Judaising Movements

Studies in the Margins of Judaism in Modern Times

Tudor Parfitt, Emanuela Semi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136860348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1

JUDAISING MOVEMENTS AND COLONIAL DISCOURSE

Tudor Parfitt

Colonial discourse is the sum of prejudice, unspoken belief, stated ideology and assumptions that guided colonial societies in their enterprise. It can be reconstructed to some extent through an examination of a wide variety of oral accounts, novels, political pamphlets, essays and colonial reports. Each contributing text builds on its predecessors, creating an interlocking system although not all texts contribute to a given stream of discourse. What concerns us here is the way in which the encounter between European and ‘native’ frequently gave rise to the creation of imagined and mythic pasts for colonised or foreign peoples. These imagined pasts, imagined languages, beliefs and origins were extracted from notions which colonists carried with them into the field and frequently served colonial purposes.¹ These projections were born of colonial fantasies which were often far from malignant and which frequently sought to find links of kinship particularly with minority groups.²

What is clear is that the European view of ‘self’ and ‘other’ came under considerable pressure at the outset of European expansion. It must not be forgotten that the discovery of the American continent in 1492 and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope a few years later had obliged Europe to expand its sense of an essentially binary European-Mediterranean mould to include a new and undiscovered Africa as well as a new and distant occident which kept moving west as the years went on. As Susanne Zantop has put it: ‘It had expanded any simple self-other, Occident-Orient dichotomies, to include not just many others, but multiple, multivalent, constantly shifting ‘occidents’. Anxieties about how to define the other in such new circumstances led to a new interest in questions of origin and language among others.³

The discovery of these new and in some cases unsuspected lands can be seen as heralding European modernity. It literally opened up new horizons for Europeans: “‘virgin territories” were to be possessed and exploited; “different” realities were absorbed, surveyed, and described; “strange” peoples were to be understood, integrated into existing categories, and subjected to European needs.’⁴ In the following centuries increasingly sophisticated methods were applied to the dissection and categorisation of the new religions, social systems and customs not to mention the assiduous mapping of the regions themselves and the categorisation of the flora and fauna found within them. None the less, the process of transformation from a view of the world which perceived the Orient and Europe as binary opposites, Europe and the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean as poles, to something more complex was accompanied all too often by a utilisation of old configurations in new and quite unexpected circumstances.

At the end of the mediaeval period the general assumption was that there were four main world religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Paganism.⁵ In time the more obvious of the great priestly and text-based religions of India, Japan and China could be more or less accommodated as an extension of this as the parallels between them and the known religions were so evident. This is not to say that these great and alien religious traditions did not frequently invoke comparisons with Judaism or Israelites. In the case of India (but it was true elsewhere) such comparisons were made frequently enough. C.T.E. Rhenius, for instance, who was sent by the English Church Missionary Society to South India in 1813 noted that ‘the Vishnu and Siva sects and religious worship exhibit a strong likeness to the Jewish dispensation’.⁶ Similarly as R. Lovett wrote in his History of the London Missionary Society 1795–1895 of the Brahmins: ‘Each is an infallible pope in his own sphere. The Brahman is the exclusive and Pharisaic Jew of India’.⁷ But the real problem arose with the religious systems of Africa, the Americas and the Pacific and to the lesser known of the Asiatic religions. Frequently the beliefs of such systems were compared to the religions of the ancient world more or less known to Europeans – particularly to Judaism and the religious systems of the ancient near east, and were assumed to be derived from them.

From the very beginning of European expansion Judaism was employed in the decipherment of religions and Jews were used as likely explanations for the peoples Europeans encountered. With the European exploration and conquest of new continents this device was used more and more. In the first stages the derivation of north and south American Indian beliefs and customs from ancient Israel was formulated. Certainly the Jews were not the only candidates to be enlisted in the battle to explain the existence and origin of the peoples of the New World: but they were among the first – and the discourse suggesting Israelite origins ran the longest and had the greatest influence.⁸ In the case of the Americas over several centuries it may safely be said that the idea of Israelite origins for the indigenous peoples of the Americas was the dominant discourse.

Subsequently the idea – often fiercely defended – that given peoples were derived from ancient Israel or from some specific tribe of the Lost Tribes of Israel became quite astonishingly widespread and was attached to just about every corner of the globe and to a wide variety of peoples from the Eskimos to the Australian aborigines.⁹

These views postulated that various peoples were indeed genealogically connected to the people of Israel and that their beliefs and practices were vestiges of the ancient Israelite religion: often their languages were explained as being cognate to Hebrew or other Semitic languages.

