Beyond the River Sambatiyon: the restoration of an erased Israelite memory
Address – Chief Rabbi of Africa
Kvod HaRabbanim,
Kvod HaRav Meir Sitruk Shlita,
Kvod Adon Yitshak Mamo, representative of the World Zionist Organization,
Honored community leaders,
Honored Bantu Tribal Chiefs,
Dear brothers and sisters, children of Africa and of Israel,
Shalom Aleikhem.
I stand before you with an emotion that words can hardly contain. For some, today we are merely opening a conference. For me – and, I believe, for Heaven – we are opening a breach in history: the first deliberate, structured encounter between the Chief Rabbinate of Africa and the question of the Bantu Israelites, the scattered descendants of the Ten Tribes.
We have not gathered here for an academic debate. We are here because souls, entire villages, entire peoples have carried for centuries a wounded memory, an unextinguished intuition:
“We belong to the House of Israel.”
1. The sufferings and erasure of an Israelite memory
Our continent has been the scene of an accumulation of suffering that defies imagination: raids, slave trades and the transatlantic slave trade, forced conversions, colonization, dispossession, genocides, and the systematic erasure of languages, lineages, and rituals.
Over the centuries, not only were the bodies of the Bantu exploited, but their story was stolen. Their ancestors were caricatured as “pagans without history,” as ridiculous sorcerers, as peoples destined to be civilized by others. In this great lie, one point is particularly painful: the erasure of their Israelite memory. How many customs, laws of purity, forms of Shabbat, tribal structures, and origin narratives were despised and reclassified as “African superstition,” when in fact they carried the trace of the Torah of our forefathers?
Today, we say: enough. Not in anger, but with the determination of those who have decided to take back the narration of their own identity.
This affirmation of a non-belligerent posture is not a slogan, but a genuine truth flowing from my heart and from the hearts of those whom I have trained, in order to honor my Masters — those who made me a Rabbi: the Talmidei Chachamim, the Geonim, the Chassidim, and the Mekubalim of Yeshivat Beit El of Rav Getz zatsal, in the Old City of Jerusalem. For more than five years, they taught me to distance myself from bad character traits (the Middot Ra’ot) through Tikkunim and Prishut — in other words, through fasts, asceticism, and self‑mortification. I gave no rest to my body nor to my soul in order to be worthy of the Torah of Israel in all the splendor of the Pardes (Pshat, Remez, Drash, Sod), all of it Al Pi Sod (according to the inner, secret dimension of the Torah). In doing so, I sought to honor the introduction of Rabbi Chaim Vital in Sha’arei Kedusha, by striving to be part of that hidden minority that wants to be counted among the Bnei Aliyah.
During the more than ten years I spent in Israel, while founding my family there, I learned to know and understand Israeli society in all that it has to offer, for better and for worse, always in relation to our Holy Torah: from the unshakeable solidarity of everyday Jews to the persistent hostility of certain political and religious elites. Despite receiving rabbinic ordination with flying colors, and as a Black Bantu Rabbi — and especially a non‑Ethiopian one, fully assuming a particular character and methodology — I had to create my own opportunities. Indeed, no Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, or Chassidic community sees in a Black Rabbi the natural possibility of faithfully embodying its Minhagim (traditions). This, to some extent, I can understand.
But the “sea serpent” that remains is the fact that, in the collective subconscious, a Black Rabbi is almost automatically assumed to be incompetent. This reality is the invisible extension of a world that is more than xenophobic — for we could have stopped at the resentment of those who do not resemble us physically — but in fact a racist world which, through its science and its legislation, portrayed Black people, and the Bantu among them, as backward beings, inferior even to animals. This is illustrated by the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900, where the descendants of Yaakov, the Bantu Israelites, were paraded in cages for the pleasure and curiosity of a sick and morally diseased society — echoing the words of Rabbi Chaim Vital.
