What We Can Learn about Judaism from Sammy Davis Jr.
In 1979, the world-famous entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. explained that he was “proud to be a Black Jew…The Jewish people have endured incredible suffering. They share that in common with Black people. My own great-great-grandparents were slaves.” Ever since his conversion to Judaism in 1960, and indeed for several years before that, Davis had explained to anyone who would listen that the Jewish and the African American experiences held much in common. Yet he struggled to integrate those identities in his own life. His experience offers us a poignant example of the challenges that continue to face Jews of color in the United States today.
People of color remain a minority of the American Jewish population. While estimates differ depending on whether one defines “person of color” according to American ideas about racial identity or includes Jewish diasporic categories such as Mizrahi (North African or Middle Eastern) or Sephardic (Spanish influence), it is clear that white Ashkenazi Jews with Eastern European ancestry predominate significantly in the United States. Many non-white Jews who participate in congregational rituals or communal life continue to experience discrimination from other Jews who question their presence within Jewish spaces.
Sammy Davis Jr. felt at home among Jews. Born in 1925 in Harlem to impoverished vaudeville performers, he grew up in “the business” after his mother, a dancer, gave up custody of him to his father. When just three years old, Sammy left his paternal grandmother’s home in Harlem to travel with his father and his father’s performance partner, Will Mastin. Even as a young child, Sammy’s talents were legion. He danced, sang, did impressions, and told jokes. He starred in a film when he at age six. Soon he was regularly on stage with his father and “Uncle Will,” performing as “the Will Mastin Trio” in clubs across the United States.
Sammy had known Jews all his life — whether from the streets of Harlem, where he returned to visit his grandmother, or from the club owners and performers he met through the entertainment business. The television host and comedian Eddie Cantor mentored Davis and arranged his first tv appearance; he also gave Davis a mezuzah that he could wear on a chain around his neck. In 1954, Davis was convalescing in a hospital following a near-fatal car accident when he had the first of many conversations with a rabbi. Impressed by the rabbi’s modern dress (unlike the chasidim he saw more often in Harlem) and by the lessons he learned about Jewish history and values, Davis decided to learn all that he could about the Jewish faith. After several years of public and private attempts to define himself as Jewish, Sammy Davis Jr. formally converted in the fall of 1960. He stood under the chuppah a few weeks later and wed the Swedish actress May Britt, who had been inspired by Sammy to convert to Judaism as well.
Davis was convinced that the prophetic Judaism he learned from Reform rabbis and the prophetic vision of civil rights he supported in the movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were two sides of the same coin. Rather than a conflict between being Black and being Jewish, Davis saw them as logically compatible: “As a Negro, I felt emotionally tied to Judaism,” he explained. He was a passionate supporter of King, donating tens of thousands of dollars of his own money and leaning on his wealthy friends in Hollywood to open their wallets, too. He attended the March on Washington in 1963 and took part in the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. This fervor carried over to his understanding of Israeli politics and Zionism, which he considered to be the culmination of the Jewish people’s struggle for survival. When he arrived in Tel Aviv for the first time in 1969, he described it as “just like coming home.”
Sammy Davis Jr.’s sense of having “a kind of oneness…with Israel and the Jewish people” was all the more poignant because of the persistent racism and anti-Semitism that he endured. It was not so much that his friends in the entertainment industry — many of whom were also Jewish — thought he couldn’t be Jewish, as they thought it was a plea for attention rather than a sincerely held belief. “It was all a little gratuitous,” Tony Curtis said. On stage at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas with his (non-Jewish) pals Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, Davis was a punchline for jokes about his racial and religious difference. Davis played along, poking fun at himself and at the reactions he elicited; asked what his golf handicap was, he quipped, “My handicap? I’m a one-eyed Negro who’s Jewish.” Some African American readers of Ebony magazine accused Davis of abandoning the Protestant church that had long nurtured Black civil rights, but from his Jewish peers, Davis encountered derision more often than hostility.
This sense that there was something absurd about a Black man in the United States identifying as a Jew was augmented by the emphasis in the 1960s and 1970s on ethnic identity. Whether through Black nationalism or the “white ethnic revival,” Americans became fascinated with genealogy, the rediscovery of “tradition,” and a deeper identification with geographies of diaspora and of a homeland. Davis wanted to carve out of a place for himself in both worlds. “My people are my people, and my religion is my religion,” he explained in 1980. “I happen to be a Black Jew. I am first Black and the religion I have chosen is Judaism.”
The persistent emphasis on ethnic heritage and genealogical descent within modern Judaism is an obstacle for many Jews by choice, whatever their racial or ethnic background. The popular conflation of Ashkenazic culture with traditional Judaism can feel alienating to Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who can trace their Jewish lineage back a dozen generations. For an African American convert such as Sammy Davis Jr., who had experienced violent racism in the United States — beaten up and humiliated by white soldiers during World War II, forbidden to dine or sleep in many of the hotels where he performed well into the 1950s — he knew that he would always be an outsider. He traced his genealogy not to a shtetl in Eastern Europe but to the horrors of American slavery. His hope was that, as a Jew, he would draw strength from a resilient tradition of outsiders, whose values and sense of history enabled them to overcome their oppressors in each generation.
Davis interpreted Jewish history as the story of “a swinging bunch of people” who endured one wave of oppression after another, never giving up their sacred book or their will to survive, forging ahead to write another chapter of their history. He admired Jews not because they blended in but because they refused to give up the faith that made them distinct. This idea of Judaism as a religion of outsiders may offer us a way past the divisions of heritage, genealogy, and ethnic particularity that lead to harmful experiences of racism within Jewish spaces today. In this way, Sammy Davis Jr. offers us a way forward.
