Millenarian Motherhood

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Millenarian Motherhood: Motives, Meanings and Practices among African Hebrew Israelite Women Author(s): Fran Markowitz Source: Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues, No. 3, Motherhood (

Spring - Summer, 5760/2000), pp. 106-138Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40326514Accessed: 16-08-2015 10:08 UTC

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MILLENARIAN MOTHERHOOD:

MOTIVES, MEANINGS AND PRACTICES AMONG AFRICAN HEBREW ISRAELITE WOMEN1

Fran Markowitz

When new cults and religious sects burst onto the American scene in the 1960s and 70s, they immediately captured popular and academic attention. Where had these new religions come from, and why did they offer such strong appeal to America's youth? Sociological and psychological studies revealed that no matter which one, these religious movements attracted young, middle-class whites - especially those from lapsed Catholic and Jewish families. For men, the group's charismatic, loving yet authoritative leaders served as role models and protective father figures, and for women, life in communal cults offered clearly defined gender roles and an alternative vision of family.2 More generally, the cults redressed young people's sense of a lack of spirituality in their lives, their disenchantment with materialism, and their feeling that warmth and intimacy were lacking in their immediate environment.3 In contrast to whites, very few, if any, African-Americans could be found

among the cults' adherents.4 Archie Smith readily explained that New Religious Movements (NRMs) had failed to attract minorities because their ethical systems and messianic messages showed little concern for racism, ethnic oppression or the struggle for social justice.5 Janet Jacobs added that because black women are often heads of households as well as significant income providers, the family-like religious community headed by a divine patriarch, which proved so attractive to whites, is "less relevant for youth whose primary relationships may develop within a more female- centered family structure."6 By limiting their focus to the larger, controversial and attention-getting

sects, Smith and Jacobs failed to see that black youth have indeed explored

106 Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women 's Studies and Gender Issues, no. 3. © 2000



Millenarian Motherhood

and experimented with cult-like groups. And despite what Jacobs describes as the "diversity of family arrangements that typify black culture, particularly with respect to the role that women assume within the black family,"7 African-Americans of both sexes can and do find patriarchal leaders very compelling - when they are black. During the twentieth century, charismatic male religious leaders have frequently emerged in the black community, where they founded new churches and social movements. Father Divine and Marcus Garvey, the best known such figures before Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, attracted hundreds of thousands of followers in the 1920s.8 Today, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam is perhaps the most recognized black religious leader in America. His rhetorical style is fiery, his message is distinctly patriarchal and exclusionary, and he places strict demands upon his huge crowd of followers. The Nation of Islam is surely a New Religious Movement, although its appeal is restricted to African-Americans. To remedy the problem of black invisibility in NRMs caused by basing

their definition on such groups as the Unification Church, the Hare Krishna Movement and the Divine Light Mission, it is helpful to employ the definitional alternative coined by Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe. Emphasizing that the global concern of new religious movements is "to revise traditions through practical innovations and new expressions of traditional piety," Hexham and Poewe suggest that sects and cults be viewed as revitalization movements.9 No matter what their structure or audience appeal, revitalization movements attempt to resurrect a

(mythical, idealized) past by changing unfavorable present circumstances through the radical alteration of group members' beliefs and behaviors.10 Commenting on the teachings of the Ghost Dance Religion, Kenelm Burridge notes that they are an "attempt to excise the purely existential and apparently purposeless nature of the present by searching into the past in order to posit a viable future."11 The Nation of Islam certainly qualifies, as its central message is that the glorious black past can be revivified if blacks will only reject the exploitative, white Judeo-Christian tradition and embrace an African one in its stead. The lesser-known African Hebrew Israelite Community (AHIC) proffers a similar goal, and for much the same reasons.12 Like the Nation of Islam and most other NRMs, the African Hebrew

Israelite Community is a highly patriarchal, hierarchical society whose

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spiritual leader is acclaimed to be the messiah. Members consider their messianic community - especially as manifested in its residential communes in Israel13 - as both preparation for and the harbinger of God's final judgment. In weekly classes conducted in several American cities, AHIC leaders disseminate the hard-won "truth" that (most) black people are the descendants of the original Hebrew Israelites.14 Acting upon this truth is vital, for those who have not embraced it by the "end of time" will miss out on eternal salvation. But beyond individual redemption, the future of the entire world is at stake. Based on their studies of biblical texts, the Black Hebrews are certain that if God's chosen people ignore the call to truth then He will surely show his wrath in the apocalypse. In addition to this dire theological message, the AHIC, like the Nation of Islam, offers itself as a positive, healthy, self-affirming alternative for men and women of African descent in America, who, through no fault of their own, had embraced the perverse and profane lifestyles of white "Eurogentiles."15 In most NRMs, women willingly take second place to men,16 especially

when this order of things is presented as being inscribed in sacred texts as divinely mandated and therefore "natural." This is certainly the case among the Black Hebrews. AHIC leaders and layfolk, men and women alike, cite biblical chapter and verse to confirm the folly of women's liberation. They frequently point to contemporary social ills, like the proliferation of fatherless families, and to health problems, like the increased incidence of breast cancer, as consequences of "coming a long way, baby."17 These messages offer both emotional and rational appeal. Modernity has not solved the problems of illness and disease, nor has American democracy eliminated the gap between haves and have-nots, blacks and whites. Despite (or perhaps because of) women's subordinate placement under (the protection of) men, the patriarchal AHIC has attracted hundreds of female adherents, contradicting Jacobs's "family ideal" explanation for why so few blacks - especially black women - have joined NRMs. In fact, in the AHIC's residential communities in Israel there are far more women - and children - than men.18 To account for this paradox, this essay examines the links between

millenarianism and motherhood through an analysis of the life stories told to me in recent years by dozens of women who are currently or who have been "saintly sisters" in the AHIC.19 These stories, conforming to the

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master narrative of millenarianism, show a great deal of uniformity.20 Though they were interviewed in different places and at different times,21 the women narrated their lives along similar plot lines, and the contents of the narratives are quite similar as well. Tropes of actual or wished-for motherhood intertwine with a search for positive black identity as they plot the progression of their lives, culminating in finding the AHIC. By emphasizing spirituality over materialism, by tending to household duties and placing their husbands and children first, they hope to strengthen their families and develop feminine self-esteem.22 But beyond these personal pleasures, as sisters in the Kingdom reasserting God's plan, the women rest assured that they are contributing to the salvation of the black race and bettering the general condition of humankind. This account of purposeful contentment is the community's normative

description of the motives for and results of millenarian motherhood. However, while the women may largely concur that the AHIC delivers on its promises of a healthy lifestyle and freedom from the scourges of urban life and racism in America, their narratives - like the backgrounds from which they enter the AHIC - are not monolithic. The community places demands upon its women to be a particular kind of woman, and it mandates a particular kind of relationship between a woman and her children. It is here, if we listen closely as they reflect upon their experiences, that we may encounter variation in the women's stories of moving toward, then into, and sometimes out of millenarianism.23 This essay has four remaining parts. The next section illustrates the

concept of millenarianism through a review of the history of the African Hebrew Israelite Community, and then summarizes key issues and images of womanhood and motherhood in the African-American diaspora. What may appear as background information at this juncture will later reappear in some of the narratives of millenarian motherhood. The subsequent two sections explore, via life stories, how and why motherhood and millenarianism make sense of each other, and the impact of both on women's decisions to devote themselves to the community - or leave it. And finally, this essay will end where we now begin: with the dozens of African Hebrew Israelite children who symbolize redemption as they go toddling about in a remote corner of Dimona, Israel.

