Short answer
- The phrase "black people are the Israelites" is a claim made by groups in the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, not an established historical finding. Proponents teach that Black Americans, and in some groups Latin American and Native American peoples as well, descend from the ancient Israelites of the Hebrew Bible. Mainstream Jewish communities and most academic historians do not accept that claim as history. They describe Black Hebrew Israelites as a distinct religious movement, separate from mainstream Judaism, and they assess the descent claim as a religious belief rather than as a conclusion supported by the historical evidence usually required for an ancestry claim. The movement itself is diverse, so no single teaching, practice, or attitude toward other Jews describes every group in it. --- A reader who types this phrase into a search engine is usually asking about identity, history, and religion at the same time. This article explains who makes the claim, where it came from, and how scholars assess it. It also separates belief, history, and genetics, which are often run together. A belief can be sincerely held and central to a community without being the same kind of statement as a documented historical finding, and a genetic finding about one population does not by itself settle a claim about descent from a named ancient people. Two cautions belong here. First, this article does not endorse the claim, and it does not present it as proven fact. Every statement about what the movement teaches is attributed to proponents or to named groups. Second, this article does not attribute the claim, or any attitude toward other Jews, to Black people as a whole. The claim belongs to particular religious groups. Most Black Americans are not members of those groups, and Black Jews, who are members of mainstream Jewish communities, are a different subject from Black Hebrew Israelites.
What the Claim Is
At its core, the claim is about descent and identity. Groups in the movement teach that African Americans descend from the ancient Israelites, the people of the Hebrew Bible who trace their ancestry in the biblical narrative to Jacob, also called Israel, and his twelve sons. Some groups extend the claim to Latin American and Native American peoples. Others limit it more narrowly, or describe it in spiritual rather than strictly biological terms. Because the movement has no single creed or central authority, details vary from group to group.
Proponents commonly teach that this Israelite identity was lost or hidden during slavery. In this account, enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Israelites, or descendants of Israelites, who were cut off from their language, customs, and knowledge of their origin. The movement then presents itself as a recovery: a return to the laws, festivals, dietary rules, and identity described in the Hebrew Bible. For many adherents, identifying as Israelites is also about belonging, dignity, and a history older than slavery. Understanding that force does not require agreeing with the historical claim, but a reader who misses it will miss why the claim matters to the people who hold it.
Proponents differ on the question that causes the most public controversy: who else counts as Jewish or Israelite? Some groups teach that their members are the original Israelites and that other Jews, including Jews of European descent, are not Israelites at all. Other groups teach that their members are Israelites while also recognizing other Jews as legitimately Jewish. Still others, closer to mainstream Jewish practice, have sought recognition from Jewish authorities and have maintained cordial relations with Jewish leaders. The George Washington University Program on Extremism, in a 2022 report, draws this line explicitly: most adherents view Jews outside the movement as legitimately Jewish, while an extremist fringe argues that those Jews are impostors or usurpers. That distinction runs through everything that follows.
The Biblical Texts Proponents Cite
Proponents usually argue from the Hebrew Bible, and from the Christian Old Testament, rather than from archives, census records, or DNA studies. The most frequently cited passage is Deuteronomy chapter 28, which sets out blessings for obedience to the covenant and curses for disobedience. Proponents point to verses describing defeat before enemies, mockery among peoples, servitude, and being carried away by ships to a land of bondage. They read those descriptions as matching the transatlantic slave trade: capture, transport by ship, sale into slavery, and dispersion among other peoples. On that reading, the curses fit African Americans better, in their view, than they fit any other modern people, and therefore identify African Americans as the Israelites addressed in the text.
Proponents also cite Lamentations chapter 5, verse 10, where the text describes skin darkened by famine, and the Exodus story, in which enslaved Israelites are liberated from Egypt. Enslaved Africans and their descendants in the United States identified symbolically with the Israelites in Egypt long before the organized movement existed. Proponents of the later movement sometimes treat that long symbolic identification as support for a literal claim of descent. That move, from symbolic identification to literal ancestry, is a key step in the movement’s argument.
