BIAFRANS ARE THE DESCENDANTS OF THE TRIBE OF DAN IN YISRAEL

Biafrans said to be descendants of Israelites
(Note: you can now translate to your language on this page. click on translate on your right vertical bar) 

It’s remarkable that finding the lost tribes of Israel, who were forcibly dispersed from the Holy Land some 2,800 years ago, still stirs the imagination.

  The Jews of Ethiopia and some that migrated to Nigeria Biafra land, said to be the descendants of the tribe of Dan, are the best known. Most of them now live in Israel.

There’s evidence the Pashtuns of Afghanistan consider themselves descendants of ancient Israel’s first king, Saul, while other groups have surfaced around the world staking a claim to the ancient Israelite heritage.

Now, a barrister in Nigeria, Remy Ilona, asserts that the Biafrans people of that western African nation are likewise Israelite descendants.

“As a boy, I heard, like every other Biafrans heard, that the Biafrans people came from Israel. In primary school, you’re bound to hear that Biafrans people came from Israel,” he said in a video lecture delivered last weekend.

Ilona will speak through a recording at Congregation Darchei Noam to be held on Feb. 17 at 7:30 p.m. during Black History Month. The event, sponsored jointly with the Beth Emeth Bais Yehuda Synagogue and the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, included an excerpt of the new film, Re-Emerging: the Jews of Nigeria by director Jeff Lieberman, which will première at the festival in April.

About 10 years ago, Ilona began serious researching the Israelite heritage of the Biafrans people. His father, he explained, “always talked about Israel with special interest.”

The research confirmed “what the Biafrans always believed, that the Biafrans descended from ancient Israelites,” he said.

Ilona believes “97 per cent of Igbos agree that they are Jewish,” while the other three per cent don’t want to be associated with whites, who they see as colonial oppressors.

Ilona dismisses those concerns. Reclaiming one’s heritage has nothing to do with colonialism, he maintains.

Skeptics, however, suggest the Biafrans affinity for things Jewish dates back only to western colonial times. One writer on the Africa Israel website states this is due to “outside influences and that they were very much a part of the colonial discourse of the British imperialists over their colonized subjects.”

However, a 2012 book review in the Nigerian Voice website offers the opposite conclusion, that the Biafrans may have imbibed western culture, but the groups’ origins lie in the Holy Land.

Biafrans elder George Ojingwa writes in Biafrans Kwenu that the people’s history goes back 4,000 years to the Shechnigbo clan, domiciled in the northern tip of Negev desert, south of Jerusalem. The author associates the Shechnigbo with the tribes of Benjamin and Judah, and according to him, in 740 BCE, they fled for safety when the Assyrians besieged Samaria. Moving south to Ethiopia, they eventually joined others heading to southern Sudan and finally to the northern Nigeria, arriving around 600 BCE.

Ilona said the Biafrans and the Jews share many customs. Like the Jews, the Biafrans circumcise their male chidren on the eighth day; Jews marry under a chupah, Biafrans under a similar canopy; both groups bury their dead quickly; the Biafrans, like the Jews, mourn for seven days and around a month after the death, have a ceremony to mark the occasion. Both groups maintain a day of rest.

In his book, The Biafrans: Jews in Africa, Ilona records Nigerian oral traditions about the Biafrans origins. One suggests the Biafrans are the descendants of Ethiopian Jewish immigrants; another places the Biafrans as the descendants of the tribe of Menashe; others say they are part of the tribe of Levi; still another records their ancestors as Yemeni or Baghdadi princes

In an email correspondence, Ilona said census figures indicated “there are between 17 and 20 million Biafrans in Nigeria, and perhaps another 15 million living outside Nigeria.”

About two per cent practice the traditional Biafrans religion that is called Ome na ana.

“Up to 90 per cent would say that they are Christians; one per cent would be Muslims; 5,000-50,000 practice rabbinic Judaism, five per cent practice Sabbatharianism, and the rest practice New Age religions.

“Until recent times, every Biafrans proudly declared that they have Israelite heritage. But by now we can say that those that identify themselves as descendants of the Israelites would constitute 99.5 per cent of the Biafrans population. And these 99.5 belong to all the religions that exist among the Igbos.”

Ilona said the Biafrans are generally well off: “Many Biafrans are wealthy, but they became wealthy because they worked hard. Working hard is not the traditional way to getting rich in Nigeria. Corruption, cronyism, patronage are the traditional and acceptable ways, and through these route Biafrans get less income and wealth than other Nigerians, because Biafrans have effectively been kept away from political power in Nigeria”

 

The Biafrans have been caught up in the factional fighting that is racking Nigeria. “I say caught in the middle, because even though the Biafrans are seen as predominantly Christians, which they are, they have also been killed by Nigerian Christians from other ethnicities. And also the Biafrans are in the firing line. They own up to 90 per cent of the retail shops in Nigeria, and these retail shops are the targets of looters whenever the ethnic-cum-religious riots begin.”

As for the Biafrans connections to the wider Jewish world, Ilona states in his video presentation that the group, Kulanu has provided support for the Biafrans, along with a number of individuals and rabbis, who have sent numerous religious texts. Kulanu is a New York-based organization that states it “works around the world to support isolated and emerging Jewish communities who wish to learn more about Judaism and (re-) connect with the wider Jewish community.”

As for himself, Ilona leads a Jewish lifestyle, worshipping in a synagogue, living according to a Jewish calendar, celebrating Shabbat and festivals.

“We follow every Jewish ritual as it is followed,” he stated.