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The Lemba people regard themselves as Jews or Israelites who migrated southwards into Yemen and later as traders into Africa. Many of their rituals suggest a Semitic influence or resemblances, embedded in an African culture. In 2010, the book was also translated into Venda, an indigenous language within South Africa, and has been reprinted due to popular local demand.
The contemporary phenomenon of people’s attraction to Judaism around the world is remarkable. Additionally, millions of people who are not of Jewish descent are increasingly identifying themselves as Jews or are converting. In this volume, scholars and practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines explore multiple sources and meanings of this new shaping of modern Jewish identities in Africa, the United States, and India.
While conversions to Judaism are generally understudied in France, conversions of Black persons go unnoticed. The past three decades witnessed an increasing number of claims to Jewishness in Africa and conversions in the African diaspora and Israel. Their diverse life stories reflect deep spiritual quests. Scripturalizing Jewishness through Blackness: Black Jews in France describes the multiple ways in which they practice and claim their Judaism, relate to their fellow Jews, and reconstruct their identities. Whether former Christians or native Jews, they (re)define their racial and ethnic identities as members of two minority groups in their interactions with Jewish texts and communities, to find their place in the French Jewry and the broader French society, where they have to face both anti-Semitism and racism. After fifteen years of fieldwork, Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot offers an original analysis of their individual and collective itineraries.
"This book presents, one by one, the different groups of Black Jews in Western central, eastern, and southern Africa and the ways in which they have used and imagined their oral history and traditional customs to construct a distinct Jewish identity. It explores the ways in which Africans have interacted with the ancient mythological sub-strata of both western and African ideas of Judaism."--Résumé de l'éditeur.
The history of Judaising movements has been largely ignored by historians of religion. This volume analyzes the interplay between colonialism, a Judaism not traditionally viewed as proselytising but which at certain points was struggling to heed the Prophets and become a light unto the Gentiles' and the attraction for many different peoples of the rooted historicity of Judaism and by the symbolic appropriation of Jewish suffering. This book will look at the role of colonialism in the development of Judaising movements throughout the world, including New Zealand, Japan, India, Burma and Africa. Particular attention will be paid to the Lemba tribe of Southern Africa. A remarkable parallel movement in 1930s Southern Italy will also be dealt with. The history of the converts of San Nicandro is seen in the context of currents of Jewish universalism, messianism and Zionism. Gender issues are also discussed here as the converted women assumed powers they had not hitherto enjoyed.
Over the last hundred years, in Africa and the United States, through a variety of religious encounters, some black African societies adopted – or perhaps rediscovered – a Judaic religious identity. African Zion grows out of a joined interest in these diversified encounters with Judaism, their common substrata and divergences, their exogenous or endogenous characteristics, the entry or re-entry of these people into the contemporary world as Jews and the necessity of reshaping the standard accounts of their collective experience. In various loci the bonds with Judaism of black Jews were often forged in the harshest circumstances and grew out of experiences of slavery, exile, colonial subj...
This collection of articles addresses contemporary debates regarding race in medicine today, answering questions from a bio-medical and social perspective.
If Christianity offers believers hope, freedom, and victory over darkness, why are Christians depressed? This book explores this question using the author’s experiences with depression both as a non-believer and later as a Christian. Self-harm, suicidal behavior, and alcohol typified his non-Christian life until an encounter with Christ healed him from depression and delivered him from his self-destructive lifestyle. Unfortunately, the depression returned within a few years of becoming a Christian. He looked to the church for help but found none. This led him on a spiritual journey with God to find healing from depression. Join him as he unmasks the problem of depression in the church and explains how the church can lead sufferers to wholeness. He also shares his own struggles and describes how he found freedom from depression through Christ.
South African history will never be the same again ... Shunning the predictable, Max du Preez has put on his investigative journalist’s cap and examined our past from a fresh perspective. The result is a collection of extraordinary and mostly unknown stories, all meticulously researched and written in an engaging and lively style. Instead of regurgitating the story of Jan van Riebeeck’s arrival at the Cape, he tells the tales of a Portuguese viscount killed on a Cape beach in 1510, of the Khoikhoi chief who was kidnapped and taken to England in 1610, and of the saucy goings-on between slave women and their European settler lovers. There’s the story of King Moshoeshoe’s remarkable con...