Scholars and Jewish readers who do not accept the claim read the same passages differently. Deuteronomy chapter 28, in mainstream biblical scholarship and in Jewish tradition, is addressed in the text to ancient Israel, as part of a covenant document for a people in the ancient Near East. The fact that a later people can recognize their own suffering in an ancient text does not, in that reading, prove descent from the people addressed in the text. Lamentations is read by mainstream commentators as poetry about famine and destruction in Jerusalem, not as a physical description intended to settle the ancestry of a modern population. Proponents treat textual resemblance as identification, while critics treat it as interpretation, and interpretation alone does not establish a genealogical line across more than two thousand years. A genealogy of that length would ordinarily need names, places, languages, records of migration, and continuity of community, and the movement’s argument rests mainly on biblical interpretation and a narrative of migration and loss, not on that kind of chain.
Where the Movement Began
The organized movement began in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Two preachers are usually named as its founders, and both said they had received revelations that African Americans were descendants of the Hebrews of the Bible. Frank Cherry founded the Church of the Living God, the Pillar Ground of Truth for All Nations, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1886. Cherry taught that African Americans had lost their Hebrew identity during slavery. His congregation combined elements of Judaism and Christianity: members faced east in prayer, wore skullcaps, avoided pork, and treated the Talmud, the body of rabbinic discussion and commentary on the Torah, as authoritative, while also using the Christian Bible. Cherry also taught distinctive doctrines, including a square earth surrounded by three layers of heaven and a return of Jesus in the year 2000, and he described Jews of European descent as interlopers. He died in 1963, and his son succeeded him.
William Saunders Crowdy, a formerly enslaved man, founded the Church of God and Saints of Christ in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1896. Crowdy also said he had received a revelation that African Americans descended from the ancient Israelites, in particular that they were heirs of the ten lost tribes. His church retained a messianic connection to Jesus, while adopting Old Testament observances such as the Hebrew calendar, Passover, circumcision of infant males, Sabbath observance on Saturday, and the wearing of yarmulkes, alongside baptism by immersion and foot washing. Crowdy died in 1908. The church later established its headquarters in Belleville, Virginia, in 1921 and reported, in 1936, more than 200 congregations and 37,000 members. As of 2005, it reported fifty congregations in the United States and dozens more in Africa. Those figures come from the church’s own history as summarized in the overview literature, and they describe one organization, not the movement as a whole.
Wentworth Arthur Matthew, an immigrant from Saint Kitts, founded the Commandment Keepers congregation in Harlem in 1919. Matthew moved closer to mainstream Jewish practice: he founded a rabbinical school in Brooklyn in 1930, ordained more than twenty rabbis, and maintained cordial ties with Jewish leaders in New York. He taught that Black Americans were the original Israelites who had lost touch with their roots through slavery, and he valued Jews outside his congregation as people who had preserved Judaism over the centuries. The Commandment Keepers therefore show, from an early date, that the movement contained both a hostile strand toward other Jews and a strand that sought connection with them.
These congregations grew in a United States shaped by slavery, by the failure of Reconstruction, by lynching, and by Jim Crow segregation. Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association used the biblical Jews in exile as a metaphor for Black people in North America, but Garvey was not a founder of the movement, and his use of the Exodus was metaphorical. By the mid 1980s, estimates placed the number of Black Hebrews in the United States between 25,000 and 40,000, with several thousand more in Israel. Those are 1980s estimates, not a current census, and no reliable current census exists, because the movement has no central registry.
The Ten Lost Tribes
Much of the claim turns on the phrase “ten lost tribes.” In the biblical narrative, the people of Israel descended from the twelve sons of Jacob. After the death of Solomon, the united kingdom split into a northern kingdom, called Israel, and a southern kingdom, called Judah. The northern kingdom was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire around 720 BCE, and its population was exiled under Assyria’s policy of resettling conquered peoples. The ten tribes associated with the northern kingdom, Reuben, Simeon, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Manasseh, and Ephraim, are therefore called lost, because after the exile they no longer appear as distinct tribes in the historical record. Judah and Benjamin survived until the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 587 BCE, and the Jewish people, in standard histories, descend from the survivors of that southern kingdom together with those who later converted to Judaism.
