Jacob's Children In The Land Of Mahdi: Jews Of The Sudan

Book Summary

"A charming recitation of the history of these Jews... told by a man whose family was at its very center. (Malka) knows all there is to know about this community. Highly readable". -- Henry L. Feingold author of Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust Jacob's Children in the Land of the Mahdi details the development of a prosperous Jewish community in the Sudan. Eli S. Malka -- one of the last living eyewitnesses to many of the events in this book -- chronicles this group's history, from its origins as an isolated group of eight Jewish families trapped in the turmoil of the Mahdi's revolt in 1881, through its period of growth to its final demise a mere eighty years later. In Part I, Malka starts his narrative with the self-proclaimed Mahdi's revolt in 1881 against British-Egyptian rule in the Sudan. During the Mahdi's thirteen-year rule all infidels, including the Jews, were forcibly converted to Islam under threat of death. Jacob's Children documents the lives of the Sephardic Jews in the Sudan through the twentieth century. Malka writes of this community's most vibrant years from the 1930s and 1940s, and insightfully describes the contacts made with the neighboring Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Eritrean Jews.This unique society began to disband during World War II, and this process was exacerbated by the Arab-Israeli conflicts that followed. As a result, almost all the Jews in the Sudan were gone by the late 1960s. The ancestry of almost all the Sudan Jews is provided herein, as well as family histories both in the Sudan and in their new homelands. Part II is an autobiography of the author describing his life in the Sudan. Wonderful descriptions ofSephardic life and culture are a bonus.

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