The Ghetto Was Not An Accident

In the 9th century, an Israelite traveler named Eldad ha-Dani claimed descent from the lost Tribe of Dan and brought astonishing news of Israelite tribes in far-flung lands. Eldad’s account, preserved in medieval Hebrew texts, asserted that the Tribe of Simeon and half the Tribe of Manasseh were living “in the land of the Khazars,” six months’ journey from Israel, and were countless in number, taking tribute from 25 surrounding kingdoms. This places these lost Israelites north of the Caucasus, near the Black Sea – geographically aligned with the medieval Khazar realm and regions like Abkhazia on the eastern Black Sea coast. Eldad’s testimony thus anchors a very early presence of Israelites in Eastern Europe, long before mainstream history acknowledged Israelite communities there. Importantly, Eldad himself was a dark-skinned Jew from Africa, and some modern scholars note that his descriptions of those tribes’ distinct practices (like variant kosher laws) resemble the customs of the Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel). Eldad’s reports, once greeted with skepticism,  have gained new resonance as we reconsider the diversity of the Israelite diaspora: he suggests that Israelite exiles of antiquity, including those of Simeon and Manasseh, migrated into the Black Sea region and mixed with local nations. This creates a historical precedent for communities of Jews in the Caucasus who were not simply Mediterranean or Middle Eastern in appearance as promoted today, but African in origin. Notably, other medieval sources echoed the idea. The Cambridge Document (Schechter Letter) hints that Khazar Jews themselves believed “our fathers were of the tribe of Simeon”, though they could not be certain. Later Israelite chronologies like the Midrash of the Ten Exiles recount a rabbi’s astonishment at finding the Tribe of Simeon living in Khazaria. These legends bolster Eldad’s claims: that a remnant of the Simeonites, traditionally associated with darker-skinned populations via intermarriage in antiquity, had established themselves among the Khazars. If true, this means Black Jews (in the sense of Jews of African lineage) were present in the Caucasus region by the early Middle Ages, forming part of the Khazar kingdom’s population.

Black Jews in the Caucasus – Abkhazia and Beyond

Centuries after Eldad, historical records from the Russian Empire period unexpectedly corroborate the presence of dark-skinned, “Negro” populations living in the Caucasus, particularly in Abkhazia along the Black Sea. Ethnographers of the 19th and early 20th centuries documented a community known as the Afro-Abkhazians, people of obvious African descent (dark skin, curly “woolly” hair, African facial features) fully integrated into Abkhaz society. These Afro-Abkhazians lived in villages such as Adzyubzha along the Kodori River and spoke only the local Abkhaz language. Observers were struck by the sight: “Against the bright green primeval jungle stood huts… curly-headed Negro children played on the ground, and a Negro woman passed by with a load on her head,” wrote one Russian traveler in 1912. He noted that aside from skin color, these Black villagers were indistinguishable from other Abkhazians, they spoke only Abkhaz and shared the same religion and customs, having lived there “since ancient times.”

In fact, an earlier report (1913) in the Russian magazine Argus urged scientific study of this phenomenon, noting it was “surprising and strange for Russia” to find an entire village populated exclusively by Negroes.

An Afro-Abkhazian family in the village of Adzyubzha, Abkhazia (photo taken in 1912). Russian ethnographer A.K. Serzhputovsky (standing, rear) documented this dark-skinned Israelite-Abkhaz community.

