How New Religions Are Made

Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions
by Jacob S. Dorman
Oxford University Press, 2013

What inspired you to write Chosen People? What sparked your interest?

When I was in college I was interested in the similarities between Jewish and Black nationalisms, and began to learn Jewish and African American histories at Stanford University with Clayborne Carson, George Fredrickson, Sylvia Wynter, Mark Mancall, Arnie Eisen, and Tudor Parfitt.

A chance encounter led me to visit the Original Hebrew Israelites of Dimona, Israel, and the experience was so powerful that I set out to study the antecedents of Black Israelite movements. At that time, Shlomo Levy, a Columbia University graduate student who was himself the son of one of the leading figures of the New York Israelite community, had begun to work with the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library to collect papers from a dozen or so Black Israelite synagogues. I wrote an honors thesis on a small part of that collection, and then returned in graduate school to use the rest.

Working towards my doctorate at UCLA I was fortunate enough to study Black Atlantic religions with Donald Cosentino, and African American and West Indian histories with Brenda Stevenson, Gary Nash, and Bobby Hill. I was also inspired by seminars I took with Carlo Ginzburg, Peg Jacob, Lynn Hunt, Henry Yu, and others. I wanted to thickly describe African American Judaism from microhistorical, Black Atlantic, and African American Studies perspectives.

The question of “authenticity” that had dominated the accounts of so many white Jews was of little interest to me. What had gone missing in the limited literature on the topics was an attempt to tell the story of Black Israelites as an instance of African American history (in the hemispheric sense, including the West Indies), and an attempt to write Black Israelites into the larger stories of American religion and of Black Atlantic religions.

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