Who ACTUALLY are the Black Israelites

In the middle of the Israeli desert, there is a village. They live peacefully, they practice strict Judaism, they keep kosher, and of course they remember the Sabbath. But they are not your typical Israelis. They are Black Americans from Chicago. These are quite literally Black Israelites, and they believe something extraordinary. They believe that they are the real literal descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel, that they were scattered enslaved and shipped across an ocean as a curse from God. But they are not the only community who believes this. Because ever since emancipation, there have been growing movements all across America making the same astonishing claim. They have built synagogues, some are politically active, some live quiet Judeo Christian lives, and a few turn into something a bit more complicated. And today we're tracing this idea that grew out of slavery across an ocean and became one of the most misunderstood beliefs in American history, from Kentucky to Chicago to Philadelphia to Harlem to the state of Israel itself. Where did this belief system come from? Why does it look so different from one group to the next? And what happens when a people who were ripped from their heritage connect themselves to what they believe is their true history? Well, let's find out. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion Camp. What's up, dude? And welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Sunday we explore the most interesting, the most fascinating, the most controversial stories from all religions from around the world from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here is I try to figure out what everybody believes. There are billions of people on this planet, many of which believe something completely different from me. I grew up Catholic, so I made a Muslim guy, I made a Jewish guy, I made a Mormon guy, I made a Hindu guy, I made a Buddhist guy, and I go, what's your God all about? How does your religion organize itself? What does it mean to be a part of your faith? And that's what the show is about is I try to understand people through a religious lens. Now, today's episode we're doing exactly that with one of the most kind of misunderstood and interesting religious groups, maybe in all of America and not only America, but in Israel as well. And these are a group that described themselves as the black Israelites. Now, there's a lot to unpack there. Before I jump in, I want to say thanks to you. All right. Yeah, dude, or girl, whoever you are. I want to say thanks for tuning in. But every time you click an episode, you like comment, you help keep the show alive. You truly are the life force behind why the show exists. And you're my reason for getting up every morning. Truly, I love doing the show. I'm so glad you're here. And you keep the lights on at the tent. You keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now, the show's not possible without the man beside me. The swirly Greek himself. Chris does pakadopados. How are you, my friend? What does swirly mean? It's like a, it's like an old English term for like handsome. Okay. I think don't look it up, but that's what I mean. That's why I think I'm not don't don't go, are you going to I'm pretty sure it's like handsome, right? Having a dark skin color or complexion. Your war, your Greek Israelite. Thank you. That's that's that's how I would describe. This is brown olive or dark and brown olive. Yeah, you're olive. Yeah, right. You guys love olives. Yeah. Anyway, we're not talking about the Greeks. We're talking about the black Israelites. Now, I just want to say a few disclaimers up top. First off, I'm not black. I'm also not in Israelite. So I'm speaking about this as an outsider. This is based off research that I've done trying to understand this group. So if there's anything I miss, please don't hesitate to drop a comment. You know, let me know if I'm incorrect in any capacity because again, I don't really care about, you know, pushing the scales one way or the other. I'm not here to convince you of anything. I'm here to try to understand the best that I can and hopefully bring you along for the journey. So let me know if there's anything that I'm off on. Additionally, this I know can be a delicate topic because people feel very passionately about this one way or the other. So I'm going to try to approach it in the most unbiased way possible to just try to lay out what this world you is and why people believe this. Again, I'm not making some type of racial or religious claim about who is or who isn't of a religion or of a people group or an ethnicity. I'm just trying to lay out how these how people that belong to this group think and why they believe what they believe. Maybe you've been walking on the street and you see some guys with a microphone and a sign and they're claiming to be like the true Israelites. That's what their whole thing is. Maybe they're yelling. Maybe they're they got a big, you know, like loudspeaker and they're saying stuff about white people and you're like, what is going on with those guys? Well, if you've ever wondered that, you're in the right place because I'm going to try to break it all down. Now first off, black Israelite is not a religion. It's not like the name of a religion, right? It's not like a church, it's not an organization. It's not even one set of beliefs. Like sure people will call themselves black Israelites, but it's more of like a like a notation. It's not necessarily like the church of the black Israelites to my understanding. What we're talking about here is really an umbrella. It is a whole family of different black American religious movements spread across more than a century that each landed on a different version of the same core idea. And the idea is basically that some black Americans and other people of African descent are connected by blood or by covenant to God's chosen people Israel from the Bible. And I say some and I'll keep saying different groups because there isn't like a single version of this claim that you can just like easily track. There are different movements that draw the line in different places about who counts, what counts, how you have to practice in order to be a part of it. And that variety is really what we're going to be breaking down today. So a quick note on names though, you'll hear a bunch of different labels for this. You'll hear black Israelite, you'll hear Hebrew Israelite, you'll hear like black Hebrew Israelite. For our purposes, I'm going to treat these as just interchangeable. They're again, not the name of one group, but they are the terms that people use for all these communities under this umbrella. It's more of just kind of like like an outsider's like catch all terms. So first, how exactly are they connected to Israel? Well, that is really where we kind of need to start and it's actually where a lot of them disagree and where they diverge. So the range of beliefs here is enormous. Some groups practice