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Millenarianism and Motherhood in the African-American Diaspora

Marx once said that "consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living," and it is from that nightmare that the modern apocalyptics want to awake. But that nightmare is part of our condition, part of their material. (Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending1*)

Visitors to the African Hebrew Israelites' "Village of Peace" in Dimona cannot fail to notice all the youngsters toddling about, jumping rope, riding bicycles, playing basketball, or just congregating outside their homes. Even if they did, this oversight would soon be corrected on site by their hosts, just as it is in classes given weekly in the American cities from which they come. The Hebrew Israelites, according to their leaders, were once some of the "sorriest" Negro-black-African-Americans. That they could build and perpetuate a Kingdom of God where men and women live together in harmony, taking pride in their babies and pleasure in nurturing them, is proof positive that they are indeed a chosen people that has returned home to fulfill divine prophecy. The AHIC is not the only group of African-Americans to identify with

the biblical Hebrews, but it is the first and remains the only one to have organized and implemented an exodus back to Israel.25 As is told in Chicago every Sunday at the beginning of the AHIC's weekly class, Benjamin Carter was summoned by God in 1966 to lead his people out of America. A year later, under his new name of Ben-Ammi,26 he gathered about 300 men, women and children who followed him to live in Liberia. By 1970, those who had not returned to America continued on with him to their final destination, Israel, where they proclaimed themselves the Original Hebrew Israelite Nation. The AHIC teaches that the Hebrews had always been a dark-skinned

African people and that African-Americans were living proof of the prophecy in Deuteronomy 28, according to which the Children of Israel, if they disobeyed God, would be torn from their homes and scattered throughout hostile lands. Dispersed by the Romans after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E., they headed south and west into the African continent. There they fulfilled the biblical prophecy of forgetting their heritage and worshipping idols of wood and stone, and

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because of this disregard of God's law, they were kidnapped and sent away in ships to be slaves. Thus, the "chastisement" of the Hebrews began with their forced servitude in North America and would continue until they resurrected their forgotten knowledge of God and reestablished a lifestyle in accordance with his commandments. The Hebrew Israelite leaders explain that no matter how hard blacks in America try to succeed, they simply will not, because America is the land of their chastisement, not their salvation. The only way to remove this curse is to reclaim their heritage and live in the land of Israel according to the laws of the God of Israel. Despite denial of permission by the State of Israel to settle in its

territory, to say nothing of being granted citizenship rights, over the years the Black Hebrews have established a presence in Israel's underdeveloped south.27 From a handful of families in the early 1970s, the AHIC in Israel has grown to over 2,000 individuals, half of whom are children who were born in the country.28

Combining biblical injunctions with Garveyism29 and holistic health practices, the African Hebrew Israelite Community is a millenarian culture practicing a fundamentalist lifestyle. Ben-Ammi is viewed as the redeemer of his people, the latest messianic personage to emerge from the line that includes Moses, David and Yeshua ben Yosef (Jesus). To assist him with his tasks, he has appointed a council of twelve princes and a cabinet of ministers who oversee various facets of everyday life.30 These all-male leaders delegate responsibilities to those whom they deem fit - women as well as men - but they are ultimately accountable for meeting the community's spiritual and pragmatic needs in its Israeli communes and at its missions in American urban centers.31 Thus, the community provides a safe haven for its members, at the price of acceding to its stringent rules and conforming to the hierarchy. For those committed to the AHIC, this is a small price to pay for

transforming one's mind from that of a slave - unavoidable after 2,000 years of Diaspora and 450 years of slavery in the "Eurogentile" world - into a righteous mind.32 The community's residential communes facilitate this transformation, because they provide an environment where God's laws (as interpreted by the AHIC's leaders) reign supreme. Along with prohibitions against smoking, imbibing alcohol and using drugs, the Black Hebrews adhere to a strict vegan-vegetarian diet33 and a dress code based

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on modesty, beauty and gender differentiation. The dress code is part of a wider law that gives one set of responsibilities to men and another to women. As part of their mandate for righting the wrongs of slavery, African-descended men are exhorted to reclaim their rightful status as household heads, and the women are urged to reassert their place as homemakers and mothers. By following this divine plan, men and women can bring healthy children into the world and raise them together to be happy, spiritually fit human beings, finally equipped with "a land, a language and a culture" - a phrase repeated in mantra-like fashion by community members to contrast what black Americans lack with what the Saints of the Kingdom finally have. Such promises can appeal to black American individuals from many

walks of life - from the underclass and also from working-class and middle-class homes. Even those who have made it financially are often ghettoized. They experience racism and second-class citizenship, and they may also fear for the safety of their children. In Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C., the lines that divide black bourgeois neighborhoods from the inner city are blurred and flexible. Gang violence, drug addiction and drive-by shootings are dangers frequently discussed in the AHIC; everyone knows that these pervade America's cities, and no one there is invulnerable to them. Police violence, job discrimination and institu- tionalized racism are also grist for the conversational mill as they are contrasted with the peaceful lifestyle the community has established in Dimona. The AHIC's message that a better, healthier, spiritually enriched and future-oriented way of life awaits them has proved attractive indeed to a number of African-American men and, especially, women who wish to live in harmonious family units, reap satisfaction from their work and raise happy children.

Motherhood and mothering, as several feminist scholars have demon- strated over the years, are far from essentialistic natural states.34 Mothers and their nurturing tasks are imbued with characteristics that derive as much, if not more, from their position in a society's class and ethnic hierarchy as from their female endowments. In bourgeois Euro-America, at a time when all women were excluded from citizenship in the political domain, white women held inalienable - and usually exclusive - rights in the domestic domain, where they ruled over their households and their

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children. Women of color, and especially women of African descent, did not possess these rights. Femininity and the cult of domesticity were, therefore, not part of the

experience of the vast majority of African-American women.35 Unlike all other immigrants to the New World, Africans were brought to America as chattel slaves, and generations of African-descended women were forced to work for others. In the fields they were treated as non-gendered units of labor, and in justification of putting them to back-breaking tasks, an image of African-American women developed that assigned to them "physical attributes and emotional qualities traditionally attributed to males."36 When they worked within the confines of the home, they performed arduous domestic chores in lieu of and for the mistress of the house, including tending to and nurturing her children. Here, too, the slave woman's femininity was amended to accord with the duties she was forced to carry out. To support an ideology that deemed them content with their duties as servants, mammies were portrayed as obese, smiling, maternal women, gendered but sexless, and thus "naturally" suited to the tasks they performed.37 Both the field slave and the house slave were represented as the antithesis of the white American ideal of female beauty and character.38 As much as these negative depictions shaped the lived experience of

African-American women, they are second in intensity to the collective memory of endangered mother-child relationships during slavery. Since women's value as laborers took precedence, they were neither expected nor allowed to be full-time mothers. Worse still, slave mothers bore children but had no rights in them, since, like the women themselves, they legally belonged to the master. If motherhood entails the privilege and obligation of women to nourish their offspring and create lifelong bonds of affect with them, then slave women were denied this so-called "natural" right of femininity as well. But because the slave woman's labor value was enhanced by her capacity to breed, she was often, as Barbara Christian points out, "the only one in a position to even attempt to safeguard her children's spiritual as well as physical survival."39 Thus, motherhood in the African-American community ultimately became connected with fierce protectiveness and calculated strategizing, and its range of meanings and

practices was extended far beyond the conventions of motherhood in white

society.

