The Lost Jews of Nigeria
30th April 2022
Ben Avraham was an early member of one of the youngest, most surprising Jewish communities in the world. Previously, Nigeria hadn’t appeared even on the periphery of any map of the Jewish realm. There is no old text laying down a Jewish lineage for Nigerians, the way the Kebra Nagast, the 14th-century epic, purported to do for the kings of Ethiopia. No Sephardic Jews migrated here from Spain and Portugal, as they did to territories in northern Africa in the 15th century. No Jewish communities arrived as part of the colonial project and stayed after its end, as they did in South Africa.
Beginning in the 1990s, though, a number of people in southern and eastern Nigeria have become practising Jews, importing wholesale the rites of this unfamiliar faith and its foreign tongue. Seemingly, this turn has been spontaneous – which is to say, there have been no local rabbis at hand to pilot these Jews through their incipient religion, and there has certainly been no formal guidance from Israel, which refuses to recognise this as a Jewish population.