Dissertation Information for Jacob S. Dorman NAME: - Jacob S. Dorman
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2004)
ADVISORS: - Brenda E. Stevenson
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Henry S.N. Yu - Donald J. Cosentino
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: The Black Israelites of Harlem and the professors of Oriental and African mystic science in the 1920's
Abstract: Scholars have written relatively little on either Black Israelites or the social history of the Harlem Renaissance. The present social and cultural history of New York's Black Israelite movements and their setting in the rich religious culture of working class Harlem during the 1920's illustrates that Harlem dazzled but it also disappointed; its public face was proud, yet most residents were poor and faced with difficult living conditions. Yet Harlem also had an incredibly rich array of public spaces, clubs, societies, and institutions.
All groups in Harlem took part in the discourse of civilization, the range of received modes of thinking that included racism, imperialism, and patriarchy. Whereas some bleached their skin in order to raise their level of civilization and get ahead, others adopted the guise of "Oriental and African" spiritual merchants and proclaimed the bankruptcy of Western civilization. Importantly, the culture of these "professors of mystic science" helped to generate many of the African-American urban sects of the twentieth century, such as Black Israelites, Rastafarians, Black Muslims, and Father Divine's movement.
Barbadian-born Rabbi Arnold Josiah Ford founded a synagogue in Harlem and then attempted to resettle African Americans in Ethiopia in 1931. His settlement scheme failed, yet the Black Israelite ideology captured the imagination of settlers who returned to Jamaica and transmitted it to Leonard Howell, one of the founders of Rastafarianism and himself a member of the mystic subculture of Harlem.
Ford's student, Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew, demonstrates that Black Israelites were not derivative of Jews, but creatively combined Judaism and Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, the British Anglo-Israelite movement, Afro-Caribbean faiths, and occult kabbalah. A close reading of Matthew's religion shows that Matthew created his religious tradition as a complex bricolage, a blending of the already-blended, described best as "polyculturalism" rather than as syncretism. Polyculturalism suggests that culture is not a brittle object but a fluid, multivalent process, constructed by individual bricoleurs who work by recombining old and new, familiar and foreign, in a process that takes advantage of similarities between cultures and is not so much conflictual, inevitable, or mechanical as it is creative, individualistic, and imaginative.
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MPACT Scores for Jacob S. Dorman A = 0
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calculated 2008-08-11 12:07:18
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