Mixed Race Studies

People of God, Children of Ham: Making black(s) Jews

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies
Volume 8, Issue 2 (July 2009)
pages 237 – 254
DOI: 10.1080/14725880902949551

Bruce Haynes, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Davis

Taxonomies inherited from the nineteenth century have shaped the discourse surrounding the racial identity and supposed roots of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel. Through their interactions with just a few colonial actors, some of whom were Christian missionaries, others who were Jewish Zionists, a small group of young Falashas developed an elite status in Ethiopia as the true lost Jews in Africa. While most historians specializing in the history of Ethiopia do not believe the Beta Israel are a “lost tribe” of the ancient Israelites, Ethiopian immigrants have altered their self-conceptions over the past hundred years and come to see themselves as both black and Jewish.  This essay offers an alternative reading of the Beta Israel narrative, and asserts that the transformation of their social identities are embedded in a political process of racialization tied to racial ideology, and both secular and religious institutions and the State. In the process of incorporation into western society, their social identities have been transmogrified from religious others in Ethiopia to co-religionists yet racial others in Israel.

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Narrating the Racial Self: Symbolic Boundaries and the Reference Group Identification Among Biracial Black Jews

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Marriott Hotel, Loews Philadelphia Hotel
Philadelphia, PA
2005-08-12

45 pages

Bruce Haynes, Associate Professor
Sociology Depertment
University of California at Davis

Few studies of bi-racial or multiracial identity have considered the symbolic boundaries people use to establish their reference group identification to different social groups.  This analysis focuses on the ontological dimensions of social identification (Hart 1996) by considering the symbolic boundaries social actors use to emplot their life stories and claim membership in two distinct American ethno-racial groups, Blacks and Jews. The analysis seeks to answer two related questions: 1) How do self-identified Black and Jewish biracial individuals utilize symbolic boundaries in their personal narratives to claim membership in two publically recognized mutually exclusive groups? 2) To what degree traditional ethno/racial social boundaries have weakened as markers for social identification.  Although the content of any individual Black-Jewish identity is variable, many subjects report a “double-minority” status as both Black and Jewish, while others articulate identities as “Black Jews.”  The reproduction of Black and Jewish identity along traditional racial and ethnic group boundaries challenges both the presumed path towards the majority culture that is predicted by classic assimilation models, and romantic notions that the impact of race and the one drop rule has declined at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Introduction

The following analysis uses the intersection of Jewish and Black reference group identification as a way to explore the degree to which traditional ethno/racial social boundaries have weakened as markers for social identification among self-identified bi-racial Black and Jewish Americans. The data for this study is drawn from eleven in-depth life history interviews of self-identified Black and Jewish bi-racial people; five men and six women were selected who range from 22 to 46 years of age.

Self-identified bi-racial Black and Jewish Americans claim membership in two American ethno/racial groups that have historically been understood to be mutually exclusive. While holding a particular reference group identity is ultimately a matter of self-identifying with a specific group (Putnam 1993, 114), being both Black and Jewish requires making claims on both Black and Jewish collectives. Identity by definition carries consequences; otherwise it wouldn’t hold such salience to the orientations of social actors (Jenkins 1996)…

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