Abdullah

Abdullah was a Black esoteric teacher active in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, remembered chiefly as the mentor of Neville Goddard and, by some accounts, of Joseph Murphy.

Neville described him as an Ethiopian rabbi and Black Jewish mystic with whom he studied for roughly seven years, learning Scripture, Hebrew, Kabbalah, and the disciplined use of imagination - the practice of “living from the end” that became the heart of Neville’s later teaching.

Joseph Murphy, late in life, similarly recalled meeting in New York a “Professor Abdullah,” a Black Jew versed in the symbolic details of the Old and New Testaments.

Abdullah’s historicity is genuine but his identity and origins remain debated, and the documentation is thin and largely second-hand. Neville never recorded a surname, and softened the “Ethiopian” claim with phrases like “I was told he was born in Ethiopia,” which some read as symbolic rather than literal given Ethiopia’s resonance in Black public life of the period.

Scholars such as Mitch Horowitz have proposed Rabbi Arnold Josiah Ford, a Harlem Black-Jewish leader, as a candidate, while other investigators have suggested a former baritone turned Kabbalah teacher who ran a study center on West 72nd Street.

This entry is offered as a sincere, careful account of a figure known mostly through his students’ testimony.