To respond to this, in 2019, with the permission of my Masters, I opened the Beit Midrash Botsina Kadisha, which has today become the Rabbinical School of the Chief Rabbinate of Africa. There I have trained students and rabbis who chose to place their trust in me — students who had undergone conversion to Judaism in France, the USA, Israel, and elsewhere — under the highest
demands of the “good pots” in which the good recipes of the Mekubalim of old are prepared, heirs of the Rosh HaMekubalim, Rabbi Nechounia ben HaKanah.
This involves intense and diligent study of Chumash Al Pi Ramban; complete mastery of Halakhot according to the Ben Ish Chai and the Kaf HaChaim (Rabbi Yaakov Chaim Sofer); learning Mishnah Al Pi Sod in order to be able to rule Halakha Al Pi Mishnah; studying the Talmud Yerushalmi Al Pi Sod as a priority, with an emphasis on the tractates Berakhot, Avodah Zarah, and Sanhedrin in order to uphold a very ancient tradition of study; studying the Tikunei Zohar, the Kitvei HaAri, and a number of Sefarim Kadmonim (early works) such as Otiyot deRabbi Akiva and Sefer HaKanah, and not forgetting the exclusive study of Sha’arei Kedusha for Mussar and Tikkunim through fasting and Kavanot. All of this high level of demand comes first from my obsession with doing things properly and applying the Halakhot correctly, in accordance with the wisdom of our Masters — but also from the conviction that excellence is, and remains, the only effective weapon against xenophobia, racism, and mockery.
Thus, in 2023, 120 Bantu Israelite and Jewish associations came together to create the Federation of the Jews of Africa and, shortly thereafter, to organize elections to establish and appoint the Chief Rabbinate of Africa. My committee and I won those elections. In this way, independence and self‑determination have become one of the pillars of the greatest rectification in history.
2. The Halakhic Starting Point: The Ruling of Rav Chaim Kanievsky זצ״ל
Our approach does not arise from resentment, nor from some identity-driven fantasy. It begins, very precisely, with a halakhic ruling.
When the question of the Igbo of Nigeria was brought before Rav Chaim Kanievsky זצ״ל in 2016, he did not dismiss the matter with a wave of the hand. He asked that they be helped and that they be granted recognition – and he spoke, in their regard, of a geirut lechumra.
Allow me to explain this term precisely, according to contemporary Orthodox Judaism, because it lies at the heart of our work.
A geirut lechumra is a conversion performed “out of stringency,” as a precaution. They are not saying: “These people are complete non‑Jews, and we are deciding to make them Jews.”
They are saying: “Everything indicates that there is here a Zera Yisrael, a seed of Israel, a real root – but one that is uncertain within the classic halakhic categories. In order to remove all doubt, and to allow full integration without later contestation, we add a full act of conversion, not to create their Jewishness, but to lock it in halakhically.”
Rav Kanievsky did not say: “Leave them aside.”
He said, in essence: “You have brothers here knocking at the door. Open it. Welcome them. But do so with the rigor of Halakha.”
Now, the Igbo are one branch of the great Bantu family. They are not an isolated, exotic case. If, for them, a gadol hador– a Great Torah Sage of the generation – recognized the need for assistance, recognition, and geirut lechumra, this provides a solid halakhic foundation for serious reflection regarding all Bantu peoples who claim an Israelite origin.
3. My Approach: Taking Responsibility for Our Own Reconnection
In the face of this halakhic ruling, we could have remained passive and allowed others to decide for us. We did exactly the opposite.
Together with my committee and the leadership of the Chief Rabbinate of Africa, we wrote, reached out, spoke up, and sounded the alarm – to the State of Israel, to Jewish institutions, and to the Bantu communities themselves. We said:
“The renewed halakhic reconnection of the Bantu Israelites cannot be managed without us, not over our heads, and not against us.”
