Black Hebrew Israelites

• 1. Introduction

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  Black Hebrew Israelites are followers of a new religious movement built on a single claim: that African Americans are descendants of the ancient Israelites. The movement goes by several names, including Hebrew Israelites, Black Hebrews, Black Israelites and African Hebrew Israelites. Some of its subgroups stretch the claim further and hold that indigenous peoples of the Americas, and Latin Americans, descend from the Israelites too.

  A claim that large invites hard questions. Who first made it, and what did they say they saw? Why does one label cover communities that live in very different ways, and why do outside observers disagree about what it means? And who decides whether these believers count as Jews, as Christians, or as something else entirely?

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• 2. Two Visions

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  In 1886, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Frank Cherry founded the Church of the Living God, the Pillar Ground of Truth for All Nations. It is the oldest known Black Hebrew group. Cherry came from the Deep South and had worked as a seaman and on the railroads before he began preaching. He taught himself Hebrew and Yiddish, and his church later moved to Philadelphia.

  Cherry and a second founder, William Saunders Crowdy, each said they had received a revelation. In it, God told them that African Americans descend from the Hebrews of the Bible. Another early key figure was William Christian. The pioneers of the movement were Freemasons, and Masonic traditions left a strong mark on it.

  Cherry's theology blended two faiths. His church counted the Christian Bible, including the New Testament, and the Talmud as essential scripture. He taught that Jesus would return in the year AD 2000, and he described a "square earth surrounded by three layers of heaven." He also "denigrated white Jews as interlopers."

  Worship followed the same blend. Men wore skullcaps, congregants faced east to pray, and members could not eat pork. Cherry banned the piano and the collection of tithes, yet prayers were accompanied by gospel singing.

  Cherry died in 1963 at about 95 years old. His son, Prince Benjamin F. Cherry, took over. Members believed the founder had only left temporarily and would return in spirit to guide the church through his son. Ten years after Cherry's church began, a second founder opened a rival congregation in Kansas.

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• 3. Saints of Christ

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  Lawrence, Kansas, was the birthplace of the Church of God and Saints of Christ in 1896. Its founder, William Saunders Crowdy, was African American. The church set up headquarters in Philadelphia in 1899, and Crowdy moved to Washington, D.C., in 1903. Unlike Cherry's church, it kept a messianic connection to Jesus.

  Crowdy died in 1908, and William Henry Plummer carried the church forward. In 1921 Plummer moved the headquarters to Belleville, Virginia, where it remains. By 1936 the church counted more than 200 congregations, which it calls tabernacles, and 37,000 members.

  Leadership stayed within families. Howard Z. Plummer succeeded his father in 1931, and his son Levi Solomon Plummer took charge in 1975. Jehu A. Crowdy Jr., a great-grandson of the founder, led the church from 2001 until he died in 2016. Phillip E. McNeil has led it since. By 2005 the church had fifty tabernacles in the United States and dozens more in Africa.

  The church describes itself as "the oldest African-American congregation in the United States that adheres to the tenets of Judaism." It teaches that all Jews were originally Black. Members regard Jesus as a prophet and an adherent of Judaism, not as God or God's son. They also consider Crowdy a prophet.

  Its rituals draw on both testaments. From the Old Testament come the Hebrew calendar, Passover, circumcision of infant boys, a Saturday Sabbath and the wearing of yarmulkes. From the New Testament come baptism by immersion and footwashing, both of which have Old Testament roots.

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• 4. Harlem's Commandment Keepers

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  Between 1919 and 1931, at least eight Black Hebrew groups were founded in Harlem alone. The best known began in 1919, when Wentworth Arthur Matthew, an emigrant from Saint Kitts, founded the Commandment Keepers of the Living God. In 1930 he opened the Ethiopian Hebrew Rabbinical College in Brooklyn, later renamed the Israelite Rabbinical Academy. He ordained more than 20 rabbis who led congregations across the United States and the Caribbean.

  Matthew drew on several influences. He met non-black Jews, and he absorbed the ideas of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. Garvey used the Biblical Jews in exile as a metaphor for Black people in North America. His movement also strengthened ties between Black Americans and Africa, especially Ethiopia.