The mere existence of an African-descended group in the Caucasus upends assumptions about European Jewry’s homogeneity. Local accounts and later Soviet-era records indicate that some of these Afro-Abkhazians were indeed Israelite or of Israelite origin. A Russian news source notes that “despite belonging to the Negroid race, they consider themselves Abkhazians,” and while most were Muslim by the 20th century, “some of them reportedly are Christians or Jews”. This hints at a complex history of religious and ethnic blending. How did people of African origin arrive in Abkhazia? Various theories emerged: some historians believed they were brought as slaves by Abkhaz nobles from Ottoman Turkey (which had a bustling slave trade), others that they swam ashore from a shipwrecked slave ship, and still others that they descend from ancient inhabitants (perhaps the “Colchi” of antiquity). Modern Abkhaz scholars have collected oral histories that these families’ ancestors came “from Abyssinia” (Ethiopia) generations ago. All accounts agree on one point: by the 1800s these Afro-Abkhazians were thoroughly assimilated linguistically and culturally. Crucially, their religious identity appears to have been fluid. Some families adopted Islam under Ottoman influence, others Christianity after the Russian conquest. But older Abkhaz Israelite lore suggests that at least a portion of these Africans in Abkhazia were of Israelite origin, possibly descendants of Eldad’s Simeonites or other Israelite migrants who had come from Africa. The parallels to Eldad’s story are hard to ignore: we have a Black community in the very region he pinpointed for Simeon and Manasseh, living among a Caucasus nation, preserving Israelite customs for centuries. This provides a plausible link between the “Black Jews” of African lineage in the Caucasus and later European Jewry.

Herodotus and the Black Colchians

The idea of Black populations in the Caucasus is not a modern fantasy, it reaches back to the 5th century BCE. The Greek historian Herodotus, often called the “Father of History,” traveled widely and wrote of an enigmatic people called the Colchians who lived on the eastern coast of the Black Sea (in what is now Abkhazia/Georgia). Herodotus made a startling claim: “The Colchians are probably of Egyptian origin… I conjectured this myself from the fact that they are dark-skinned and have curly hair… and more importantly they alone, besides Egyptians and Ethiopians, have practiced circumcision since time immemorial.”. He goes on to relate an Egyptian legend that the Colchians were the descendants of Pharaoh Sesostris’ army that had ventured north. In Herodotus’s time, both Egyptians and Colchians recognized commonalities, the Colchians even recalled details of Egypt more than vice versa. This makes complete sense, understanding that Mannaseh was literally of Israelite and Egyptian ancestry. This ancient account provides external affirmation that a dark-skinned, African-featured people with a practice of circumcision (a hallmark of Israelite and Egyptian religion) were present in the Caucasus region over 2,400 years ago. Herodotus explicitly ties them to Egypt and Ethiopia, which in his day were known centers of the Israelite diaspora (the Biblical tradition itself recounts Jews in Egypt and Ethiopia via the Eleventh Dynasty and Queen of Sheba). While Herodotus does not label the Colchians “Jews,” later commentators noted the significance of circumcision: it suggests a linkage either through common cultural contact or possibly through the dispersal of Israelites (who, after the fall of the Kingdom of Judah, found their way into many lands). At minimum, Herodotus establishes that Black or dark-skinned communities have been part of Caucasus history since antiquity, lending credibility to legends of ancient Black Jews in the area. Indeed, some have speculated that the Colchians could have included or been influenced by early Israelite or Israelite migrants who integrated with Egyptian soldiers, or as I have previously stated were of both Egyptian and Israelite lineage such as Maasseh. In any case, the presence of an African element (the “Egyptian” Colchians) on the Black Sea coast since the classical era laid the groundwork for later populations like the Afro-Abkhazians.

The Khazar Conversion and “Black” Teachers of Judaism

Fast-forward to the 8th century CE: the Khazar Empire, a powerful Turkic kingdom spanning the Caucasus and steppes north of the Black Sea, famously adopted Judaism as the state religion. According to multiple medieval sources, the Khazar royal house and aristocracy converted after engaging in a discourse with representatives of the major faiths. What is particularly intriguing is who these Israelite teachers were and where they came from. Some records (such as the Khazar King Joseph’s letter and Arab chronicles) mention that scholars from Babylonia and Byzantium came to instruct the Khazars in Torah and Talmud. But if Eldad ha-Dani was correct about communities of Simeonite Jews already residing in Khazar lands, it stands to reason that local Israelite tribes, possibly including dark-skinned Jews of African origin, would have been among the teachers of Judaism to the Khazar court. In fact, one modern historian notes that “Jews from various regions taught their rather primitive neighbors more advanced ways… They taught the art of writing. A 10th-century Arab author states, ‘the Khazars use the Hebrew script.’”. This implies a diverse influx of Israelite influences into Khazaria. It is tantalizing to consider that Black Jews from the Caucasus or the African Highlands of Abyssinia may have played a role in the Khazar conversion. The Khazar king Bulan and his successors might have been instructed not only by rabbinic envoys from Baghdad or Constantinople, but also by Hebrew-literate Jews already within their realm, Jews whose ancestors could have been those exiled tribes. Contemporary accounts of the Khazars (in Hebrew and Arabic) do not explicitly mention the skin color of these Israelite teachers. However, given the mosaic of peoples in the Khazar empire, it is highly plausible that they were of African descent. The empire was a crossroads of trade routes and peoples: Byzantine Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Slavs, and yes, people from lands as far as Nubia and Ethiopia traversed its markets. One Hebrew source (the Kuzari by Judah Halevi, 12th c.) metaphorically calls the Khazar conversion a precursor to the messianic age when “all nations will be converted,” hinting at the variety of Israelites present.