We cannot accept a situation in which external bodies – who at times do not know our languages, our histories, or our traditions – allow themselves, alone, to approve or invalidate our identity. We reject a paternalistic attitude that speaks from the outside and says:
“These will be recognized, those will not be – solely according to our criteria.” Therefore, we began to structure and regulate this process, first and foremost through the publication of a halakhic responsum regarding Rav Kanievsky’s rabbinic directive, as well as through the issuance of the first rabbinic decree of the Chief Rabbinate of Africa, called Niflaot Be’eretz Cham (“Wonders in the Land of Ham”), which enabled us to:
• draft geirut lechumra protocols tailored to the real situation of the Bantu peoples – which we chose to call “reconnection”;
• map and document halakhic traditions still alive on the ground (lunar‑based Shabbat, additional stringencies in niddah, widespread brit milah, and more);
• build and formalize a Nusach Afriki – an African path of Torah observance, faithful to the Sages of the Mishnah, the Talmud, and the great Mekubalim.
This initiative is not a secession from the Jewish people. On the contrary – it is the entry of a new, mature, and responsible actor at the table of Klal Yisrael.
3. Forgotten Memories: The 1830 Letter and the Classical Sources
What we are undertaking is not without precedent in Jewish tradition.
In 1830, a rabbi named Yisrael of Shklov (also known as Yisrael of Tzfat), a disciple of the Vilna Gaon, sent a letter to the Ten Lost Tribes. This letter, written on behalf of the Ashkenazi communities of the Land of Israel, was addressed to the Ten Tribes and to the “sons of Moses” said to be living beyond the River Sambatyon. Carried by the emissary Rabbi Baruch ben Shmuel, it expresses the burning desire of the Jews in exile—described as weakened and persecuted—to reconnect with these tribes, perceived as powerful, sovereign, and spiritually pure. Among them we may count the Bana Isolele and the Bnei Kongo.
The letter is structured around three major requests:
• Spiritual intercession: Asking the Ten Tribes to pray for an end to the sufferings of exile and for the rebuilding of the Temple, since their spiritual purity grants them direct access to the “heavenly palaces.”
• Halakhic restoration: Requesting that judges possessing semikhah (authentic rabbinic ordination) be sent to reestablish a Sanhedrin in the Land of Israel—an essential condition for the final redemption according to Maimonides.
• Material support: Appealing for urgent financial aid to save the Jewish communities in the Land of Israel, which at that time were crushed by debt and poverty.
This letter is a deeply moving testimony: even in the nineteenth century, leading sages of Israel knew that the entire House of Jacob was not gathered in Europe or the Middle East. They understood that fragments of Israel were living elsewhere—perhaps precisely in places where so many preferred not to look: in Africa.
To this we must add the Talmudic and Midrashic sources:
• The Gemara and various midrashim speak of the Ten Tribes exiled “beyond the rivers of Kush.”
• The Zohar, on the Haftara of Parashat Shoftim (Isaiah 52:4), comments on the verse, “My people went down to Egypt… and the Assyrian oppressed them without cause,” to explain that the Assyrian exile carried parts of Israel far, very far, into lands that our modern maps now call Africa.
• The commentaries of Rashi on the Gihon and the land of Cush, reread in light of contemporary geography, point more convincingly toward the Congo basin than toward a modern “Ethiopia” redefined by European cartographers.
None of this “proves,” in a mathematical or laboratory sense, that a given Bantu village descends from a specific biblical tribe—we are not dealing with DNA test results. But it is more than enough to say that the halakhic and historical possibility of Israelite Bantus is not only open, but is in fact strongly supported by our own classical Jewish texts.
5. Moses, King of Kush, and the Imprint of Forty Years
One source, in particular, must be recalled:
The texts transmitted by the Arizal and by the midrashim concerning the forty years of Moshe Rabbeinu's reign over the kingdom of Kush.
Before returning to Egypt as the emissary of Hashem, even before standing before the burning bush –
Moshe Rabbeinu governed an African kingdom.
