The Strange Immortalities of Race

One of the ways in which some people talk about black Jewishness, especially some black people who aren’t Jewish, is to disparage it––to frame it as yet another way that their race-mates try, vainly, to deny an undeniable blackness. (This is not unlike the joke about every African American claiming to have Cherokee ancestors somewhere in their family tree.) Leo Felton, the biracial neo-Nazi skinhead who had to pretend to be “southern Italian” so that his “materialist” white supremacist friends would let him conspire with them to blow up Jewish monuments in New England, is just one sensationalized example of such purported self-denials (Jackson 2008, 155–56). He is framed as a kind of poster child for self-hatred and internalized racism. However, Felton considered himself the sincere advocate for a brand of white identity that wasn’t about blood or genes at all—that supposedly wasn’t reducible to biology (even if his co-conspirators weren’t as enlightened on the matter).

Despite his efforts to deploy spiritualism in antiracist activism during the mid-nineteenth century, the black mesmerist, sex magician, and spirit medium Paschal Beverly Randolph would deny being African American throughout different phases of his life. He attempted to pass for any number of other things, including a mystic from the Near East. Even if this denial was mostly just a ploy to make his sex-magic business more marketable in a racist world, this explanation still doesn’t comes close to accounting for his polygenesis arguments (marking blacks and Jews as outside the Adamic family), his profound hostility to—and dismissal of—any discussion about past/ancient African greatness, and his record of derogatively referring to blacks as “the thick-lipped Negro of the Stupid Tribe,” even if his use of quotations marks is meant to place some of that rhetoric in another’s mouth (Deveney 1997, 150).

The slippery links between blacks and Jews are not simply about variations on the theme of self-loathing. There are also many tales of covetous longing or just confusion and misrecognition. There are stories of W. E. B. Du Bois being mistaken for a Jew, and of other black nationalists—beyond Marcus Garvey—celebrating and even studying the political and social moves of Jews and political Zionists as a model for Africana nationalists. For the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ (ICGJC) in New York City, a group of African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans who consider themselves genealogical descendants of the ancient Hebrew Israelites, the investment in Hebrew Israelite identity demands a double denigration/denial. They don’t want to be African, but they don’t just want to be “Jewish,” either. Africans, they argue, are different peoples: Hamites, Cushites, Hagerens, and Ishmaelites. But not Israelites. And that difference, they argue, makes all the difference in the world.

This belief might be glossed as yet another version of “postracial” thinking/ longing—and one not as different from the standard American version of things as some might think. For the ICGJC, skin color and other phenotypical similarities do not shore up collective belonging. Africans constitute different peoples with their own discrete histories. In fact, the ICGJC claims, African Americans are not Africans at all (a relatively hard sell on the streets of Harlem, New York). But being an Israelite also means not being Jewish, and Ashkenazi Jews are dismissed as mere imposters, usurpers of the true Israelites’ rightful identity. Ashkenazi Jews are deemed Edomites (“the children of Esau”— not Jacob), and they are said to be getting back at Jacob’s descendants by supposedly stealing their identities (maybe as comeuppance for Jacob stealing Esau’s birthright in the famous Hebrew Bible story). The ICGJC provides an interesting reinterpretation of many Old Testament tales, and those readings are no more outlandish, some might argue, than the one Freud once proffered (about two different historical figures named Moses and the odd connections between them). It is a story that Eliza Slavet elegantly unpacks in her book, Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question. And maybe I’m the only strange reader who...