The later confirmed presence of Black Jews in Abkhazia by the 1800s (descendants of earlier migrants) suggests continuity rather than a sudden appearance. In other words, the “Black Jews of Simeon and Manasseh” were likely a persistent thread in the Caucasus from ancient times through the Khazar era. They would have been well-positioned to impart their traditions when a Turkic king opened the door to Judaism. While written records from that time are sparse, the circumstantial evidence, Eldad’s report, Herodotus’s observation, and the 19th-century Afro-Abkhazians, all dovetail to support this scenario. Israelite and local chronicles agree that Judaism took root among the Khazars with input from many Israelite communities. Thus, it is not far-fetched that some of those communities were African Israelite ones, preserving customs from biblical times. The “Negro blood” that later racist ideologues like Hitler ascribed to Eastern Jews may in fact trace back to this very intermingling of Khazar converts with the Jews of African origin in their midst.

Ottoman Slave Trade and Later Afro-Abkhazians

In the 17th–18th centuries, during Ottoman rule over the Black Sea region, a new chapter in this story unfolded. The Ottoman Empire’s slave trade brought thousands of Africans to the shores of the Black Sea, and some of those Africans were very likely Ethiopian Jews (Falashas). Historians have documented that Ottoman slave markets in Constantinople and elsewhere sold not only Africans from Sudan and Somalia, but occasionally Ethiopian Falasha Jews captured in wars or raids. In fact, one account notes that the Ottoman Sultan himself had Falasha (Ethiopian Israelite) slaves in his palace, confirming that some slaves from Abyssinia were of the Israelite faith. It is within this context that an intriguing local Abkhaz tradition arises: a ship carrying black slaves (reportedly from Africa, possibly Ethiopia) wrecked off the Abkhaz coast in the late 1700s. The survivors, “several dozens of dark-skinned slaves on board, probably from Sudan or Somalia,” according to Russian ethnographer Sergey Arutyunov, were saved from the sea by Abkhazians. These Africans were freed and settled among the Abkhaz; over generations they assimilated, “married Abkhazian girls and acquired Abkhazian names”, forming the Afro-Abkhazian communities mentioned above. Local lore adds a twist: it suggests that some among these shipwreck survivors were not random slaves but members of an ancient Abyssinian Israelite group sent as a diplomatic “gift” or tribute. A 1935 newspaper report and later researchers recounted that Ottoman dignitaries at times presented exotic slaves to Caucasian princes. It is entirely plausible that if an Ottoman vessel was carrying a batch of prized Abyssinian slaves and some were Falashas, Abkhazia ended up inheriting a pocket of Ethiopian Jews in this unusual way. Russian archival sources from 1912 indeed mention that “they (the Afro-Abkhazians) were a chance phenomenon, brought here not earlier than the appearance of the Turks on the Black Sea coast… the Turks always had many African slaves from their colonies”. While that Russian observer assumed they were all ordinary slaves, the timing and location line up precisely with the Falasha-involving narratives. Furthermore, place-name evidence and oral history in Abkhazia point to Ethiopia: Dmitry Gulia noted villages called Bagadi, Gonja, and Samkhar in Abkhazia matching names in Ethiopia, and elders in those Afro-Abkhaz villages claimed their forefathers came “from Abyssinia”.

