While conversions to Judaism are generally understudied in France, conversions of Black persons go unnoticed. The past three decades witnessed an increasing number of claims to Jewishness in Africa and conversions in the African diaspora and Israel. Their diverse life stories reflect deep spiritual quests. Scripturalizing Jewishness through Blackness: Black Jews in France describes the multiple ways in which they practice and claim their Judaism, relate to their fellow Jews, and reconstruct their identities. Whether former Christians or native Jews, they (re)define their racial and ethnic identities as members of two minority groups in their interactions with Jewish texts and communities, to find their place in the French Jewry and the broader French society, where they have to face both anti-Semitism and racism. After fifteen years of fieldwork, Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot offers an original analysis of their individual and collective itineraries.

Autorentext

Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot is a senior research associate on the Archiving the Inner City Project at the Department of Sociology of the University of York (UK), a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Religion and Public Life of the University of Leeds (UK), and an associate researcher at the Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcité (CNRS, France) hosted by the Sorbonne (École Pratique des Hautes Études).