Black Jews in Africa and the Americas tells the fascinating story of how the Ashanti, Tutsi, Igbo, Zulu, Beta Israel, Maasai, and many other African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Pursuing medieval and modern European race narratives over a millennium in which not only were Jews cast as black but black Africans were cast as Jews, Tudor Parfitt reveals a complex history of the interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses. For centuries, colonialists, travelers, and missionaries, in an attempt to explain and understand the strange people they encountered on the colonial frontier, labeled an astonishing array of African tribes, languages, and cultures as Hebrew, Jewish, or Israelite. Africans themselves came to adopt these identities as their own, invoking their shared histories of oppression, imagined blood-lines, and common traditional practices as proof of a racial relationship to Jews. Beginning in the post-slavery era, contacts between black Jews in America and their counterparts in Africa created powerful and ever-growing networks of black Jews who struggled against racism and colonialism. A community whose claims are denied by many, black Jews have developed a strong sense of who they are as a unique people. In Parfitt’s telling, forces of prejudice and the desire for new racial, redemptive identities converge, illuminating Jewish and black history alike in novel and unexplored ways.

Yemen was ruled in the 20th century by imams from the extremist Zaydi Muslim sect. The Jews suffered from legal restrictions and persecutions. In 1910 the victorious Imam Yahya reinstated the "sharia" as the legal code in place of the Turkish civil code, and promulgated the law which imposed on the Jews the status of dhimmi in its most rigid form. In 1922, the reintroduction of forced conversion of Jewish orphans to Islam initiated a Jewish campaign to smuggle many of them to Aden. In the same year, the Imam Yahya virtually banned Jewish emigration from Yemen. Popular hatred of Jews was intense. The UN decision on the partition of Palestine in 1947 engendered a blood libel in San'a and anti-Jewish riots (aggravated by a civil war in Yemen), as well as pogroms in neighboring Aden and Shaykh Othman in which ca. 100 Jews were murdered. In 1948-50 most of the Jews left Yemen.