The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem

Joseph Yudin

This article examines the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (AHIJ) and their place in the movement that came to be known as “Black Judaism.” Although its origin may be traced to a number of different historical circumstances, Black Judaism emerged most prominently in the nineteenth-century Americas in the context of evangelical Protestantism.1 Mainstream Jewish movements do not recognize Black Judaism or any of its offshoots as Jewish movements. In the following pages, I present a brief history of Black Judaism, with particular emphasis on the AHIJ.

The Early Years: William Saunders Crowdy and His Revelation

William Saunders Crowdy, a Black Civil War veteran, laid the foundation stone for the creation of the Hebrew Israelites. On September 13, 1892, Crowdy heard what he believed was the voice of God, commanding him to establish a church rooted in both the Old and New Testaments.2 Following this instruction, Crowdy styled himself the “World’s Evangelist” and adopted a number of “Hebraic practices” for his new “true church.” He preached that Jesus was Black and promoted the idea that African Americans were the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel.3

Crowdy was not the first Black figure to make such claims. In 1888, the Black pastor Reverend William Christian, a former enslaved person from Wrightsville, Arkansas, asserted Israelite descent for African Americans (he also stated that all non-Africans were descended from Satan).4 In 1913, David Ben Itzock and Henry Itzock, who claimed to be Ethiopian Jews, declared that “the Negro is the right Jew” and advocated the mass immigration of Black Americans to Ethiopia.5 In 1915, a certain Prophet F. S. Cherry of Philadelphia preached that the Blacks were the seed of Jacob, who was Black, and that white Jews were “interlopers and fraud(s).”6 While these figures shared theologies and practices with Crowdy, he went further in his appropriation of Jewish holidays, rituals, and customs.

Beginning in 1892, Crowdy preached from Texas to Illinois, making a name for himself as the “Black Elijah.” It was probably during his preaching in Chicago that his followers became known as “Black Jews.”7 By 1897, Crowdy had declared himself chief bishop, selected twelve “elders” and an assistant bishop, and established branches of his church, the Church of God and Saints of Christ, in twenty-seven towns throughout the United States.8 Crowdy’s church and Christian’s Church of the Living God are the seedbed institutions to which all Black Jewish movements can be traced.9

Theologically speaking, Crowdy’s churches were a mixed bag. They observed the Sabbath on Saturday and practiced infant circumcision (berit milah), for example, but they also endorsed the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. By 1899, the Church of God and Saints of Christ had celebrated their first national Passover and counted twenty-three tabernacles, along with eight bishops, in the state of Kansas alone. Around the turn of the century, Bishop Crowdy began teaching that African Americans were the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. Shortly thereafter, his church adopted the Hebrew calendar and increasingly emphasized Jewish and Old Testament holidays and festivals. The Passover festival would later become the central holiday for the AHIJ, among whom it was known as the “New World Passover.”10 In May 1899, Crowdy baptized over one thousand people in New York City alone, and new congregations began to spring up throughout New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. His church continued spreading throughout North America and the Caribbean, as it made its headquarters in Philadelphia.11

The Next Steps:
Wentworth A. Matthew, Arnold Josiah Ford, and Marcus Garvey

Arguably, the figure who most profoundly shaped the Black Jewish movements in North America and the Caribbean was Rabbi Wentworth A. Matthew, founder of the Beth HaTephila Ethiopian Congregation in Harlem, New York. Matthew, who came to be considered the “best-known Black Jewish leader” of his time, arrived in the United States in 1919 from Saint Kitts and immediately founded a “Jewish” congregation, the Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation.12

Matthew may have had some Jewish ancestry. In 1723, some one hundred persons, or 25 percent, of the population of the tiny Caribbean island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, were Jews. Most of these individuals were Sephardic, Jewish people of color whose ancestors had fled the Inquisition to Brazil, from which they were then expelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many Jews of the Caribbean produced offspring, both legitimate and illegitimate, with enslaved Africans and other freed or free residents. The community of Nevis is the only possible known direct genetic link between Black Hebrew Israelites and the Jewish people of today or the Israelites/Hebrews of antiquity. There is no other historical evidence to support the claim that descendants of Black enslaved people in the Americas are descendants of the ancient Jews or Israelites.

Whereas Crowdy was born and raised as an enslaved person in nineteenth-century America and was exposed to Jews and Judaism only through Scripture, Matthew grew up in Saint Kitts among Jews and non-Jews who were the offspring of Jews. He claimed to have been ordained by the Hebrew Union College in 1923, allegedly becoming the first Black ordained rabbi in America. He did apply to become a member of the New York Board of Rabbis, but they rejected his application because he was originally “ordained” by a “Hebrew Israelite rabbi,” Arnold Josiah Ford, who was unrecognized by the established Jewish body. Friction has dogged the relationship between Jews and Hebrew Israelites ever since.