Claims of descent from the lost tribes have been proposed for many groups, not only for Black Hebrew Israelites. British Israelism, for example, claimed that the British people descended from the lost tribes. Because the lost tribes disappear from the record, the gap can be filled by many different stories, and a story that fills a gap is not the same as evidence that fills it. Mainstream historians treat the fate of the northern tribes as assimilation, migration into Judah, and resettlement under Assyrian policy, not as a documented migration to a single modern population. Proponents offer a different filling of the gap: that some exiled Israelites migrated into Africa, and that their descendants were later taken across the Atlantic in the slave trade. That narrative is presented by proponents as history, but it is not supported, in the academic literature summarized for this article, by the contemporary records, linguistic evidence, or archaeological evidence historians ordinarily require for a migration of that scale.
Ethiopian Jews, known as Beta Israel, are a distinct community with a long history in Ethiopia, and they are not the same as Black Hebrew Israelites, who are a modern American movement founded in the late nineteenth century.
A Movement, Not a Single Church
The overview literature describes the movement as non-homogeneous, composed of numerous groups with varying beliefs and practices. Some groups identify as Christian, including the earliest institutions, while others identify more closely with Judaism, celebrating Jewish holidays, observing dietary and ritual laws, and using Hebrew in liturgy. Some groups teach that Jesus was a prophet and adherent of Judaism rather than divine. Others hold a messianic view of Jesus. No summary that picks one group’s teaching and presents it as the movement’s teaching will be accurate.
The One West Camp, named after its first grouping at One West 125th Street in Harlem, is a messianic subdivision whose groups teach an exclusive identification of the twelve tribes of Israel with ethnic communities of Black, Latin American, and Native American descent in the Americas. It has since splintered into numerous camps, including the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ and the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, often shortened to ISUPK, along with Israel United in Christ. These street preaching groups are the most publicly visible part of the movement in many American cities, and their confrontational style has shaped public impressions of the whole movement.
The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem form another distinct branch. Ben Ammi Ben-Israel, formerly Ben Carter of Chicago, founded the group in Chicago in 1966, saying he had received a vision instructing him to lead the children of Israel to the promised land. After a sojourn in Liberia, Ben Ammi and around thirty followers moved to Israel in 1969. Over the next twenty years, nearly six hundred more members left the United States for Israel. As of 2006, about 2,500 members lived in Dimona and two other towns in the Negev region, where they are widely referred to as Black Hebrews. Members teach that they descend from the tribe of Judah, exiled after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. They observe Shabbat and holidays such as Yom Kippur and Passover, follow a strictly vegan diet, wear only natural fabrics, and circumcise newborn boys.
When the first members arrived in Israel in 1969, they claimed citizenship under the Law of Return, which gives eligible Jews immediate citizenship. The Israeli government ruled in 1973 that the group did not qualify for automatic citizenship, because members could not prove Jewish descent and had not undergone Orthodox conversion. After negotiations, members were granted permanent residency in 2003, and the first member gained Israeli citizenship in 2009.
How Mainstream Judaism Sees the Claim
Mainstream Jewish communities do not recognize Black Hebrew Israelites as a denomination of Judaism, and they do not apply the movement’s self description as the test for Jewish status. In the traditional definition used by Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, a person is Jewish if born to a Jewish mother or if that person has converted to Judaism under Jewish law, through study, acceptance of the commandments, immersion in a ritual pool, and, for a male convert, circumcision. Reform Judaism in North America also recognizes a child of one Jewish parent, mother or father, as Jewish when raised with a Jewish identity. A claim of descent from ancient Israelites, on its own, does not meet those criteria, because the criteria concern birth to a Jewish mother or formal conversion, not a biblical reading or a migration narrative.
The overview literature therefore states the point directly: Black Hebrew Israelites are a distinct group, not affiliated with the mainstream Jewish community or normative Judaism, because they do not meet the established criteria, such as matrilineal descent or formal conversion, used to identify someone as Jewish. The point is about criteria, not about worth. Conversely, Black people who are Jews by birth or conversion are members of mainstream Jewish communities, and their Jewishness does not depend on the Black Hebrew Israelite claim.
