His work, the group once wrote, was “blatantly inaccurate” and “unworthy of any educational institution.”īut Mr. The Anti-Defamation League, troubled by books of his with titles like “ We the Black Jews: Witness to the ‘White Jewish Race’ Myth,” stopped just short of calling him an anti-Semite. Ben-Jochannan was an impostor and a historical revisionist. I was blessed to study at his feet.”Īnd yet to others Mr. “He is a kind of godfather to all of us in African and Afro-American studies,” Cornel West, the author and activist, said. He regularly lectured to crowded auditoriums he was a disciple of Marcus Garvey and a confidant of Malcolm X, and he appeared on stages with Amiri Baraka, Al Sharpton, James Brown and Louis Farrakhan. Ben-Jochannan emerged as prominent figure in Harlem, pushing his anticolonial message to its limit, claiming that the very foundations of Western civilization, including Greek philosophy, Judaism and Christianity, were African in origin. Ben-Jochannan was a sage, a self-taught scholar who dedicated his life to uncovering the suppressed history of a people, challenging narratives that had written Africa out of world history. Ben-Jochannan was born, Africa was largely under colonial rule, the Voting Rights Act was a half-century away and the lynching of black Americans was at its peak. Ben-Jochannan died, leaving behind 13 children from three marriages and a generation of intellectuals and activists who looked to him for guidance.
Ben-Jochannan was once a powerful orator and a prolific author, one of the most vital and radical Afrocentric voices of his generation.Īnd he may have been the last. He died on March 19, 2015, at the age of 96, at the Bay Park Nursing Home in the Bronx.Though he now had difficulty speaking, exhausted by even the smallest effort, Mr. Ben-Jochannan was married three times and had a total of 13 children. In 2002, Ben-Jochannan donated his library of more than 35,000 volumes, manuscripts, and ancient scrolls to the Nation of Islam.
#DAMBALLAH WEDO DR. BEN YOSEF JOCHANNAN SERIES#
He also appeared on Gil Noble's WABC-TV weekly public affairs series Like It Is. Lefkowitz wrote that Ben-Jochannan proceeded to tell those present that "they could and should believe what black instructors told them" and "that although they might think that Jews were all 'hook-nosed and sallow-faced,' there were other Jews who looked like himself. During the question and answer session following the lecture, Lefkowitz asked Ben-Jochannan, "How would that have been possible when the library was not built until after his death?" Ben-Jochannan replied that the dates were uncertain. Ben-Jochannan taught that Aristotle visited the Library of Alexandria. In 1993, Wellesley College European classics professor Mary Lefkowitz publicly confronted Ben-Jochannan about his teachings.
At the same time, the white Jews later adopted the Jewish faith and its customs, statements that have been widely criticized. In his writings, he argues that the original Jews were from Ethiopia and were Black Africans. Ben-Jochannan, authored 49 books, primarily on ancient Nile Valley civilizations and their impact on Western cultures. From 1976 to 1987, he was an adjunct professor at Cornell University. During that time, he taught Egyptology at Malcolm King College, then at City College in New York City. He claims that in 1945, he was appointed chairman of the African Studies Committee at the headquarters of the newly founded UNESCO, a position from which he stepped down in 1970. He worked as a draftsman and continued his studies. Ben-Jochannan immigrated to the United States in the early 1940s. He received doctoral degrees in Cultural Anthropology and Moorish History from the University of Havana and the University of Barcelona, Spain. Ben 1938 earned a BS in Civil Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico and a Master's degree in Architectural Engineering from the University of Havana, Cuba, in 1939. He was a Black writer and historian.īen-Jochannan was the only child of an Afro Puerto Rican Jewish mother, Julia Matta, and an Ethiopian father, Kriston Ben-Jochannan, in a Falasha community in Ethiopia. *Yosef Alfredo Antonio Ben-Jochannan was born on this date in 1918.
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