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Not surprisingly, several scholars - primarily feminists and people of color - who have investigated slavery in the American South are reluctant to portray the enslaved as hapless victims. Although marriage, repro- duction and household arrangements were all manipulated by slave owners to maximize their economic return, African-Americans exercised agency in putting together families as places of refuge and sources of strength. Fostering, adoption, care for and by the elderly and shared motherhood have been characteristic of African-American families since slavery and continue to this day under other economic pressures and political programs. The legacy of slavery, coupled with a punitive social welfare policy

developed in the middle of the twentieth century, has left an especially strong imprint on gender relations, family forms and modes of mothering.40 In the 1990s, black men are the most at-risk population in the United States. Many black women find themselves in the difficult, ambiguous position of being sexualized but not feminized, as they try to make ends meet by being workers first and mothers second. Patricia Hill Collins has described how, for these mothers, working "long hours to ensure their children's physical survival, that same work ironically denied [them] access to their children."41 When middle-class white American women began demanding equal pay

for equal work, if not the right to work itself, African-American women were devising mothering strategies on a shoestring and seeking support among themselves in fulfilling their domestic roles.42 Black women, who worked mainly in low-status jobs, often derived personal gratification from placing greater importance on their performance in the home than on their function as wage-earners. As Sharon Harley notes: "Recognition by family and friends as a good mother, cook, and housekeeper gave many black women a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction not possible in their paid work lives."43 High performance in these domestic roles was reinforced by black churches and community organizations, where women- as-mothers were publicly granted positions of authority and respect.44 But even in what ought to have been the sanctuary of their homes, black

Americans could not be worry-free. The African-American feminist bell hooks has written of a yearning for domesticity, a homeplace for the family removed from threats of white violence.45 She emphasizes that "all black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live

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with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness."46 But it is not only from whites that men, women and children in inner-city neighborhoods fear physical or psychological harm. They may suffer more immediate dangers closer to home. Black women, despite their own vulnerability and victimization, often remain silent about abuse in the interest of maintaining race solidarity, refusing to feed into the negative images of black criminality.47 Moreover, according to Collins, "Black women's experience as mothers yields resistance traditions that view motherwork as a site of political struggle against violence targeted at them and their children."48 For this fortitude, which is frequently coupled with a veneer of fierceness, African-American mothers may be rebuked and ridiculed. As so-called matriarchs in a wider American society that is glaringly patriarchal, they have been blamed by blacks and whites alike for retarding the "progress of the group as a whole, and imposing] a crushing burden on the Negro male."49 This view persists in the 1990s: the "proper domestication of the Black woman" is still considered the key to restoring respect to the Black man and revitalizing the entire race. Nowhere does this message resound louder than in the programs of several African- American revitalization movements, which often attract more women than men.50 Paulette Pierce and Brackette Williams suggest that when black women

accept these negative characterizations and seem to embrace misogynistic patriarchy, they are "expressing a deep yearning for protection, security and respect."51 By linking up with groups like the National Black Independent Political Party, the Nation of Islam, or the African Hebrew Israelite Community, they are grasping at the opportunity to establish a safe and secure home, to assert their femininity, to claim the protection that should be their due as women, and, most important of all, to assure their children of a better place in the world.52 The AHIC, in providing an escape from the constant reminders of America's racism, coupled with the promise it offers for salvation, attracts its sisters from many rungs in the social hierarchy, and in recent years the young, well-educated and upwardly mobile have predominated.53 The search for a meaningfully gendered lifecourse and a safe black environment in which to raise children leads them to the Kingdom of God. Millenarianism is all about salvation in the face of deluge. Motherhood

might be read in similar fashion, since it means fighting off disease and

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disaster to raise a child from dependent infant to knowledgeable adult, capable of making its way in the world. Although each story's plot is therefore predetermined, the slides and slippages along the way reflect an ongoing realization that past events resonate in the imperfect present and that one's control over the future is far from sturdy. This holds true, of course, for the lives that the Hebrew Israelite women narrate. Whether their tales are of a maternal happy-ever-after in the Kingdom of God or hang unfinished, in limbo, once salvation is betrayed, they create illustrative texts, in content and structure. These texts convey powerful messages about motherhood among African-American women, and about the Utopian desires of the Hebrew Israelites for an alternative.

Salvation Promised

Redemption narratives are told frequently in both formal and informal settings in the AHIC, and so it was not unusual that on one Sunday in February 1999, Prince Asiel, who was leading the community's weekly meeting in Chicago, called upon a young woman in the audience to testify. He announced that she had lived just about all of her nineteen years in the "Village of Peace" in Dimona. Then he asked her:

How many funerals have you been to? How many times have you been in the hospital? How may times have you been the victim of rape or of attempted rape? How many times have you had your hair pulled, your eyes scratched out?

To each question, her answer was "not a one." Sighs and howls of approval resounded from the audience. Prince Asiel nodded in assent, "Talk about quality of life in the Kingdom ..." The message that a safe, secure lifestyle alternative exists was not lost

that week, nor is it discounted on all the other occasions when it is conveyed. Many people in Chicago, men and women, middle-aged and young alike, told me that they "came into the Kingdom" (joined the AHIC) soon after experiencing the community's Soul Vegetarian restaurant, eating the good, healthy food there and meeting the nice people. They

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were struck by the friendliness, cleanliness and spirituality of the place and wanted to know more, for their own good and especially for the sake of their children. Briutiela and Mikhtaviya54 are separated in age by about twenty years.

Briutiela joined the AHIC in 1982, when she was a forty-year-old mother of two teenagers and pregnant with her third child. Mikhtaviya found her way to the community in the mid-1990s when she was an upwardly mobile, college-educated career woman who, approaching age thirty, was still unmarried and childless. Both women tell their stories as a series of incidents that led them to seek an alternative to the lifestyle they had worked so hard to achieve in America. Both the narrative structures and the contents of these stories derive from and revolve around the tropes of black womanhood and mothering.

Briutiela was born in Mississippi, where she lived until age 13 with her sister and grandparents. Although the rest of the family was Baptist, Briutiela was sent to a Catholic elementary school, where she embraced the church's teachings, and at age nine she was baptized.55 As she entered adolescence, Brutiela's grandmother decided that the time had come to reunite her granddaughters with their parents, who were living and working up north. In Chicago, Briutiela continued her education at an all- girls Catholic high school and then won a scholarship to study nursing at a nearby Catholic college. She married her high school sweetheart, who she says was raised Baptist but was not a churchgoer, after getting a commitment from him to baptize their children and send them to Catholic schools. Throughout her adult life, Briutiela worked as a public health nurse. She and her husband established a home, had two children, wore nice clothing, drove expensive cars and were getting their "piece of the pie." "In 1978," she recounts, "my husband met the Ambassador of the

Hebrew Community in Chicago." This association started through busi- ness dealings, but after a while the two men became friends, and Briutiela's husband began attending Sunday classes.

By the next year he was all into the community. I thought that this was a passing fancy. All this time I remained a staunch Catholic. We had a nice apartment, the children were in Catholic schools, and there were bills to take care of.

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Briutiela was enjoying her life, or so she thought, but the more her husband attended AHIC classes, the more he questioned their lifestyle and challenged her to do the same,

"All this materialism we have, are you happy?" And he started talking about the Bible. ... I decided to go to some classes and see what they were teaching. Although a staunch Catholic, I never really did read the Bible or analyze it.

Briutiela liked the lessons that linked vegetarianism to the Scriptures, and those that answered the question of

why black people are in such a bad situation. They explained about the chastisement. And I could see that this is why we were in this condition; this bears looking into.

At about the same time, Briutiela became a victim of black-on-black crime. She narrated a series of four incidents, and at its end she exclaimed, "Now there's got to be something better than this!" After a pause, she listed and mulled over news reports of children molested in America, terrible drive-by shootings and gang violence, in preparation for where she was going next.