forms of Judaism very closely, like they'll keep Sabbath, they'll you know, eat kosher, they'll learn Hebrew, and they'll live like a proper whole like Jewish life. Others identify as Christian, others reject both Judaism and Christianity entirely and many kind of land somewhere in between that doesn't really fit into either box. And their temperament varies just as much from quiet community-oriented congregations focused on just raising their kids, keeping their traditions, and just kind of keeping them selves all the way to very loud confrontational street preaching organizations like the ones that maybe you've seen that I kind of mentioned earlier. And then a small number go further than that there, you know, into open hostility, they're preaching that other groups are in postures or that they're straight-up enemies. And as we go through the episode, you're going to have to remember one key thing. This umbrella is factioned. So when we describe one, we are describing that group only. It's not going to apply to every person that claims to be a part of this umbrella. And there's another really important distinction before we even go any further into this. Black Hebrew Israelites are not the same as Black Jews. So Black Jews are Jewish the same way that anyone is Jewish by birth, by descent, by conversion, or by belonging to a Jewish community. You can think of like Ethiopian Jews that live in Ethiopia, they keep the Sabbath and they keep Jewish tradition. And they are ethnically Ethiopian. And to the American racial lens, we see them as Black. But the Hebrew Israel movement is a different thing. Their unique claim is that Black people are the literal blood descendants of the ancient Israelites of the Bible and that this heritage was stolen from them through slavery. Now, those two worlds, Black Jews and Black Israelites do overlap. So Black Jewish identity and Hebrew Israeli identity aren't always like cleanly separate. And as we're going to see, one of the most important congregations in the whole story sits like right in the middle of that. But at the same time, they're not interchangeable categories either. So you can keep that in mind. So if this isn't one religion and it's a bunch of scattered movements, then we need to find out where it all stems from. Like, what is the idea or the person that connects all of them in the beginning? So for that, we're going to have to go to the one text that all of these movements, no matter how different, keep coming back to and that's the Bible. So the connection between Black Americans and the tribes of Israel did not start in the 1900s. It didn't start with any of the founders were going to meet. It's actually much older than that. And for a long time, it wasn't even about a claim to ancestry at all. It was a comparison. So let me explain what I mean. You go back to slavery in America, right? And slave people often introduced to Christianity by many times the very people that were enslaving them found something in the Bible that they connected to extremely deeply. You got to think this is the American South. You are a slave. Maybe you were born into slavery. Your great-grandparent was basically shipped from Western Africa and you're living as a slave in America and your slave master is giving you the Bible. And so you're reading it and you find Exodus. They find a story about a people held in bondage, held in slavery, people crying out under the whip and a God who hears them, who comes down personally and sets them free. This is a God who explicitly is unmistakably on the side of the slaves. And you can hear these callbacks in traditional spirituals, right? Like go down Moses, let my people go. When enslaved Americans in America sang about Pharaoh, everybody knew the Pharaoh they were talking about wasn't like a dead Egyptian king. Pharaoh was the master. It was the plantation and Egypt in this analog was America. So the language that was used to describe Israel in the Bible like bondage, exile, deliverance, a promised land was already deeply woven into black American faith long before the black Israelite movement became like an identifiable thing. Now for most of that history, it ran as an analogy, right? Like people would say, our people like enslaved people in America, we are like Israel. We suffer like they suffered and and we are waiting for you. for deliverance in the same way that they waited. And I don't want to make it too clean because the honest history is much messier. The metaphorical version and the more literal version actually lived side by side for a long time, even early on. They were black Americans who pushed past the like Israel towards something much more direct, like the sense that they might genuinely be Israel. You can see the difference, right? This wasn't like one clean switch that just flipped one day. It was more like a stream that was kind of always there and then the current just kind of got stronger over time. And then in the years after emancipation, that stronger claim like really surfaced and like took hold. And a number of people in different places started saying more comfortably like, hey, we're not like Israel. We are not like the people of this place in Exodus. We are Israel. We are God's chosen people. And this wasn't a comparison anymore. They were claiming an actual bloodline like literal descendants from the ancient Israelites of the Bible. It chosen people who had been scattered and enslaved, stripped of their name and of their history, shipped across the notion and who were still underneath all of it God's original chosen nation. Now, it might seem like a small distinction, but it's not a small idea. It is a revolutionary idea and it starts to really catch fire and spread all through the country. But it wasn't just the idea itself that made the belief so fierce. It was also what was happening in culture and in society that made it so explosive. Because after emancipation, it wasn't like everything was just, you know, Hunky Dory and life was good for black Americans. There was a crushing backlash against the black population still in America. Reconstruction collapsed. Jim Crow era politics locked into place and there's redlining and racial terror across the South. There's lynchings, there's nightriders, entire communities living under threat. Technically as free people, but in many ways still terrified for their life and still fighting to get any type of equal representation. And out of that terror came one of the most remarkable episodes in all of black American history. So in 1879, tens of thousands of black southerners just left. Like they just packed up their things and they went west out of the old slave stays towards Kansas seeking land and safety and just a place that they can govern their own lives based on their own accord. And history remembers them by a pretty special name that will probably make sense to you. They called them the ex-adusters and that name didn't get made up later. That was what they called themselves at the time. So by the end of the 1800s, more