  When Matthew learned of the Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jews, he identified with them. He taught that his congregation descended from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He declared that "the Black man is a Jew" and that "all genuine Jews are Black men." Even so, he valued non-black Jews as the people who had preserved Judaism across the centuries, and he often invited their leaders to worship with him.

  In 1962 the congregation moved into a landmark building on 123rd Street. After Matthew died in 1973, a fight over succession began. Shortly before his death he had named his grandson, David Matthew Doré, who was 16 years old. In 1975 the synagogue's board instead elected Rabbi Willie White. Doré preached there occasionally until the early 1980s, when White had him and other members locked out.

  Membership fell through the 1990s, and by 2004 only a few dozen people belonged. In 2007 the building was sold while former members sued one another. Today the Commandment Keepers keep kashrut, circumcise newborn boys, hold Bar and Bat Mitzvahs and separate men and women with a mechitza. Eight or ten congregations exist around New York, with others elsewhere in North America and in Israel. Since 2000, seven rabbis have graduated from Matthew's academy.

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• 5. Journey to Dimona

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  Chicago, 1966, was where Ben Ammi Ben-Israel founded the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. Black nationalism was rising then as a response to the civil rights movement. In 1969, after a stay in Liberia, Ben Ammi and about 30 followers moved to Israel. Over the next 20 years nearly 600 more members followed. By 2006 about 2,500 lived in Dimona and two other towns in the Negev, where people widely call them Black Hebrews.

  The group traces its ancestry to the Tribe of Judah, exiled after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. It reads the Bible through African-American culture and rejects rabbinical interpretation such as the Talmud. Members keep Shabbat, Yom Kippur and Passover. Men wear tzitzit on African print shirts, women follow the niddah laws, and newborn boys are circumcised.

  Their reading of scripture also shapes daily life. Members follow a strictly vegan diet and wear only natural fabrics. Most men have more than one wife, and birth control is not permitted.

  The first arrivals in 1969 claimed citizenship under the Law of Return, which grants eligible Jews immediate citizenship. In 1973 the Israeli government ruled that they did not qualify, since they could not prove Jewish descent and had not undergone Orthodox conversion. They were refused work permits and state benefits. The group blamed racism.

  In 1981 American civil rights activists led by Bayard Rustin investigated and found that racism was not the cause. No one was ordered back to the United States, but some individuals were deported for working illegally. Some members gave up their American citizenship to try to stop further deportations.

  In 1990 Illinois legislators helped broker an agreement on the group's legal status. Members could now work and use housing and social services. They reclaimed American citizenship, and the U.S. government helped them build a school and more housing. A revised agreement in 2003 gave them permanent residency. In 2009 Elyakim Ben-Israel became the first Black Hebrew to receive Israeli citizenship, and officials said others might follow.

  Today young men and some women from the community serve in the IDF. Members have competed in international sporting events and academic contests under the Israeli flag. They have twice represented Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest. A gospel choir tours Israel and the United States, and the group owns restaurants in several Israeli cities. In 2003 singer Whitney Houston visited them in Dimona. In 2006 the Israeli public chose Eddie Butler, a Black Hebrew, as its Eurovision entrant.

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• 6. Many Camps

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  By the mid-1980s, between 25,000 and 40,000 Black Hebrews lived in the United States. They did not share one creed. The movement draws on its own readings of Christianity and Judaism, and Freemasonry and New Thought also influenced its beliefs. It is made up of many groups with differing practices, so no single description fits all of them.

  Many members prefer the names Hebrew Israelite or Black Hebrew to the word Jew. The movement stands apart from the mainstream Jewish community. Followers do not meet its usual criteria, such as matrilineal descent or formal conversion. They also stand outside Nicene Christianity, which anchors the mainstream Christian denominations.

  One branch is known as the One West Camp. It is a messianic subdivision that accepts the Old and New Testaments. It holds that the Twelve Tribes of Israel correspond exclusively to Black, Latin American and Native American communities in the Americas.

  The camp takes its name from its first gathering, at One West 125th Street in Harlem. That group was then called the Israeli School of Universal Practical Knowledge. Since then the movement has splintered into numerous camps, among them the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ. Descendants of the One West Camp also include the Gathering of Christ Church, Masharah Yasharahla and Israel United in Christ.