By this time, I was in my late thirties. My son was 17, my daughter 10, and I got pregnant. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect this! Abortion's not the way to go, but I was struggling. In this day and age I didn't want to bring a child into this world. And that's when my husband asked if I wanted to go to Israel. And I did. In 1982 I came, and my youngest daughter was born here. At first the Kingdom of God was not ingrained in my head, but I liked the love and concern. But as I lived here and started to work in the House of Life, it all came together.

In this, her story of motherhood and salvation, Briutiela portrays herself as a minor character, more illustrative than dynamic in the inevitable plot of black people in America. Pursuit of false gods and self-defeating ambitions, she tells us, ultimately leads nowhere, and her narrative reiterates the broad message of the AHIC that African-Americans, far from

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progressing, are sliding down a degenerative course. Briutiela was more fortunate than most to have a husband with foresight, who led her out of the morass into a community where she could save her pre-teen daughter from the perversity of American urban life and raise her new baby absolutely free from its effects. Briutiela's third child was born in Dimona. Today that child is a teenage

girl who has never witnessed a drug deal, gang warfare or prostitution. And for this, Briutiela-as-mother is grateful and happy. She is also pleased to help other women become mothers by using her medical training to bring healthy Black Hebrew children into a safe and secure corner of the world. Yet although her tale worked its way back to present consonance between her place in the AHIC and the steps she took to get there, we might read some ambiguity into the concluding lines of her narrative:

Let God in and let Him show the way. I have peace of mind. I feel that I made the right move. I serve the community in the capacity of midwife, and I have a fulfilling role as homemaker, wife and mother."

When I last saw Briutiela in Dimona inl998, she introduced me to her co-wife and their daughters. Then she motioned me aside and asked if I knew of anyone who had need of a private nurse, because money was tight. She wanted to bring in some income and make greater use of her nursing skills. In the face of street crime in Chicago, the AHIC is salvation indeed, and her child's worry-free life is testimony to that. Yet despite the satisfaction that Briutiela reaps from millenarian motherhood, she may also yearn for the exclusive companionship of her husband, professional recognition and a space of her own.

Mikhtaviya is 33 years old, has no children and has never been married. Raised in a small southern town, she fondly recalls that she grew up in a traditional two-parent family with lots of extended kin nearby. Her father's income provided for the family, and this allowed her mother to quit working after she gave birth to her second child. Mikhtaviya remembers that there was always an aroma of freshly baked bread in her home, and a

bevy of aunts, uncles and cousins constantly stopping by to visit, gossip, ask for and offer help. The eldest of three children, Mikhtaviya describes herself as "the good

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one, an obedient child," most at ease when curled up in a corner with a book. After completing high school with excellent grades, she became the first in her generation to attend college. Mikhtaviya had always wanted to be a teacher, but, warned against the long hours and low pay of that profession, she took a double major in English ("I always loved literature") and marketing ("to be practical"). Upon graduation, she moved up to Washington, D.C., and built a career. After a few years

I had a very nice house in the suburbs of Arlington, right down the street from the bike path, and within walking distance of the super- market and the park. I had a brand new car. I had a very comfortable, good job - a comfortable existence - if there were things that I wanted, I could pretty much get them.

But all was not well, because along with this nice life, Mikhtaviya was having chronic migraine headaches, and they were attacking with unremitting frequency. She visited one doctor after another and was prescribed a variety of increasingly potent drugs. With the declaration that she was finally told to take daily injections, Mikhtaviya ends the first part of her narrative - pursuit of the American dream that was leading nowhere. The story takes a sharp turn after Mikhtaviya learns about the achievements of Africans and African-Americans and decides that she wants to integrate these into her life.

Like Briutiela's recounting of the incidents that alerted her to the negative consequences of getting "a piece of the pie," Mikhtaviya narrates her discovery of African-American history as something that happened to her unintentionally, almost mystically:

The workday was pretty much over. And I saw a notice on the bulletin board where there was going to be a speech, a presentation that evening at work. I can't remember exactly, but it had to do with the achievements, the contributions of Africans and African-Americans to the world, as far as scientific, technological, medical advancements, discoveries, things of that nature down through time. And I thought, well, I'm here already, so I think I'll step in the boardroom and see what it's all about. And that was really the beginning of it.

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Millenarìan Motherhood

This first chance meeting inspired her to investigate black cultural organizations. Remembering that a friend from college was involved in one, Mikhtaviya called him, and he introduced her to the AHIC. She related well to the lectures about "who we are as a people," liked the community's emphasis on holistic health care and began to change her diet. Beyond providing an answer to black identity dilemmas and her terrible

headaches, the AHIC offered a solution to the most pressing problem in Mikhtaviya's life:

When I was a young girl, I had it in my head that by the time I was 25 I was going to be married, with two children, a little house, with the hill and the fence and the dog, and all that. So when I turned 25 and wasn't even seeing anybody - Oh my God! I got one foot in the grave and I'm nowhere near realizing any of the things that I want to do with my life ... But [as time came to pass] I said, OK, fine. Perhaps marriage is not in the works for me. I could still have a baby ... and I had actually picked out the man, a[nother] really good friend of mine who I went to school with.

But her plan to become a single mother was quickly thwarted:

I started hearing and reading about all the atrocities in the world -

crimes committed by, to and against children ... and it was devastating ... In just a 30-day span - oh, my eyes are watering - so many terrible

things done to children, by children, by their parents, by their

neighbors, by family members. It was terrible. And so I came to the

conclusion, I can't, I can't in good conscience bring a child into the world and then be afraid of what's gonna happen to this baby ... So it's

like, again another door closes. That's something else that I've wanted all my life that I'm never gonna have.

Mikhtaviya has now reached the dramatic nadir of her narrative. Her dreams of having a child have been dashed because she fears being an

inadequate mother - "afraid that he's going to grow up to be a psychopath because I'm a single parent and I can't teach a male how to be a man" - in addition to the dangers that lurk everywhere in this heartless world. Then the story changes for the last time:

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And it was not too long after that that I saw the poster for the lecture, and that whole process started, and then I met members of the community, and I learned more about the community, and it's like those doors in my mind that I had closed, I realized, Wow! There are men who will let you do things for them and not be suspicious. There are families where the women do the womanly things, and the men do the manly things, and it's okay. There is a place where you can have a child and let him go out and play in the morning and not worry that you're going to have to go identify a body at the end of the day. So my transition, so when I found the Kingdom, it was literally like the answer to my prayer, and the return to me of the possibility of the things that I had wanted since I was a child. And I was very, very happy.

Mikhtaviya is presently being courted by a number of men. She is carefully weighing each one's character before she marries, takes on the role of wife and becomes a mother. Mikhtaviya rejoices in the Kingdom for resurrecting her all-but-abandoned desires to be a woman/wife/mother and for providing her with the opportunity to bring these wishes to fruition. After tracing the downward slide of their sense of personal safety and satisfaction while progressing along the prescribed life course of the American dream, Mikhtaviya and Bruitiela described how they linked their destinies with the Hebrews and justified their stories' end - divine motherhood in the Kingdom of God.