than one black congregation in America separately independently started teaching that its members were the true Israelites. And there were two main guys who history remembers as the most influential founders. These guys share the same core claim that we are not like Israel, we are Israel, but they had two completely different approaches to it. So the first one is William Saunders Crowdy. Now Crowdy's story is pretty extraordinary, right? He was born into slavery in 1847 on a plantation in Maryland. And as a teenager during the Civil War, he escaped. And one of the first things that he did as a free man was change his name from Wilson, which his overseer slash master called him to William because he refused to keep a name that was given to him in bondage. So he fought in the Union Army, survived some of the wars like most brutal battles. And afterwards searched for just kind of like an ordinary life. And so he went to be a cook on a railroad and then a farmer in Oklahoma and then became a Baptist deacon in Kansas. And then in the early 1890s, that ordinary life became extraordinary. Crowdy said that God came to him in a series of visions telling him that black Americans were the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. And that he had been chosen as a prophet to basically tell them. So in 1896, he founded his church in Kansas. The church is called the Church of God and Saints of Christ. Now notice the name, right? Because it mentions God and Christ. So it's not Judaism, but it wasn't standard Christianity either. Right, like Crowdy blended the two. There was an emphasis on Hebrew scriptures, the biblical commands, the Sabbath, the God of Abraham, Isaac Jacob, while still holding on to major pieces of Christian tradition with this new kind of like Hebrew Israelite chosen people lens. And that single church actually grew into a massive institution. They had congregations all across the country and then even overseas with ordained leaders and property and leadership getting passed down across generations. And actually this church, the church of God and Saints of Christ is still around to this day. So this movement wasn't just a scattering of eccentric prophets who kind of came up, spread a message and then vanished and with it went the whole congregation. No, from the very start, it was building a stable multigenerational religious kind of legacy. Now there is another guy who is usually credited as one of like the earliest. His name is F.S. Cherry or Frank Cherry. Honestly, we don't know a ton about Frank Cherry's early life. He was a working man, a former sailor and a railroad laborer, largely self-taught who said that while traveling abroad, he received a vision revealing that black people were the real descendants of the ancient Israelites. So around 1886 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he started one of the very first black Jewish churches, the church of the living God. Now Cherry's theology could get a little unconventional. He taught that Adam, Eve, and Jesus were all ethnically black. Like they had black skin and he became fluent in Hebrew and Yiddish. He was famous for like very fiery like slang-filled preaching that really connected with the people he was speaking with and he offered a standing challenge. Supposedly he offered a thousand dollars to anyone who could prove from the Bible that black people were not the original Hebrews. He also said things well outside of mainstream teaching, things like the Earth of Square and that Jesus would return in the year 2000. A lot of stuff like that. And there's something else that we have to pause on with Cherry. So unlike Croti, Cherry was from very early on pretty openly hostile, right? He preached that white people were inherently evil and that white Jews specifically were frauds and impostors. And to be clear, this was not the standard then and it's not like the standard now. Cherry's very aggressive approach was not the only or the dominant version of the movement. And while sure strains of that still do exist today, it is by no means the standard. So already before this movement is even a generation old, you can kind of see a fork in the road, right? You can see Cherry's approach versus Croti's approach. One turns it into an accusation. The other turns it into kind of a personal self discovery. And believe it or not, this is just the beginning of this division because Croti and Cherry weren't alone. Other figures like the Reverend William Christian were developing their own Israelite interpretations around the same time, which is exactly why historians resist naming just one single guy being like, this is where it all started 'cause there were a bunch of these people around the same time all thinking the same thing. There was no head office, no origin point that you can just point to. The men were scattered across Kansas, Tennessee, Philadelphia, Arkansas. And they were mostly independent. Like they didn't have a cohesive network where they were like sharing notes all the time. Like sure they chatted, but they weren't like, hey, take this. Now this raises a real question. If nobody was copying anyone, why and more so how did this same electric idea erupt in so many places at once? Well, historians say it's because these ideas didn't kind of know where. There was a lot going on all at once and it was all kind of moving in this direction. And here's what they mean when they say that. By the late 1800s, America was full of new things happening and new ideas spreading for the emancipation and reconstruction periods. There was obviously the exoduster movement, like the migration that we just talked about. There was enormous symbolic weight of Ethiopia in Black Christian thought. There was the holiness in Pentecostal revival sweeping through Black churches in the South with like a real intense focus on Old Testament law and living very biblically. There was also a rising black nationalism and a hunger to prove Black people were a distinct people with a great and ancient past. There was even Black Freemasonry, which had a deep fascination with secret ancient lineages. And all of this is happening, right? So with that in mind, this isn't the start of like, a few men coincidentally had like the same weird dream and a time where everything was normal. No, like so many powerful currents were already moving in this direction of Black people in America trying to understand their identity and trying to basically reclaim heritage that was taken from them from the horrors of slavery. And that idea like we are Israel is not an unusual thing to come out of that. Now a lot of the OGs were mostly rooted in the South and on the Western frontier, like the post-Civil War kind of Christian world. But the movement center of gravity was about to shift to a single neighborhood in New York City and it changed everything. And to understand that chapter, we have to go to Harlem. Now why Harlem of all places? Well, in the early 1910s to the 1920s, there was one man who was electrifying Black America in a