one, have come “to the conclusion that they are second-class citizens” in Israel. Lyons predicts that their Israeli integration will take a long time. Nonetheless, though they may not yet feel “at home” in Israel, “most Ethiopian Israelis profess strongly the idea that Israel is their home.” 

 

The Abayudaya of Uganda form another fairly well-known African Jewish community. Isabella Soi’s “Judaism in Uganda: A Tale of Two Communities” discusses the Abayudaya community’s rise, difficulties and more recent renaissance. She recounts the Baganda leader Semei Kakungulu’s religious shift from Christianity toward biblical Judaism, and eventually rabbinic Judaism, in the late 1910s and 1920s, as well as the subsequent travails the relatively isolated community experienced under the dictatorship of Idi Amin, whose anti-Semitic policies reduced its numbers to some 300 members. 

The now-revitalized Abayudaya, though not recognized as Jewish by Israel, have many international Jewish links, which have aided them in developing religious, educational and economic infrastructure in Uganda. These international links have also led the community to split into two groups, with the larger one embracing Conservative Judaism, and its members undergoing Conservative conversion, and the smaller one seeking Orthodox affiliation.

While Miles’ “Jews of Nigeria” and “Afro-Judaic Encounters” were written to appeal to casual readers and scholars, the various articles in “In the Shadow of Moses” are clearly geared more toward students and specialists on Africa. Nonetheless, this is an informative volume with chapters of interest to anyone seeking material on Jewish identity among black Africans.

SHAI AFSAI lives in Providence. His article “The Sigd: From Ethiopia to Israel” appeared in the fall 2014 issue of the Reform Jewish Quarterly.