Salvation Betrayed

Narratives connecting salvation with motherhood, such as those we have

just read, are told by the majority of Hebrew Israelite women. They demonstrate how life in the Kingdom resolves past contradictions and provides them with a rewarding womanhood-motherhood experience far from the dangers of urban America. Women living in the AHIC's Israeli communes or affiliated with its American branches rarely, if ever, expressed discontent to me.56 Only those who broke away from the community told stories of salvation betrayed. I met Victoria in Beer Sheva and Esther in Ashkelon during the summer

of 1998. Years before, both women had come with their children to the

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Dimona community, where they hoped to strengthen their families in a morally strong, supportive environment. But over time they encountered unbearable difficulties, and, unlike the women from whom we have already heard, Victoria and Esther eventually left the AHIC. Yet both women and their children remain in Israel, convinced that this land provides the link between their history and their destiny.57 Victoria and Esther have removed themselves from the residential space

and disciplinary purview of the AHIC, but their stories demonstrate con- tinuing adherence to the community's main message: Satisfaction, if not salvation, depends on re-linking once-lost history with present practices, if the (black) Children of Israel are to make good on the promise to follow God's law. The women's narratives remain millenarian in that their ends coalesce with beginnings, but teller and listener alike are acutely aware that Victoria's and Esther's stories remain open and unresolved. In contrast to Briutiela and Mikhtaviya, who concluded their tales with

the hope held out to them by the AHIC, Victoria and Esther commenced with that hope. Mirroring the genre used by the other women to demonstrate why they had left America, they each presented a list of attitudes and events that led them to reject what they had once believed to be the Kingdom of God. Esther left in the mid-1980s after determining that the elders had set her son against her. Victoria, who moved out of the

Village of Peace in Dimona with her husband and children in 1995, did not make the final break until over two years later, in outrage over an

unjust and cruel punishment meted out to her daughter. Both women, then, did not leave the AHIC when they began to suspect that it would not deliver on its promise of a spiritually rich, communal lifestyle, but only when they concluded that it endangered their maternal bonds and the very children it was to protect. Here are their stories of millenarian motherhood gone awry. After having raised two older children, Esther came into the Kingdom in

1975 with two sons, aged thirteen and twenty, and her 47-year-old brother. She harbored doubts almost from the start, because the living conditions were shockingly poor. Her disappointment deepened as she sensed that those on the top rungs of the community's hierarchy were jeopardizing her

family's solidarity. The AHIC leadership blamed Esther's negative attitude for her husband's change of heart - although he had initiated the move to

Israel, he remained in America - and heaped a lot of praise on the teenage

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boy, moving him into the ranks of adult men when he was only 16. But, Esther adds, "my older son, he never turned against me." In the mid-1980s Esther's younger son, along with several other Black

Hebrew men, was arrested and then deported.58 Although no one from the community visited him while he was incarcerated in an Israeli jail, once back in America he made his way to AHIC branches, first in Chicago and then in Atlanta. Esther and her older son, though they identified as Hebrews and loved the Land of Israel, returned to Michigan. A few years later, her younger son repudiated the AHIC and reunited with them:

It took him longer to realize that the things that I was saying were true, that they were not spiritual people, that the morals were very, very low. A lot of things he saw, but it didn't register with him. ... And then my son met one of the girls, and that's who he married. They have four children, and we converted [to Judaism] ... to come back here. ... At first I went to Reform, and then I went through the Conservative conversion ... We came back here in '95.

Esther, now a woman in her mid-seventies and a Jewish citizen of Israel, looks back on her life with the Black Hebrews from this vantage point. The story of her experience began with her first move to Israel at age 52 and worked toward its end with the second and final move in 1995. But, as her story revealed, Esther's connections to Israel reach back much further, to sayings that her grandfather and her mother used to repeat about African- Americans being the people of the Bible, and their predictions "that someday black people in America would go back to Israel." It seemed that she was setting up her narrative to conclude on a note of triumph, as one of those black people who had reclaimed their Hebraic heritage and returned to dwell in Israel. Esther worked long and hard to save her two sons, and I expected her, at

the narrative's end, to cast herself as an elderly matriarch, cared for by her adult children. But, like life itself, Esther's motherhood story has not reached its conclusion: she has two adopted daughters, the biological daughters of her niece, who, like the mothers of a number of un- accompanied children in the AHIC, feared that she could not raise her children right. These girls were fifteen and nine years old when we spoke.59

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It's difficult. I try to be a good mother but it's difficult with her [the 15- year-old], although different than it was with my other children at that age. I know a lot of it has to do with the time.

Esther sighs. She does not see eye-to-eye with her teenage daughter about staying out late and attending parties, and she wonders aloud how it can be that morals are so lax in the Holy Land. The girls told me that they have no desire whatsoever to return to Michigan, they love their Mama Esther, enjoy attending the religious school in their neighborhood and have plenty of friends. Their family is tight-knit and relationships are secure, but Esther retains a bittersweet realization that salvation is neither promised nor expected, and her motherwork is far from over. Thus, as her narrative trails off, it confirms that she is firmly planted neither in a fresh beginning nor at a triumphant finale, but in the murky middle of a womanly life course.

Victoria was a young, unwed mother in Memphis, Tennessee, when she met Elijah, a kind, gentle Hebrew man. He and the AHIC provided her with a positive message that offset her discomfort with America's racial unrest and the "situation" she was in with an abusive male partner:

I was in America and I was having problems. ... I felt like I didn't belong in America. Various racial things were happening. Martin Luther King, Jr., had just been shot. It wasn't easy for me at that time. ... I had gotten pregnant and had a baby, so I decided to go out on my own. I had some problems at that time. ... Before Elijah there was this man. We were living together. We had more children. We had some problems. So when Elijah told me about Israel, it just sounded good.

Victoria became Elijah's second wife, living with him in a polygynous household in the Chicago area (like many of the women with whom I

spoke, Victoria extolled the virtues of "divine marriage" - i.e., polygyny -

for allowing women to share household tasks, child-rearing duties and

companionship). After a few years, he asked her to take the children and resettle in Dimona. He joined her there, but only for a couple of weeks, because he was based in Chicago "working with the brothers on the international staff." Some of this work led to his arrest, and he spent three

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years in prison. Victoria's "sister-wife" never came to Israel and ultimately left the community.

Over the years, living with other families in a crowded communal home in Dimona, Victoria came to realize that her children were being treated unfairly. They were blamed for minor thefts and other untoward deeds because they did not have a father nearby to stand up for them. She had embraced the AHIC for the collective lifestyle it offered, and this treat- ment upset her sensibilities.

In America they kept telling us, "All in common." All the men are all the children's fathers, and all the sisters are all the children's mothers. But the men never came round to talk with the children about their homework, or just to talk with them, take them for a walk. And if the children do something, they're ready to beat them. If a child dropped a plate or argued, immediately - BOOM! Upside the head! Go stand in a corner! Then they're ready to go. That love they talked about, that wasn't true. And when they said that if your husband is in America they take care of the brother's family, that wasn't true either.

I interrupted Victoria to ask her why she had stayed all these years.

I stayed because Elijah wanted me to stay and because there were some good things ... taking care of my family, sisters' meetings, the Shabbat seder.

Then she returned the narrative to its predetermined course and offered a string of stories to show how the AHIC broke rather than supported families, and abused rather than nurtured children. Unlike the salvation stories that worked their way to an ultimate climax,

Victoria's tale of the community's mistreatment of her family contained a series of endpoints. The first was Elijah's death in 1995.

They didn't do right by him. ... In the community, usually when somebody passes they cancel all parties. He passed on Shabbat. On Motzei Shabbat they had a party. He gave his life to that community. Carter couldn't call and say we are sorry he passed?60 They whipped him down to nothing.

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While saddened and embittered by the disrespect shown her husband, Victoria persisted in attending some community functions and sent her children to the Dimona school. She had no choice in that matter, since, according to the 1992 agreement between the AHIC and the State of Israel, all children whose parents were registered as members of the Hebrew Israelite Community had to attend the school built especially for them.61 Now the scene was set for the second ending:

After we moved out Ben and Batiya took the bus every day from Beersheva to Dimona to go to school. ... Batiya had been in her gym class. In gym they don't have to wear the head covering. She was going to put it back on, but Carter came up behind her with his bodyguards. He told her to go over after school to the park because she's disrespectful. All the children were told to say that Batiya had been disrespectful ... She walked over to the park. She didn't know what to expect. She went over there because she was told to. Carter's secretary and his men came to the park and escorted her to the basement. Four women were sent for to whip her ... she was told to pull down her pants and panties ... and they gave her forty lashes.

