Judaising Movements by Tudor Parfitt Emanuela Semi

Author:Tudor Parfitt, Emanuela Semi [Tudor Parfitt, Emanuela Semi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Judaism, History
ISBN: 9780700715152
Google: UVhWswEACAAJ
Publisher: RoutledgeCurzon
Published: 2002-01-15T05:55:08+00:00

6

THE ‘FALASHISATION’ OF THE BLACKS OF HARLEM

A Judaising Movement in 20th-century USA

Emanuela Trevisan Semi

Black, white, brown: ethnic and religious Judaism

There is today a generalisation of the definition of the word ‘diaspora’, a term once applied to the Jewish, Armenian and Greek communities and now extended to various groups.1 According to certain postcolonial theorists, the diasporic condition is considered a state of hybridity and impurity; others see it almost as a creative, even purifying, state, while others yet consider it a transnational entity as opposed to nation-states. A more general reflection on this condition – and on the possible definitions that may be given to the term ‘diaspora’ – also permits a fresh reading of Jewish history. Even if the diaspora were a transnational community, it nevertheless lay at the root of certain nationalist movements that led to the return to the nation-state, Zionism being an obvious example. Many of these movements were interpreted as ‘a project for coming home from exile, for the resolution of hybridity, for a positive printed from a negative’.2 In the postcolonial discourse of diaspora it is generally recognised that Black intellectuals are in a certain way indebted to Jewish history: the birth of Zionism, for instance, influenced the Black liberation movements. Jews and Blacks shared ‘the condition of exile, (or) forced separation from the homeland’ as they also did ‘the notion of a return to the point of origin’.3 Herzl’s book Der Judenstaat (Wien, 1896) strongly affected Black leaders for they considered the project a good model for the construction of a Black state and a centre for Black renaissance in Liberia and elsewhere.

This study will examine the process through which the Black diaspora in America gradually came to identify itself with the American Jewish diaspora. This took place in the stirring times following the Balfour declaration which ultimately led to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and permitted, if you like, ‘the return to the point of origin’.4 This process was speeded up by the spread of information about a Black Jewish diaspora in Ethiopia: the Falashas. The possibility of sharing a mirrored diaspora – Blacks in America and Jews in Africa – linked obviously by skin colour, and less obviously by the conditions of slavery, exile, discrimination and a keen hope of redemption, gave rise to new myths of origin in which Ethiopia became a shared locus and the process of identification took the form of what we may call ‘Falashisation’. As the country known in the Bible as Cush and associated with the glories of ancient Egypt and the Queen of Sheba, Ethiopia was well suited to represent a common birthplace.

Through this two-way route, both ideal and concrete, of ‘back to Ethiopia’ and ‘back to Jewish America’, some American Blacks hoped that the new Falasha identity would aid the integration process in the great Jewish American diaspora.

Similarly, if the Black diaspora in America could find a mirror image in a Jewish diaspora in East Africa – which in the successive

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