Matthew and Ford were heavily influenced by the Black nationalist and publicly declared antisemite Marcus Garvey, who claimed that Jesus had not been a Jew at all.13 Garvey, born and raised in Jamaica, was considered a prophet in the Rastafarian religion. He was also a successful businessman who owned a newspaper company. Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and had the ears of millions of followers both in New York City and throughout the Americas. At the turn of the twentieth century, Garvey teamed up with the renowned sociologist W. E. B. DuBois to spearhead the “Back to Africa” movement. In so doing, the two men sought to instill a sense of pride and purpose among the African American populace of their time. In Garvey’s theology, Blacks were the chosen people of God.14 Drawing on the biblical imagery that had powered Harriet Tubman’s efforts to free the African American enslaved people of the South and the Back to Africa ethos, Garvey would brand his own followers as “Zionists.”15

As one of Garvey’s most ardent followers, Ford served as an officer in the UNIA. Following Garvey’s arrest for mail fraud in 1923 (Garvey blamed his incarceration on a Jewish conspiracy), Ford announced that he would now “lead the Black race.”16 Accordingly, he established a congregation, which he called Beth B’nai Israel, and took on the title of “rabbi.” Garvey’s arrest led to the collapse of his movement, but his ideas moved from the nationalist sphere to the religious one. Although he was deported back to Jamaica and died in the United Kingdom in 1936, his influence significantly shaped the various Black Jewish, Hebrew Israelite, Nation of Islam, and Rastafarian religions.17

In a conscious effort to distinguish his congregants from the Jewish people, Ford referred to the former as “Hebrews” or “Israelites.” While living in his native Barbados, Ford had rejected Christianity as the “white man’s religion” and embraced a form of Judaism, while preaching that Blacks were descended from the ancient Hebrews.18 Ford likened the Black exile from Africa to the exile of the Jewish people from the Land of Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Black immigrants from the Caribbean flooded the United States between 1899 and 1929, just as a similar influx of Eastern European Jews were arriving. New York City became a nexus for interaction between these groups. By 1930, 25 percent of the inhabitants of Harlem in Manhattan were Caribbean-born, and many of them became followers of Rabbi Ford.19 By 1931, eight distinct Black Jewish sects had arisen in Harlem.20 The members of these sects, who originated from the West Indies and were initially drawn to the Christian Holiness Movement, later adopted some of the beliefs of their Eastern European Jewish neighbors after coming under the influence of Rabbi Ford and others.21

In the 1920s, Ford and Matthew appropriated the identity of Ethiopian Jewry, declaring that the Black people of the Americas were the descendants of the original Hebrews, as the Ethiopian Jews claim to be, and that Christianity had been forced upon them by slavery. They maintained this claim despite the fact that the bulk of their congregation was of West Indies descent. Ford now began using the term “Hebrews” for African Americans, stating that “white” Jews were late converts to Judaism in the Khazar Khaganate and not descended from the original Israelites.22 He and Matthew blended their new theology together with eschatology and a uniquely Black nationalist bent. Arguing that the Arabic and Hebrew languages were native to Africa, Matthew assigned Hebrew names to his congregants. Additionally, he incorporated into his movement a number of Islamic religious practices, including the observance of Ramadan.23

With Rabbi Ford’s ill-fated attempt to settle in Ethiopia, where he resided from late 1930 until his death in 1935, Ford’s protégé, Rabbi Matthew, became the leader of the Original Hebrew Israelite community, a position he held until his death in 1972. It was while Ford was in Ethiopia that he “ordained” Matthew, in May 1931. Ford mailed Matthew his “rabbinic certification” papers from Addis Ababa. It was always assumed that (what was thought to be) the Amharic section of the certificate was formal recognition from the long-established Ethiopian Jewish community, but it turns out to have been written by Ford himself.24

In 1970, the number of Black Jews in Harlem was estimated to be one thousand souls. Rabbi Matthew led this community in prayer every Saturday, in Hebrew, at the Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. He became the Hebrew Israelites’ foremost influencer, often claiming to possess miraculous powers.25 At this time, Matthew presided over the largest Black Jewish sect in New York.26

For a time, Matthew was associated with Elijah Robert Poole (or, Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam as well as the mentor of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan). Poole suggested that Matthew start a religious movement that was entirely disconnected from Judaism as, in his view, Matthew and his followers would never be accepted as Jews. Some scholars argue that the Black Islamic movements, including the Nation of Islam, are direct offshoots of Black Judaism.27 What is clear is that the movement and its leaders had an immense impact on the various Black Islamic and Black national movements.

Rabbi Matthew practiced a form of Black Israelite religion that featured Jewish traditions and liturgy, and he ordained at least a dozen “rabbis” during the fifty years of his active pulpit. At the same time, Matthew’s private writings reveal his adherence to the Holiness Movement and spiritual healing, an aversion to modern medicine, and an endorsement of the Methodist practice of dual baptism. Notably, at least until the year 1944, these writings also show Matthew’s belief in Jesus as the messiah.

