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Around Jewish Africa
history
 More than 2,700
years ago, on a tiny strip of fertile land on the
far eastern edge of the Mediterranean, a small
band of farmers, metalworkers and merchants lost
a war and, at least temporarily, their land. A
haughty Assyrian army swept in from the north,
and as they advanced through Sameria they ravaged
the communities of Hebrews who dwelled there. The
Hebrews fought to protect their homes but in the
end they had no choice but to flee. Some took
their families and escaped to the east,
disappearing into unfamiliar Asian nations.
Others fled south into Africa, through the desert
that their people had crossed in the other
direction five hundred years before while
escaping enslavement Egypt. A tiny group of
Hebrews did remain in nearby Judea, but a century
later the Babylonians conquered them, laying
waste to their capital city, Jerusalem, and their
most sacred structure – the Temple at which
they worshipped God. The Hebrew people were
homeless, wandering as they had through the Sinai,
taking root, as they had become accustomed, in
foreign lands.
Such devastation would have marked the end
of most peoples, but the Hebrews did not allow
their defeat to finish them. Perhaps their Jewish
religion made them different enough from the
people who conquered them that they had to cling
to one another to retain it. Perhaps those who
opened their lands to the Hebrews distrusted,
disliked or feared them enough to keep them
separate. Whatever quirks of culture and history
allowed them to maintain their identity, the
Jewish people were able to survive domination by
Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians and Romans, as
well as Muslim conversions, Catholic Crusades,
centuries of Inquisition, even the Nazi Holocaust.
Though Jews maintained their own religious
beliefs, rituals and core customs through these
tribulations, they did not remain entirely
separate from the people whose lands they
inhabited. In fact, Jews often intermarried with
other peoples, bringing local genetic
characteristics (and often local cultural traits)
into their community. When the Jewish people
began their journey they were dark-skinned people,
like any other tribe that originated in the so-called
"Fertile Crescent," who spoke Hebrew
and dressed in the robes and fabrics of the
region. In the Diaspora, some Hebrews found
themselves in Asian and African countries; over
centuries, their collective skin darkened, they
began to speak local languages and live, work and
dress in a local fashion. As they developed over
centuries into a substantial European population,
the Jews there became white as their fellow
countrymen, adopting their languages and day-to-day
culture. This wandering nation may have
maintained its identity through shared history,
core beliefs and religion, but it could not
reliably define itself by superficial
characteristics like skin color, language or
style of clothing.
Even today, when more than three quarters
of the fourteen million Jews live in North
America, Europe, and the largely white nation of
Israel, one certainly does not have to have white
skin and be identifiable as a "European"
to be Jewish. In fact, there are more then a
hundred thousand people self-proclaimed Jews in
Africa today. Some of the Jews of Africa are
white as their Western cousins, but others are
dark-skinned as other North Africans, or as black
as any African dwelling in the heart of the
continent. They dress and speak like their
neighbors, live in the same kind of dwellings,
work the same type of jobs – upon a cursory
glance one might not be able to tell that they
are different.
But they are different – religiously
different from other Africans, culturally
different from the Jews who live in other parts
of the world and substantially different from one
another, for each Jewish community in Africa has
its own history, character and view of what
exactly "being Jewish" means. Many
African Jews are "transplanted" Jews,
those who have come to Africa from European
nations. Some of them, like the Spanish Jews
fleeing the Inquisition who arrived in North and
West Africa in the 15th
and 16th centuries, have
intermingled with the local community so entirely
that one can no longer call them "European."
Others, like the clearly European Jews of
Mozambique, seeded a Jewish community which
remained when the political climate of the nation
became unfavorable to non-Africans. Still others,
like the white Jews of South Africa, have built
their community on the African land but, so far,
have retained their European identity.
There are "Jews by choice," such
as the Abayudaya in Uganda and the Jews of Rusape,
Zimbabwe and of Sefwi Wiawso and Sefwi Sui in
Ghana, Africans who acknowledge their non-Jewish
lineage but in recent years have chosen to
practice Judaism. Some of them want Israel’s
Orthodox Rabbinate to accept them as Jews, others
do not seek others’ recognition of their
faith. These Africans find solace in Judaism and
identify with some aspect of the rituals, history
or culture of the Jewish people.
There are Jews by lineage, black Jews who
some researchers call, "African Hebrew
Israelites," such as the Beta Israel of
Ethiopia and the Lemba of Southern Africa, who
still practice some Jewish rituals of the ancient
Hebrews or Jewish traders who they claim seeded
their communities. There are also Moroccan,
Tunisian and Egyptian communities which have been
practicing Judaism continuously since the ancient
Hebrews fleeing Babylonian or Roman domination
founded them almost two thousand years ago.
