Reflections on the Afro-Jewish question

When Sartre visited the United States, one of those who welcomed him was Richard Wright, the celebrated African American novelist, author of Native Son. Wright knew where to take Sartre, who was a lover of jazz and of the Black hipster¹: Harlem. As they strolled through this Black world, Sartre turned to his host and asked his opinion on the Negro problem. Here is Wright’s reply: “There is no Negro problem in the United States, there is only a white problem.” ² Wright was indicating by this that the problem to be posed was that of the way in which whites treated Blacks. His reply was a revelation for Sartre. When he returned to Paris, he wrote Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew), in which he discusses the Jewish question as a problem of the antisemite, of the antisemite’s hatred of the Jews.³

A large part of my work concerns the appearance of invisible communities. By invisible, I do not mean here a failure to reflect light. Invisible refers to the social forces that bear upon perception, when a person is perceived as absent even though she is there, before everyone. The discussion that will follow can be understood by way of an analogy. If one is in a room without light, one may believe that one is alone. If one strikes a match, a small set of other people will appear. And more still, if one lights a candle. And if one must use the candle to find the light switch, everyone in the room will come to light. The conclusion? To see no one does not imply that there is no one. It is important to call into question our mode of perception and to explore the social mechanisms of power that affect what we see and want to see.

The idea that the Afro-Jewish question is something complex does not go without saying. One might think, at first sight, that it raises at the same time questions about the Negro problem and about the Jewish problem, as if the Afro-Jew encountered both anti-Black racism and antisemitism. When one places oneself from the standpoint of Judaism, the question of the convergence between people of African origin and others of Jewish origin would present no specific character, and the “problem” here too would be quite simply anti-Black racism and antisemitism. A difficulty appears, however, when the anti-Black racist is Jewish and refuses to recognize Afro-Jews, or thinks that the Afro-Jew is impossible, that he cannot exist. Curiously, there are Black Jews who reject the idea that a person can be both white and Israelite. They admit the existence of people of the white race who call themselves Jews, but they assert that there is no biological or historical link between these people and those of ancient Israel. They maintain that the ancient Israelites were people of color, like those of today⁴.

Formulated in biological terms, this claim of the “Black Israelites”⁵ is, however, a double-edged sword. The recent development of genetics reveals the way in which biological and genealogical history cannot resolve the questions that arise concerning people’s ancestors. The flourishing field of Jewish genetics attaches itself to these questions, but it poses many problems: even if someone possesses the genetic material of a person from North Africa or Western Asia, this does not mean that his distant ancestor was from Judea. But, as we all know, fanatics find the means to defend such a claim. However, should it turn out that there is no genetic link between most of the past and present members of the Jewish people, then the Black Jew, the brown Jew, the red Jew, or the white Jew would have to make a great effort of reflection in order to appeal to their Jewish past in terms other than theological.

The approach that consists of attaching Judaism to the Jews and the Jews to the Hebrews and the Israelites creates a new series of questions. Just like the one that attaches people originating from Africa to the Black population of today. In addition to the question of the Afro-Jews, there is that of the Black Jews. Even if the expression Afro-Jew may suggest it, this qualifier is not reversible: Black Jew is not identical to Afro-Jew. An Aboriginal Jew of Australia, for example, is not an Afro-Jew. (One could reinscribe Africanness within another reading of the Aborigines of Australia, but it would then be in a primordial sense, which applies quite well to everyone, since we are all homo sapiens.)

