154 Book Reviews

Lis, Daniel, William Miles, and Tudor Parfitt (eds.) In the Shadow of Moses: New Jewish Movements in Africa and the Diaspora, Los Angeles: tsehai Publishers, 2016, xvi + 259 pp, isbn 978 1 59 907146 6, US$29.95.

This collection demonstrates the need and ease of including as a key topic in any course on or research into African and African Diaspora reli- gions. Its chapters make wonderful counterpoints to related studies of Islam, Christianity, and other ‘world’ religions in Africa and the Diaspora that display dynamics analogous to those of Judaism in these areas. Len Lyons notes the relevant conundrum: the ‘dichotomy of perspectives between Jewish activists and clergy on the one hand’ who ‘see [African and African Diasporic] … as exiles and as part of the ’, and ‘historians or Africanists on the other’ who ‘see them as native [African and African Diasporic popula- tions] who [have] developed a unique “Judaized” religion’ (201). The contribu- tors to this work stake out a range of positions along these lines, revealing in the process how black Jews and members of New Jewish Movements define themselves. In the introduction, William Miles considers emerging ‘Black Jewish com- munities in Africa and the African Diaspora’ (3) as new religious movements subject to the same demographic shifts toward the Global South that charac- terize Christianity in terms of population growth and religiosity. Jewish Igbos, or Jubos, in Nigeria and recent Malagasy converts to Judaism offer examples. They came to the faith as Christian Messianic Jews but converted to Judaism to join an economically independent, global community while retaining their social and theological conservatism. The rest of the book falls into three parts, mirroring such contrasts between unity and diversity in global Judaism. In part one, ‘Euro-African Encounters’, Tudor Parfitt tells the histories of those ‘Portuguese and Spanish Jews who … fled the Inquisition’ for Africa (27). Whether practicing Jews or ‘New Christians’ who converted to avoid persecu- tion, they gave rise to ‘identifiable Black Jewish communities’ along Africa’s western coast ‘until the end of the nineteenth century’ (44). Some appear to have practiced the Sabbath, spoken Hebrew, avoided eating with non-Jews, and left Jewish graveyards, inspiring questions about racial purity and adapta- tion until twentieth-century anthropology ended such speculation with the critique of race. Daniel Lis then explores how Swiss missionaries and African intellectuals developed an alternative ‘Jewish identity construction in Africa’ (69) in the nineteenth century, based on the racialized myth of Ham. They aimed to find and evangelize African Jews, hoped to found an Ethiopian mission, and exulted

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/15700666-12340133 Book Reviews 155 after formerly enslaved Africans who resettled in Sierra Leone ‘recognize[d] themselves and their customs in the stories of the Old Testament’ (59). They also detected ‘a strong Old Testament influence’ in the patriarchal family life of Ghana (63) and concluded that Nigerian Igbos ‘were one of [Israel’s] Lost Tribes’ (65). Such missionaries sought connections over barriers. In contrast to the first three chapters that focus on continuities between African Jews, global , and Christian evangelism, Aurélien Mokoko Gampio and Cécile Coque-Mokoko emphasize ruptures in France between contemporary Black Jews and the majority white Jewish community. Jews from the West Indies, Africa, and the U.S. struggle for visibility against an ill-fitting ‘Ashkenazi/Sephardi binary’ (78) and despite racial discrimination. Black Jews have thus created community organizations ‘to challenge the racial status quo [and normalize] their presence in [French] Jewish spaces’ (85). Here diversity is the rule within Judaism. The authors of part two, ‘New and Renewed Jews and Judaism’, explore fur- ther variations in Jewish identities. Janice Levi describes unwritten vestiges of Jewish identity—‘mechanisms of remembrance’ (94)—that the ‘House of Israel’ in Western Ghana has used since 1977 to (re)claim their Jewishness: a building said to have housed women while they menstruated, abstention from work on Saturdays, and a training program for kosher slaughterers (shochetim). West African Jews likely sustained their identities similarly, without drawing attention to themselves, to escape an anti-Jewish jihad in the Sahel in the fif- teenth and sixteenth centuries. Indeed, Levi suspects that the House of Israel shares a common history with these predecessors. In Cameroon Nathan Devir charts the development of a Jewish commu- nity since 1998 ‘via online means, without any prior personal interaction with other Jews’ (114). Beth Yeshourun began as a group of evangelical Christians concerned with discrepancies between Christianity and the Tanakh. Through Internet sites maintained by Chabad and web searches on the , Beth Yeshourun eventually came into contact with the American Jewish organi- zation Kalanu, which helped them buy a cocoa farm as a source of income, highlighting ever-new strategies for being Jewish and building new Jewish communities. Isabella Soi documents an equally original alliance between two Jewish communities in Uganda: the Bayudaya, founded by former Anglican colonial leader Semei Kakungulu, and the expatriate Jewish community in the capi- tal, Kampala. After Kakungulu helped the British ‘conquer Buganda’s neigh- boring territories’ (133), he became disillusioned with colonialism, converted to Judaism, and established a Jewish community in Mbale in eastern Uganda. With aid from Kampala’s Jewish community and international channels, Mbale

Journal of Religion in Africa 48 (2018) 145-171