Date (happened)
- c. 1900 (possible)field_clip_date on the media item, derived from the scan filename 'Reading-Times1900HEBREW.jpg'
- 1900 (possible)field_clip_date on the media item: CWB filename date (bare year in filename), 1900-jew.jpeg
- c. 1900 (possible)media field_clip_date claim (AI dating pass 2026-08-17), filename year 1900 on this witness's own scan, matching Reading-Times1900HEBREW.jpg's citation for the same editorial
A newspaper piece ('Negro Jews', reprinted from Reading Times) reports that The American Hebrew 'thinks it is time to stop the immigration of the African Hebrew', noting the paper 'had long supposed there was only one of him, but others are appearing in America with begging proclivities well developed'. The piece disputes calling black itinerants 'African Hebrews', arguing most African Jews (from the old North African Jewish settlements predating the Arab invasion) are not negro in appearance, and that negro Hebrews in Africa are rare. Collected by CWB as background for Neville's account of Abdullah as an Ethiopian Jew; read alongside the named itinerant-traveler reports elsewhere in this corpus (Waltzkowitz, Valskabomann, Wolskowicy) and the unnamed blind traveler in node 4084, this piece is contemporary evidence that more than one man was working this claim in this period — CWB's own thesis, not resolved here.
Second, independently scraped copy of this clipping (node 4094, image '1900-egy.jpeg') reproduces the same 'Negro Jews' text word for word.
The original American Hebrew text (this is fuller than the Reading Times paraphrase already cited) states that for a period of two or three years all accounts of 'an African Hebrew' indicated a single individual, but that there now appear to be more than one, 'to judge from the different accounts we have seen'; it argues he should be 'suppressed by being forced to earn his livelihood' rather than given alms, warning in a comic aside (echoing Gilbert & Sullivan's Pinafore) that his 'brothers, and his cousins, and his uncles' will otherwise follow.