brand new way and his name was Marcus Garvey. He was a Jamaican-born activist. He built the largest organized Black nationalist movement of its era. So what they call the universal Negro improvement association or the UNIA. I think I can say that word, right? It's a historical context, right? You can say it, UNIA. Sure, did I make it weird by saying I can say it? Yes, my bad. You got what I'm saying, right? Anyway, his message was intoxicated. Garvey basically preached Black pride, Black self-reliance, Black economic independence and Black dignity on a global scale. So at a time when America was offering Black citizens almost none of these things, he told people of African descent and just the general Black population that, like, hey, Not only are we not slaves or not only are we not like dumb or not only are we not like, you know, just completely disenfranchised and like, you know, we have no opportunities. Actually, we come from greatness and that we are one global people and famously, he championed a back to Africa vision. The idea that black people should look to Africa as a homeland and as a source of identity and of power. Now, Garvey's movement was more political than religious. He was not here being like, "Hey guys, you are the literal descendants of Israel, but you can probably imagine how good this message sounded to, you know, when you put him next to the religious ideas floating around at the same time." And there's another thread of Garvey's teachings that we need to talk about because it's honestly the key to understanding the rest of this story and its Ethiopia. So for generations, Ethiopia carried enormous symbolic weight in black American religious thought. Part of it is biblical, right? Ethiopia appears in scripture, including a famous line in the Psalms. Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. And the other part of it was that Ethiopia had its own ancient Christian and Jewish and biblical tradition. Plus, it was the only black nation that had never been fully colonized. So the growing movement of black pride and hope and biblical imagination in Harlem was kind of given a new name and they called it Ethiopianism. And there was one guy who fused it all together like taking Garvey's ideas and Ethiopianism and Judaism and put it into one. And his name is Arnold Josiah Ford. He was a musician from Barbados and the musical director of Garvey's UNIA organization. But he was also a black Jew who came to teach that Judaism was the original religion of black people and that Africans were the true descendants of the biblical Israelites. So he opened a synagogue in Harlem. He declared himself a rabbi and gathered followers who studied Hebrew and general Jewish law with him. And then in 1930, Ford actually left. He moved to Ethiopia to try to build a life there and even took part in the coronation of emperor, highly salasi. But we did a whole episode on highly salasi, which is fascinating. He's a fascinating figure in world history, but specifically like Ethiopian history. And so Ford was in a sense the first person in this story to really turn that like return to the homeland kind of idea into a reality. But before Ford left for Ethiopia, he mentored by some accounts, they would say ordained, the man who would build the most enduring black Jewish institution of the 20th century. And his name is Wentworth Arthur Matthew. He was born in 1892 in the Caribbean on the island of St. Kits. And he had come to the United States as just a young man. And in Harlem, surrounded by both the Garvey movements pride and the Ford movements kind of a Jewish community. And the black Israelite teachings, he built on top of all those things, bringing the movement into the next phase of development. So in 1919, in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance, this is a moment where you have jazz pouring out of nightclubs and Garvey's movements and like full roar black people in Harlem specifically are feeling pretty optimistic about the, you know, their lives and their creating art. And they're excited about, you know, this, this moment. And Matthew founded the congregation, the commandment keepers. Now the commandment keepers were different from the other groups because they weren't just borrowing a few Jewish teachings here and there. They built a real synagogue. And his congregation kept the Sabbath. They kept kosher, learned Hebrew, celebrated all the Jewish holidays, held services, and even ran a Hebrew school. And we know all of this in detail because their records still survive to this day. I mean, membership roles, financial ledgers, attendant sheets for the children's Hebrew classes, all that stuff, still dating back to the 1920s. So you can follow the thread of the lineage real quick, right? You have Garvey in Harlem, lighting the political fire of black pride and African identity. And then Ford fuses it with Ethiopianism and Judaism inside this movement. And then Matthew comes in and pulls it all together and winds up building the most enduring black Jewish institution of them all. Matthew said that black people, specifically in his framing, Ethiopian Hebrews were descended from ancient Israelites, and that the great figures of the Bible had actually been black. Now one quick but important note, because the phrase Ethiopian Hebrew kind of trips a lot of people up. There is a group called the Beta Israel. This is an ancient Jewish community that actually lived in Ethiopia for centuries. They have their own long documented history and they are widely recognized as Jews. Many of them live in Israel to this day. But this gets a little confusing because when Matthew called his Harlem congregation Ethiopian Hebrews, he was not saying that they were a part of that same community that existed in Ethiopia. He was making his own separate claim that black Americans descend from the Israelites of the Bible. That's a different idea entirely. And it's not the one that Beta Israel or mainstream scholars really accept. So two totally different groups, two different histories. So don't let that word Ethiopian kind of like trip you up. They're sort of distinct. They may be drawing on kind of like similar ideas, but one of them is seen through I guess like the mainstream kind of scholarly Jewish lens as being a very direct tie into the biblical Israelites. Now remember how cherry taught that white Jews were frauds and imposters? Well Matthew actually went a different direction. He didn't treat white Jews as enemies. In fact, he sought them out and looked at them as brothers and hoped that they might help black people return to what he believed was their original faith. And that difference leads us straight into one of the most sensitive and misunderstood questions in kind of the whole subject. Were the commandment keepers accepted as Jews by the wider Jewish world? Well, the easiest answer here is like no, but it's not fully accurate because the honest truth is that you're actually dealing with four completely different questions that people kind of just put