  It’s worth emphasizing that not all Afro-Abkhazians arrived via slavery. Some families may have migrated earlier (as Herodotus’s Colchians or Eldad’s Simeonites), and others later came as free people in more recent times. But the Ottoman period clearly augmented their numbers. By the 1800s, European travelers describe seeing multiple “Negro villages” along the Abkhaz coast, whose inhabitants were bilingual in Abkhaz and Turkish and practicing either Islam or the remnants of their ancestral faith. Even Soviet writers took note: Maxim Gorky visited Abkhazia in 1927 and met elderly Afro-Abkhazians, concluding (perhaps romantically) that they were likely descendants of Ethiopians. Whatever their precise origin, these Afro-Abkhazians maintained a collective memory of coming from Africa and in some cases preserved Israelite customs (like older generation women lighting candles on Friday, according to one 19th-century account). Their story shows how the African-Israelite thread in the Caucasus was reinforced in early modern times, creating a continuous presence right up to the 20th century.

Geographic and Linguistic Continuity with Ethiopia

One of the most fascinating supports for an Ethiopian (and potentially Israelite) origin of Abkhazia’s black population comes from linguistic and geographic clues. The Abkhaz renaissance man Dmitry I. Gulia, in his 1920s History of Abkhazia, devoted a section to drawing parallels between Abkhazian and Abyssinian (Ethiopian) places and names. He painstakingly listed over a dozen place names in Abkhazia that closely match names in Ethiopia. For example: in Abkhazia there is a village Gumma, and in Ethiopia a region Guma; Abkhaz Bagada corresponds to Bagada in Ethiopia; Samkhara in Abkhazia and Samkharia in Ethiopia; Atara (or Atbara) appears in both; even the name Abasha (an area in Abkhazia) echoes Habash – the root of the word “Habesha,” meaning Ethiopian. These are unlikely to be coincidental. Gulia argued that such correspondences “support an Abyssinio-Egyptian origin of the Colchians [ancient inhabitants]” and by extension the Afro-Abkhazians. He also compared proper names: Abkhazian names like Zakhariya, Shabako, Gubaz sounded strikingly similar to Ethiopian names Zekarias, Shabaka, Guba.

Furthermore, Abkhazian folklore itself remembers a link to Africa. The Nart Sagas (ancient Caucasus epic tales) include a story of heroes traveling far south and encountering a tribe of “black-skinned people… so black that even a brave horseman would be frightened at seeing them.” The Nart heroes spend time among them and even invite some back to the Caucasus, where “a hundred of the best black-skinned horsemen” settle and remain forever. As Abkhaz poet Vladimir Ankvab noted, even if legendary, “the epic reflects truth of the historical past… everything in the narrative corresponds to actual history. For 18 months the Narts rode south – they could well have reached Equatorial Africa… and the black-skinned people who returned with them left traces of the Negroid race.”. In other words, Abkhazia’s own oral tradition encodes the migration of Africans into their land in antiquity. All these threads, ancient Greek testimony, local legend, matching place names, and modern ethnography, weave together a picture of direct continuity between Ethiopia and the Caucasus. They strongly suggest that at least some of Abkhazia’s Black inhabitants (and by extension some of its Israelite inhabitants) were descended from Ethiopian Jews or related African populations who arrived many centuries ago. The presence of distinctly Israelite cultural markers among them (circumcision noted by Herodotus, Sabbath candle-lighting in anecdotal reports, etc.) strengthens the case that these were indeed Black Jews by origin. Even Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, mentioned in her memoirs encountering Afro-Abkhaz villagers in the mid-20th century and hearing they were called “Ethiopians” locally – showing how persistent the memory was. The Abkhazian Jews of African descent, though few in number, thus represented a living link between Africa and Eastern Europe.

Migration into Poland and Eastern Europe

Between the 14th and 17th centuries, waves of Israelite refugees poured into Eastern Europe from the west and south. Expelled from Spain and Portugal (1490s), persecuted in Western Europe, and pressured in the Ottoman Empire, many Jews sought new havens. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, in particular, became a center of Jewry. It is well-documented that Sephardic Jews from the Iberian expulsions traveled east, some via Italy and the Balkans into Turkey and Crimea, others via North Africa, and that Ashkenazic (German) Jews also moved eastward into Poland. What has been less discussed is that among these migrants could have been Black Jews, easily overlooked by history.

