Police officers scramble during a shootout with two gun-wielding Black Hebrew Israelites who attacked a kosher grocery on Tuesday.

When the news first crossed the wires Tuesday about a lethal attack on a Jewish market in Jersey City, New Jersey, in which six people, including a police officer and the two gunmen, died, speculation ran rampant on social media that it might be another act of far-right terrorism inspired by anti-Semitism. After the smoke had cleared, that concern had largely been confirmed, but with a complicated twist: at least one of the perpetrators turned out to be an apparent follower of the black-nationalist Black Hebrew Israelite movement, which is indeed deeply anti-Semitic, and which has inspired an ongoing litany of violent acts over the past decade and longer.

According to The New York Times, 47-year-old David N. Anderson—who had posted anti-Semitic material on social media before the attack, and left a rambling manifesto behind in a van left at the scene full of hateful references to Jews—was connected to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement. He and 50-year-old Francine Graham, the second suspect, opened fire on customers inside the Jewish market after having first shot a Jersey City police detective near a cemetery.

The scene turned into a six-hour shootout and standoff with police, at the end of which both suspects were killed. A pipe bomb was found in the van alongside the manifesto. Police spokesmen have denied that the incident was terrorism, but local Jewish leaders are insisting that the case is a clear-cut hate crime.

Black Hebrew Israelites occupy a complicated space in the realm of right-wing extremism. Black nationalists such as these groups are largely isolated from other sectors of the far right, which are dominated by white nationalists, but still draw many of their ideas from bigoted and anti-Semitic elements of the old white-supremacist right.

This is acutely true of Black Hebrew Israelites, because they adhere to a kind of religious belief system that portrays black people as the true Children of Israel. It is remarkably similar in form and content—in many ways a kind of mirror image—to the old Christian Identity movement, which held that white people are the true Israelites, and that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan. This was the religion practiced by the Aryan Nations church in northern Idaho in the ’80s and ‘90s, which spawned a wave of horrific crimes around the West, as part of Identity’s program to create an all-white homeland in the Pacific Northwest; Black Hebrew Israelites similarly advocate for creating an all-black homeland for African Americans.