Yosef ben-Jochannan ("Dr. Ben")

Background

Yosef Alfredo Antonio ben-Jochannan, widely known as "Dr. Ben," was born on 31 December 1918, according to a New York State Senate resolution. BlackPast says he was born in Ethiopia to an Ethiopian father and an Afro-Puerto Rican mother, in a Beta Israel (Falasha) community. Biographical accounts say he was schooled in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil and Spain, and that he came to the United States in the early 1940s. There he worked as a draftsman while continuing his studies.

Work

Ben-Jochannan is credited with 49 books, pamphlets and papers, mostly on the ancient civilizations of the Nile Valley and their influence on later cultures. His best-known titles include Black Man of the Nile and His Family, African Origins of the Major "Western Religions" and Africa: Mother of Western Civilization. In them he argued for the African character of ancient Egypt and its foundational role in Western thought and religion.

He began teaching in Harlem in the 1950s at Malcolm-King College, later taught at City College of New York, and held an adjunct appointment at Cornell University from 1976 to 1987. For more than four decades he led annual educational tours to Egypt, and also to Ethiopia and Sudan. Writer Todd Steven Burroughs credits these tours with bringing thousands of African Americans to Egypt. Burroughs also writes that ben-Jochannan helped found the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations. In 2002 he donated a personal library of more than 35,000 volumes to the Nation of Islam.

Questions about credentials and scholarship

Biographies issued in his lifetime and after his death, including the 2015 Senate resolution, list degrees in engineering from the University of Puerto Rico, a master's and a doctorate from the University of Havana, and a doctorate from the University of Barcelona. A 2015 NY City Lens report noted that The New York Times had questioned his credentials. According to that report, he had claimed degrees from Cambridge University and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, and the Times found no record that he attended either. Supporters quoted in the same report said formal degrees were beside the point.

His historical claims have also drawn academic criticism. The classicist Mary Lefkowitz, in Not Out of Africa (1996), described a 1993 Wellesley College lecture in which he said Aristotle had taken ideas from the Library of Alexandria. She argued this was impossible because the library was assembled after Aristotle's death. BlackPast notes that critics accused him of distorting history because his views ran against the prevailing account of Egyptian and African history.

Legacy

Ben-Jochannan died in New York on 19 March 2015, aged 96. Hundreds of people lined up for his funeral at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. To admirers he was a "people's scholar" who taught generations of Black Americans that their history began long before slavery. To critics he exemplified Afrocentric claims that lacked evidence. Both views remain part of how his work is discussed.