In fact, Western observers of the 1600s did remark on the dark complexion of many Jews. The French traveler François Misson, writing in 1714 about the Italian ghettos, noted: “’Tis a common error that the Jews are all black; for this is only true of the Portuguese Jews, who marrying always among one another, beget children like themselves, and consequently the swarthiness of their complexion is entailed upon their whole race… But the Jews who are originally of Germany… are not blacker than the rest of their countrymen.”. Here we have a contemporaneous account confirming that Sephardic Jews (the “Portuguese” Jews) in Europe were often so dark-skinned that people considered them “black”. Misson attributes it to endogamy and climate, but essentially he’s describing a known phenomenon: the Jews of Spain and Portugal, many of whom resettled in places like Italy, Holland, and the Ottoman Empire, had a markedly darker (sometimes African or Moorish) appearance. This likely stemmed from centuries of interaction with Moorish (North African) communities and perhaps distant Levantine and Ethiopian kin. Given that, it stands to reason that when Jews migrated into Eastern Europe, they did not suddenly turn white. Many Sephardim joined Ashkenazi communities in places like the Balkans, Ukraine, and Poland during the 16th–17th centuries. Polish historians have even posited that a significant portion of Polish Jewry had Khazar and Eastern (Caucasus) origins: e.g. Prof. Adam Vetulani argued “the main body of Jews from Western Europe [in medieval times] originated in the east, from the Khazar country.”. If Khazar-country Jews were part of Polish Jewry’s ancestry, that would include those Caucasus Black Jews we’ve been discussing. Indeed, the population numbers are telling: the Khazar realm likely had hundreds of thousands of Jews by the 10th century, and medieval Poland by the 1500s had a comparable Israelite population, suggesting a transference of communities from the collapse of Khazaria (13th c.) into Eastern Europe. As one analysis in the Israelite Journal of Sociology (1962) asked pointedly: Where did the sudden appearance of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Poland come from, if not from Khazaria?. What this means for our topic is that Black Jews did not remain confined to Abkhazia or the Caucasus. Through the churn of history, expulsions, trades, migrations, they likely filtered into the broader European Jewish population. We have evidence that Jews in the Ottoman Empire’s European domains (like Greece and the Balkans) sometimes included Ethiopian Israelites or slaves, who could easily blend into local Jewish communities. We know that Italian ghettos in Venice, Livorno, etc., had Sephardic Jews as dark as Moors. We also know that by the 19th century, some European Jews still bore African features (anthropologists of the era, obsessed with racial typology, frequently commented on “swarthy” or “Oriental” traits among Polish and Russian Jews). It stands to reason that the ghettos of Europe, from Amsterdam to Warsaw, had their share of Black or biracial Jews, even if they were a small minority. These individuals would have been seen simply as Jews by their neighbors (and by their persecutors), with perhaps a note made of their darker skin in passing. In the American context, during the early 20th century Harlem had congregations of African-American Jews; but even earlier, in the 18th–19th century, African-descended Jews (from the Caribbean or Ethiopia) sometimes lived in Israelite communities of New York, London, or Paris. They were few, but they prove the principle: wherever Jews went, some Black Jews were among them. This same logic of containment did not begin with Hitler and it did not end with Europe. The American ghetto predates the Nazi one and provided both a model and a justification. Long before the Warsaw Ghetto, the United States had already perfected the practice of spatial confinement of Black populations through redlining, segregation laws, housing covenants, and enforced economic isolation. American eugenics thinkers openly framed Black Americans as biologically inferior and socially dangerous, and Hitler himself studied these ideas, praised American race laws, and adapted their logic to Germany. If, as mounting historical and genetic evidence suggests, many Black Americans descend from West African populations such as the Igbo, long associated with Israelite identity and customs, then the American ghetto mirrors the European one in function even if not in name. It served to confine a people marked as both racially and historically threatening, to isolate them from political and economic power, and to erase internal distinctions by treating the entire population as a single problem. Just as Ashkenazi Jews were swept into ghettos alongside darker Jews in Europe, Black Americans were contained wholesale, regardless of cultural, ethnic, or historical differences. The ghetto became a modern tool of population management, refined in America and later weaponized in Europe, aimed at controlling descendants of peoples whose survival contradicted Western racial hierarchies. The throughline is not coincidence but continuity, a shared ideology that treats containment as destiny and erasure as order.

