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Although a substantial literature about black-Jewish relations (what Adam Newton termed "blackjewishrelations")1 and Jews' ambivalent and ever-shifting status as not fully white continues to grow (Brodkin, Jacobson, Goldstein),2 few analyses have paid attention to black Jews. As the title of her impeccably researched The Black Jews of Africa: History, Religion, Identity suggests, Edith Bruder is one such scholar. Along with Tudor Parfitt of Lost Tribes fame and Emanuela Trevisan-Semi, who wrote the definitive text on Jacques Faitlovitch, Bruder is associated with the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, the leading scholarly institution bringing Jews from diverse backgrounds into the academic spotlight. Across the Atlantic, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Lewis Gordon are also doing important scholarly and community work to increase recognition of and legitimacy for a broader spectrum of Jews, especially those of color. Gordon's Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University, established in 2005, is the first of its kind, but if Bruder's work is any indication, the field will only continue to grow. More than providing the first detailed scholarly account of many of Africa's black Jews and their origins, Bruder makes a compelling case for explaining why these groups are significant not only for Jewish studies, but also for intellectual histories of colonialism, travel, religion, trade, and identity.
Typically when scholarship has addressed black Jews, the focus has been on questions of Jewish identity: are they really Jewish, and if so, according to whose definition? While arguments have been made based on halakhah, culture, religious practice, and, more recently, genetics, Bruder circumvents the question by investigating the symbolism that identifying as Jewish performs for these African groups. Her project takes up the kind of question that rhetoricians find intriguing: not whether Africa's black Jews are Jewish in an ontological way, but rather what their narratives of Jewishness do for their understanding of self, both individual and collective, and others' understandings of them. Drawing on methodologies from fields as varied as "ethnography, phenomenology, history, religious, and cultural studies," Bruder traces the intellectual and interactive history both of Africans' exposure to "Jewish myths and traditions in multiple forms and a number of situations" (5) and of the historical contexts "that gradually...