“We came here offering ‘shalom,’ ” Mr. Ben-Israel told The New York Times in 1971. “We have been met with no jobs, no decent housing and Jim Crow policies similar to what we left behind.”

Later that year, he told The Baltimore Sun that two million blacks from the United States would wrest Israel from its Jewish inhabitants. “The Lord personally ordered me to take possession of Israel,” he said.

More followers made their way to the African Hebrew compound in Dimona, overstaying tourist visas. Tensions flared anew on April 17, 1986, when the police surrounded the village to prevent a planned protest march. Mr. Ben-Israel made an impassioned proclamation of strength to his followers but without the inflammatory talk of earlier years, and they did not push ahead with the march.

“We’re sons and daughters of peace,” he said. “We will not leave. We will wait. We will wait.” In 1990, the Israeli government offered the African Hebrews a path to permanent residency and citizenship. In return, the African Hebrews agreed to stop the flow of new members.

The community soon became more entwined with Israeli society. Many of its children who grew up in Israel have served in the country’s military. The African Hebrews have opened a small chain of vegan restaurants, and they manufacture tofu cheese for a vegan pizza sold by the Domino’s pizza chain.

Mr. Ben-Israel became an Israeli citizen in 2013.

He was born Ben Carter in Chicago on Oct. 12, 1939. After dropping out of high school, he served three years in the Army while earning his equivalency diploma, Mr. Ben-Yehuda, the spokesman, said. After his discharge he worked as a metallurgist at the Howard Foundry on the West Side of Chicago, where, he recounted, a black co-worker came up to him one day in 1961 and asked, “Did you know we are descendants of the biblical Israelites?”

Mr. Ben-Israel adopted his Hebrew name after studying the Bible. In the turmoil of the 1960s, he allied himself with those who believed that blacks would be better off leaving the United States than trying to change it from within through the civil rights movement. They established a congregation and a meeting place, calling it the A-Beta Hebrew Israel Cultural Center.