Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Black Jews in Africa and the Americas . By Tudor Parfitt . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 2013. Pp. xiii+225. $29.95, hardback (ISBN 9780674066984 ).
Reviews of Books
For almost thirty years, Tudor Parfitt has been a trailblazer in the discipline of Black African Jewish Studies (a field which, some may claim, he founded almost single-handedly). He has also published widely in areas such as Jewish genetics, Lost Tribes narratives, and Judeo-Islamic relations. Now, in a volume based on the Higgins lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 2011, Parfitt offers a kind of summing-up of a once-esoteric subject that, in his words, has 'touched a nerve' (p. xiii) in the (occidental) Jewish world: Jews of color in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.
In Part One, 'The Color of Jews', Parfitt explores the shared historical genealogies of Jews and black Africans, specifically the ways in which Jews came to be considered as 'black'. In Part Two, 'Lost Tribes of Israel in Africa', the author demonstrates how black Africans and Jews were inextricably linked in the premodern Christian imagination as 'fundamental others' (p. 3). He does this by highlighting the major (somewhat dubious) sources of information that led to...