into one. So I'll show you what I mean. Question one is what does a person call themselves? Question two is which Jewish communities accept them. And the question three is what do specific Jewish nominations formally require for someone to count as Jewish? Either under their religious law or conversion by community standards. And then of course question four, what does the state of Israel recognize under its immigration laws? You see what I mean? These are four different questions governed by different communities and institutions that can give you four different answers to the same question. Somebody can sincerely and deeply identify as an Israelite living a fully observant Jewish life and still not meet the particular denominations formal legal criteria for Jewish status. So Matthew is basically seeking recognition and acceptance from mainstream Jewish sources. He even tried to enter New York's rabbinical establishment, but he wasn't accepted. So he was a man who kept the Sabbath. He kept kosher. His children all spoke Hebrew. He ran a synagogue for decades and still found that other people held the power to decide whether he was actually Jewish or not. And to be honest, the real question underneath all of this is kind of tricky, right? It's not the simple version like are they really Jews? Yes or no, but it is complicated. What does it mean to say like this is who I am and then be barred from that identity, right? Like if it is a religion, like couldn't you just become it? Well, there's one group in the story that took that question to an extreme. And this is a group that decided that no one, no rabbi, no government, no bureaucrat could tell them who they were or who they weren't. And they proved it by moving to the desert. So far, most of what we've seen from the Black Israelite communities has been inward facing, right? It's congregations and synagogues and community building and, you know, keeping holidays and fighting for dignity and recognizing what they believe is like their true history. But in the 1960s, one branch of the movement took a turn and they really kind of just leveled it up. And the key figure to know in this whole thing is a man that we know as Abba Bivens. Now Bivens came out of exactly the world that we just described. He'd spent years by some accounts nearly two decades inside Matthew's Harlem Hebrew world connected to this movement, the Commandment Keepers. But he broke away the 1960s over a theological disagreement, including the role of the New Testament. And he started his own school. It was called the Israeli School of Universal Practical Knowledge. And it was located on one west on 125th street. And the address here is important because it gave the whole current its lasting nickname, one west. Now let me kind of lay out the transformation because it's not simply like a movement gets more extreme. What happens here is that a more judyizing inward community building tradition gave way to a more militant street preaching model built around a highly systematized racial map of the Bible, an aggressive kind of style of like public confrontation and a strong worldview on the apocalypse. And then that branch splintered again and again and again into a whole ecosystem of separate camps. But even one west was not a single organization with a single set of beliefs. It is a source. It's sort of like a stream that split and split and split into a huge number of separate groups of ministries and local chapters and then eventually YouTube channels and social media brands. So when you hear someone say like one west believes this, your first question should always be like, well, which group in which years led by whom? But you will hear certain verses cited over and over, especially two lines in Revelation about a synagogue of Satan and maybe most importantly, Deuteronomy 28. So we'll get to Deuteronomy in a second, but first there's a really important piece of theology that you may have already seen online. And it's a chart. And the idea is this, the Bible describes the 12 tribes of Israel. And some of these groups made charts that take those 12 ancient tribes and map them directly on two modern populations. One prominent organization, for example, assigns the tribes to black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. Teaching that these are the scattered lost tribes of Israel that wound up hidden in America. But again, there's no single agreed upon charts. Different groups will produce different maps and they don't always agree. So this is just one chart. Again, different charts will say different things. I'm not claiming that this is the end all be all. This is just one to give you an idea. So 12 tribes of Israel, they say that the tribe of Judah became American Black people. The tribe of Benjamin becomes West Indian Black people. The tribe of Levi becomes Haitians. Ephraim becomes Puerto Ricans. Manassa becomes Cubans. Simian becomes Dominicans and so on and so forth. All the way down to like the tribe of Ruman, which becomes the Seminole Indians and like the tribe of Issaqar becomes Mexican Aztecs. So this is what they understand as, again, for this one group, again, not all groups believe the same thing. But this one group says, okay, this chart maps the 12 tribes of Israel, who the actual people of God are in the Old Testament, to modern ethnic groups that exist largely in the West. So again, this is just one chart. But what all these charts do is they take a theological claim like we are the lost tribes and they turn it into something tangible like a literal map of the races of the present day world. And to support that belief, they point to one biblical passage above all the others. And that is Deuteronomy 28. Now Deuteronomy 28 is a chapter of curses and in it God warns Israel what will happen if they break the covenant in disobey. And the warning says, you will be struck down before your enemies. You will be scattered among all the peoples of the earth and you will be taken in ships back into captivity and there you will be sold to your enemies as slaves and no one will buy you back. Now, you see how that fits like this is where the belief is coming from. For many believers, that's not a coincidence or an analogy. It is a prophecy describing the transatlantic slave trade. And if that curse was about your people then the identity behind the curse must be yours as well. That is a genuinely powerful piece of religious reasoning. So is it true? Are black Americans literally the descendants of biblical Israelites? Well, first off, did ancient Israelites exist? Yes, they're no dispute. Like this is an actual people. Have there been Jewish and Israeli populations in Africa? Yes, absolutely. All over Africa, right? The Mediterranean, the Near East. There are thousands of years of shared tangled history of migration and trade and conquest and conversion and intermarriage. And Jewish communities have lived across parts of Africa for a millennium. African history and Jewish history are truly interwoven in many places. But again, that's