Viñas came to see that his family was among countless “crypto-Jews” who fled the Spanish Inquisition of the late 15th century, many of whom eventually wound up in the New World. Today, Viñas is the spiritual leader of the Lincoln Park Jewish Center, a modern Orthodox congregation in Yonkers, New York, and founder of El Centro de Estudios Judios Torat Emet, a Jewish spirituality and learning center for Spanish speakers. He also publishes a quarterly bilingual newspaper, Torah Tropical, which circulates its message of “Judaism with a Latin Flavor” in the United States.

For Rabbi Funnye, the African-American convert from Chicago, the path to Jewish conversion began with his pastor’s suggestion that he become a preacher. “It got me to start looking at the world through different lenses,” he recalled. “In the church, so much is put into the divinity of Jesus, and that grew more problematic. It seemed to limit the availability of God if everything was directed to one individual or one group of individuals. Then there was the issue of Easter, of resurrection. Who’s in charge for three days if Jesus and God are connected as One? Was God dead for three days? Who’s running the world? Those were the kind of questions coming up in my young mind.”

It was the late 1960s and Funnye started looking around at the other spiritual options. He checked out the Pentecostal churches and then the Black Muslim movement, but nothing seemed to fit. Then he stumbled across an African American–Jewish movement founded in 1919 as Commandment Keepers, one of several organizations started in that era by blacks in the United States who saw historical and experiential evidence linking them to the Twelve Tribes of Israel and the centuries-long plight of the Jewish people. Bible passages that told of the Israelites being scattered all over the world by slave ships and forced to worship alien gods resonated with Funnye.

Tobin understands how Judaism could appeal to people from disparate cultures. “Judaism as a religion and culture is interesting, intriguing, hopeful,” he said. “You get a history, a language, a culture, ritual, tradition. You get a country. You get two countries! You get a remarkable theology. You get all that. To horde it is self-defeating.” And he has little patience for the perennial lament by mainstream Jewish leaders obsessed with intermarriage and a decline in religious observance in recent generations. His wife, Diane Tobin, founder and director of Be’chol Lashon, was raised in the Episcopal Church.

“In the 1930s, the vast majority of Americans thought Jews were not suitable marriage partners,” he said. “Today that number is down to about 5 percent. Jews are desirable marriage partners, not undesired. That is such a blessing. To complain about it is perverse.” Gary and Diane were sitting in their offices across the street from Golden Gate Park, talking about the project, when their 10-year-old son walked into the room. The Tobins adopted a newborn African-American baby, named him Jonah a decade ago, and brought themselves face-to-face with an issue Gary had been studying his entire life: the connection between race and religion in U.S. society.

Gary spent two years in Berkeley working on his doctoral thesis in city and regional planning, where he studied the interaction of blacks and Jews in a racially changing neighborhood. He went on to teach and conduct research at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, before returning to the Bay Area in 1997 to establish the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, an independent think tank devoted to the study of Jewish demography, philanthropy, and religious prejudice. Gary and Diane like to point out that our preconceptions about whether someone “looks Jewish” start to crumble with the most basic research. Just read your Bible. Moses led the Jews out of Egypt. Moses married Zipporah, an Ethiopian. Solomon and David each took a wife from Africa.

Ephraim Isaac, who directs the Institute of Semitic Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, argues that Judaism began as an open, universalistic religion with few barriers to conversion. He was one of several scholars at the conference—including some from the Orthodox movement—who agreed that the Hebrew Bible and early commentaries on Jewish law welcomed people into the fold. Ironically, this “hunger for converts” was only fully embraced by the two world religions that grew out of Judaism: Christianity and Islam, leaders of which would then embark on a centuries-long campaign to systemically repress the religion from which their own belief system sprang. “Judaism would have been the largest religion in the world if Christianity and Islam did not seek to replace it,” Isaac said.

Most Americans, including most American Jews, don’t hold an image of Lewis Gordon in their heads when they think “Jewish person.” Gordon is a professor of philosophy, religion, and Judaic studies at Temple University and the founder and codirector, with his wife, Jane, of Temple’s Center for Afro-Jewish Studies.

“People think to look like a Jew is to look like an 18th-century Polish nobleman, rather than what the ancient Jews really looked like,” said Gordon. He descended through his mother from two Jewish communities. One was the Solomon family, who migrated to the United States from Jerusalem and Egypt in the 19th century, and the other was the Finikin family, who were Irish Sephardic Jews.

“My mother was black and my mother was Jewish,” said Gordon. “Our prejudices of migration make us presume people always wanted to go north. That’s because in recent times the opportunities have been in the north. At one time, the opportunities were in the south. Africa was a vast trade network full of riches. That’s the story of Islam, but not just Islam. Wherever there were Muslim traders, there were Jewish traders, and they settled in communities all over Africa.”

Or, as Ethiopian-born Ephraim Isaac likes to reply whenever he gets the “you don’t look Jewish” line, “Ethiopia is mentioned in the Bible over 50 times, but Poland not once.”

Don Lattin ’76 is an author and freelance religion writer, whose latest book is Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge. He can be reached through his website.

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