In 1934, Matthew assembled a Rosh Hashanah gathering of Black Israelite leaders and rabbis in Harlem, further broadcasting himself as a self-styled “Chief Rabbi of the Black Jews of the Western Hemisphere.” Two years later, Matthew would claim that the emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia had declared him “Chief Rabbi” and “official representative of the Falasian order of African Jews.”28 Matthew himself went even further, suggesting that he was Jesus incarnate. During a communal Passover seder at which a group of “elders” were seated, he announced, “I know one of you will betray me.”29 Later, Ben Ammi ben Israel would use this same tactic, hinting that he himself was the messiah.30

By the time of his death in 1973, Rabbi Matthew had created a new religion and shaped a new identity for his community. Matthew constructed his version of Black Judaism from a diverse range of religions and ideas including, among others, traditional Judaism, Christianity, Voodoo, and other assorted Afro-Caribbean customs, as well as Masonic ideals, occultism, and mysticism. Matthew identified the Africans as descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel and rejected the claim of “white” Jews to be the descendants of the ancient Israelites.31 According to Matthew, the Jews were the descendants of Esau and the Edomites, the ancient enemies of the people of Israel.32

The leaders of the various Black Jewish movements sought to differentiate between the sects, some purposefully violating traditional Jewish customs by acts such as eating pork products. But there was consensus on the idea that Jesus was a Jew, albeit a “Black Jew” who was “lynched” by the non-Jews.33 Ben Ammi ben Israel, founder of the (AHIJ) would later brand the Jewish people as “gentiles” or even satanic in nature.34

The cultural Black nationalism that would take the reins of the civil rights movement in the United States emerged in the wake of Black Jewish movements that claimed links to the ancient Israelites and Ethiopian Jewry as a form of “divine identity.”35 These movements, although grounded in an eventual redemption of their people in “Palestine” through an End of Days scenario, gave African American communities the means to express themselves with pride in the face of American racism and, as such, stimulated the Black nationalist movement.36 Yet not all Black Jewish groups believed that they should wait for Armageddon before moving on to the Promised Land.

According to Jacob S. Dorman, the Black Israelite religion was largely shaped by three historical circumstances: the Protestant Holiness Movement, which emerged in the 1890s; an era of “Spiritual and Judaic” communities that sprang up around World War I; and a “Black nationalist Israelite” camp that grew out of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s.37 This assessment overlooks an important issue: the experience of the children of Jews and enslaved Black people in the Caribbean, combined with their descendants’ migration to major northern American cities, where they met with rejection by mainstream Jewish groups. When this experience was coupled with Crowdy’s millenarian and Methodist-influenced visions of the lost tribes and parallels between freed enslaved people and the biblical Israelites in the book of Exodus, it led them to see themselves as the real Israelites. Adding to the account the exposure of Black individuals to mainstream Judaism in urban areas of the United States, it is easy to trace the African Hebrew Israelites’ claim to be the authentic Jews.

Notably, current scholarship on the history of the African Israelite movements, collectively called the African Hebrew Israelite Community (AHIC), has failed to put these movements into their proper context.38 All these movements, with the exception of the AHIJ, which began to take a different direction at the end of Ben Ammi ben Israel’s life and after his death, are staunchly eschatological. Uniquely, the AHIJ has succeeded in its elitist agenda, creating a separatist American religious movement that has migrated to what they refer to as their “Holy Land.”39

Ben Carter/Ben Ammi ben Israel and the AHIJ

Ben Carter (1939–2014) is considered the founder and messiah of the AHIJ.40 In 1960, Carter attended a meeting of the Original Hebrew Israelite Nation, after which he heard a heavenly voice instructing him to bring his people out of slavery. Eventually, Carter claimed that the Jewish patriarchs were Black, and that Black Africans and their descendants in the Americas are the offspring of the ancient Israelites. He considered those Blacks who did not subscribe to this theory inferior in status to those who did, and he viewed any other people who claimed ancestry from the patriarchs as imposters. Carter began his studies with Rabbi Levi Ba Shalom (Fred Lang) of Congregation B’nai Zaken in Chicago. The congregation he joined held the belief, not widespread among assemblies of Hebrew Israelites, that it was time for the congregants to leave America.41 Carter’s next teacher was Rabbi Abihu Reuben. Reuben, a student of Matthew, had been ordained in the latter’s rabbinical college in New York and served as rabbi and educator at the Chicago Hebrew School founded by Matthew in 1952.42 In 1961, Rabbi Reuben ordained Carter and renamed him “Ben Ammi” (“son of my people”).43

Israelite communities had blossomed in Chicago over the previous decades. In 1963, Ben Ammi Carter, later called Ben Ammi ben Israel, became the spiritual leader at Congregation B’nai Zaken and bore the title Moreh Tsedeq (“righteous teacher”). His followers referred to him as Abba or “father.” Notably, Protestants reserve the term “father” for God when Jesus is speaking to or about God in the gospels. This appellation takes on distinct messianic overtones when we recall that the Black Israelite community sprang from the Protestant tradition and claim to be the real Jews.

