The competitive nature of the definitions is apparent,
that they involve the defense of “belonging” as social issue, tend to fight each other. And this supposed or real confrontation, cross our community. It reveals above all the problematic in which everyone is now invited to determine in a context of encouragement of particularism. This “identity market” seems to condemn any attempt at sociological dilation that takes into account evolution of identity definitions and thus ignoring the meaning that a society confers on them a given moment in his history.
The field of Jewish interethnic relations has often been summarized to that of
relations between two social categories. The relations between these groups, of various origins, is in the order of everyday sociability as well as in the reciprocal representations and ideas. In addition, these procedures ethnic categorization seem to undermine any single community benefit from the establishment of particularisms. From the outside, the coming together of these groups can reveal common logics, symmetrical positioning, interdependence and concomitant circulation of ideas. But in reality, they answer rather to an ideological imperative that the Black Jews reprove in our time.
If the justification of this reality answers the excesses of a universalism judged
destructive, the question of a common identity reappropriation now arises. What sense could this recognized difference, each of which has the intimate conviction of being the best ? Because, contrary to a widely held idea, it is not necessarily to crush their culture that these groups will collide but very often to attachment ancestral to a village, a place or an object which assures presubated filiations and certainties identities to which they can relatively claim. Thus, the reference to the Maghreb, land of origin direct of most of those who today claim the Sephardic identity, the dispute at the reference mythical to Spain, distant cradle, but often preferred for some Ashkenazi Jews, Western, Central and Eastern of Europe, for the others.
What about black Jews ?
Black Jewish identity certainly requires sharing a framework of common values and goals. But this normative commitment don’t need to embrace what some people call “bipolarity”. Indeed, as soon as we have to think about the situation of Black Jews, the circumscription of spatiality and temporality constituency, which is necessary to conduct an inquiry, is by no means current (Black Jews) is struggling with historical interdependencies.
Perhaps more than any other group, or any other community, this one immediately calls the question of Africaand its place in a “community space” governed by these currents. Reconfiguration of the Jewish identity space implies the questioning of a number of certainties. Criteria Biologicals have never been an instrument for defining the Jewish people as a miscegenation. The traits of its members betray different origins, and all are also Jewish to each other. A black Jew can be Ashkenazi if he wants it or chooses it, a black Jew can also be Sephardi, if he wants it or chooses it. But the identity assignment of the black Jew is ideological and does not result from a true judgment. Black Jews are Jewish subjects in the same way as those of Europe or the Maghreb.