Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism (review)

This interesting collection of essays explores "shared elements in black and Jewish sacred life . . . the development and elaboration of new religious identities by African Americans . . . [and] the creative ways that African Americans have interacted with Jewish beliefs, Jewish traditions, and Jewish institutions" (p. 3). The essays discuss a wide range of topics, including little-known groups claiming some linkage with Judaism, the use of Hebrew Scriptures in African American sermons, and the adaptation of Jewish synagogues to Christian houses of worship. As an examination of relatively obscure movements in Black American life, relationships between both prominent and little-known African-American and Jewish religious figures, and urban relations between Black and Jewish communities, Black Zion serves as a useful source. It presents data and information on that segment of Black religious life that has been influenced, to some degree, by Jewish religious thought, ritual and tradition. However, as an analysis of the interaction between African Americans and Judaism and particularly as an interpretation of that interaction, this book leaves much to be desired.

Several of the essayists thoughtfully analyze the book's several themes. Bernard J. Wolfson offers interesting insights into the experiences of those who are both Black and Jewish, either by birth or conversion. Some of these individuals consider themselves secular Jews and have no apparent interest in or commitment to religion or Judaism. Others participate in Orthodox, Conservative or Reform religious communities. Nearly all report some degree of suspicion, disrespect, or alienation from American Jews who are White. The essay by Susannah Heschel, discussing the close relationship between her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Martin Luther King, Jr., provides a helpful account of their shared theological convictions and political sympathies. The intriguing discussion by Allen Dwight Callahan of the oblivion of Nehemiah in Rabbinic Judaism and his renaissance in Black religious and social thought is one of the finer pieces of scholarship in this volume.

Unfortunately, some of the other essays are less successful. Especially problematic are those that attempt to link marginal Black religious experiences with some prevailing theory (e.g., symbolic identity formation; the proximate other) that confounds rather than clarifies the issue at hand. Nathaniel Deutsch's essay on the religious character of the Nation of Islam, for example, offers an extended analysis of the "Midrash" of Elijah Muhammed, the Nation of Islam's founder. Deutsch finds Muhammed's exegesis of the opening chapters of Genesis "both midrashic and Gnostic in style" and sees many parallels to rabbinic midrash (p. 102). His devotion to the Bible is said to be "striking by twentieth-century American standards" and resembles "the intimate knowledge . . . possessed by the rabbinic authors of Midrash" (p. 105). However, the example we are given of Muhammed's midrashic skill demonstrates no more than what one can hear on any Sunday in countless Black churches where the Bible is expounded in some bold and creative way. That this has done for generations, constituting almost an art-form of Black preachers, may surprise scholars. Nevertheless it is as intimate to the African American community as the exegesis of the rabbis of old to the Jews and certainly as creative as anything Elijah Muhammed ever attempted.

Kathleen Malone O'Connor's essay is even more troublesome. She examines the Nubian Islaamic Hebrews who had a brief, two-year flirtation with Judaism and who have currently shifted their interests to extraterrestrial beings. The leader of this group, one Malachi Z. York, is described as having a "unique and idiosyncratic understanding . . . of philology and comparative linguistics" (p. 125) and in an accompanying footnote as having a "profound engagement with the primary languages of Judaic, Christian, Islamic, and ancient Near Eastern sacred scriptures (Hebrew and Aramaic, Arabic, Syriac, Amharic, Greek and Latin, hiero-glyphics and cuneiform) . . . " (p. 142, n.77). Having spent a good many years trying to master just two of...