Victoria pauses. She brings out some newspaper articles that report on the

injury done to her daughter.

I was ready to go down there and give them a piece of my mind. But the

spirit of God told me, "Don't do that. There's another way to handle that." I took her to the hospital ... and I pressed charges. But the police didn't do anything ... the police in Dimona didn't do anything. They're afraid of him down there.

When I last saw Victoria in September 1998, she urged me to join her in

writing letters to various governmental and philanthropic agencies to rouse the Israeli public to "save all of the people down there in Dimona." It is her belief that hundreds of women and children are suffering at the hands of their leaders. Of course, the AHIC leaders believe that they have built an ideal community that gives purpose and meaning to the lives of former African-Americans and is the vehicle by which they are saving the world. Victoria's narrative, as well as that of Esther, reaches its third end in an

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apocalyptic counter-tale of horrors in the Black Hebrews' millenarian community. As prologues to this end, both women had proudly related that they left behind their American names, identities and families to become part of a divine lifestyle that reunited lost African Hebrews with their heritage, land and language in Israel. In making this positive move and re-forging the broken link between themselves and their God by joining the AHIC, they expected to achieve in reality what had once been just a Utopian image of motherhood. And at first that seemed possible - until they experienced incidents of deceit and damage to themselves and their children. Trying to resolve these disappointments while recounting them, they ultimately reached a tentative ending in a place in Israel far from yet comparable to where they began, outside the borders of the AHIC.

Esther and Victoria no longer believe that a messiah exists to solve their personal and family problems, for the community upon which they relied for deliverance has failed them. Now they must do what generations of mothers have done before them - continue on in the struggle to provide meaning and support for their children and for themselves.

Conclusions

Millenarian movements emerge to produce redemption, a divinely sanc- tioned cancellation of the injustice meted out in a world gone wrong. Led by charismatic, prophet-like leaders, they promise resurrection of a pristine past through implementation of a set of rules determined to be the once- forgotten link between humans and God. Both rhetorically and in the group's practices, future and past converge, ensuring that life in the "time after" will be glorious, purposeful and just. In similar fashion, autobiographical narratives intertwine the particulars

of a life with the ends imagined possible by the liver of that life. The plot line, "how I got from there to here," provides the moral of a story, holds the meaning of a life, and allows for articulation of what are imagined to be the next steps.62 Sometimes a story ends on a wistful note of yearning for the paths not taken. Sometimes, in the USA at least, it closes mechanistically in conformity with the "happily ever after" master trope of American utopianism. And sometimes, when concluding the telling of a

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tale, if not the living of a life, we cease thinking of our own trajectories and place all hope instead in the lives of our children. If children are indeed our hope and give life meaning, then motherhood

is millenarian. Millenarianism, as manifested in revitalization and new religious movements, strives toward "a new situation and status which, providing the basis of a new integrity, will enable life to be lived more abundantly."63 Whether inspired by divine vision or maternal longings, actively seeking alternatives to the material and spiritual conditions that shaped their own lives, millenarian leaders and mothers work to make the future - of the world, or of their children - a better and more rewarding place. Mothers, especially those confronting racial or class inequalities, may feel vulnerable in the wide world and daunted by their child-rearing tasks. Should they find millenarian movements led by strong, self-assured men whose personae and messages resonate with their familial goals as mothers, they have good reason to believe that their children, if not they themselves, will live more abundantly. The narratives recounted by women seeking salvation in the African

Hebrew Israelite Community pivot on their quest for a positive black identity, a less competitive-individualistic, more cooperative-collectivist society, and a way of life that emphasizes spirituality over materialism. These mothers yearned for a stable family life where they could provide their sons and daughters with positive male and female role models, a crime- and drug-free environment, and a living link to a noble black African history. Together, all these qualities combine in the envisioning of their own and their children's status being altered from second-class, vulnerable and displaced to respected, protected and secure. The women whose stories we have read found in the AHIC a powerful message and a leader to deliver them from the profligate, materialistic and racist world of urban America. The protected "second place" of women in this community is not nearly

as objectionable as the "no place" in which many had felt themselves to be in America. Briutiela's economic well-being could not protect her children from urban violence and racism. The cold-hearted materialism of "Generation X" stopped Mikhtaviya from finding a husband and raising children. The racial conflicts that pervaded Victoria's life contradicted America's message of equality. For all of them, second place in what they believed to be a divinely inspired community was preferable to making it

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or breaking it as "equals" in unequal America. Moreover, this second place gives to women an indispensable role in bringing about the Kingdom of God. Their jobs - perfecting the diet, health-care and cleanliness in their homes, providing morale and emotional support to their husbands, and fostering self-esteem, caring and knowledge in their children - are recognized as vital to the community's survival and to bringing about a better world. Millenarian mothers, therefore, even those who have reached the

endpoint of their stories by linking their fate with the African Hebrew Israelite Community, have not cast off agency. They remain alert to injustices within and without as they prepare their (in some cases, as yet unborn) children for the realities of the world. Whether or not they are sisters in the community, they are bombarded by an assortment of his- torically constructed contradictions that pervade their relationships at every point, with white folks, black folks, strangers, kin, Israelis, Americans, boyfriends or husbands, and their children, and these beg for resolution. Fiction, Frank Kermode tells us, delivers the satisfaction of consonance

between beginnings and ends that the reality of life-in-the-middle simply cannot. Yet he reminds us as well that perfect resolution is never possible, even in the most beautifully crafted of literary forms. Millenarian movements are also aimed to bring about resolution, but they do so as social fact, on the ground, through a communal lifestyle and in their prescription of life courses. The salvation they promise battles against life as a muddle of uncertainty where lone individuals are powerless against stronger social forces, and families, like fortunes, can be made and lost. The communal lifestyle that the Black Hebrews have established in

Israel attracts its members and gains legitimacy by programmatically, and not only ritualistically, linking ends with origins. It gives back to African- descended men the responsibilities and pleasures of social leadership, making it possible, even mandatory, for each to father and support a line of spiritually alert and physically fit descendants. To the women, it provides opportunities for creative self-realization in the activities of the sisterhood and recognition of the struggles they endured by being black and female. They are compensated for the years of their toil by the re- appropriation of their "natural" rights to make a home, be protected by the brothers of the community, and bond with their children. The hundreds of

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youngsters walking around without fear of slipping on discarded syringes or being harmed by evildoers in their midst are the ultimate proof of the community's rectitude and its members' redemption. And for just about all of the AHIC's men, women and children, the narrative ends here. Yet for some, though the AHIC may deliver the consonance for which

they longed while rootless in America, obedience to a law that places God first, then men, then women and then children demands more than they are willing to give. This is especially the case for those women who come to believe that their mother-child bonds, if not the children themselves, are threatened by the requirements of the community. It may be difficult, as we have seen, to articulate a womanly sense of justice, and even harder -

given a lack of resources - to act upon it.64 More often than not, AHIC women will develop partial solutions, like those described by Briutiela, to try and resolve some nagging contradictions that they would rather not face. Surely the safe and healthy environment they have found in the Kingdom is preferable to the "freedom road" that they had already trodden as black women in America. But others, like Esther and Victoria, confront the threat to their children by rallying their strength and leaving the community to face, once again, the unjust world-at-large. It is their ongoing quest for coherence between hopes and prospects that

makes these women's lives, and those of their children, rich in significance. Their stories reflect lives that differentially intertwine race, gender, class, apocalypse and salvation. They produce a variety of meanings of motherhood, pregnant with a hope that struggles to negate, but can never erase, the palimpsest of slavery and daily reminders of

injustice in a far from perfect world.

