Question:

I have a question that have been pondering. Are African Americans the true Israelites ? Here’s why I ask: Deuteronomy 28:15-68 (KJV) “And the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt (also meaning bondage) again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again: and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and go no man shall buy you.  Also, there is Acts 6:7 (NIV) ” Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated 400 years.   Also, Adolf Hitler states,”America has stolen the Jews. The Jews of God. His jewelry. The negroes. They are the true Hebrew. What a foolish move and a direct challenge to God. And they plan on moving these false white Jews into a state of Israel.”   Adolf Hitler, “The white Jews know that the negroes are the real children of Israel. And to keep Americas secret, the Jews will blackmail America. The Jews will extort America.  Their plan for world domination won’t work if the negros knew who they were.  I believe that this is true because the Bible says that these things shall come to pass and so far the slavery part has .

Answer:

Absolutely no!  There is not even a shred of evidence that the black Africans who were stolen from their lands by the Europeans from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries were descendants of Israel.  To be honest, it disturbs me that anyone would use the testimony of the most violent racist hater of the Jews—Hitler—as  evidence to support a theory about the Jews.  There is no evidence that Jewish exiles ever traveled to Central or Western Africa.  To be honest, this theory is an insult to Africans who were there in place long before the Jews were even given a homeland in the Promised Land.  It is somewhat similar to the unfounded claim by Mormons that Jews traveled to the New World.

It is true that the Jews were made exiles and were strangers in a country not their own, but history tells us where they went.  Some were exiled under Sennacherib to Assyria when he destroyed Samaria in 722 BC.  Others were sent as exiles to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar when he destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC. Still others fled to Egypt when Jerusalem was destroyed, where they set up a Jewish temple, but there is no evidence of the Jews in ancient times traveling to Western, Central or Southern Africa.  Deuteronomy 28:15-68 is a prophecy of the captivity of God’s people, but it does not mention Africa and we know from history how this prophecy was fulfilled.  The people you are using as a source are taking this passage out of its context.  Deuteronomy 28:64 predicts that the Jews who rebel will be scattered among the  nations where they will worship other gods.  They will live in fear and danger, wanting to return to the land.  It then says that they will go back to Egypt, as some of them did in 586 BC.  In fact, Jeremiah was taken down into Egypt at that time, and probably died there (2 Kings 25:26).  Egypt, of course, is on the continent of Africa, but there is no evidence that the Jews traveled to any of the areas from which slaves were later taken by the Europeans.  There is no evidence that the Hebrews or the Egyptians were black.   The Acts 6:7 passage, if you look at the context, is clearly a reference to the Jews in Egypt before they were freed from slavery by Moses.

I hate to say it, but I am afraid that you have been reading some racist propaganda.  The literature you have been reading is the kind of material which has been used to justify the enslaving of black Africans.  You would do well to not read such material.  I suggest you learn to be more skeptical and more discerning about what you read.

John Oakes