There he was crowned king, and there he was given the queen Adoniah as his wife. Forty years of rule by a prophet and future lawgiver do not pass without leaving an imprint. And within Bantu culture, we find echoes of that ancient imprint:
• The centrality of tribal lineages and ancestral land;
• The importance of traditional chiefs and kingships as authorities that are both political and spiritual;
• Patterns of judicial systems that recall the judges of Moses, sitting "under the tree," where the judge must be wise, versed in the hidden as well as the revealed, possessing deep understanding of both law and the mysteries of the world.
As we often say:
"What Moses established cannot be undone."
The kingdoms of Kush and their descendants still carry, within their social structures, something of that Mosaic imprint.
This is manifested, among other things, in the persistent determination of Israelite Bantus to always establish for themselves political leadership imbued with real wisdom and a genuine understanding and mastery of spirituality and all that pertains to the hidden Torah—the mystical tradition.
This is also why rabbinic ordination from the Chief Rabbinate of Africa cannot be conferred upon a candidate unless he has also attained the status of Tribal Chief.
It is with this same logic that I was able to run as a candidate for the Presidency of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2023. The political ambition—or more accurately, the political engagement—of the rabbis of our institution is in no way an expression of a thirst for power or financial appetite, but rather the authentic expression of the will to see the more than 400 million Bantus and their lands achieve complete liberation—politically, spiritually, and in Torah.
6. Am Bnei Yisrael and Bnei Yisrael: Distinguishing the Roots
The Arizal, in Sha’ar HaPesukim on Parashat Shemot, gives us a remarkable key. He distinguishes between:
• Bnei Yisrael – the direct descendants of the seventy souls who went down to Egypt;
• Am Bnei Yisrael – those Egyptians whom Yosef had circumcised and whom Yaakov later brought into the covenant, whom the Torah sometimes calls “the people of the children of Israel.”
These converts lived separately, in their own cities. They practiced a form of Torah, but they did not share exactly the same root as Israel itself. They later became what the tradition calls the Erev Rav.
Why is this important for us?
Because Africa has carried both of these realities:
• Lineages that descend directly from the Tribes, who passed through the Assyrian exile and were then settled in the heart of the continent;
• Peoples who joined the covenant, converted already in the Egyptian period and then were scattered, who kept the flame of Torah alive from within the nations of Kush. So when we speak of Israelite Bantus, we are not speaking only in terms of “blood” or “genetics.” We are speaking of a complex fabric, in which physical descent, ancient conversions, and lived fidelity to the commandments are all interwoven.
7. The Haftara of Shoftim and the Four-Fifths Who Remained in Egypt
The Haftara of Parashat Shoftim alludes to the conclusion of the 400 years of Egyptian exile and to the intervention of Assyria.
Rabbi Nechunia ben HaKana, in Torat HaKana – Hilkhot Pesach, and other sages, remind us of a striking fact:
Only one-fifth of the people left Egypt with Moshe.
Four-fifths remained behind, or were later carried off by other empires.
These four-fifths, who are invisible in our family Haggadot, still exist in the memory of the Torah. Where did they go? Where do their descendants live today? The texts speak of Kush, of Afriki, of territories that rabbinic literature associates with the South.
When we speak of Israelite Bantus, we are, in truth, asking about those four-fifths of the people whom official history stopped looking at—but whom Divine Providence never abandoned.
8. Why a “Mishnaic” Torah Is Necessary
A word now about methodology.
We love and deeply respect the Shulchan Aruch. It has been the backbone of Jewish practice for centuries; it organizes the details of daily life for someone already recognized as a Jew. But when it comes to the question of the Ten Lost Tribes, the Shulchan Aruch was not written to address entire peoples returning after twenty-seven centuries of separation, with fragmentary Jewish practices, intact tribal structures, but without written genealogies or continuous communal records. For this kind of question, we must go further back:
• to the Mishnah,
• to the Talmud,
• to the great Mekubalim who discuss Zera Yisrael, Erev Rav, Am Bnei Yisrael, • to what we might call a “Mishnaic Torah” – a fresh reading of the foundational categories that define the status of Israel.