In summary, the mass migrations into Eastern Europe likely included Jews of African descent alongside the majority. They may have arrived via Italy (Sephardic families from Iberia with Moorish blood), via the Ottoman Empire (e.g. Jews from Syria or Egypt, possibly including Beta Israel slaves or merchants), or via the Caucasus/Crimea (Khazar-converted descendants of the Khazarian Kingdom from their association with the Afro-Abkhazians (Black Jews)). Thus, the Warsaw Ghetto and others under Nazi occupation “more than likely had Black Jews in them.” ,  even if by that era intermarriage and assimilation had lightened some of their appearance.

Notably, Nazi race scientists themselves believed that Eastern Jews were of “mixed race” with traces of Negroid and Asiatic blood. German anthropologist Hans F. K. Günther wrote in 1930 that Jews were an “Asiatic race” often with Negro admixture. The Nazis, obsessed with racial purity, classified Jews as a racial mishmash, partly because they saw some Jews with African features and used that to stigmatize the entire group.

Absorption and Erasure in Modern Israelite History

By the 20th century, the distinctive identity of these Black Jews in Europe had largely been absorbed and erased. In places like Poland, Russia, and Germany, Jews were catalogued by religion and ancestry, not by skin color. A Black Jew from Abkhazia who ended up in Warsaw would simply be another Jew as far as the authorities were concerned, subject to the same anti-Semitic laws and ultimately the same fate in the Holocaust. Nazi racial policy made no special category for “Negro Jews”; all Jews were targeted regardless of appearance. In fact, Nazi propagandists often claimed that all Jews had tainted blood. Adolf Hitler railed that Jews were the ones “bringing Negroes into the Rhineland” to bastardize the Aryan race, a reference to the offspring of African WWI soldiers in Germany, and this was framed as a Jewish plot, implying Jews were comfortable mixing with or even being part Negro. Hitler privately told Mussolini that southern Europeans were “tainted by Negro blood” and viewed Jews as the most tainted of all. The Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws defined Jews by having Israelite grandparents, with no regard to physical color; thus a person could be blond-haired and blue-eyed or dark-skinned and curly-haired and it made no difference if they were of Israelite lineage. Ironically, this means that if a small number of Black Jews lived in the Warsaw Ghetto or other ghettos, we would not easily know from photographs or documents. The Nazis did not bother to note “Negroid features” in their ghetto registries, a Jew was a Jew. There are anecdotal hints: for instance, a survivor’s account from Hungary mentions a “dark-complexioned Israelite girl from Rhodes” in a transit camp, likely a Sephardic Jew who might have had African ancestry. But such references are rare. What we do know is that by Nazi definitions, some Jews fell under both the anti-Israelite and anti-Black persecutions. In the 1930s, there were a handful of biracial German children (offspring of German mothers and African colonial troops) who, if they had Israelite fathers would have been doubly persecuted, though cases like that were extremely uncommon.

The main erasure came after the war. In rebuilding European Jewry’s narrative, much focus was (understandably) on the decimation of the Ashkenazi communities. The diversity that once existed within those communities was downplayed. Any Black Jews who survived likely blended into either new Israelite communities (often emigrating to Israel or America) or into local populations, and their unique heritage was forgotten. In the Soviet Union, discussing a distinct African lineage among Abkhazian Jews would have been politically inconvenient, so it was largely ignored. Over time, as Israelite identity in Europe became almost synonymous with a European (or West Asian) appearance, the story of the Black Jews of Eastern Europe was largely forgotten. Yet traces remained: scholars continued to puzzle over why medieval writings often described Jews as “black”. The answer to that puzzle lies in everything we’ve traced: it wasn’t mere metaphor, a large portion of the Jewish people literally had Black African ancestry, and this was visible in their skin.