not the question. Are black Americans as an entire people collectively descended from the biblical 12 tribes? Well, the truth as far as I'm concerned is that there is no accepted historical evidence confirming that claim. I'm not saying it's not true. I'm just saying based off what historians have said, it's difficult to find evidence back in it up. Most biblical scholars do not say that Deuteronomy 28 is a prediction of the Atlantic slave trade. They say that it's an ancient text written centuries ago and it's describing curses tied to the world of the ancient Near East and that interpreting it as the Atlantic slave trade is a modern projection. The other problem is that there's no continuous demonstrable chain of descent connecting black Americans as a population to those specific ancient tribes. So the correspondence that is felt, right? This scripture describes my people suffering so perfectly is extremely powerful. But feeling that a text describes you is different than being able to demonstrate an actual genealogical descent. But I promised you three people at the start of this, right? A street preacher, a Harlem worshiper, and the man in the Israeli desert. So it's time to meet the third one. But it doesn't start over there. It starts in Chicago. Now remember, for like a century, the language of Exodus had mostly been a metaphor. Egypt was like the plantation, Egypt was America, and Pharaoh was, you know, the slave master was the American government that allowed slavery to exist. And the promised land was freedom or dignity or heaven. And that one man who'd actually returned to the homeland, Arnold Josiah Ford, well, he had done so pretty quietly when he moved to Ethiopia in 1930. But this third guy in the 1960s didn't consider the Bible a metaphor. He didn't consider Ethiopia home. His name was Ben, Ami, Ben Israel. And he was not born with that name. He was born as Ben Carter in Chicago in 1939. And he was raised in a Baptist family. He served in the US Army. And afterwards worked in Chicago as an industrial worker. But some account specifically described him as a metallurgist, while others mentioned him being a bus driver. Either way, he was by every measure in ordinary working guy in segregated mid-century Chicago. But in the 1960s, a coworker introduced him to the idea that black Americans were the descendants of ancient Israelites, and it changed his world forever. He began attending Chicago's black Hebrew meetings. He took the Hebrew name Ben Ami, literally meaning the son of my people. And in 1964, he helped fund a community called the Ibiza Hebrew Israel Culture Center. And then in 1966, a year of intense racial upheaval in America, Ben Ami said that he received a vision. The angel Gabriel appeared to him and he said, basically an instruction, lead the children of Israel, meaning black Americans out of America. And back to the promised land and establish the kingdom of God. And he did it. Not straight to Israel. First, his community went to Liberia, the West African nation that was founded in the 1800s by freed American slaves. Ben Ami and his followers saw that as the wilderness. And they basically, you know, based off like a biblical like wilderness stage. And this was a place to purify and prepare and basically the way of the Israelites of the Bible, how they wandered in the desert and in the wilderness before they could actually enter the promised land. So around 1967, they went roughly 300 of them or so, maybe more, maybe less. And they lived in extremely hard conditions. Those years in Liberia were genuinely brutal. They faced poverty and sickness and like a very genuine hardship. And some of the group gave up and just went home. But the ones who stayed came out the other side, committed and certain purified in their own eyes and ready for the promised land. So in 1969, they went to Israel. Now the state of Israel has a law called the law of return, which gives any Jew in the world the right to immigrate and become a citizen. Now here comes a group of black Americans from Chicago arriving and saying like, hey guys, where Israelites? We're home and we are here to stay. And the Israeli government did not know what to do. Ultimately, Israeli authorities did not recognize them as Jewish under the law of return. And the group couldn't provide the kind of proof of Jewish lineage that the law required. So they kind of landed in like this legal nomans land. And they were settled in Demona. This is a kind of like tough development town way, way out in the Gav desert. Now the relationship was genuinely complicated on both sides. The community for its part was in the country without normal legal status or work authorization. And some of its members at various points like voice their own harsh, even anti-Semitic rhetoric towards Israeli Jews that were living in the country. And the state for its part spent years unsure whether to accommodate them or expel them and deport them back to America. It was messy and tense and it really stayed that way for a long time. Yet against every expectation, they stayed. And they're in that desert, they built something unbelievable. So they called their community Demona. This is the village of peace. And over the decades in the middle of a desert that did not want them, they created one of the most distinctive communities on earth. So first of all, they became strict vegans. No meat, no dairy, growing much of their own food. They abstained from alcohol and tobacco. They fasted every Sabbath. They developed their own music, their own school, their own businesses, their own fashion. And like a very rich kind of internal culture. And their family life had its own distinctive shape as well. The community practiced polygamy for many years before formerly ending the practice around 1990. And they raised children, children who grew up knowing no other home. They were born in Israel. And this was their whole life. They were kids of the desert. They were Israeli Hebrew speaking, born and raised in Demona kids. And slowly the community eventually wove itself into the fabric of Israeli life. So their sons and daughters began serving in the Israeli army. And members of the community have represented Israel at the Eurovision Song contest twice. The country that once tried to kind of expel them or wasn't sure what to do with them was now sending them to sing under its flag on an international stage. But their legal status stayed unresolved for decades. And this is where we see the same lesson from early. Remember how recognition is really several different layers. Because on the religious side, being recognized as Jewish under the law of return, having actual paperwork to prove a Jewish lineage, well, the answer kind of just stayed no. But the other questions like, can they live here? Can they work here? Can they stay here and belong here? Like those slowly turned into yes. And through the 90s, they gained temporary residency. And in 2003, many received permanent residency, a massive milestone. