THE LOST JEWS OF NIGERIA

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. Ben Avraham wasn’t yet Jewish himself; he wasn’t even “Ben Avraham”, for that matter. His Anglican parents gave him the name Moses Walison and raised him as a church going boy. In this, they were no different from millions of others in their part of the country. 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. Islam and Christianity have been in Nigeria for centuries, but Judaism has none of that history or heritage. In his childhood, Ben Avraham knew nothing about Judaism, and only encountered Israel as a biblical name: “Israel, Abraham, all those things,” he recalled.

Then, in 1986, his father died, and a few years later, in the midst of a growing disaffection with his church, Ben Avraham fell ill: a cut on his tongue set off a severe infection. At the time, he came across a Christian ministry called the White Garment Sabbath, and after one of its white-robed, barefooted priests healed him, he joined the group. The White Garment Sabbath calls itself a church, and its prayer halls host icons of Christ on the cross. “But they told me that Saturday is the day of worship, the shabbat – not Sunday,” Ben Avraham said. It was the first time he’d heard this, but when they offered him proof – careful readings of Genesis and Exodus – he wondered what else he’d been doing wrong. “On my own,” he said, “I started to go deeper.”

A 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 exalts Jesus as the messiah. To Ben Avraham, being a Messianic Jew didn’t feel very different from being a White Garment Sabbatarian. Both groups convened on Saturdays, prayed barefoot to God as well as Jesus, and slaughtered rams for Passover in accordance with old Jewish scripture. Ben Avraham opened his own hall of worship and called it Ark of Yahweh.

By this time, as the century turned, Port Harcourt was heaving with industry, on its way to becoming the biggest oil-refining city in Nigeria. In 2001, a Jewish-American executive with Shell, passing through Port