To the Nazis, all of this was only further “proof” of Israelite inferiority, the fact that Jews did not belong to any one race but were a mixture of Middle Eastern, European, and African genes was, in their eyes, the ultimate sin. Nazi anthropologists even classified Jews into subtypes, including “Near Eastern” and “Negroid (Nubian) race” categories within the Jewish population. One Nazi analysis claimed that Jews of Central Europe were about 5% Negroid on average. (This was pseudoscience, but it shows the acknowledgment of African lineage.) Thus, Hitler’s reference to Jews having “Negro blood” was not metaphorical, it reflected a distorted understanding that some Jewish families indeed had distant Black ancestors. Tragically, those Black ancestors’ identity was erased by the very hatred that marked them as targets.

Reclaiming the Record

Today, the hidden legacy of the Black Jews of Eastern Europe is being rediscovered and reclaimed. By drawing on multiple strands of evidence, from Eldad’s medieval travelogue to Herodotus, from Russian ethnographic reports to local Caucasus lore, we can stitch together the story that was nearly lost. In this narrative, the tribes of Simeon and Manasseh (and others) left the Land of Israel long ago which was in Africa (aka Ethiopian Highlands), and later re-emerged in the Caucasus, settling among the Khazars and Georgians. They maintained their identity, dark-skinned Israelites in a land of pale mountaineers, and when the tide of history shifted (Khazaria’s fall, Ottoman slavery, etc.), they spread into the general Israelite diaspora of Europe. Their “Negro blood,” as hostile observers termed it, flowed quietly in the veins of some European Jews right into the 20th century.

Only now are scholars connecting the dots. Recent studies of African lineages in Israelite populations, and books like “The Israelite Traveler: Lost Tribes” or Edith Bruder’s “Black Jews of Africa”, have given this topic serious attention. They confirm that the Israelite people have never been monochromatic. The Ghettos of Europe, from Venice’s cramped island to Warsaw’s teeming quarters, indeed held Jews of many hues, including black. In the United States, African-American Israelite congregations have grown, but even in the Colonial era there were Black Jews recorded in synagogues in the Caribbean and North America (often Sephardim from Dutch colonies). Those parallel stories mirror what happened in Europe.

Reclaiming this record challenges the simplified post-Holocaust image of European Jews as exclusively “white”. It restores the memory of people like the Afro-Abkhazian villagers and the “black Portuguese” Jews of old. It also gives new meaning to the Holocaust: when the Nazis murdered six million Jews, among them were undoubtedly Jews of African descent,  a fact rarely, if ever, acknowledged. The Nazis burned the records, but the truth can be reconstructed from the surviving fragments. This forgotten thread of Simeon and Manasseh was never fully buried; the records remain. We have now brought that thread to the surface.

In conclusion, the weight of historical evidence, ancient testimony, ethnographic documentation, and the Nazis’ own racial assertions, strongly supports that there were Black Jews in the ghettos of Europe, and specifically that the Warsaw Ghetto could very well have harbored Jews with “Negro blood,” just as Hitler claimed (with malevolent glee). Far from being a myth, the Black Jews of Eastern Europe were a small but real part of the tapestry of Israelite history. By shining a light on their story, we affirm the deep and diverse roots of the Israelite people, from Abkhazia to the ghetto,  and back to Africa again.

Sources:

Eldad ha-Dani’s account of Simeon and Manasseh in the land of the Khazars

Herodotus on the dark-skinned, woolly-haired Colchians and their practice of circumcision

Russian ethnographer V. Markov’s 1912 description of an Abkhazian “Negro village” (Adzyubzha)

Argus magazine (Russia, 1913) noting an entire Abkhaz village “inhabited exclusively by Negroes”

Paul Goble, summary of Russian7 report on Afro-Abkhazians (Caucasus) including note that some were Jews

Dmitry Gulia’s findings of Abyssinian (Ethiopian) place-name parallels in Abkhazia

19th-century sources on Ottoman-era African slaves in Abkhazia and their assimilation

Maxim Gorky’s 1927 observation of Ethiopian origin for Afro-Abkhazians

François Misson (1714) on the “black” Portuguese Jews in Italy’s ghettos

Adam Vetulani (1962), as cited by J. Brooks, on Khazar origins of Polish Jewry

Nazi classification of Jews as a mixed race with “Nubian–African (Negroid)” elements