The Black Hebrew Israelites are Appropriating Our Identity

Weeks after George Floyd’s murder, demonstrations continue to rage across the United States as citizens protest systemic racism and demand justice. So many positive changes have already resulted from the movement. How could there be any downsides?

Unfortunately, there will always be people who co-opt movements to further their own, often unrelated, agendas. Since the protests started, I have seen an increase in anti-Semitism, revisionist Jewish history, and anti-Israel sentiment on various social media platforms and threads. They are hidden in plain sight under the guise of supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and “calling out” the truth. All of these “movements” seek to co-opt Jewish identity while modifying our people’s history to fit their narrative.  

As an example, there have recently been comments and threads claiming that Jews were the main slave traders and slave owners in America. This has been disproven by multiple sources, but the allegation still persists. These false narratives are damaging to our already shaky public identity which is fraught with outright lies and conspiracy theories meant to keep us firmly in the position of “Other” in relation to white-dominated Western society.

Most recently, there has been a Twitter resurgence of the Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI) movement via rapper Ice Cube. For those unfamiliar with it, the BHI movement originated in the late 19th century in America by Frank Cherry and Williams Saunders Crowdy. Both men claimed to have had visions/dreams where G-d told them that Black Africans are the true Israelites and descendants of the Biblical Hebrews. Following their proclamation, various groups and churches popped up across America. There is even a BHI group of around 3,000 living primarily in Dimona, Israel. The movement as a whole attempts to erase Jewish identity and real Jewish history through its Illuminati-like conspiracy theories. The Anti-Defamation League even reports that “[s]ome, but not all, are outspoken anti-Semites and racists”.

Ice Cube has begun sharing BHI-related images with his 5.3 million Twitter followers over the last several days. He has shared graphics such as the two below, dated from June 7, 2020 and June 10, 2020.

Now in fairness to Ice Cube, he hasn’t come right out and said he’s a supporter of the BHI conspiracy, so we’ll just have to make our own assumptions based on his posts. The threads that follow underneath the two images seem to be split mostly into two camps: those calling him out for his perversion of history & facts and a majority supporting Ice Cube’s speaking “truth” to “power”  and claiming that others are finally waking up to the “real” Black history. At the time of this article’s writing, his “We are the Chosen People” post had 4,000 likes and 1,300 retweets just on the original post alone. Cube’s post about Black Israelites being in Egypt has received 5,100 likes and 1,800 retweets.

But you might be asking yourself “who cares?” or “those numbers aren’t even that big.” And my answer would be that it always matters. Appropriating someone else’s culture, heritage, and identity is wrong. White people in America get called out for it all the time. We are the Israelites. The Biblical Hebrews were our ancestors. They are a part of our history, a part of our DNA, and a part of our story. There are already groups claiming the Holocaust is a hoax; that six million Jews didn’t die at the hands of the Nazi regime. We have pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel supporters trying to erase our indigenous ties to our land. Some people like to claim that Jews are white and therefore not a Levantine or Middle Eastern people.

I repeat – there are already large groups of people attempting to wipe out our history, erase our Jewish identity, and eliminate our ethnic, cultural, religious, and historical ties to Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. We need to stop looking the other way or sweeping it under the rug and saying “well, it’s just one person” or “they’re in the minority with their view.” Celebrities are constantly being “cancelled” or pressured to apologize for racist things they have said or done to Black people, Asians, Muslims, Native-Americans, etc. Why aren’t we pushing for the same level of cancellations and apologies? Enough is enough. 

I think that just as important as the erasure of our past, is the fact that BHI overlooks that there are actual, real Jews who have sub-Saharan African Diasporic identities. Though most of them now live in Israel, there was once a sizable Diaspora of Ethiopian Jews. They have an authentic connection to Jerusalem. They have practiced Jewish customs for over a millennia, just as any descendants of the true Israelites have. Beta Israel is as much as part of our biography as Ashkenazi, Sephardi, or any other Diasporic identity. Do those claiming to be Black Hebrew Israelites even know this people exists? Do they care?

Taking all of this into account, why in the world should we allow yet another group of people, uneducated in real Jewish history, to have a voice in dictating what our history is or isn’t? Anyone giving any credence, any sliver of credibility, to the Black Hebrew Israelites claim effectively erases thousands of years of real Hebrew history. It appropriates our story and claims it as their own. We cannot look the other way.

So what do we do? I believe that the best way for us to combat this appropriation and retellings of our people’s history is simply to speak up. Rather than scrolling past the Facebook post or Twitter feed that you know is wrong, stop. Take two minutes, take five minutes, take however long you can spare and correct the original poster or whoever it is. Keep a couple of factual links handy in the Notes section of your phone or save images with factual data. Even if you don’t change their mind – and many times I don’t – you may change someone else’s mind or educate someone else who happens to be reading the thread. It can feel scary or overwhelming or awkward to do this, especially with people we know. I’m not insensitive to that. I really had to thicken my already tough skin to start taking this on. But it’s so important that we do it. Other minorities speak up when their cultures are appropriated or misrepresented. It’s time we do the same for ourselves.