The Jews of Africa (1920) (ePub)

"Mendelssohn...put forward a multitude of details about the...common descent of the Jews and the native people of South Africa." - The Black Jews of Africa: History, Religion, Identity (2008)

"Stray references to Ethiopian Jews...were diligently assembled by the bibliophile Sidney Mendelssohn." - The Falashas: A Short History of the Ethiopian Jews (2012)

"Mendelssohn, a Jewish mining magnate in South Africa, observed...when he looked at a crowd of black men...certain faces stood out as being indubitably Jewish." - The Jews of Ethiopia: The Birth of an Elite (2013)

The amazing and obscure history of African Jews is revealed in this absorbing 1920 book compiled by wealthy African diamond merchant Sidney Mendelssohn, who collected African literature.

Since the final destruction of the Jewish kingdom by the Romans, many histories of Jews which have appeared since the time of Josephus have almost invariably represented them as one people as well as of one race and one religion.

Sidney Mendelssohn in his 1920 book "The Jews of Africa," is the first publication that has been attempted on the plan which to portray the separate and progressive history of the Jews in the different African countries in which they have made their homes, since their expulsion from the land with which they had been identified for something like thirty centuries.

In these pages Mendelssohn endeavored to compile a narrative of a great part of what has occurred to the Jews of Africa in the eighteen and a half centuries which have elapsed since Titus did his best to erase the Jews as a political race from the face of the earth.

About the author:

Sidney Mendelssohn was born on December 31, 1860, in Exeter and died September 26, 1917. He moved to South Africa in 1878 and became a successful diamond dealer. He served as the minister of the Griqualand West Hebrew Congregation in Kimberley from 1878-1884. He became a director of the Bultfontein Mining Company, of which he was later chairman, until it was taken over by De Beers Consolidated Mines. He was a promoter of the Musical, Literary and Debating Society which was formed in November 1885. He was very interested in Africana and was an avid contributor to South African literature, authoring South African Bibliography and The Jews of Africa.