  Another group, the Nation of Yahweh, is based in Miami. Its founding members have been accused of violent behavior, including the murder of apostatizing members in 2007. Watchdog organizations would later single out this group, along with the Philadelphia-based Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge.

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• 7. The Extremist Fringe

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  In 1999 the FBI produced a terrorism risk assessment that looked at the movement's radical edge. It said that "violent radical fringe members" held "beliefs that bear a striking resemblance to the Christian Identity theology practiced by many white supremacists." The same assessment concluded that "the overwhelming majority of Black Hebrew Israelites are unlikely to engage in violence."

  Late in 2008 the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that the extremist fringe of the movement has a Black supremacist outlook. According to the SPLC, such members "believe that Jews are devilish impostors and... openly condemn Whites as evil personified, deserving only death or slavery." The same report stressed that "most Hebrew Israelites are neither explicitly racist nor anti-Semitic and do not advocate violence."

  As of December 2019, the SPLC listed 144 Black Hebrew Israelite organizations as black separatist hate groups. Among them are the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge and the Nation of Yahweh. The SPLC calls these extremist sects "Radical Hebrew Israelites." It does so to separate extremist from non-extremist sects, and because not every Hebrew Israelite is Black.

  The Anti-Defamation League offers a similar picture. It says that "Some, but not all, Black Hebrew Israelites are outspoken anti-Semites and racists." The ADL has written that the 12 Tribes of Israel website, run by a Black Hebrew group, promotes Black supremacy. It has also described several sects as hate groups: the House of Israel, the Israelites Saints of Christ, the True Nation Israelite Congregation and the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ.

  Some sects take their message to the sidewalk. Street preachers may use provocation to push a message that is often antisemitic, racist and xenophobic. In January 2019, street preachers purportedly targeted students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky during a confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial. One student said the preachers used slurs and told an African American classmate that his white classmates would "harvest his organs."

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• 8. Violence and Dissent

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  On the 30th of June 1974, Alberta Williams King, the mother of Martin Luther King Jr., was shot and killed at age 69. The gunman was Marcus Wayne Chenault, a 23-year-old Black man from Ohio. He had adopted the theology of Hananiah E. Israel, a Black Hebrew Israelite preacher in Cincinnati, and had shown interest in a group called the Hebrew Pentecostal Church of the Living God.

  Israel condemned Black civil rights activists and church leaders as evil and deceptive. In interviews, though, he claimed he had never advocated violence. Chenault drew no such line. He had first decided to assassinate Rev. Jesse Jackson in Chicago, but canceled the plan at the last minute.

  On the 10th of December 2019, two people who had expressed interest in the movement died in a shootout with police. They had killed a police detective at Bayview Cemetery in New Jersey. They had also killed three people at the JC Kosher Supermarket in Jersey City: its Jewish co-owner, an employee and a Jewish shopper. Authorities treated the attack as domestic terrorism.

  Capers Funnye, for 26 years the rabbi of the 200-member Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, condemned it. He said his community was "gripped by sadness" over "the heinous actions of two disturbed individuals who cloaked themselves in anti-Semitism and hate-filled rhetoric." He also faulted media reports that used the term Black Hebrew Israelites "without distinction as if the description is a one size fits all and it is absolutely not." In his words, "we are Torah-oriented Jews."

  On the 28th of December 2019, during Hanukkah celebrations at a house in Monsey, New York, a man with a machete attacked several Orthodox Jewish people. Authorities said his journals contained references to Black Hebrew Israelites.

  Critics have challenged the movement's claims on other grounds. African American Christian apologetics groups, such as the Jude 3 Project, have critiqued its theological and historical arguments. Zimbabwean novelist Masimba Musodza says its followers have made historical revisionist claims and "force their own ideas onto the text to promote their own agenda." He argues this engenders "antisemitism in Black communities in western countries."

  Fran Markowitz, a professor of cultural anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, notes that the movement's account of the transatlantic slave trade conflicts with historical records. So does its belief that Socrates and William Shakespeare were Black. Academics in general have faulted various sects for their theology and revisionist history, citing a lack of evidence.

  Shais Rishon, a Black Orthodox Jewish writer and activist, objects to a different confusion. He says that treating Black Hebrew Israelites as Black Jews erases the "mainstream normative Black Jewish community." In his view, the two groups do not share an identity, a community or the same concerns.

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