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to talk to you about getting old. I turned 30 this month. Yeah, it's sad. And my body is not responding the way that it used to. I could feel exhausted all day and then I get into bed and then now I'm suddenly wide awake. I'm not recovering as quickly. My motivation is kind of inconsistent. My gym habits are not as sharp as they were. And it felt like a bunch of unrelated problems. But the one thing that I can connect to all those issues is cortisol. It's my body stress hormone. And it's supposed to rise when I'm under pressure and then come back down. The problem is between work and podcasts and standup and answering emails and meetings and trying to raise a family and being a dad and staring at screens all day and doom scrolling. My stress response is constantly activated. And that's why I've been taking Mars men. You can hear this bottle is basically empty because I legit take this every single day. And they sponsor the episode. and I love them. Marsmen uses natural ingredients designed to support healthy testosterone production while helping your body manage cortisol levels. There's no weird stimulants or synthetic hormones. And what I like about it is that it doesn't feel like, I'm just ripping a cup of coffee and like my heart's gonna go crazy. It's designed to support a more consistent energy and stamina and sleep and recovery. It's also made in the USA, it's third party tested and now available at GNC Nationwide. Plus it comes with a 90 day money back guarantee and over 91% of users report higher energy levels. All the ingredients are fantastic and natural. If, I mean, you can just buy all of these things separately but that's gonna take a ton of time and be super expensive or you just go to mengotomars.com and you can get all of it packaged into one simple supplement stack that's gonna give you everything you need. And for a limited time to listeners of this show, we're gonna get 50% off for life plus free shipping and three free gifts when they go to mengotomars.com. That's mengotomars.com for 50% off and three free gifts that check out an after you purchase, tell them the Mark and Christo said show. Now let's get back to the show. And then in 2009, El Yaqim, Ben Israel, became the first member of the community to receive full Israeli citizenship with the Israeli government signalling that more might be able to follow. This was a turning point that came through tragedy when a member of the community was among those killed in a bombing and the state moved towards extending status more broadly. Ben Ami himself, the working man from Chicago who followed an angel's vision across two continents received full Israeli citizenship, a few years later in 2013, just one year before he died. So he died in Israeli citizen, revered by thousands of followers who considered him in a way a messianic figure. And even now, this story is not done. As recently as 2021, dozens of long time community members, some of them born in Israel were hit with deportation orders because somewhere in the kind of bureaucratic decades their status had kind of fallen through the cracks. So think about that from their perspective. It's like you're a kid, you're born in the Israeli desert of DiMona in this town and you've never lived anywhere else. You maybe served in the Israeli army. And then the government sends you a letter saying like, hey, you have to leave the only country you've ever known to go to a different country where technically you belong that you've never been to that maybe, you know, you barely even speak English well enough to like live there. And then in 2025, after years of legal fighting and a public campaign, there was a breakthrough. More than a hundred of those community members were granted temporary residency. They kind that has to basically be renewed every couple of years, but it'll let them stay. Now, temporary residency is not citizenship and it's not like a guarantee that you're gonna be able to stay there forever. Some family members, reportedly including children were still kind of left in limbo. And so the fight for secure permanent status is still ongoing in the state. Still does not accept the original claim that brought them there. So where does that leave the black Israelites today? There's still no central church, no membership role, no single authority, and there's no clear picture on how many there are who actually practice. And estimates range from tens of thousands all the way up to maybe over a million. What's certain is that it's one of the most significant homegrown American faiths that most people never really take the time to actually understand. And this belief was forged in the hardest fire in American history, literally out of slavery, out of the broken promise of emancipation, out of the tear and betrayal of the collapse of reconstruction from a people who have been told systematically for centuries that they had no name, they had no nation, and they had no history. But then they opened and argued that the most powerful book in the world was actually theirs. And they found themselves in the Old Testament, not as slaves, but as chosen, not as a footnote in history, but as the heart of history itself. And that brings us to the central question that the black Israelites have been really fighting like who gets to decide who we are. And what they built from that is their own. They took Judaism, it's laws, it's Sabbath, it's covenant, they took Christianity, the faith that many of them had been, basically that they learned and bondage. And instead of simply accepting either one, they kind of put their own lens over both and produced an entire new tradition, a faith that tells them the story of their survival, of their exile, and what they believe is their hope of a promised return. And so in a lot of ways, it maybe wasn't even that much about genealogy charts or DNA, it was about a people trying to reach back across thousands of years and reclaim a birthright that slavery took from them. And maybe that's the most important thing to keep in mind when thinking about the black Israelites, that they claim we were here before you named us, and they say today we're still here, and that their story for them does not just end in chains. And that ladies and gentlemen is a brief understanding of the black Israelite movement in America, who they are and what they believe, fascinating. Right, like these are the kinds of things that I love. Like it is in a lot of ways like an American religion, right? Like it is a religion that came up here that, you know, like I guess like church of Latter-day Saints, like AKA Mormons would be the only other one that would be like considered like an American religion. And the black Israelites, like it came out of this moment. Now again, based off everything I've ever seen, I don't see like a strong historical claim to being like the descendants of the tribes of Israel. Like it's tough to like make that leap. But I understand the feeling. Like I understand if you are an enslaved person or the children of