waiting for the messiah? 529
former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel who founded in the 1980s what was
to become Shas, a powerful force in Israel’s politics established to combat
discrimination against non- Ashkenazim and to bolster among Sephardim
a sense of pride in their identity, was closely linked politically to the aged
Lithuanian rabbi Elazar Shach, who dominated the world of non- hasidic
Ashkenazi haredim in Israel for the last quarter of the twentieth century.
On the other hand, the reputation of Sephardi kabbalists like the Moroc-
can rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira, known as Baba Sali, who was famed as a
miracle-worker through the power of prayer, was recognized also in the
Ashkenazi world. The Baba Sali died in 1984, and his tomb in Netivot, a
small town close to Gaza, has become a place of pilgrimage.^3
There is less pressure to conform outside Israel, where Jewish identity
of any kind is largely a matter of self- definition, and the grounds for self-
definition as a Jew vary greatly, with different degrees of acceptance within
the wider Jewish world. It remains the case that most Jews consider them-
selves Jewish because at least one of their parents was Jewish, but the
patrilineal inheritance of, for instance, many of the emigrants from the
former Soviet Union who have established sizeable Jewish communities in
Germany and Israel is not recognized within orthodox circles.
The inherited Jewish customs of the Ethiopian Beta Israel (see Chapter
9) proved sufficient evidence of Jewish identity for the State of Israel to
treat them as Jews and to encourage the migration of much of their com-
munity to Israel in the 1990s, but the orthodox rabbinate remains
suspicious of them. Claims to Jewishness by a variety of other groups with
Judaizing customs in southern Africa, Latin America, India and Japan
have been generally treated as exotic but irrelevant within the wider Jew-
ish community. Such claims have proliferated with advances in genetics
since the 1970s, with ethnic groups like the Lemba in Zimbabwe and
South Africa welcoming DNA testing which suggests the origin of some of
their male ancestors in the Middle East. The Lemba, who point to their
observance of the Sabbath, male circumcision and food taboos as evidence
of their inherited Jewish practices, have sometimes been identified as the
lost tribes of Israel, as have the Bnei Menashe in north- east India.
Liberal Jews in the United States, eager to show their anti- racist cre-
dentials, have often welcomed such claims from a distance. They have
been less welcoming of the claims by Christian groups of black African
ancestry in the United States itself, like the Black Hebrew Israelites, to
be the only authentic Israelites in contrast to the ethnic claims of ordi-
nary Jews. Christian self- designation as the true Israel goes back, of
course, to the early history of the parting of the ways between Judaism