At this time, many other Black groups subscribed to the notion that African Americans were the descendants of the ancient Israelites. This shared belief eventually led to a merger of communities into the A-Beta group. Louis “L. A.” Bryant, later known as Shaleak Ben Yehudah, was a member of one of the communities that merged with A-Beta into the Beta group and became associated with Ben Ammi ben Israel’s Congregation B’nai Zaken.44

Carter and his followers in the Beta/B’nai Zaken temples morphed into the AHIJ. The AHIJ read the turbulence of the 1960s as divinely given, the purpose of which was to create a “smokescreen” for the group’s escape from the United States.45 The organization played on the “Back to Africa” theme with a millenarian bent, as they believed America was on the verge of destruction.46 Thus, in 1963, Carter informed his congregation that he and two other individuals were being sent to Africa to explore the possibility of the congregation migrating there en masse. Along with Carter, Nasik Gavriel and Ben Yaacov travelled to Africa and laid the groundwork for the move to happen. Later, the idea that the Land of Israel was part of Africa would be incorporated into Carter’s ideology.

In 1966, equipped with funds collected from various Israelite communities, Carter, Gavriel, and Yaacov left for Liberia. Upon the trio’s return, the community organized some three hundred members to leave for Liberia in different groups between 1967 and 1968. Several leaders had been vying for the chief leadership role in the movement at this time, but Ben Ammi ben Israel seized control of the community, aiming to lead the people out of the “American wilderness.”47

Life in Liberia was hard for the AHIJ members. By the end of 1967, only twenty members had found decent jobs, while more than ninety were still living in squalor at their camp.48 The Hebrew Israelites’ Saturday day of rest did not accord well with Liberia’s six-day work week, and the Liberian government refused to grant permission for the colony to carry on their polygamous relationships. The 125 AHIJ members left in Liberia in 1969 were then expelled by the Liberian government.49

After Liberia: Israel-Bound

After the two years of hardship in Liberia, Ben Ammi ben Israel began formulating a plan to move the AHIJ community to Israel. In 1969, as their Passover festival was approaching, the group purchased, at significant cost, a goat for a ritual Passover sacrifice. Somehow the goat died, either by its own rope or by strangulation. This event triggered despair in the community, but Ben Ammi interpreted it as a sign that the group should “offer themselves through their obedience” to God. Some members, however, saw it as a sign to go back to the United States. Additionally, some women started to rebel against the polygamy or “Divine Marriage” that had become rampant. Those members who remained came to believe that Ben Ammi had a special relationship with God, and he became their undisputed leader.50

In 1986, Ben Ammi and another AHIJ member, Charles Hezekiah Blackwell, visited Israel on tourist visas. Blackwell remained in the country for a year, working on Kibbutz Ein Tsurim and later Kibbutz Maʿabarot; they sent positive reports back to Ben Ammi. In August 1969, Ben Ammi sent five families to Israel. All were admitted to the country as legal immigrants under Israel’s Law of Return, which allows any person with at least one Jewish grandparent to immigrate immediately. As immigrants they were granted special status, entitling them to stipends, Hebrew classes, temporary housing, simple furniture and appliances, tax breaks, and help finding employment. The leader of the first group, who had stayed in Israel after the first “advance party,” was Blackwell. In requesting immigrant status for the group members, Blackwell stated that they were Jews practicing the traditional Jewish laws, or mitzvot, and that they wanted to serve in the Israeli military.51 The group’s arrival at the airport in Lod caught the Israeli Minister of Absorption and his staff by surprise. Blackwell played on the Israelis’ sympathies and managed to obtain rights for the group as Jewish immigrants, including apartments and food subsidies, despite lacking proof that they were in fact Jews, or related to Jews, as required by the Law of Return.52

With the granting of immigrant rights to these first Hebrew Israelites who landed in the State of Israel in September 1969, the establishment of the AHIJ was officially underway. This event sent positive reverberations throughout Israelite African American communities. The group’s immigration to Israel was for many Original Israelites confirmation that the biblical prophecies, as interpreted by their leaders, were now being realized, and that they would all soon be restored to their rightful place in history.

When the second group of thirty-nine members arrived in December 1969, and then the third group in March 1970, including Ben Ammi, the Israeli authorities became suspicious. These groups were granted only tourist status, and a government order was issued not to allow any more members of the community into Israel until it could be determined whether they had a real claim to being Jews. Blackwell invoked his community’s generations-old tradition that they were descended from the Falasha Ethiopian tribe through the Israelite patriarchs, who fled to Ethiopia after the destruction of the Judean kingdom. To this day, the Hebrew Israelites continue to claim that they are “Judeans.”53 This assertion contradicts their earlier claim to being descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel, which did not include the Jews from the tribe of Judah.54 Blackwell also insisted that there was proof in the Hebrew Bible that the ancient Israelites were Black, and that formerly enslaved Black Americans were descended from them. He did admit, however, that many men in his community had married gentile women and even that some were baptized and married within the church.