Notes:

Acknowledgments: Funding for this study was generously provided by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation. The author expresses her gratitude to all the former and present sisters in the African Hebrew Israelite Community who so

graciously shared their stories with her. Thanks, too, to Susan Sered, lisa Schuster, and Deborah Greniman whose comments and queries helped to strengthen this article. 1. Members of the African Hebrew Israelite Community are known more generally as the Black Hebrews. Sometimes they refer to themselves simply as Hebrews or

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Hebrew Israelites. Over the years they have also called themselves the Original Hebrew Israelite Community and Nation. They also refer to their community as the Kingdom of God, and to themselves as the brothers and sisters, or saints, of the Kingdom. All of these terms will be employed in this article. 2. Some cults offered "free love" within the group, whereas others stressed a return to traditional family units. See Janet Liebman Jacobs, Divine Disenchantment: De- converting from New Religions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 5-11; and Elizabeth Puttick, "Women in New Religious Movements," in Bryan Wilson and Jennie Cresswell (eds.), New Religious Movements: Challenge and Response (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 141-162. 3. Geoffrey K. Nelson, Cults, New Religions and Religious Creativity (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). 4. See Jacobs, Divine Disenchantment (above, note 2), p. 11. 5. Archie Smith, Jr., "Black Reflections on the Study of New Religious Con- sciousness," in G. Baker and J. Neddleman (eds.), Understanding New Religions (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), pp. 220-234. 6. Jacobs, Divine Disenchantment (above, note 2), p. 5. 7. Ibid., p. 5. 8. For a thorough synopsis of the Father Divine cult and Marcus Garvey's "back-to- Africa"-based United Negro Improvement Association, see Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis (New York: Octagon, 1974 [first edition: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944]). It should be noted that the UNIA, although defunct for seventy years, is still highly evocative among African-Americans and remains the largest national-religious organization to have existed in black America. 9. Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe, New Religions as Global Cultures (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), p. 36. 10. The classic definition of revitalization movements, including the process of their rise and fall, was articulated by Anthony Wallace in "Revitalization Move- ments," American Anthropologist, 58 (1956), pp. 264-281. 11. Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 79. 12. Neither group claims to be or is recognized as practicing the orthodox religious tradition - Islam for the Nation of Islam, Judaism for the AHIC - with which they are allied. Instead, their leaders have picked up what Hexham and Poewe call "mythic fragments," or severed strands of one or several religious traditions, "to form a more cohesive mythology" (New Religions [above, note 91 p. 92). 13. The AHIC's administrative and residential center is located in Dimona, a dusty desert town in Israel's southeast. It also has communes in two other Negev towns and in Tiberias in Israel's north. Most Black Hebrews entered the State of Israel on tourist visas, which they allowed to lapse. In 1992 an agreement was reached

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whereby AHIC members received temporary residence status. The community believed these would become permanent residence permits in December 1998, allowing them some citizenship rights. However, as of this writing (July 1999) there has been no change in their status apart from the extension of their temporary residence permits. 14. They believe that most, but not all, of the Africans who became slaves in America were the descendants of Hebrews. Also among them were Egyptians, as well as a smattering of people from other cultures and traditions. A widespread belief in the AHIC is that the descendants of Egyptians and other sons of Ishmael have found or will find their way back to the Muslims, while those whose hearts tell them that they are Hebrews will somehow discover the AHIC and link their fate with it. 15. "Eurogentile" is the word used in the writings of Ben-Ammi, the AHIC's spiritual leader, as a gloss for white Christians of European origin. Louis Farrakhan employs more inflammatory terms to refer to Christians, and especially Jews, of European origin. 16. Indeed, Janet Jacobs, in "The Economy of Love in Religious Commitment: The Deconversion of Women from Non-Traditional Religious Movements" {Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 23 [1984], pp. 155-171), notes that women are often abused sexually by cult leaders. See also Jacobs, Divine Disenchantment, (above, note 2), pp. 97-101. 17. The slogan "You've come a long way, baby!" was central to the advertising campaign for Virginia Slims cigarettes, which were designed just for women. It is

frequently used with harsh sarcasm as an indictment of the supposedly hazardous health practices that accompany women's lib. 18. See Hagit Peres, "Women in the Kingdom of God: Reconstruction of a Hebrew Israelite Feminine Identity," M.A. thesis, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 1998; and idem, "Return to Womanhood: Construction of a Redefined Feminine

Identity," in A. Paul Hare (ed.), The Hebrew Israelite Community: Prophetic Change for a New Reality (Landham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998). Similar

findings, with a much stronger indictment of patriarchy, are presented by Paulette Pierce and Brackette F. Williams, "'And Your Prayers Shall Be Answered through the Womb of a Woman': Insurgent Masculine Redemption and the Nation of

Islam," in Brackette F. Williams (ed.), Women Out of Place: The Gender of Agency and the Race of Nationality (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 186-215; and Paulette Pierce, "Boudoir Politics and the Birthing of the Nation: Sex, Marriage, and Structural Deflection in the National Black Independent Political Party," ibid,, pp. 216-244. Pierce notes that whereas "women usually represented a major, if not the majority share of the participants" in black nationalist movements, their contributions have systematically been ignored (p. 218).

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19. Life stories are often used in anthropology so that teller and listener alike can make sense of personal experiences from within a specific cultural milieu and over time. By placing their contents in wider ethnographic perspective, life stories can and do reveal hidden facets of a culture and help to explain, for example, how symbols and myths provide motivation for and meaning in individual lives, as well as how life courses are differentially planned and gendered. Because the life story elicits rich subjective detail, it is a privileged kind of interview. It allows for, indeed encourages, its subjects to delineate and concentrate on experiences that they consider deeply meaningful. 20. Burridge notes that millenarianism always "comes to us as a story, as a narration of historical or quasi-historical events" (New Heaven [above, note 11], pp. 12-13). Frank Kermode adds that such stories are necessarily end-determined so as to satisfy Utopian desires for consonance between beginnings and ends, and to counteract "the paradigms of apocalypse [that] continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world" (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction [London: Oxford University Press, 1967], p. 28). My thanks to Danilyn Rutherford for bringing Kermode's work to my attention. 21. From 1992 through 1998 I made several visits to the Dimona community. During 1998/99 I spent a year in Chicago and had the opportunity to speak with many AHIC women there. I also paid a visit to the Atlanta branch, where I met with two of the sisters. 22. This is the general conclusion reached by Hagit Peres in the two studies cited in note 18. 23. Two scholars view the time that young people spend in cults as sojourns, even rites of passage. Saul Levine, in Radical Departures: Desperate Detours to Growing Up (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), suggests that young men, in particular, stay in cults for about two years, readying themselves for adult status in the wide world. Susan J. Palmer's analysis of women in NRMs, "Women's 'Cocoon Work' in New Religious Movements: Sexual Experimentation and Feminine Rites of Passage" (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 32/4 (1993), pp. 343-355), concludes that they seek in the cult a therapeutic community for dealing with temporary life crises. My analysis is not so deterministic or instrumental; indeed, the life stories I heard illustrate a variety of causes and reasons for affiliation and disaffiliation. 24. Kermode, The Sense (above, note 20), p. 121. 25. On the identification of black Americans with ancient Israel and the particular brand of (Christian) millenarianism this has inspired see Timothy C. Fulop, "The Future Golden Day of the Race': Millenialism and Black Americans in the Nadir, 1877-1901," in Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau (eds.), African-American Religion (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 227-254; and Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire

