Between Diasporas: Religious Fluidity of Black American Jews

Posted by Amari Boyd '14

For my senior capstone, I explored the religious fluidity of a Black Jewish or an Ethiopian Hebrew sect based in Harlem, New York known as the Commandment Keepers seen in the photos below. I was fortunate to analyze the Commandment Keepers through the lens of my great grandmother, who was raised in this synagogue by means of her mother. 

In 1919, Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew founded the Commandment Keepers Church of the Living God the Pillar and Ground of Truth and the Faith of Jesus Christ where members of the Commandment Keepers primarily self-identified as Afro-Caribbean and African American. Originally a Christian church, the Commandment Keepers under the leadership of Matthew gradually deemphasized the significance of Jesus Christ and adopted Orthodox Jewish practices. Following these theological shifts, the group changed its name to Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation of the Living God Pillar & Ground of Truth. The Commandment Keepers are important because they challenged Jim Crow legislation by explicitly rejecting the identity given to them by the dominant White culture through striving to achieve the status of traditional Orthodox Jews. Regardless of the Commandment Keepers Christian origins, Rabbi Matthew explicitly denounced Christianity stating, “During slavery they took away our names, language, religion, and science as they were the only possessions the slaves had and they were pumped full of Christianity to make them more docile” (Brotz 1964: 16). Matthew wanted his congregation to practice a religion that was explicitly Jewish Orthodox and rooted in Ethiopia after he discovered the existence of Falashas, who are Ethiopian Jews, and saw them as the missing link to connect the Commandment Keepers in both the Jewish and African Diaspora.

I applied Victor Turner’s concept of liminality to analyze my great grandmother’s positionality as a self-identified Black woman with a complex religious identity.  Turner describes “liminality” as a period of margin “...served not only to identify the importance of in-between periods, but also to understand the human reactions to liminal experiences: the way liminality shaped personality the sudden foregrounding of agency, and the sometimes dramatic tying together of thought and experience” (1979).

In addition to applying Turner’s concept, I also incorporated informal interviews with my great grandmother, which I found to be most effective aspect of my methodology. Our informal interviews began in September, which totaled to three complete interviews with a video recording of the final interview.

Great grandma Sarah

My main finding is that cultural blending is an inevitable process for Black Americans with reasons varying from obtaining access to resources like Grandma Sarah to creating an alternative historical lineage like the Commandment Keepers acquired by assimilating into an alternative culture. Regardless of the reason, the creation of a counter-hegemonic identity was inevitable by challenging the myth of the Black monolith. I  argue that the Commandment Keepers demonstrated a complex layer of liminal moments where they possessed a myriad of retentions from slavery, Christianity, and Judaism. My great grandmother also demonstrates this pattern of liminality by raising her children Catholic and at times she identifies as Catholic, but she still wears her Star of David, physically displaying the retentions of her Black Jewish upbringing.

References:

Brotz, Howard
1964  The Black Jews of Harlem: Negro Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Negro Leadership. The Free Press: New York.

Thomassen, B.
2009  The Uses and Meanings of Liminality. International Political Anthropology 2(1):5-27.

Turner, Victor.
1979  Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rights de Passage. Reader in Comparative Religion 4th ed. Row Publishers.