While the variety of Jewish communities in
Africa today may confound those who have a narrow
concept of Jews and Judaism, such a variety is
only natural considering that the history of
Jewish influence on Africa is a complex, often
contradictory jumble of roaming tribes, crusading
traders and proselytizing marauders who
crisscrossed the continent imposing their own way
of life.
According to some historians, Jews first
crossed into the Nile Valley nearly two thousand
years before the birth of Jesus, perhaps in some
relationship with the Hyksos "Shepherd Kings"
who may have originated in ancient Canaan. The
Hyksos arrived in Egypt in the Second
Intermediate period in the 17th
century B.C. and roamed the Northeastern region
of Africa for centuries. There is scant
archaeological evidence to verify the Jews’
wanderings, but there is a general agreement that
a substantial number of Israelites settled in
ancient Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs. The
Exodus from Egypt led by Moses most likely took
place during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses II (1279-1212
BC). After the Jews fled Egypt they settled in
Canaan. The twelve tribal families of Hebrews
unified under the Kingdoms of Saul, David and
Solomon in the 10th and
9th centuries B.C. The
Hebrew kings were powerful rulers who expanded
their empires’ influence by trading
throughout North Africa, Egypt, the Arab
Peninsula and the Horn of Africa.
By the 7th century
B.C. the Jewish state had already split into the
two kingdoms of Judea in the south and Samaria in
the north. The Assyrians attacked this divided
kingdom in the 6th and 7th
centuries B.C. defeating the ten tribes that
comprised Israel and scattering them so widely
that no one, not political leaders, historians,
anthropologists, theologians nor even the true
believers, all of whom have claimed to have known
their whereabouts to suit their own purposes or
satisfy their own needs, has been able to prove
to have found them.
The Babylonians destroyed the Jewish Temple
in Jerusalem and exiled the southern Hebrew
kingdom in the 8th
century B.C. Some of the defeated Hebrews settled
in Babylonia itself, others set up Jewish
communities all around the Mediterranean,
including Egypt, where they set up a Temple in
Elephantine, and on the North African coast,
especially in the Tunisian city of Carthage and
on the island of Djerba. The Jews used these
footholds as a base from which they could explore
(and, in some cases, exploit) African tribes
further inland and into the Sahara. There are
recorded accounts of Jewish traders in ancient
Ghana, Tekrur and Tuat in the first centuries
after the birth of Jesus. Some historians believe
that in this period Jews from either Elephantine
or Yemen moved into present-day Ethiopia and gave
root to the Beta Israel, and perhaps into the
Bantu lands of Southern Africa that are home to
today’s Lemba. Many of Jewish merchants
moved further inland as Muslims conquered North
Africa in the 7th
century -- Jews were in Tamentit by then; one can
still see traces of Jewish architecture today. By
the 8th century there
were also reports of Jewish merchants in the
Saharan regions of Mzab, Tafilalet and Sijilmasa.
In this time Jews (and with them, through
intermarriage and some proselytizing) influenced
nomadic Berber tribes in the Atlas Mountains both
economically and culturally. The Spanish-born, 12th
century geographer al-Idrisi, 13th
century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, and the 16th
century historian Leon Africanus, wrote extensive
tomes about Berber and black Jews they
encountered in their research and travels in
Africa. The Jewish population in North Africa,
Cape Verde and the Guinea coast swelled in the 15th
and 16th centuries as
both Jews fleeing the Inquisition and those who
had "converted" to Catholicism, many of
whom still practiced Judaism secretly, settled
there. The Jewish communities thrived, especially
in North Africa, and though they faced repeated
waves of persecution at the hands of Muslim
rulers, there were Jews throughout the region
until the 20th century.
Today most former Jews – especially those in
the Sahara and West Africa – have long since
converted to Islam or Christianity, leaving only
travelers’ legend, tribal lore and the odd
artifact of their centuries of Jewish observance.
A substantial number of the Jews in Africa,
especially those in Northern Africa, emigrated to
Israel after 1948. The Beta Israel followed suit
in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,
leaving only a portion of the community in
Ethiopia. Even many white South African Jews have
left Africa for Israel or the West.
Despite nearly two millennia of persecution,
forced conversion and the constant drain of
migration, once can still find Jews in most every
part of Africa. Perhaps the Jews have been so
determined to stay in Africa because they
penetrated the continent slowly – they chose
Africa as their land with purpose, and have
struggled to remain there because, after all,
over centuries Africa became their home.
around
jewish africa
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