Even that lower estimate, though, would outstrip the other major group in sub-Saharan Africa to adopt Judaism over the last century: the Abayudaya of eastern Uganda. Howard Gorin, a retired American rabbi who has toured the country’s synagogues three times – and is so beloved that he’s often described as Nigeria’s de facto chief rabbi – thinks there are no more than 3,000, although he hasn’t visited the country since 2008. Edith Bruder, a French ethnologist who studies Judaism in Africa, reckons there might be as many as 30,000 Nigerian Jews. The Jewish Fellowship Initiative, an umbrella body in Nigeria, maintains a list of about 80 synagogues, but their memberships are varying and fluid. No reliable census of Nigerian Jews exists. 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. No Jewish communities arrived as part of the colonial project and stayed after its end, as they did in South Africa.īeginning 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. No Sephardic Jews migrated here from Spain and Portugal, as they did to territories in northern Africa in the 15th century. 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. Previously, Nigeria hadn’t appeared even on the periphery of any map of the Jewish realm. “That was when I became fully Jewish.”īen Avraham was an early member of one of the youngest, most surprising Jewish communities in the world. “He was the one who told me so much about Judaism, sent me books and introduced me to rabbis in the Holy Land.” So when, in 2003, Ben Avraham spotted a small posse of Port Harcourt men in distinctively Jewish attire walking into a building on a Saturday, and when he followed them in to talk to them, and when their leader told him that the building was a synagogue and that they’d decided to worship only God the creator rather than the Holy Trinity, he was already well primed.
“He told me that it should be called Ark of Hashem, because Jews don’t use Yahweh to call out the name of God,” Ben Avraham said. In 2001, a Jewish-American executive with Shell, passing through Port Harcourt, saw Ben Avraham’s Ark of Yahweh and dropped in. It had offshore rigs, chemical skies and scores of visitors from other countries. Ben Avraham opened his own hall of worship and called it Ark of Yahweh.īy this time, as the century turned, Port Harcourt was heaving with industry, on its way to becoming the biggest oil-refining city in Nigeria. Both groups convened on Saturdays, prayed barefoot to God as well as Jesus, and slaughtered rams for Passover in accordance with old Jewish scripture. To Ben Avraham, being a Messianic Jew didn’t feel very different from being a White Garment Sabbatarian. In his childhood, Ben Avraham knew nothing about Judaism, and he’d only encountered Israel as a biblical name: “Israel, Abraham, all those things,” he recalled.Ī decade later, Ben Avraham took a further step, becoming a Messianic Jew – a member of a movement that spun out of Jews for Jesus in the US half a century ago, which considers itself to be a Jewish sect that nonetheless exalts Jesus as the messiah. Islam and Christianity have been in Nigeria for centuries, but Judaism has none of that conspicuous history or heritage. On billboards, preachers hype their ministries a prayer meeting is never just a prayer meeting – it is a “global mega powerquake” or a “harvest of miracles”. The minibuses sputtering up and down these southern highways bear slogans like “Jesus is Needful” on their back windows. One of the first demographic details anyone learns about Nigeria is that while people living up north are predominantly Muslim, those down south are just as overwhelmingly Christian.
In this, they were no different from millions of others in their part of the country. His Anglican parents gave him the name Moses Walison – still his official name – and they raised him as a churchgoing boy. Ben Avraham wasn’t yet Jewish himself he wasn’t even “Ben Avraham”, for that matter. B ack in the 1970s, when Moshe Ben Avraham was growing up in Port Harcourt, in southern Nigeria, the town was small and fringed by bush villages, and there were no Jews in sight.
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