The importance of Hebrew in the Mediaeval world was that it was widely considered as one of the first languages of mankind. It was with the Hebrew words vayhi or (let there be light) after all that God had created the world in the first place. The Bible described the translucent language of Adam and followed its fall via the Tower of Babel into the convoluted languages of the myriad nations of the world. In early Christian times the three sons of Noah had been considered the founders of the three main groupings of humankind. Within a few centuries later peoples such as the Scythians were also connected to the biblical genealogies of race and language. By the time of the Renaissance historical etymology took over as national pride began to assert that modern languages – such as French¹⁰ or Flemish – could be identified as the world’s first language or at any rate were closely connected to it. In De Vulgari eloquentia Dante mocked the remote hamlets wedded to the uplifting notion that their miserable dialect was the language of Adam and that they were privy to the secrets of the language of Paradise. But alongside these vainglorious claims on behalf of one’s own language, nation and village there were also claims made on behalf of Hebrew. The idea that all languages ultimately derive from Hebrew is an ancient one, and it still has an altogether surprising number of adherents as a few minutes on the Internet will show. In earlier centuries one might mention Père Louis Thomassin’s work of 1690: La Méthode d’étudier et d’enseigner chrestiennement et utilement la Grammaire ou les Langues par rapport à l’Ecriture sainte en les réduisant toutes à l’Hébreu.¹¹

The motiviating force behind this desire to show that Hebrew was the first language was simple enough. As the language of Adam, (a popular image particularly in the scientific domain was that of Adam the philosopher in the Garden of Eden) Hebrew was a language of philosophy and clarity. As the language of the Kabbalah it was perceived throughout Europe as a key to arcane wisdom, to the wisdom of the East. If one could only recover the Hebrew of Adam in all its purity one could begin to understand the hidden secrets of the universe itself. As we shall see in the colonial context the use of Hebrew to explain the unknown languages and civilisations of the world becomes a key feature of the Orientalist discourse.

In a similar way the myth of the Lost Tribes became a useful channel for understanding unknown peoples and races, as a means of labeling human entities for whom there was no readily available label. It is extraordinary that in the seventeenth century a Congregationalist missionary, Cambridge educated, could announce that ‘fruitful India are Hebrewes, that famous civil (though Idolatrous) nation of China are Hebrewes, so Japonia, and those naked Americans are Hebrewes, in respect of those that planted first these parts of the world’.¹²

Perhaps more than that, this myth has been used in the western world as a device for understanding the ‘other’ – often the savage ‘other’ which is the imagined opposite of ourselves.¹³ For much of this century at least we have been aware that the savage is somehow within us, not just a crude caricature of the other, or more genuinely, the other tout court. So when George Santayana writes (in Dialogues in Limbo) ‘the young man who has not wept is a savage’ we instinctively approve. The evolution, in the English language at least, of the word and its concept is instructive: a sense in the seventeenth century that the natural savage state of freedom as Dryden put it ‘when wild in woods the noble savage ran’ was desirable gives way by the nineteenth to a meaning close to the antithesis of civilized, and in our own time to a state of being apprehended by many and positively aspired to by some.

The notion that someone not sharing your own cultural and ethnic attributes is by definition ‘barbaric’ or ‘savage’ is hardly recent. In ancient Mesopotamia the divide essentially followed urban:nomad lines. For people living in lower Mesopotamia, it was the tent-dwelling, raw-flesh-eating, ungodly nomad from the semi-desert who epitomized the savage. People from the Zagros mountains were also, but less emblematically, considered to be savages and there is a reference to mountain-dwellers’ language as the ‘twittering of birds’. Greek and Greco-Roman civilizations dismissed outsiders as ‘barbarians’ which term is also said to derive from the cacophony of birds as opposed to the speech of civilized humanity. The first European impressions of the languages of southern Africa were expressed in similar terms. In 1614 John Milward claimed that the language of the Hottentots was ‘a chattering rather than a language’; in 1649 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier wrote: ‘when they speak they fart with their tongues in their mouths’.¹⁴

‘Savagery’ a close synonym of ‘barbarian’ has a similarly bucolic etymology and is connected with the closed and unknown world of the forests. These antecedents suggest that the borders between the civilized ‘I’ and the savage ‘other’ were initially drawn at the limits of the known world. The town dweller knows nothing of the desert. The plainsman is ignorant of the mountains and forests. This dialectic of ‘self’ and ‘other’ has required constant modification. With the rise of universal ideological systems such as Christianity, traditional ways of understanding the other were faced with a particularly vexatious challenge. How could the other be a true savage if he too were a child of God? In The Universal Prayer Alexander Pope noted: ‘Father of all! in every age, in ev’ry clime adored, by saint, by savage, and by sage, Jehovah, Jove or Lord’. The origin of the word cretin exemplifies the problem: the Swiss used the word to describe the hopelessly degenerate and loathsome creatures who lived beyond and above their valley systems. Notwithstanding their utter marginality they were none the less Christians (crétins).