enslaved people living in America, you read Exodus and you're like, dude, this is a story about us. Like how this is so spot on. This is exactly what I feel. This is exactly what I want to happen. I want to be delivered into a promised land. I want, you know, a messianic figure. I want a Moses to come take us out of here. Like I can, I understand the feeling so palpably. But it's interesting how it gets crossed in with so many other cultural movements that are happening, right? Like Marcus Garvey coming in and like creating so much pride in like this black culture overlapped with a religious element to say like, hey, not only are we important, like we are God's chosen people. It's a powerful message and if you're like a young dude going like hearing someone talk about this, like I understand why it would be so palpable. And who knows? Maybe I'm wrong about the genealogy thing. Maybe you can track it. It's just not something that I've seen. But I would honestly really like to talk to a black Israelite and like get his perspective. And there's other elements in the Bible. I think like revelation, they describe Christ returning with like skin of copper. Like that's another line. I see people point out that like I didn't include in the in like the actual discussion about it. But it is interesting that they're like, you know, like you can find elements in the Bible that like support that. And even that line from Deuteronomy, like, hey, you guys are going to be put in boats and shipped to a different place where you will be enslaved and no one will buy you. It's like bang. If you're reading that as like an American black kid living here and like you're pissed off about the state of the country and like the state of race relations, you're living in like the 1950s and a segregated America. You would read them and be like, yeah, this is us. Who else could it be? Right? Like I understand the feeling. So I'm curious what do you guys think? If you grew up Jewish or like was there ever discussion in your house about like Hebrew Israelites? Like was there ever discussion like, oh yeah, these people are like living in our country now? It's such an interesting gray area. I would love to see the Eurovision, the video of a, I never seen, I didn't look up the Eurovision contestants that came from this community. But like I could see the Israeli government being like, we did not expect that this would happen. Right? It's not like people like testing their standards. It's people that are genuinely showing up at their door being like, hey, we're Jews. And they're like, okay, like what do we do about that? It's fascinating. So I'm curious what like from a Jewish perspective, like what you would say to this movement and like how you understood it from a Christian perspective, what, like how do you understand it? And I'm curious how it interfaces with like the nation of Islam, right? Like and Elijah Muhammad and like Farakhan. Like I wonder how like does that kind of have like a similar shape in some ways? I don't know enough about the nation of Islam to know like the background. But maybe that's another episode we should do. We should definitely go into that and try to understand that phenomenon as well. So I found one actually, this is Eddie Butler. He was born in 1971 and according to his Wikipedia, he is an Israeli singer. He was born in Demona to a family of Black Hebrew Israelites from Chicago. He started performing at the age of eight. And in the 1990s, he sang with wedding bands in 1992. He was a backup singer for Zahava Ben. And then in 1999, Butler represented Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest in Jerusalem. Whoa. And then in 2001, he was a part of like a music group and he launched a solo career, toured through Europe, Russia, and the United States. I mean, that's wild. And then yeah, he, that's he proposed to his wife. That's that's wild. Yeah, he officially converted to Judaism in order to have an orthodox wedding in Orley. What a fascinating life. I would like, I would love, this is a guy would have to have him upon. I love meeting like rare humans. I don't, that's the specific term that I'm coining rare humans. We're like, you ever meet someone? And you're like, oh, like where are your parents from? And they're like, oh, like my, my mom is Venezuelan. My dad is like weager. And you're like, wait, what? And they're like, yeah, my, my mom is Venezuelan. My dad is like a Chinese Muslim. Immediately, I'm like, how did that happen? Tell me everything. Like do you meet people like that? Not really. Really? Oh, it's like my favorite thing in the world. I love meeting like a rare human, where it's just like a mix of like culture and background and perspective that you never hear about, right? Like it's the most fascinating thing in the world to me. If you're a rare human, I'd love to know. What is your, what is your claim as a rare? You go on a meme by rare human, right? Just a mix that you're not accustomed to. It's an interesting cultural, ethnic mix that you don't see all the time. Like you could think of one right now. Go ahead. Pick up pick a rare human. But if you met someone and they told you that this was like where their mom or their dad were from. Oh, I'm a black guy from Chicago that was raised in Israel and converted to Orthodox Judaism. You'd be like, tell me more. Right? Okay. Um, this could get racist. So be careful. I don't think it is, dude. I think we're on a good path here. I'm trying to think of another good one. Like let's say there's so many people I meet them like fascinated. Okay. You meet someone they're like, oh, yeah. Like my mom is Swedish, my dad's Japanese. And I was raised in Africa. You're like, I tell me everything. Our friend Joshua Walker. Yeah. White guy from North Carolina. I think. Yeah. Raised his whole life in Hokkaido, Japan. The northern part of Japan. You're like, that's fascinating. White guy speaks fluent Japanese. You're like, tell me everything. What was your life like? What? Tell me what was going on with that. Well, if you're on the Patreon, you got to see his latest episode with us. That's true. You can check it out patreon.com/campgagnon. Look, guys, we did some history stuff today. Great news. If you like history content, we have an entire channel dedicated to that. It's called history camp. If you like crazy deep dives on mystery, conspiracies, the esoteric, trying to understand what's going on in reality. Campgagnon is a place for you. We also have a ton of interviews with really, really interesting, awesome, smart people. So make sure you check that out. And if you just like to rock with the religion viable, great news. We do these episodes every single Sunday here at religion camp. So God bless you all. Have a beautiful Sunday. Thank you all so much. We go to go to church today or synagogue or good war or the mosque or whatever it is that you like to go to. Just believe in something. All right. It's your life is better with belief. That's what I say. Anyway, God bless you all. See you next Sunday. Peace.