Media Roundup: Wakanda is Jewish

Generalizing Black identity and refining Jewish identity.

This intermediary article is a corollary to my ongoing series on Black identity, “Why We Remain Blacks”, part one of which can be found here.

Wakanda is Jewish

In 2018, the Black Orthodox rabbi Shais Rishon penned a thought-provoking article for Tablet entitled “Where Are the Jews of Wakanda?” Writing under the pseudonym MaNishtana, Rishon argues that while the absence of Islam and Christianity from Wakanda makes sense given the city’s insulation from colonialism, the absence of Judaism is ahistorical. Rishon reasons that the historical prevalence of Jews throughout Africa, from North Africa to the cape and across the horn, suggests that it would’ve been impossible for Wakanda to not have dealings with Jews.

Of course, what is meant by Jews for Rishon varies depending upon the situation. Despite being orthodox, Rishon champions non-rabbinical sects like the Ethiopian Beta Israel and the Bantu-speaking Lemba of South Africa, the latter of which have few if any genuinely “Jewish” religious practices but nonetheless bear the famous Cohen Modal Haplogroup, a genetic paternal marker associated with the highest strata of the religious caste system observed by some Jewish sects. (The Cohen Modal Haplogroup is one of the more impressive Y-DNA haplogroups in terms of its diversity and achievements, though it pales in comparison to the greatest Y haplogroup of all time, R1b.)

If a paternal modal haplogroup is a marker of Jewish identity in the same way that having a converted Jewish mother is, this is an interesting testament to the enormous diversity of essences that can determine one’s Jewishness. Further, the ethnic and religious diversity of the Cohen Modal Haplogroup suggests that a law higher than any religious law governs its spread, namely, the law of racially egalitarian male sexual preference.

Rishon goes on to applaud the presence of hereditary Jews of color in Hollywood and in the Marvel canon, and laments that Jews of color have reputations as mere converts or adopted orphans who have not been born Jewish. Absent from his discussion, however, is acknowledgment of the internal diversity of “Black.” For example, he elides the racial, cultural, and geographic divisions among North Africans, horn Africans, and South Africans, implying they’re all Black. I’ll note he also doesn’t comment upon the “Cushitic” genetic signal that shows up in European Jews, but perhaps he’s saving that for a final victory lap article. In any case, his goal here is not to refine “Black” but to generalize and expand it at the cost of refinements to “Jew”.

Eventually, Rishon considers the startling conclusion that every ethnic narcissism contemplates at some point – whether in fact something distinct from, and therefore potentially threatening to, the group self-image is actually part of that group and therefore safe. Rishon marshals a rabbinical interpretation of the Torah to conclude that perhaps Wakandans are Jewish:

“Wait…Jews. Hidden kingdom. Superior magic and technology. Inaccessible to civilization…sounds like…Sambatyon?

Holy crap, guys, what if the Wakandans are the Jews of Wakanda?”

The Erasure of Black Jews

Recently in UnHerd, Ralph Leonard, a British-Nigerian writer, wrote an article lamenting the “erasure” of Black Jews. He begins by noting that most people think of the “Woody Allen type” when they imagine a Jew, meaning they think of a racial archetype when they’re asked to consider what a Jew looks like. But he cautions that this is wrong. Consider, for example, the rapper Drake, who has solid “maternal line” credentials as a Jew. Interestingly, Ralph asserts that he has the same Jewish bona fides as Drake, despite being Jewish on the paternal line (does this mean he bears the powerful Cohen Modal Haplogroup?). For me, I have it on good authority from a Nigerian queen that Igbos are the Jews of Africa.

Next, Leonard launches into a genealogy of Jewish whiteness. While such genealogies are inherently tendentious, the history of Jewish ethnic identity he offers seems to be relatively accurate, if a bit one-sided, meaning it’s written as a sociodicy to apologize for Jews becoming white (it’s white people’s fault that Jews became white).

This sociodicy transitions paradoxically into the more important apologia of stating that Jews do not participate “in racist structures against people of color,” which Leonard advances by endorsing David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count. The full argument is that Jews arrived in America and were not white despite the color of their skin, because other American whites were paranoid about Jewish loyalty (in the same way they were paranoid about other white ethnics). They escaped this suspicion by becoming white through assimilation. But in becoming white and escaping persecution, they did not perpetuate the structural racism of whiteness because they have a history of being “detested” as a group.

Here we see the casuistic nature of ethnic narcissism: the omnipotent group self-image develops and abstracts in fits and starts through engagements with immediate perceived threats, resulting in enormously convoluted legalistic arguments that only make sense to people who are convinced of the omnipotence of that group self-image in the first place.

The more interesting part of the article delves into the ethnic and racial diversity of “Jews” worldwide. Leonard argues that because American culture dominates the world, American Jewish identity dominates the world’s perceptions of Jews, which means the world tends to think of Jews as mirroring the Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish types. For Leonard, this is the genealogy of the global misperception of Jewish racial identity.

Leonard then blames this misperception for the emergence of intragroup caste politics among Jews, like Ashkenazi landlords refusing to rent to Sephardic Jews. This is a just-so story for internecine ethnic and racial conflict among Jews. The conflict is very old and can be observed among medieval European Jews.

The reality, Leonard maintains, is that Judaism is enormously diverse. He says there are nearly 2 million Black Jews in America, for example. He also observes, to my delight, that many of Israel’s far-right parties draw upon non-white Jewish constituencies for support. This is consistent with what we’ve learned about the far right in Europe and the United States.

Interestingly, Leonard recapitulates an argument initially made by John Murray Cuddihy that American Jews turned their backs on assimilation because of the Black power movement, which inspired them to vicariously take pride in the heroism of the Six-Day War. According to Leonard, this allowed Jews to “adopt a dual identity without being accused of “dual loyalty”.”

On the issue of dual loyalty, Leonard is drawing upon a 2022 book by Emily Tamkin for this Cuddihyan insight. I recounted Cuddihy’s argument in a recent article on Jews and Genealogies of Group Narcissism, which garnered criticism from the Blue Checksphere as “anti-semitic.” I hope Emily Tamkin and Leonard know they’re being anti-semitic (because everything is potentially anti-semitic, just as everything is potentially Jewish and Black).