For the Jews, a large part of the problem is complicated by a general disagreement over what counts in order to know who is Jewish. Although some lay claim to the idea, in the racial-ethnic sense of the term, of a group of Hebrews or Israelites whose religion is Judaism, their claim runs up against elements that destabilize it from the outset. For example, there have been and there still are people who speak Hebrew or who descend from the Hebrews or the Israelites, who do not practice Judaism, but who may belong to the category of the Jews because of certain dimensions of Jewish law, or Halakha: if their mothers are Jewish, they are Jewish. Then there are those who do not come from the Hebrews, but who are considered Jewish by the Halakha: if their ancestors were converted to Judaism, if they continued to practice Judaism, and if they descend from them through their mothers, they are Jewish. And then there are those who, for example, descend from the Hebrew people, who are born Jewish, but who do not have the right to marry Jews, again on account of the Halakha: if a Jewish woman commits adultery, the child of this illicit relationship (called a mamzer), although Jewish, is not permitted to marry a Jew (Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Jews reject this practice as immoral and barbaric, but there are Orthodox Jews who maintain it). Moreover, there are different Jewish denominations with radically different conceptions concerning the place and the interpretation of the Halakha in contemporary Jewish life. For Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, one Jewish parent, the mother or the father, suffices. These different conceptions, ranging from Orthodoxy to Reconstructionism, affect the notion of being Jewish by birth. Although rabbinic Judaism affirms that one is born Jewish through one’s mother, the ancient Judeans were patrilineal, which is in conflict with Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, because, even if they recognize an individual as Jewish through his father, these Judaisms must also recognize as Jewish all those whose mother alone is Jewish. Yet another complication of fact, although theoretically irrelevant for the Jews who prefer patrilineal filiation: think of the importance of the family names Cohen, Levi, Benjamin, Isaacs, Judah, Reuben, or Simeon, or, among the Jews of Ethiopia (and perhaps everywhere in the world), Solomon. For whoever seeks to give an identity to this mixture, one can imagine the problems he would encounter if still other difficulties were to present themselves!

At first sight, the question of “race,” as it arises for the African diaspora, seems to have no relation to the Jewish question, until the moment when one realizes that historically the mixed, multiracial reality of the Jews intervenes as soon as one employs the qualifier Hebrew or Israelite. In the New World in particular, Afro designates, however, a mixed group, so that skin color there is something very fluid, ranging from light to dark. This qualifier, as Frantz Fanon showed in Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), is also what one may call a historico-racial schema, concerning which it must be recalled that the groups from which modern Afros and Black peoples descend were historically neither African nor Black.⁶ A great deal was done to constitute them as such. The political, economic, and mythico-symbolic history that led to the emergence of this schema hampers the intellectual resources necessary for the study of the Black population. Today, for example, a condition is often placed upon this study, which deforms every effort to conduct it rigorously: it must begin by denying the reality of its object. Reflecting on what he had learned from his ethnography of Blacks in Philadelphia, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that being born into a group did not imply that one had privileged scientific knowledge of that group.⁷ He meant by this that, even though he was Black himself, he still had much to learn about Blacks. He had to consider the perspective of the social sciences. His understanding of the Black population came after his study. Likewise, many Jews have studied Jews under the pressure of antisemites and have invested the Jewish identity proposed by adherence to the universe that rejected them. In other words, in addition to the false formulations enunciated by antisemites about Jewish history, there also arose the problem of the false formulations enunciated by Jews themselves about their own history.

Judaism became supposedly more “authentic” as a religion and a way of life born in Europe rather than in Western Asia or East Africa. A large part of this phenomenon emerged from the constitution of Israel as a Jewish State. Although many Zionists were secular Jews, they entrusted religious authority to groups that were formerly marginal among the Jews of Europe, which instituted them as controllers of Jewish identity. The result today is the fact, widespread throughout the world, that Jewish identity ends up in the hands of the ultra-Orthodox among the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. Although most Jews, of those who identify as Jews, or as Israelite-Hebrews, do not live in Israel, and although many of them continue to live their lives independently of what the chief rabbis of Israel declare, the impact of the authority of the ultra-Orthodox is felt above all among those who belong to communities whose ancestors ceased to practice Judaism. Their “return” to Judaism almost always takes place under the auspices of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Beth Din and, in certain cases, recognition is not even guaranteed.⁸

A myth common to the African diaspora and the Jewish diaspora is the so-called notion of “purity,” understood as an uninterrupted morphology. In other words, a community that claims authenticity today can appeal to an “authenticity” it supposedly had in the past. But, in order to attain this, certain historical facts are erased, such as migration and the dangers it brought to bear on despised communities. Others fail to recognize the practices of marriage and the birth of children out of wedlock. There are also the erroneous representations that place the way in which a great number of people imagine the history of entire continents such as Africa, Europe, and Asia. The construction of the two extremes that are the civilized and the savage engenders the notion of a rational Europe opposed to a primitive and irrational Africa.

