Another Jar of Jellybean
Okay, 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 places a jar of jellybeans in front of you. You’re told to guess how many are inside. “If you get it wrong,” the face grins, “no vote.”
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, even former President Barack Obama reminded us of this ugly past at Congressman John Lewis’s funeral: “We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans 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, to ancient Judea, and thus to 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), which emboldened Europeans to either steal or destroy such records. This is the dilemma facing Nigerian Igbo Jews.
The Jim Crow jellybean test and Israel’s demand for “precolonial Judaic proof” may look like different tests, but beneath the surface, they are the same: exclusion disguised as procedure and those behind the schemes as innocent proceduralists. But there’s nothing innocent in setting impossible conditions never meant to be met and denying rights that already exist: the right to vote in one case and the right to return in the other. These are tests neither of literacy nor faith, but of endurance in the face of cruelty.
Israel’s Law of Return (1950) promises citizenship to Jews worldwide. Yet in practice, a racialized double standard has emerged. Igbo Jews, widely identified as descendants of Gad, one of Israel’s lost tribes, are asked for precolonial documentation. This requirement ignores African oral traditions, ritual continuity, and the colonial record of suppression: missionaries themselves documented how Hebrew prayers were replaced by English hymns, synagogues repurposed or destroyed, and family genealogies erased from official registers. Baptismal certificates supplanted ancestral scrolls, severing legal recognition of Jewish continuity. That’s if the demand were legitimate, which, of course, it was not.
Consider the case of the Soviet aliyah. During the aliyah, more than a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union, many with tenuous or no Jewish ties at all, were welcomed into Israel under the Law of Return without such scrutiny. And, consider the 2017 statement (since deleted from The Times of Israel website) in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel “does not recognize any lost tribes.” Together these examples expose the disingenuity and duplicity in the demand for precolonial Judaic evidence and the double standards in the Law of Return’s application. Africans must “prove” what colonization destroyed; Europeans need only show up.
The irony is painful. The modern State of Israel grounds its legitimacy in biblical continuity, often citing verses such as Genesis 17:8 as deed and divine mandate. Yet when it comes to descendants of Gad, Dan, or Ephraim who happen to be Black, the same Torah suddenly loses its evidentiary power.
This isn’t merely theological gatekeeping. It is spiritual apartheid, a system where European Jews are waved through the gates of return while African Jews are stalled outside, told to prove what colonialism itself destroyed. Apartheid is not only walls and checkpoints. It is also the bureaucratic weaponization of doubt against a people’s very identity.
To be clear, the Igbo are not alone. Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) were long denied recognition until Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s 1973 ruling, and even then, they faced discriminatory treatment: segregated schools, discarded blood donations, and obstacles to marriage. Similarly, the Lemba of Southern Africa, who preserve Israelite oral traditions and carry the Cohen Modal Haplotype, remain effectively ignored by Israel. Despite cultural continuity and genetic validation, they are denied recognition under the Law of Return. The message is clear: even when Africans present more evidence than Europeans, it is still deemed insufficient.
Defenders of the current policy argue that requiring documentation protects Israel from fraudulent claims. But that defense collapses under scrutiny. No such proof was required of Soviet immigrants admitted under the Law of Return, nor was it demanded of Ethiopian Jews once rabbinic approval was granted. In practice, the “documentation” standard has been wielded selectively: rigorous for Africans, relaxed for Europeans.
If Israel truly believes in the Law of Return, it must abolish this precolonial requirement and treat oral tradition, ritual continuity, and even genetic evidence as valid. Fairness also requires a reckoning: if hundreds of thousands of Soviet immigrants were admitted despite tenuous ties, the state must, at a minimum, acknowledge that distortion. That need not mean mass expulsions, but it does mean making space, in law, in policy, and in conscience (but not in Palestinian landgrabs), for the Igbo and others whose claims are as old as Israel itself. To deny rightful heirs while retaining mistaken beneficiaries is to compound injustice with hypocrisy.
As a diasporic Igbo, descended from America’s “Chosen People” (trafficked and enslaved Africans chosen to build young America and her wealth), I feel this wound personally. My people preserved what they could through centuries of displacement, enslavement, colonial oppression, and wealth extraction. Some of us still pray in Hebrew. Some returned to rabbinic Judaism, others to Omenala, our ancestral faith. And some, like me, raised Baptist, have always felt a connection to Judaism and a desire for conversion that we cannot fully explain.
Although I am not personally seeking Israeli citizenship, I support it for any Jewish Igbo who desires it. My role is advocacy: pointing out the unfairness in how the Law of Return is applied, and proposing solutions. Because in the end, what is at stake is not just policy. It is dignity, belonging, and honoring the right of a people to return home.
Anything less is just another jar of jellybeans.
Tonnie Darron Walls is a University of Oxford graduate, an English language educator, and a diasporic Igbo American writer based in Harlem.
