530 A History of Judaism
and Christianity (see Chapter 7), and a plethora of different black
Israelite groups devoted to keeping Jewish practices, with distinctive
doctrines and names such as ‘Commandment Keepers’, sprang up in big
American cities in the twentieth century. Numerous members of one
such community, the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, have
settled in Israel where, after being denied an automatic right to Israeli
citizenship as Jews, they have nonetheless been granted permanent resi-
dence and integrated to a considerable extent into Israeli society.
Israelis and most diaspora Jews have proved more suspicious of claims
by ethnic Jews converted to Christianity that Jews who accept Jesus as
Messiah are not abandoning Judaism but fulfilling it. ‘Jews for Jesus’,
founded in 1973 with an energetic mission to the wider Jewish commu-
nity, is the most prominent of numerous groups which have promoted
Messianic Judaism to Jews since the 1960s. Messianic Jewish congreg-
ations have mushroomed in the early twenty- first century, especially in
the United States and Israel. Messianic Jews characteristically observe the
Sabbath on Saturdays and keep the main Jewish festivals. Many observe
Jewish dietary laws – if not from conviction then as a form of outreach to
other Jews. They refer to Jesus by his Hebrew name, ‘Yeshua’.^4
This missionary approach of Messianic Jews within the Jewish com-
munity is unusual; the only other contemporary Jews with equal
missionary enthusiasm are the Lubavitch hasidim (see Chapter 19). For
much of the time Jewish communities of different outlook operate sep-
arately from each other and their clashing criteria for Jewish identity
can be ignored. Problems arise most often when it comes to marriage,
when doubts about the status of one of the partners can preclude mar-
riage according to orthodox Jewish law. The obstacle generally has
nothing to do with the beliefs and practices of either party, although in
principle all objections can be circumvented by the lengthy procedure of
conversion under the auspices of an orthodox rabbinic court of any
individual whose status is in doubt.
Within the orthodox world, even more recalcitrant a problem is the
status of a mamzer (often roughly, but inaccurately, translated as ‘bas-
tard’), as Deuteronomy prohibits the offspring of an adulterous or
incestuous union from marrying another Jew; the possibility of acquir-
ing such a status has been greatly increased by the number of Jews
remarrying after a civil divorce without undergoing a valid Jewish
divorce through the provision of a get, a bill of divorce, from the hus-
band to the wife. The problem has been exacerbated both by the
disappearance of many in the Holocaust without record of their death