The Igbo culture always surprises me.
Today I learned that those Igbos that still pray according to the ways of Omenana, convene an additional service steeped in tradition (after they recite together the tephilloth that they have learned from Jewish sources) with the invocation: “Whom do Igbos serve?” “Yah!”
I don’t think we’re talking about a lost tribe of Israel that wandered en masse across Africa – but an Israelite nucleus that fled (northern?) Israel, migrated through Elephantine westward all the way to the Niger River Basin, where they naturalized/integrated with members of local communities and were supplemented by Jewish Berbers via Mali and Israelite/Jewish merchants from central and east Africa.
According to this theory, the nucleus diverged from Israel and the core community coalesced along the Niger River before the textual revolution of Ezra haSopher and his court in the (later!) Persian period.
Notably, unlike their Nigerian neighbors, the Igbo kept kashruth, family purity, inheritance laws, economic laws, the laws of to’eba and tuma, and male circumcision on the eighth day, just like Israelites.
Most importantly, the Igbos are unique in West Africa in preserving a form of “republicanism” that exhibits the same horizontality in socio-political organization that R José Faur z”l argued is central to Israelite society.
And according to this theory, and unlike their erstwhile Jewish cousins, the Igbos lost Hebrew, the text of the Tora, the Shabbath, the attachment to Israel, and their own history (beyond the popular tradition – “We are Israelites!”).
There remains so much research to be done in Israelite Studies, especially in Africa – anthropological studies, material culture cataloging, archival documentation, genetic sampling and classification.
We need to devote resources to developing a coherent and rigorous picture of Israelite history beyond the Jewish people, in Israel, the Middle East, Africa, and the rest of Asia.