From Antiquity to the time of early modernity, one can nonetheless study Africa as a vast system of trade routes. This renders suspect the notions of African isolation and of primitivism. One must on the contrary examine closely the fact that it was precisely the disruptions in this commerce that determined the history of Christendom in the Middle Ages, from its slow efforts to reestablish expansion through to the Renaissance and to triumphant globalism in the modern era in the form of Europe.⁹ This expansion brought about the appearance of prototypical racial categories, which is manifest with the word raza, born in the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages, which refers to breeds of dogs, of horses, and, when applied to persons, to the Moors and the Jews.¹⁰ The legacy of this convergence is twofold. On the one hand, there is almost no distinction between the Moors and the Jews, because of the identification of North Africans as Jews or Moors (many Christians of North Africa were converted to Islam from there). On the other hand, the geo-racial understanding of the Moors brings two regions to meet: Western Asia and Africa through Islam; Western Asia and Africa through Judaism.

Although Christianity also brought Western Asia into Africa, the Romanization and the Easter-Europeanization of Christianity led to the ignorance of African history, at least in its theological considerations. From the Christian Trinity onward, North Africa is imagined as a place of European thought. But, for those at least who consider that the geological remoteness of Western Asia from Africa does not go without saying, there is a snag: is Western Asia not East Africa?

A similar preoccupation affected the emergence of Judaism in the ancient Roman world. The rabbis knew well that the inhabitants of Judea had adopted many Roman practices and that the Christians were not the only ones to be proselytes.¹¹ The Judeans (the people of Judea) offered their rituals and their practices to the Roman world, which made them a very effective community of proselytes, since their number increased by nearly 8,000,000 over the course of the first century of the Common Era. This tendency was maintained until the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity, who outlawed (on pain of death) the conversion of other groups, Christians in particular, to Judaism. And this decree forced the Jews to become endogamous, in the ancient world at least. We should not, however, forget that the Roman world was multiracial and that it extended to the North as far as Britain, reached to the South as far as the Sahara, and to the East as far as Mesopotamia, contemporary Iraq. In this sense, many of those whom we consider the Jews of today reflect very diverse groups spread over a vast geographic territory.

Each part of the term Afro-Jew also raises specific problems. On the Afro side, drawing again on Du Bois, there is the problem of double consciousness, in a world where being Black must not be a norm — or worse, must not be normal.¹² This consciousness supposes both that Blacks see themselves from the anti-Black racist gaze and that this gaze is itself considered defective. It also entails negotiating with the history of dehumanization (slavery, racism). Other problems are specific to the Jewish side. The persecution of the Jews throughout history even though Judaism is the foundation of the religion of a great number of the persecutors. Or again, the internal problem of the meaning of the word Jew, in terms that are not those of discrimination in the modern world but that are those of Jewish law. In other words, from the standpoint of Judaism, the Jew is the one who lives according to the Torah, and thus every Jew in fact becomes a priest, which Nietzsche had understood¹³. Because certain Jews, such as the Cohens and the Levis, have specific roles from the standpoint of the law, every Jew is, as it were, “in reserve.” Even secular Jews often find themselves in the situation of having to fulfill a ritual that requires the presence of Jews when there are no religious Jews among them.