Not in order to replace the Shulchan Aruch, but to provide it with the conceptual tools it lacks when the subject is not a single individual, but an entire continent knocking at the door. This is precisely how the Chief Rabbinate of Africa is working:
• starting from Mishnaic, Talmudic, and Kabbalistic sources,
• in order to build a coherent halakhic framework that allows us to recognize the Ten Tribes, while remaining fully faithful to rabbinic rigor.
9. The Federation of the Jews of Africa: Responsible Autonomy
Practically speaking, how are we moving forward?
Through the independent creation of the Federation of the Jews of Africa, one hundred and twenty associations, across multiple countries and communities, voted:
• to recognize the need for autonomous management of all matters relating to the status of Israelite Bantus;
• to elect an African Rabbinic Committee charged with studying each case seriously, organizing giyorim lechumra, when necessary, and setting clear standards of communal practice;
• to entrust this committee— which I have the honor of chairing— with a mandate until 2033.
This structure is not an act of rebellion. It is an act of maturity.
It means:
“We assume our share of responsibility in building Klal Yisrael.
We no longer outsource the definition of our identity entirely to others.
We come with our Torah, our evidence, our suffering, and our longing for unity.”
10. From Suffering to Responsibility
Brothers and sisters,
We have suffered enough from letting the “other” define who we are.
We have suffered enough from seeing our traditions treated as exotic curiosities or superstitions. We have suffered enough from being invited in through the side door, like unruly students being lectured from the outside on what it means to be a Jew.
Now is the time to transform suffering into responsibility:
• the responsibility to study seriously;
• the responsibility to apply Halakha to our own realities;
• the responsibility to engage in dialogue as equals with our Ashkenazi and Sephardi brothers —
not to challenge their merit, but to add our own light.
11. Conclusion: A Call for the Unity of Israel
I would like to conclude with an image.
When Yosef finally reveals himself to his brothers, he says three words:
“Ani Yosef” – “I am Yosef.”
At that precise moment, everything that was hidden becomes visible: the sin, the sale, the Divine plan, the reconciliation. The brothers understand that the one they rejected has become the instrument of their survival.
Today, with the utmost humility, I would like, on behalf of the Israelite Bantus, to say to Klal Yisrael:
“Anachnou Yosef. Hod Avinou Chai.”
“We are Yosef. Our father is still alive.”
We are not here to take anything away from anyone. That is why our Shema Yisrael contains ten words, as the Ben Ish Chai cites in his commentary Benayahu ben Yehoyada on Tractate Berakhot: “Shema Yisrael Avinu, Ki Adonai Eloheinu, Hu Adonai Echad.”
We come to offer:
• our obscured yet stubborn faithfulness;
• our villages where brit milah never ceased;
• our women who uphold laws of purity that even some Jewish circles have forgotten; • our lunar Shabbatot, our lineages, our chieftaincies;
• our capacity for resilience after slavery and colonization.
We ask for:
• a just halakhic framework,
• an honest dialogue,
• and the recognition that, perhaps, in the heart of Africa, the four-fifths of Israel who did not leave Egypt with Moshe are still waiting to stand up.
May the Holy One, blessed be He, grant us the wisdom not to fear this stage. May He bless the work of the Chief Rabbinate of Africa and the Federation of the Jews of Africa.
May He enlighten our brothers in Israel and throughout the Diaspora, so that they see in us not a threat, but a promise of wholeness.
May we merit to see the day when all the tribes—from Yehuda to Dan, from Kush to the furthest reaches of the North—will stand together in Jerusalem and upon the lands of Africa, in one united song:
“Hashem Echad, uShemo Echad.”
“The Lord is One and His Name is One.”
Chief Rabbi of Africa
Rabbi Pinhas Eliyahu SHADAY