Igbo, Jim Crow, and Israel's Law of Return

Imagine this: It's Election Day in America. You walk into the polling place, heart pounding, ready to exercise what is supposed to be your most basic right as a citizen - but before you can mark your ballot, a face lacking melanin puts a jar of jellybeans in front of you. You're told to guess how many are inside. "If you get it wrong," the face says with a grin, "no vote.

- By TONNIE DARRON WALLS

Sounds crazy, right? Well, some could argue that Jim Crow advocates, while not the inventors of crazy, were among its pioneers in the Stolen Hemisphere, the so-called New World, where they took crazy to a whole new level. Their Wile E. Coyote-esque obsession for concocting schemes - in this case, a "literacy" test - to deny Black voters their 15th and 19th Amendment rights (i.e., keep the vote, like the front of the bus, the better water fountains, and anything halfway decent, stamped 'Whites Only').

On July 30, 2020, former President Barack Obama reminded us of this ugly past at the funeral of Congressmember and civil rights leader John Lewis: "We may no longer have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar in order to cast a ballot," he said, "but even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting."

Now imagine you are among the Nigerian Igbo, whose Judaic traditions link you not only to the tribe of Gad, ancient Judea, and thus Israel, but also to centuries of peril, persecution, and pariahdom. Like other Jews, you would long to return to the safe harbor of a promised land. Yet, before you can set foot on that ancestral ground, promised through sacred covenant, you are told you must first produce proof that your forebears practiced Judaism before European colonization - the very system (along with its predecessor, the transatlantic slave trade) that emboldened Europeans to either steal or destroy such records. This is the dilemma facing Nigerian Igbo Jews.