By the early 1970s, a series of tourist visa violations had allowed the AHIJ numbers to climb to two thousand, most of whom lived in one of three cities in the Negev: Arad, Mitzpe Ramon, and Dimona.55 The AHIJ’s stated goal was to “redeem all the Blacks throughout the world from their distress and bring them to Israel, inter alia in order to escape ‘Judgment Day’ when America is due to be destroyed.”56 Ben Ammi ben Israel proclaimed that the Land of Israel was rightfully theirs, and that all white Jews would be deported to their countries of origin. This idea echoed the rhetoric of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), backed at the time by the Arab League, which urged the deportation of all Jews from Palestine to make way for the return of the Palestinian refugees.57 Further inflaming the situation was Clarence Ellis (aka El Kannan), one of Ben Ammi’s chief advisors, who declared that the group had returned to the Land of Israel in order “to liberate Israel from the false Jews—the white Jews.”58

The 1970s witnessed a continuation of the struggle between the AHIJ and the Israeli authorities. Over time, the community leaders’ verbal statements and writings became increasingly anti-Zionist and antisemitic. In 1971, housing dried up completely for the AHIJ. Their initial, government-granted apartments were being overrun with illegal immigrants, landlords were unwilling to rent to them, and public housing was denied. African Hebrew Israelites were being turned away from Israel at the airport. Ben Ammi called a press conference near Jerusalem and publicly likened Israel to apartheid South Africa. Back in Chicago, Prince Asiel Ben Israel, dubbed the “International Ambassador” of the African Hebrew Israelites, also called a press conference, during which he referred to Israel as a racist state and threatened to overrun the country with “planeloads” of “Black men.”59 Notably, Prince Asiel led a fierce, anti-Israel and antisemitic political campaign in America, enlisting the support of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.60

In 1972, the Supreme Court of Israel rejected a petition by eight Hebrew Israelites to obtain immigrant visas under Israel’s Law of Return. The court ruled that they did not qualify because they failed to prove that they were Jewish.61 It was at this point that AHIJ members became known in Israel as the “Black Hebrews.”

In October of that year, Ben Ammi ben Israel consolidated his power, granting leadership positions to his closest allies and proclaiming “national guidelines” for members of the AHIJ community. Within these guidelines were a set of punishments applicable to all those who broke his rules—which, by his claim, were transmitted to him by divine revelation. Those who defied Ben Ammi were expelled from their apartments, excommunicated from the community, and in some cases beaten.62 With most members lacking any identification or permission to work and live in Israel, excommunication obviated any means of subsistence.63 One dissident was even killed during a beating, leading to arrests, convictions, and jail time for some of Ben Ammi’s supporters.64

As the attacks continued, the tide of Israeli public opinion shifted from one of sympathy and kinship to one of disdain. After repeated confrontations with Israeli citizens and the police, as well as a murder within the AHIJ community by one of their own, the local police, in apparent conjunction with the American government, began arresting and deporting community members who caused any trouble at all. In response, Ben Ammi denounced Israel as a “racist Jim Crow country” and organized demonstrations in which American passports were burned.65

The situation was coming to a head. Wholesale disappearances within American Hebrew Israelite communities in and around Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit were reported to the American and Israeli authorities. By June 1974, more than five hundred Hebrew Israelites were living in Israel, only a handful of whom had obtained legal citizenship. The AHIJ information minister boasted that group members would be admitted to Israel with a tourist visa, automatically available to them as holders of American passports, and then disappear.66 Many cases were reported of young women, some married and others single, some pregnant and others with children, who announced that they sold all of their possessions in order to immigrate to Israel and then disappeared without a trace. Family members who tried to search for these women were sometimes confronted by Blackwell and other members of the community who were called nesiʾim, or princes, of which there were twelve, including Blackwell, Ben Ammi, and Ben Yehuda.67

The “Council of Princes” was said to be part of the ruling body of the sect. Nonetheless, Ben Ammi ben Israel, who was called the “Prince of Princes,” “Father,” and “Our Master” by group members, functioned as an absolute ruler. Community members would bow down to him if they ran into him in the street. He was judge, jury, and executioner when it came to disputes within the community, including on matters of marriage and divorce. Only Ben Ammi ben Israel was allowed to speak with the authorities or the media, unless he granted someone else explicit permission to do so. According to the Israeli police, the community has their own system of punishment, including corporal punishment, confiscation of passports, and excommunication.68 At least in the past, it was reported that women were kept within the AHIJ against their will.69

As Israel rejected AHIJ demands for more housing, jobs, and citizenship, the group exposed its Black nationalistic attitudes, further alienating themselves from Israeli society. By late 1973, deportations of AHIJ members had sped up, with three hundred members deported in the month of September alone. The Israeli government debated deporting the entire community, but Ben Ammi played the race card in the media and worked on Israeli fears of being depicted as racists in the eyes of the world. Ben Ammi, who was seen by the community as their “Messiah and Savior,” even reverted to classic antisemitic tropes in the media to argue their case for legal immigration into the Land of Israel.70