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in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 26. This name is often explicated in terms consistent with biblical teachings about the emergence of a messiah. Jesus - or Yeshua ben Yosef, as he is designated in the AHIC - was to have arisen from among the people. Ben-Ammi means "Son of My People." 27. The Black Hebrews attempted to immigrate to Israel via the Law of Return. They were turned down because none of them has a parent or grandparent who is considered Jewish according to Jewish law. 28. The community's early years have been documented from within the group by Prince Gavriel Ha-Gadol, The Impregnable People: An Exodus of African Americans Back to Africa (Washington, D.C.: Communicators Press, 1993); and by Shaleak Ben-Yehuda, Black Hebrew Israelites: From America to the Promised Land (New York: Vantage, 1975). External studies have been written by historian Israel J. Gerber, The Heritage Seekers: American Blacks in Search of Jewish Identity (Middle Village, N.Y.: Jonathan David, 1977); and by anthropologist Merrill Charles Singer, "Saints of the Kingdom: Group Emergence, Individual Affiliation, and Social Change among the Black Hebrews of Israel," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Utah, 1979. 29. During the 1920s, Marcus Mosias Garvey organized and led the Universal

Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), the

largest black nationalist-religious movement in the history of the United States. As Randall K. Burkett points out, "The themes that Garvey used were drawn from the Old and New Testaments, as well as from the (white) civil religion ... but with a new twist: Negroes are the chosen people; Africa is the promised land" (Garveyism as a Religious Movement [Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978], p. 8). Along with Burkett's work, readers may refer as well to David Jenkins, Black Zion: The Return

of Afro-Americans and West Indians to Africa (London: Wildwood House, 1975). 30. This position is best articulated by the community's spiritual leader, Ben

Ammi, in God, the Black Man, and Truth (2nd revised edition, Washington, D.C., Communicators Press, 1990). See also Hare, Hebrew Israelite Community (above, note 18) for a description of leadership and government within the AHIC. 31. The community's residential and cultural center is in Dimona, but Black Hebrews also live in Arad, Mitzpeh Ramon and Tiberias. The AHIC has a

vegetarian restaurant in Tel Aviv and maintains some apartments in that city for the restaurant staff. In the U.S., the community's major extensions are in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. Each of these cities has a Soul Vegetarian restaurant as well an Institute for Divine Understanding (where Sunday class and other meetings occur) and a boutique where African garments, vegetarian cookbooks and AHIC leaders' writings are sold.

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32. See Fran Markowitz, "Israel as Africa, Africa as Israel: 'Divine Geography' in the Personal Narratives and Community Identity of the Black Hebrew Israelites," Anthropological Quarterly. 69 (1996), pp. 163-205. 33. That is, no animal products are consumed. 34. See, for example, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang and Linda Rennie Forcey (eds.), Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 35. See Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Our Mothers' Grief: Racial Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families," Journal of Family History, 13 (1988), pp. 415-431. 36. K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 36. 37. Ibid., pp. 38-43; see also Leith Mullins, On Our Own Terms (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 39-40 and Chapter 6. 38. It should also be pointed out that this attempt at desexualizing slave women counteracted the obvious result of white owners and overseers availing themselves of these women's sexuality. 39. Barbara Christian, "An Angle of Seeing," in Glenn et al., Mothering (above, note 34), p. 96. 40. Michael Eric Dyson, in Reflecting Black: African American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), notes that "much of the ideological legitimation for the contemporary misery of African-Americans in general, and black men in particular, derives from the historical legacy of slavery, which continues to assert its brutal presence in the untold suffering of millions of everyday black folk" (p. 183). 41. Patricia Hill Collins, "Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood," in Glenn et al., Mothering (above, note 34), p. 51. 42. See Carol Stack, All Our Kin (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). 43. Sharon Harley, "For the Good of Family and Race: Gender, Work and Domestic Roles in the Black Community," in M. Maison, E. Mudimbe-Boyi, J. O'Barr and M. Wyer (eds.), Black Women in America: Social Science Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 171. 44. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, "The Roles of Church and Community Mothers: Ambivalent American Sexism or Fragmented African Familyhood?" in T.E. Fulop and A.J. Raboteau (eds.), African-American Religion (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 365-388. 45. bell hooks, "Home Place: A Site of Resistance," in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990). 46. Idem, "Whiteness in the Black Imagination," in R. Frankenberg (ed.), Displacing Whiteness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 175.

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47. Patricia Hill Collins, "The Tie That Binds: Race, Gender and U.S. Violence," Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21 (1998), p. 928. 48. Ibid,, p. 927. 49. Daniel Patnck Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, excerpted in J.H. Bracey, Jr., A. Meier and E. Rudwick (eds.), Black Matriarchy: Myth or Reality? (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1971), p. 140. 50. See Pierce, "Boudoir Politics," and Pierce and Williams, "Your Prayers" (both above, note 18). 51. Pierce and Williams, "Your Prayers" (above, note 18), p. 201. 52. See Patricia Hill Collins, "It's All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation," Hypatia, 13 (1998), pp. 62-82. 53. Of course, this mirrors the demographic profile of the white youth who affiliate with NRMs. 54. All names have been changed, but they contain phonemic and lexical similarities to the Hebraic names given to members of the AHIC. 55. This was one of very few routes available for upward mobility. 56. Twenty-seven-year-old Tommy is the only person who took advantage ot my presence in the Chicago Soul Vegetarian restaurant to talk about refuting the AHIC. Tommy, who was brought to Dimona at age four by his mother, left that community when he was in his teens because "teenagers are like that, don't want adults always telling you what to do." He stayed for a few years in Tel Aviv and then made his way back to America to meet his father. For the past five years he has been living with his stepfather. Just recently he has made a return appearance at the AHIC's Chicago center and has been drifting in and out of classes. While

making fun of his more serious and dedicated age-mates, he also confides that he would like the clarity of purpose that they seem to have. Since returning to

Chicago, Tommy has been "hustling" to pay his way and help support a child he has fathered. He wants to return to Israel and asked me about conversion to Judaism. 57. Scores more have returned to America, but I have met none of them. Victoria and Esther were exceptional in their openness to discuss their experience in the

AHIC; others wish only to put it behind them. In the Dimona community horror stories circulate about the fate of those who relapsed into the devilish world of America - they turned to prostitution, became crack addicts and neglectful welfare

mothers, or died of drug overdoses. 58. Just about all the members of the AHIC entered Israel on tourist visas, which then lapsed. Over the years the government arrested and deported a few

individuals. In 1986 there was a crackdown against the illegal immigration of Black

Hebrews. 59. As was noted in the second section of this paper, fosterage and adoptions

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within the extended family have been part of the African-American tradition for centuries. 60. By referring to the community's leader by his American surname, Victoria strips him of his spiritual authority and messianic role. 61. The Achva School was built with funds from the United States government. The State of Israel's Ministry of Education, which also pays the salaries of its principal and all certified teachers, oversees its curriculum. In addition to the standard curriculum, two community courses are offered, one on African- American history and the other on the AHIC's specific traditions. 62. See Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 83-109. 63. Burridge, New Heaven (above, note 11), p. 171. 64. Pierce, in "Boudoir Politics" (above, note 18), p. 237, pleads, "Women should not be forced to choose between their commitment to nationalism and the full development of themselves as human beings. But as things stand, these are precisely the choices patriarchal nationalism provides them."

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Millenarian Motherhood

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