6 - Propagating Modern Jewish Identity in Madagascar: A Contextual Analysis of One Community’s Discursive Strategies

Summary

IN MID-MAY 2016, a group of 121 women, men, and children on the island of Madagascar formally converted to Judaism. The members of the North American Orthodox rabbinical court who conducted the conversions, as well as the organizers of the occasion—leaders of the New York City-based Jewish outreach group Kulanu—had never met any of the individuals scheduled to undergo conversion in person. Before the conversions, the Westerners had only vague and secondhand notions about the proselytes’ difficulties in maintaining a religiously observant lifestyle in a country that has been plagued with endemic corruption and barely functioning infrastructure for decades. What is more, only one of the three rabbis on the rabbinical court and several volunteers who accompanied the Kulanu delegation spoke French, Madagascar's second official language; none spoke Malagasy, the converts’ native tongue.

Given these ostensibly dire barriers in communication, which might have easily set the proselytes up for a post-conversion descent into mayhem, confusion, and backsliding, how could all parties involved be reasonably certain that this life-altering event had any chance of coming to a successful fruition? The answer is a twenty-first-century one: their reliance upon and faith in the efficacy of the culture of digital communications, which they had harnessed in myriad ways since 2013 in order to prepare for the conversions. Their exploitation of globalized digital mechanisms towards this spiritual end included Google Translate, YouTube, Facebook, Skype, WhatsApp, Google Chat, online encyclopedias, and even that veritable dinosaur of store-and-forward technology, email. In retrospect, it seems fitting that the Malagasies’ eventual inclusion into kelal yisra’el, the worldwide Jewish community, was facilitated by the same kind of medium— the globalized matrix of mass communication—that had initially enabled them to come together to learn about post-exilic Judaism in the first place.

As individuals who have only recently come to know about normative Judaism through mainly online means, the Malagasies are in good company. Other such groups of contemporary ‘Internet Jews’ from the developing world, especially the sub-Saharan African regions, include the Igbo of Nigeria, the Beth Yeshourun (House of the Righteous) community of Cameroon, and the Communauté juive du Gabon neutraliste (Neutralist Jewish Community of Gabon), all of which, in Heidi Campbell's categorization, belong to the ‘increasingly flexible, transitional, and transnational’ world of ‘networked religion’, in which the modes of traditionally transmitted spiritual propriety are usurped in favour of decentralized communicative strategies (Campbell 2012: 85).