On December 31, 1973, the AHIJ addressed a letter to the Black members of the United States Congress, accusing Israel of racism and injustice “against American blacks.” The leaders called for an economic boycott of American Jewish businesses, a denial of aid to the State of Israel, and the release of all AHIJ members from Israeli incarceration. Ben Yehuda asserted that the “Black Congressmen in Washington are obviously controlled by Jewish people,” and, later, on April 15, 1974, that the State of Israel is the benefactor of Jewish Americans who made their fortunes as slave merchants and slave holders at the expense of Blacks.71

In October 1974, in a communication with the US State Department, Israeli official Yaakov Keiman wrote that Israel did not want “to be blamed if United States citizens are cheated out of their money and property because of some group’s false promise of paradise in our land.” He suggested that Israel’s enemies might be behind this infiltration, and that the reality of the AHIJ illegal immigration was one of “dirty buildings, clashes with neighbors, rebellious activities, internal strife, homicides, and enforced polygamy.”72

In the meantime, illegal infiltration into Israel by the AHIJ continued, with their leaders stepping up efforts to gain recruits and help them avoid questioning upon arrival as tourists in Israel. The new members would simply come as part of a tour group and then disappear into the desert city of Dimona. Many of them would then renounce their American citizenship at the United States Embassy in Tel Aviv, becoming stateless and almost completely eliminating the possibility of being deported. In April 1977, in addition to outright rejection of those applying to immigrate, Israeli officials began turning away Black Hebrew tourists as well.73 This did not sit well with the AHIJ leadership, and they went on the offensive, branding Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin as Hitler and announcing that “[m]oney is the God of the sinful, white Jewish dogs.”74

The day after the AHIJ leadership compared the prime minister of Israel to Hitler, several Hebrew Israelites were violently arrested and deported, and the government announced that the remainder of the group would be deported as well.75 With the patience of the Israeli people and government wearing thin, the future of the AHIJ community looked bleak. At this point, Ben Ammi and his disciples prophesized an “Armageddon” scenario in Israel, complete with destruction of the white Jews and their Israeli government, to begin on September 22, 1977.76

In response to a push by the mayor of Dimona, Jacques Amir, to force the Knesset to deal with the issue, on March 13, 1978, the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress formed the Committee for the Examination of the Problem of the Black Hebrews Cult. The committee was formed at the request of Israel’s minister of the interior, Joseph Burg, and chaired by David Glass. The final report was presented to the minister of the interior on June 13, 1980.77

The Glass report vigorously refuted the AHIJ claim of ancient Israelite origin and dispelled any link to Judaism or the Jewish people. The committee pointed out the illegality of AHIJ immigration, their poor relations with their new neighbors, and the ruthless rule of the self-proclaimed messiah, Ben Ammi Carter. The most damning part of the report deals with the alleged criminal activity of AHIJ members in Israel and of their associates within the United States, as well as the group’s blatant and unrepentant antisemitism and anti-Zionism, including calls for the overthrow of the State of Israel. 78

Prince Asiel Ben Israel, who sat on the AHIJ Council of Princes, was charged in 1986 in the United States with fraud and other financial crimes. He, along with three other members of his community, was found guilty and served prison time. Among the evidence that helped support the criminal case against him and other members of the community were hundreds of false documents, including identification, airline tickets, and checks.79 Initial information, later to be confirmed, indicated shocking levels of criminal activity and abuse within the community in both Israel and the United States.80 The State of Israel, faced with no good choices, decided to recommend that the current AHIJ members be allowed to stay in Israel as “long-term temporary residents,” and that after a two-year period they would be granted “permanent residency status” on an individual basis at the discretion of the Ministry of the Interior.

Chairperson Glass put out a press release explaining that this decision was the lesser of two evils, as the committee feared that the threat of deportation might lead to another “Jonestown.”81 In August 1981, after reviewing the Glass report and hearing the Dimona mayor’s desperate pleas to deal with the situation once and for all, the Knesset placed the AHIJ members’ fate in the hands of the Ministry of Interior.82 Aryeh Deri, the interior minister, finally went to Dimona in 1990 to meet with Ben Ammi, and he granted those AHIJ members already living in Israel “temporary residency” status in accordance with the Glass report and the decision of the Knesset.83 This decision also aligned with the wishes of Illinois state legislators, who had gained support from the United States government to provide the AHIJ with a school and expanded housing in Israel.

AHIJ Theology: A Précis

The AHIJ—like Christians, Muslims, Messianic Jews, Samaritans, and Karaites, among others—perceives the Talmud, or Oral Law, as a nonauthoritative work. In contrast, for almost two millennia, the Jews have regarded the Talmud as the key to interpreting the biblical canon. The AHIJ’s rejection of the Oral Law places the sect squarely outside Judaic thought and tradition. Despite this, members of the community refrain from work on the Sabbath and fast from sundown to sunup. Both men and women wear a form of tzitzit, although they are different from the traditional Jewish tzitzit. Community members admit to having married gentiles over the last two millennia, as well as sanctioning marriages in American churches and the rite of baptism. They do not perform the Berit milah ceremony for their male children, which the Torah commands be done on the eighth day after birth to sanctify the Jews’ everlasting covenant with God. Instead, the community holds that circumcision in a hospital by a doctor satisfies the commandment. Nevertheless, they do claim to adhere strictly to the Torah.84

In this context, it is worth mentioning that Ben Ammi ben Israel held (on the basis of Isaiah 4:1) that Jewish law permits a man to have seven wives, so the AHIJ allows polygamy. Women are expected keep house and bear children, although sometimes they are also sent to work outside the home in order to bring income into the community. They are not permitted to wear cosmetics or perfume, and they may be punished for infractions by having their heads shaven.