Scholarly criticism follows a similar logic. Academics cited in the overview literature have criticized various sects for theology and historical revisionism, on the ground that the claims lack supporting evidence. Fran Markowitz, a professor of cultural anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, is cited as writing that the Hebrew Israelite view of the transatlantic slave trade conflicts with historical accounts, as does the belief that figures such as Socrates and William Shakespeare were Black. Masimba Musodza, a Zimbabwean novelist, is cited as saying that Black Hebrew Israelites make historical revisionist claims and force their own ideas onto the biblical text to promote their own agenda, generating antisemitism in Black communities in western countries. Those are the critics’ characterizations, reported here as criticism. The criticism is not that religious belief is illegitimate, but that a historical claim presented as history is judged by historical standards, and is found wanting by those standards.
Genetics does not settle the question in the form the claim is usually stated. Genetic studies can show patterns of ancestry among modern populations, but “Israelite” in the biblical narrative is a tribal and historical identity, not a genetic marker, and this article presents no genetic finding as deciding the question.
The Extremist Fringe
Public discussion is dominated by the movement’s extremist fringe, but the fringe must not be mistaken for the whole. The Southern Poverty Law Center, in writing summarized in the overview literature, described the extremist fringe as holding a Black supremacist outlook, teaching that Jews are impostors and condemning white people as evil personified. The same SPLC writing also stated that most Hebrew Israelites are neither explicitly racist nor antisemitic and do not advocate violence. The Anti-Defamation League has made a parallel distinction, summarized as: some, but not all, Black Hebrew Israelites are outspoken antisemites and racists. As of December 2019, the SPLC listed 144 Black Hebrew Israelite organizations as Black separatist hate groups because of their antisemitic and anti-white beliefs, including ISUPK and the Nation of Yahweh. The ADL has likewise described several extremist sects as hate groups, including the House of Israel and the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ.
Those designations apply to named extremist sects, not to every congregation using the name Hebrew Israelite. The George Washington University report argues that the predominant threat today comes from individuals loosely affiliated with or inspired by the movement, rather than from groups or institutions. A reader who applies a hate group designation to every congregation will overstate the evidence, while a reader who denies that any extremist sect exists will understate it.
The record of violence attributed to that fringe and to loosely affiliated individuals should be stated without exaggeration and without minimization. In 1974, Alberta Williams King, the mother of Martin Luther King Jr., was shot and killed by Marcus Wayne Chenault, a man who had adopted the theology of a Black Hebrew Israelite preacher in Cincinnati. In December 2019, two people who had expressed interest in the Black Hebrew Israelite movement killed a police detective at a cemetery and three people at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey, before being killed in a shootout with police. Authorities treated the incident as an act of domestic terrorism. Later in December 2019, a man attacked several Orthodox Jewish people during Hanukkah celebrations in a house in Monsey, New York, and authorities revealed that his journals included references to Black Hebrew Israelites. A 1999 FBI terrorism risk assessment, summarized in the overview literature, concluded that the overwhelming majority of Black Hebrew Israelites are unlikely to engage in violence.
Why the Phrase Spreads Online
The phrase spreads online for reasons that have little to do with academic history. Short videos and street preaching clips present the claim in a direct, confident form: a verse is quoted, a historical suffering is named, and a conclusion is drawn in a few sentences. That form suits online discussion, where a claim stated in one line travels further than a careful argument needing pages of qualification. The George Washington University report notes that extremist demonstrations are increasingly broadcast online, amplifying the fringe relative to quieter congregations.
