New panels on Black Judaism offered at annual scholarly conference
By Len Lyons|
Tablet - December 30, 2014
For the first time in its 57-year history, the African Studies Association’s
annual conference this year offered panels discussing the rising tide
of Black Judaism—communities in sub-Saharan Africa and in the African
Diaspora identifying themselves as descendants of Jews or practicing
some form of Judaism. I attended the November conference along with
1,600 participants from 30 countries, and presented new research on
Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Five other researchers and authors in the
field of Black Judaism also contributed to the panels.
The panels were proposed by William F. S. Miles, a political
scientist from Northeastern University. His academic interest in Nigeria
took a personal turn in 2008 when he discovered, while reading Edith
Bruder’s The Black Jews of Africa, that the several thousand
Nigerian Igbo who practice Judaism had religious traditions quite
similar to those of his own family. Miles, who returned to Nigeria
several times to visit the Jews of the capital city of Abuja—where there
are now four synagogues—describes Jewish life in his book, The Jews of Nigeria.
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