Until his death in December 2014, Ben Ammi himself presided over all marriages and divorces in the community. The community is strictly gender-separated; males and females are forbidden to spend time together before marriage, and unaccompanied married women are forbidden to speak with men other than their husbands. In the 1990s, a number of women from the AHIJ communities in Israel went public to reveal that the men were brutalizing the women and children, that they practiced polygamy, and that they were all living in squalor.85 In 2000, Fran Markowitz reported that a young girl in the community was charged by Ben Ammi of being “disrespectful” for not wearing her headscarf in gym class and was punished with forty lashes. 86

In recent years, there has been a move away from communal belief in the divinity of Jesus, although this belief is attested in many texts authored by AHIJ leaders.87 For example, Ben Yehuda, in his 1975 book, links the AHIJ to various New Testament passages read as prophesies and likens Ben Ammi ben Israel to John the Baptist or even Jesus himself.88 In a letter to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, written in July 1978, Ben Ammi professed his people’s adherence to the belief in the one God “of Jacob, Noah, David, Paul and John the Baptist.”89 In his book The Messiah and the End of This World (1991), Ben Ammi frequently supports his arguments with quotations from the New Testament.90 The Christian saints, the messiah, and Scripture have been a part of the AHIJ religion from the beginning—from “Ezekiel to Jesus,” as Ben Ammi stated in 1993. At a minimum, sect members believe, like Crowdy, Ford, Garvey, and Matthew, that Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet of the Israelite deity, whom they call “Yah.” This teaching also parallels the beliefs of the Nation of Islam and Rastafarianism.

In his later years, Ben Ammi ben Israel sought to take AHIJ theology in a new direction, attributing this shift to his experience of the 1991 Gulf War.91 For example, he tempered his longstanding view that Africans are the sole descendants of the ancient Israelites. Not all sect members appreciated these revisionist ideas. Nonetheless, since 1996, AHIJ community members have generally endorsed the idea that it is one’s righteousness, not one’s ethnic origin or race, that is the true sign of Israelite ancestry. This stance, which was a deliberate reorientation made by the AHIJ founder, represents a transformation in theology and is in stark contrast to most other AHIC groups worldwide. Notably, it opens membership in the AHIJ to non–African Americans.92 It is worth mentioning that AHIJ members seem to be distancing themselves theologically and politically from other unaffiliated camps or extensions of Hebrew Israelite communities in North America that espouse extremist, hateful views against white people and Jews.93

AHIJ Lifestyle

Veganism is strictly observed among AHIJ members. They also abstain from alcohol, as well as tobacco and other substances that are smoked. Through the teachings of Ben Ammi, they have come to believe that veganism and exercise are the key to unlocking potential personal immortality. They adhere to a strict “holistic health maintenance” program that structures their diet with sodium-free days, sugar-free weeks, raw food days, solar cooking days (which involve cooking food solely with the sun’s rays), enemas, periodic fasting (especially on the Sabbath), and mandatory physical exercise at least three times a week. Ben Ammi ben Israel himself wrote that this lifestyle will “allow man to enter the realm of immortality.”94

The AHIJ refer to their unique diet as “Edenic,” following their notion that it was the diet kept by Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. In their belief system, the path to immortality runs through veganism. El Kannan even averred that no one from their community had ever died from “natural causes” or disease, and that the sect members could rejuvenate their cells perpetually and become immortal by changing their diet and behavior.95 As the first generation began to pass away, the sect introduced the idea that those who had not followed their health principles their entire lives, including before they entered the AHIJ, or those who had strayed since then could die.

Members of the AHIJ refer to Acts 2:44–45 and 4:32 in the New Testament, which discuss “all things in common” and have served as the basis for several communities with idealistic socialist leanings.96 These are also the key passages of Christian Scripture which every major nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian sect that has moved to the Land of Israel in order to establish communal settlements has cited as their motivating spark. Like Protestant sects before them who settled in the State of Israel, the AHIJ refer to their villages as “urban kibbutzim.”97

The Death of a Leader and the AHIJ Afterlife

On December 27, 2014, Prince Immanuel Ben Yehuda announced the death of Ben Ammi Ben Israel Carter with the words: “Abba has ascended.”98 With Ben Ammi’s passing, the AHIJ has undergone striking changes. It appears that the strict rule over the community has subsided, and that the African Hebrews have been working, studying, and serving side-by-side with Israelis. AHIJ members have also begun to distance themselves, at least publicly, from the global AHIC organization, which is seen as antisemitic by the State of Israel and by most American Jewish organizations.99