Confusion about terms adds to the argument. “Jew” in modern usage names a member of the Jewish people, defined by birth or conversion. “Israelite” is mainly a historical term for the ancient people descended, in the biblical narrative, from Jacob. “Hebrew” is an ancient term for the early people and also the name of their language. “Israeli” names a citizen of the modern State of Israel, and carries no religious or ethnic meaning on its own. A reader can ask whether a group recognizes Jews outside its own congregation as legitimately Jewish, whether it presents its descent claim as a religious belief or as a documented genealogy, and whether its preaching relies on confrontation or on worship and study. Terms such as “so-called Jews” are described by the ADL, in the overview literature, as terms used by some extremist sects to cast doubt on the Jewish identity of mainstream Jews. This article avoids using the word “true” as its own description for the same reason: proponents sometimes call themselves the “true Israelites,” but a neutral article cannot adopt one side’s “true” as its own adjective, and the headline is phrased as a question for the same reason.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are Black people the Israelites?
That is a claim made by groups in the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, not a conclusion accepted by mainstream Jewish communities or by most academic historians. It is best understood as a religious belief held by groups, not as a fact about Black people as a whole.
Who are the Black Hebrew Israelites?
They are members of a diverse American religious movement, founded in the late nineteenth century, whose groups teach that African Americans descend from the ancient Israelites. It is not a denomination of mainstream Judaism, and not a description of Black people.
When did the movement begin?
Frank Cherry founded the Church of the Living God, the Pillar Ground of Truth for All Nations, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1886. William Saunders Crowdy founded the Church of God and Saints of Christ in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1896. Both said they had received revelations that African Americans were descendants of the Hebrews of the Bible.
What Bible passages do proponents cite?
Proponents most often cite Deuteronomy chapter 28, reading its curses, including defeat, mockery, servitude, and transport by ships, as matching the transatlantic slave trade. They also cite Lamentations chapter 5, verse 10, and the Exodus story. Mainstream biblical readers interpret those passages as addressed to ancient Israel and as poetry about famine and destruction, not as genealogical proof about a modern population.
Are Black Hebrew Israelites the same as Jews?
No, in the sense used by mainstream Jewish communities. They are described as a distinct group, not affiliated with the mainstream Jewish community, because they do not meet the criteria of birth to a Jewish mother or formal conversion.
Are Black Hebrew Israelites the same as Ethiopian Jews?
No. Ethiopian Jews, known as Beta Israel, are a long established community in Ethiopia with its own history. Black Hebrew Israelites are a modern American movement founded in the late nineteenth century.
Do all Black Hebrew Israelite groups hate other Jews?
No. The SPLC and the ADL designate named extremist sects as hate groups, while also stating that most adherents do not hold those views. Hostility toward other Jews is a teaching of the fringe, not of every group.
What is the Dimona community?
The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are a community founded in Chicago in 1966 by Ben Ammi Ben-Israel, whose members moved to Israel from 1969 onward and settled mainly in Dimona and two other towns in the Negev. The Israeli government ruled in 1973 that the group did not qualify for automatic citizenship under the Law of Return. After negotiations, members were granted permanent residency in 2003, and the first member gained Israeli citizenship in 2009.
Has DNA testing proven or disproven the claim?
No single DNA test settles a claim of this kind. Genetics can show patterns of ancestry among modern populations, but “Israelite” in the biblical narrative is a tribal and historical identity, not a genetic marker that a test returns.
Why does this topic cause so much argument online?
The claim is stated in short, confident online forms; it offers a powerful identity story; and key terms such as Jew, Israelite, Hebrew, and Israeli are often used as if they meant the same thing, when they do not.
Sources & references
- George Washington University, Program on Extremism, "Contemporary Violent Extremism and the Black Hebrew Israelite Movement," September 2022. Opened and read for the movement overview, the distinction between most adherents and the extremist fringe, the history of the Nation of Yahweh, and the Jersey City and Monsey incidents.
- "Black Hebrew Israelites," overview article, opened and read on 27 Oct 2026, for the founding dates of Cherry and Crowdy, the Commandment Keepers, the One West Camp, the Dimona community and its legal history, the SPLC and ADL designations as summarized there, and the scholarly criticism summarized there. This is a secondary overview, not a primary source, and claims taken from it are marked qualified in the writer ledger where they were not independently confirmed in the George Washington University report.
- "Ten Lost Tribes," overview article, search result read on 27 Oct 2026, for the Assyrian exile around 720 BCE, the list of northern tribes, and the point that claims of descent from the lost tribes have been proposed for many groups.
