Tribes of Benjamin: A Novel (The Reverend Doctor Howard Thurgood)

Can a black person be a Jew? Benjamin’s mother is white and Jewish, the daughter of Holocaust survivors who escaped Hitler’s invasion of Poland and immigrated to Brooklyn, New York. Benjamin’s father is black, the son of an African American mother and an Ethiopian refugee who escaped Mussolini’s invasion of Emperor Haile Selassie’s country. Raised by his father to be a Christian, Benjamin’s mother secretly raises him a Jew. After going off to college, he becomes a Muslim, a member of the Nation of Islam, and later one of the Fruit of Islam ministers over a mosque. Benjamin’s leadership over the brothers and sisters at Muhammad’s Mosque #5 in St. Louis proceeds smoothly and uninterrupted...until he attends the Million Man March. The experience of that day of atonement, reconciliation, and responsibility awakens in Benjamin a need to commence a journey which takes him first to Ethiopia and unexpectedly to Israel. A week following the Million Man March, Captain John Muhammad summons three of his lieutenants to Mosque #5 for a secret meeting. What happens next to the brilliant young man, Benjamin—whose life has unfolded at the vortex of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is a murder that can be investigated by one man only. The Reverend Doctor Howard Thurgood, leading expert in theological criminology, a mystic who retreats to desert for his contemplations, is called upon to find the answer to why Benjamin had gotten himself into a situation to be murdered, why he had become a Muslim when he was a Jew, and why his last words were “Tribes of Benjamin.” At the time of writing this novel, in the late 1990s, the author, then named Jon Michael Spencer, was a distinguished Professor at the University of Richmond. Since the year 2005, the year he departed academe and expatriated to Tanzania, he has had the name Yahya Jongintaba. His novel came back to mystical life over the last six years of living off the grid in Tanzanian forestland overlooked by the Uluguru Mountains, in the region of Morogoro.