CONTEXT

 With the development of a Judaic identity among African communities in the Americas towards the end of the eighteenth century, a similar phenomenon started to occur in Africa during the nineteenth century. All these movements partly rely on the central narrative of the Scriptures as a form of resistance to a feeling of oppression and on a common need to recover identity and history. The wider argument identifying the Hebrews of the Bible with a black nation came to be a dominant feature of pan-African American movements in their formative period. 

In Africa the construction of Judaic identities by missionaries and colonial civil servants formed an insistent part of the interface between indigenous peoples and colonialism, and the Israelite paradigm formed a vital building block in the colonial attempt to comprehend African religious culture and African society.

The last several decades have witnessed some surprising consequences of such colonial activity in the emergence of a significant and growing number of sub-Saharan African ethnic groups in Mali, Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa and elsewhere who trace their origins to Israelite antecedents or to the Lost Tribes of Israel. These groups may be viewed along with older Judaizing groups such as the Lemba of southern Africa and the Abayudaya of Uganda as a new Judaic African fraternity increasingly linked by e-mails, Facebook and other new forms of communication.