Scripturalizing Jewishness through Blackness

Reviews / Votes

This book will interest students and scholars of lived religion in France, as well as those studying the process of identity formation in a diverse contemporary world. * Choice * Aurelien Mokoko Gampiot opens a new intellectual space for thinking about what Jews look like and what being Black signifies in France where the post- World War II Jewish community is divided by a European Ashkenazi - North African Sephardi binary unfamiliar to most American readers.
Visible markers of Jewishness coupled with visual diversity of physical appearance necessarily reworks meanings of Blackness and African otherness where French racism and antisemitism remain intimately linked. Mokoko Gampiot argues that scripturalization of Black identities are compatible for interiorizing both Jewish and Black African identities. Within the intersection of two French ethnic minorities, existential African and Caribbean legacies are complimentary to spiritual experiences finding community with and as Jews.
Gampiot's engaging ethnography should be prioritized by anyone interested in 21st century Jewish diversity and Blackness outside the prism of American racism. -- Katya Gibel Mevorach, Grinnell College; author of <i>Black, Jewish, and Interracial It's Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity</i> This is a pioneer research on Africans and Caribbeans in France, either born Jewish or who convert to Judaism, and display increasing visibility and claims. The book astutely shows the specificities of the French context and the complexity of their double identity, as Blacks and Jews negotiating between their Jewishness, color and daily ordeals of racism and antisemitism. By giving voice to the experiences and itineraries of these Black Jews, the book explores their conversion paths, their communal organizations, questions of intermarriage, and their strategies to carve themselves a place in French Jewry, despite the discrimination they encounter in Jewish communities and French society. This study is of special interest for scholars of Jewish and Blackness studies, and of French Jewry and minorities in France. -- Lisa Anteby-Yemini, CNRS, IDEAS, Aix-Marseille University