Black Cults

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Black Hebrew Israelites

Black Hebrew Israelites (also called Hebrew Israelites, Black Hebrews, Black Israelites, and African Hebrew Israelites) are a new religious movement claiming that African Americans are the descendants of the ancient Israelites. Black Hebrew Israelites incorporate certain aspects of the religious beliefs and practices of both Christianity and Judaism, though they have created their own interpretation of the Bible, and other influences include Freemasonry and New Thought, for example. Black Hebrew Israelites are not associated with the mainstream Jewish community, and they do not meet the criteria that are used to identify people as Jewish by the Jewish community. They are also outside the fold of mainstream Christianity. Various sects of Black Hebrew Israelism have been criticised by academics for their promotion of historical revisionism.

The Black Hebrew Israelite movement originated at the end of the 19th century, when Frank Cherry and William Saunders Crowdy both claimed to have received visions that African Americans are descendants of the Hebrews in the Bible; Cherry established the Church of the Living God, the Pillar Ground of Truth for All Nations, in 1886, and Crowdy founded the Church of God and Saints of Christ in 1896. Subsequently, Black Hebrew groups were founded in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from Kansas to New York City, by both African Americans and West Indian immigrants. In the mid-1980s, the number of Black Hebrews in the United States was between 25,000 and 40,000.

The group sometimes employs street preaching to promote their ideology. Sidewalk ministers may employ provocation to advance a message that is often antisemitic, racist, and xenophobic. This primarily gained notice in the news through their street preaching that purportedly targeted students of Covington Catholic High School (Kentucky) in January 2019. One student reported the Black Hebrew Israelites called students 'racists', 'bigots', 'white crackers', 'faggots', and 'incest kids', and told an African American student that white classmates would "harvest his organs". During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, dozens of Black Hebrew organisations were established. In Harlem alone, at least eight such groups were founded between 1919 and 1931.

Black Hebrew groups that are characterised as being Black supremacist include the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, the Nation of Yahweh and the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ. There are 144 Black Hebrew Israelite organisations listed as black separatist hate groups because of their antisemitic and anti-white beliefs. Fran Markowitz, a Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, writes that the Hebrew Israelite view of the transatlantic slave trade conflicts with historical accounts, as does the Hebrew Israelite belief that Socrates and William Shakespeare were black.

Conclusion

Evil.