Let us now come to the essential. There is now an Afro-Jewish question, because of a problem that arises both in Jewish history and in the history of the formation of Blacks. Jewish history has its origins in the conquests of the ancient peoples of Judea and in the debates over separation versus assimilation. Among the Greeks and the Romans, it was a matter, for many Judeans, of knowing what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God. As we have seen, Christianity attempted, with the emperor Constantine, a convergence between Church and State, but in the modern and secular State, questions of membership have become in part racial. Because of the rise of colonialism and the development of the conceptions of modernization that accompanied it, the European Jews — people who were rarely considered white, because European Christians regarded Judaism as foreign and more tribal than religious, and because whiteness was born with Christendom — were reached by a process of whitening. It happens that the decoupling of religious membership and tribal membership made another path emerge toward full citizenship, in particular in the European colonies seeking a white majority presence. The separation of Church and State in North America meant that someone’s religion could not be invoked to deny him citizenship. But because racial identity was also a requirement of citizenship in the countries of North America (and most of the countries of the Americas), the path of access to assimilation for European Jews was obvious: to become white. It is only recently that one has seen the appearance of studies on the efforts made by Jews to become white, but these studies neglect an additional element: the impact of the trauma of the Shoah.¹⁴ The trauma of the Holocaust made the experience of the European Jews not only the experience of the European Jews, but the Jewish experience par excellence. Guilt, traumas, and the enterprises of reparation and redemption have led to a rewriting of Jewish history that produces the social practices of Jewish communities throughout the world, even those that, for example, have not yet recovered the memory of the Inquisition. In fact, a great number of descendants of the Inquisition live today in Latin America, and this apparatus strikes them full force: a certain contemporary narrative accuses them of impurity from the standpoint of a so-called halakhic purity, which taxes them with inauthenticity or with negative characteristics, thus depriving them of their history of struggle and resistance.

The problem of the appearance of Blacks in history arose in the following manner. Blacks have often been described as not being part of history as actors. This means that, except in an exceptional way, their history has not been written, even in the countries where they were the majority. Or else it has been written in a way that rendered them absent. If one considers, for example, the mythical hierarchy of civilizations, wherever there was civilization, there were no Blacks. This means that countries (including Black-majority countries) have been whitened, to the point of making Blacks disappear. A similar logic applies to citizenship. Although there have been exceptions, Blacks have been, in general, governed by the logic of an essence imposed on them. Thus, nothing that came from Africa (from Blacks) was legitimate, but only the treasures that had been introduced into Africa.

Such a repression has engendered a persistent logic of illegitimacy. Black suffering, considered as legitimately imposed, is not in a position to justify reparations for Blacks. The suffering of Blacks presents itself as a limit to an anthropology of equality. And, more pertinent to the Afro-Jewish question, the history of Blacks, as a history of slavery during the period of the worldwide expansion of Christendom, is considered a history of Christianization. In other words, Blacks are supposed to have entered the modern world as Christians, with the result the presupposition according to which they offer no ontological resistance to Christianity¹⁵. In other words, all Blacks have been transformed into Christians, despite the history of Islamic colonial expansion, which was always accompanied by a Jewish presence. Forms of resistance also really existed, represented by divergent cultural interpretations of spiritual life and of African regulations. The consequence, in the quasi-anthropological sense, is that the Black symbolizes a particular form of Christianity. Even Afro-Muslims are often perceived as clandestine Christians or crypto-Christians.

An additional difficulty comes from the fact that one often studies Jewish communities with a bad set of questions, such as: who are the true Jews? And, if there are Afro-Jews, how many of them are true Jews? I do not think that it is for researchers to work out a definition of the Jewish people (even if it is a challenge for rabbis and philosophers of Jewish thought). Another reason has already been mentioned: most Jews have difficulty agreeing on who is Jewish, and it is necessary to question and to criticize the presupposition of the existence of an authentic Jewish identity (those who are “really Jewish”). Drawing on the schema developed by Diane and Gary Tobin, I prefer the model of “identified Jewish communities.”¹⁶ Certain critics might object that this can lead to studying dubious communities, of dubious Jewish status. I reply that I know of no Jewish community today whose origins are not dubious. Even those who think that a group is Jewish if its Jewishness consists in corresponding to the expectations of the ultra-Orthodox of legitimacy (namely, that those are Jewish who descend from people converted by ultra-Orthodox rabbis) are confronted with this doubt. I think, finally, that it is more important to learn more about the history of the Jewish people (in all its diversity), as it is recounted through oral history, documents, and archaeological research, and to examine the problems raised by these approaches and these data. For whoever adopts such an approach, the most imprudent thing would be to prevent people from telling their own story.

The conclusion is obvious and simple: it must be recognized that the communities that live under the rubric of Judaism are diverse, spread throughout the world, and loosely connected. In this way, we can apply ourselves to the important task of studying what each Jewish group brings to the understanding of Jewish life. I am convinced that this will be an accurate portrait of the men and women who today compose the Jewish people.

Notes