Signs of change in the community and the public perception of them were already evident about a decade earlier. In 2003, 2,500 AHIJ members were granted permanent residency status.100 Beginning that same year, AHIJ members who chose to be drafted into the military were assured citizenship along with their immediate families. In May 2004, sixty-three Hebrew Israelites reported to the Beersheva draft board and became the first from their community to enter the Israel Defense Force (IDF). In 2012, Interior Minister Gideon Saʾar announced that AHIJ members who enlisted in the IDF could receive full Israeli citizenship within two years. Soon thereafter, many from the community enlisted, including Ben Ammi’s own grandchildren. The AHIJ’s emphasis on an “Edenic” lifestyle, which entails healthy living, positive thinking, and a form of mindfulness and veganism, has led to a non-confrontational attitude toward Israel. Group members continue to serve in the Israeli military, learn Hebrew in schools, legally work and seek employment, and increasingly participate in Israeli society.

As of March 2019, the number of AHIJ adherents in Israel may have reached 5000, of which approximately one hundred have full Israeli citizenship, although there is a pathway for the majority of legal residents to receive citizenship.101 The Israeli Population and Immigration Authority has provided an official count of about 2000 AHIJ members in Israel.102 Part of the numerical discrepancy may be related to a deal made between Ben Ammi ben Israel and the Israeli Ministry of the Interior in the 1990s. At that time, all group members residing in Israel had to be registered, and an official list of members was given to the interior minister.103 However, it seems that at least forty-five members of the AHIJ were never registered, and neither were their descendants.104 It appears either that Ben Ammi did not want these people registered, or that members of the AHIC have continued to illegally immigrate to Israel. Since the African Hebrew Israelites first arrived in Israel, more than 1200 children have been born in the community. In May 2021, Yoel Lipovitzky, head of the Israeli Population and Immigration Authority, noted publicly that birth in Israel does not automatically confer citizenship, and that many AHIJ members are slated for deportation due to their illegal presence in the country.

Scores of AHIJ members in Israel have left the sect. Some of these individuals remain in the country while others have returned to America and maintain some connection with their “satellite communities” in Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC in the AHIC.105 AHIC is a loosely affiliated global umbrella organization of African Hebrew Israelites outside of Israel. These groups never considered Ben Ammi ben Israel their leader, but they share theological and lifestyle beliefs with their AHIJ sister communities.

Today, AHIJ members are referred to by the global Hebrew Israelite community as “saints,” and the community in Israel is called “the Kingdom.” AHIJ enclaves exist in Arad, Tiberias, Beersheva, and Mitzpe Ramon. The main settlement, located in Dimona, is called “Kfar HaShalom” or simply “the Kfar.” Members of the Hebrew Israelite community who open private businesses are expected to keep only what profit they need to sustain themselves and their immediate family, and to give the rest to the Kingdom in Mitzpeh Ramon and Dimona.

A new generation of Hebrew Israelites in the State of Israel is serving in the IDF, studying in Israeli universities, entering the Israeli workforce and assimilating into the mainstream Jewish population. Short of a mass migration of other Hebrew Israelites from their diaspora communities in the AHIC, it is likely that the AHIJ will assimilate into greater Israeli society. Even if such a migration were to take place, however, the anti-white radicalism and antisemitism imbedded within the AHIC communities would probably not be well received by the AHIJ, whose members are now being recognized in Israeli society as Israelis, receiving citizenship in greater numbers, and thriving in the only country the new generation has ever known. There remains the issue of more undocumented immigrants in the community, which suggests that illegal overstays of tourist visas among other Hebrew Israelites were never completely halted. As late as May 2021, there were reports of new illegal immigrants overstaying their tourist visas from the United States. That situation may spur renewed tensions between the community and the State of Israel.

Since the final years of its founder, the AHIJ has made a remarkable volte-face. From its inception as an antisemitic, elitist, supremacist, revolutionary, eschatological religion, it has transformed into a religion of healthy living, positive thinking, wellness, acceptance, and veganism. It currently enjoys a thriving and legitimate business empire based on these core values. The members still practice polygamy, which is technically illegal in Israel. But reports of physical and sexual abuse are now few and far between. And the acceptance of Israelis who are not of African American descent into the community demonstrates a dramatic shift away from its earlier stance of separating itself from non-Black Jewish people.106 It appears that the African Hebrews of Jerusalem may have succeeded in becoming full-fledged, contributory members of Israeli society.

Joseph B. Yudin has written for the Jerusalem Post as a travel writer and has contributed to articles in Conde Nast Traveler, Town & Country, and Travel + Leisure. He lives with his wife and three children on Kibbutz Megiddo. He earned his Ph.D. in Israel Studies at the University of Haifa. Dr. Yudin is author of The Protestant Settlers of Israel: Missionaries, Millenarians, and the African Hebrew Israelites (Lexington Books, 2023).