Of course all sorts of glimpses of strange and exotic peoples had been vouchsafed mediaeval Europe before the great expansion which followed the age of exploration. Much of the interaction, with the Indian sub-continent and the Far East for example, slight though it was, came about as a result of the spice trade in its various forms. This interaction led to the exchange of desirable goods, and the exchange of strange and unlikely stories, artistic devices and motifs. Travelers’ tales and travelers’ books added to the store of knowledge and in due course themselves created a rich mulch in which Europeans’ views of much of humanity were formed. However it was only with the establishment of physical (albeit fluctuating) frontier zones with these exotic societies, the frontier zones which were created typically at the beginning of the colonial era, that a real symbiosis started to occur. Symbiosis is perhaps not quite the mot juste: certainly in most cases Eastern and African societies were much more influenced by the West than the West was by them: but none the less there was a flow both ways. Clearly in the sort of frontier situation typical of the colonial experience a struggle for political as well as economic mastery is implicit and part of this struggle is the not entirely innocent attempt to better understand the adversary. Both sides were compelled to engage in this difficult exercise of comprehension.¹⁵

From the moment of discovery of these new worlds and their inhabitants increasingly sophisticated methods were applied to the dissection and categorisation of savage social systems and customs not to mention the assiduous mapping of the savage regions themselves and the categorisation of the savages, flora and fauna found within them.

How did our relatively recent forbears approach the issue of the unknown ‘other’? Essentially through historical models. Already among intellectual elites the role of history in determining how we should see the world was paramount. Carl Schorske has shown how for instance conservative figures such as Disraeli and Coleridge attempted to fight against the greed of their society in the recreation of a concept of community salvaged from the Middle Ages. Both William Morris and Wagner at varying points in their very different careers found useful historical models in Nordic myth. Fichte saw the future of Germany through the past of the communitarian morality of the mediaeval German city, many Zionists a Jewish future through the recreation of a long dead Judean polity.

For the better comprehension of the unknown parts of the world and their perplexing inhabitants two historical texts served more than any others: the Bible and the Greek and Latin Classics. These texts of course were the main educative texts of Europe and it is not therefore surprising that they were turned to with such regularity: indeed it can be said that in some ways they served as maps to these unfamiliar territories and to their inhabitants and their beliefs. It may in addition be noted that the missionaries who were often the most persistent enquirers in the frontier situation were particularly prone to drawing on their sacred texts for illumination. This was no doubt especially true of the British, American and German Protestants who had been influenced by the Great Evangelical Revival of the nineteenth century and who played such an overwhelming role in world wide missions. In the British context the missionaries themselves were characteristically of relatively humble origins: members of the upper strata of the working a class and the lower ranks of the middle class. Robert Moffat – the missionary who exercised such control over the mighty Ndebele king Lobengula was a gardener. The great Livingstone had started his working life in a cotton mill. Samuel Marsden was the son of a blacksmith. Such men had a profound knowledge of the Bible, but perhaps of not much else. Even more to the point, practically all the Protestant missionaries explicitly believed in the Bible, as a quite undifferentiated body of information, as their sole and infallible source of authority both for belief and practice. It was in every sense their guide to life. It was, then, the most natural of things that they should have sought in its pages the explanation for the otherwise inexplicable things they encountered. But these missionaries’ projection of the Bible was one which was mediated by a European culture in which all sorts of European Enlightenment concepts were present: the Bible was an infallible source alright but the way it was understood was a way specific to a time and a class. In the nineteenth century the Bible was infinitely better known than any other work. If parallels were to be found to explain strange peoples’ lives and customs, in the absence of any other body of knowledge they would be found in the Bible.

One stratagem was to argue that even if there were no direct connection between an indigenous group and the Israelites there were morphological connections to be made: that one custom or another reflected ancient Jewish practice. In the American context there are dozens of examples of this approach: one such work is the Jesuit Joseph Lafita’s Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains comparés aux moeurs des premiers temps which set out to dissect the religious system of the Iroquois Indians and made connections between the Indian practices he had observed and aspects both of Jewish and ancient Greek religious systems. This basic methodology was used widely throughout the colonised world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and became part of the predominant discourse in the discussion of little known religions and peoples. Let us now look at some examples.

The exploration and colonization of the Pacific was attended by lively speculation about long-lost Jewish communities and the likely existence of the Lost Tribes in these remote islands. In the second half of the sixteenth century a number of Spanish explorers principally Alvaro de Mandaña and the pilot Pedro Fernandez de Quros set out into the Pacific from the Peruvian port of Callao. Alvaro de Mandaña had been stimulated by stories of previous Inca explorers who had supposedly found rich islands some six hundred leagues to the west. For some these represented the fabulous Ophir of King Solomon although on Benedictus Arias Montanus’ World Map of 1571 Ophir was marked on the west coast of South America somewhere in Peru perhaps in the vicinity of Callao. In any event when a group...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Judaising Movements and Colonial Discourse
• 2 Israel in China
• 3 The Lemba
• 4 Conversion and Judaisation
• 5 A Conversion Movement in Italy
• 6 The ‘Falashisation’ of the Blacks of Harlem
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index