In almost every way, the Abayudaya, a tiny, native African tribe who live about 160 miles from Kampala, the capital of Uganda, are indistinguishable from their Christian and Muslim neighbors. Like their neighbors, they speak the local language and support themselves as subsistence farmers, growing bananas, casaba, maize, millet, potatoes, and beans for their own consumption. Also like their neighbors, they live without electricity or plumbing in small one-room mud houses with roofs of tin or thatch, and share communal toilet facilities.

In one way, however, they are different. The word “Abayudaya” means “Descendants of Judah”; the Abayudaya are, or consider themselves to be, Jewish, and have practiced Judaism for 77 years in almost complete isolation from the world Jewish community. Four generations have circumcised their sons, rested on the Sabbath, and fasted on Yom Kippur.

About a year and a half ago, a group of American Jews, including my wife and myself, made the journey into the Ugandan interior to visit the Abayudaya, having first equipped ourselves with a knowledge of their history.

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The Abayudaya are followers of Semei Wakirenzi Kakungulu, a warrior and statesman of the Bagandan tribe who in the 1890’s took up with the Bamalaki, a breakaway sect of Protestant fundamentalists who observed Saturday as the Sabbath, declined to eat pork, and permitted polygamy. In time, Kakungulu’s devotion to the Bible led him to quarrel with the Bamalaki as well, and to demand that they observe all of Moses’ commandments, including circumcision. When the Bamalaki claimed that circumcision was practiced only by Jews, Kakungulu is reported to have replied: “If this is the case, then from this day on, I am a Jew (Muyudaya).” In 1919, Kakungulu, then over the age of fifty, was circumcised.

But although he declared himself a Jew, Kakungulu still retained a belief in Jesus; the 90-page guide to Jewish laws and beliefs he compiled in 1922 (in the Lugandan language) contains several verses from the New Testament. Indeed, until 1926, there is no evidence that Kakungulu, whose conversion was quite spontaneous, had ever known a Jew or read a Jewish book more recent than the Bible. In that year, however, he met in Kampala a Jewish trader remembered now only as Yusef, or Joseph, and invited him to come and instruct the Abayudaya in the Jewish religion. As a result of Joseph’s visit, the Abayudaya ceased to believe in the New Testament or in Jesus; they stopped the practice of baptizing children; they kept the Sabbath strictly; they learned traditional Jewish blessings and prayers; and they learned to slaughter animals in a kosher manner.

At the time of Kakungulu’s death in 1928, there were some 3,000 Abayudaya. Over the next 35 years, under pressure from the other local religions and bereft of the support provided by Kakungulu’s means and social position, their numbers would dwindle to no more than 300. Some returned to the Bamalaki sect, others to Christianity or Islam; financial pressures brought the school established by Kakungulu under the control of the Anglican Church. By the 1960’s, the Abayudaya consisted mainly of the elderly, plus some younger women and small children.

It was at this low point in their fortunes that the Abayudaya came to the attention of the outside world. In May 1962 they were visited by an Israeli anthropologist, and letters were subsequently exchanged with Jewish dignitaries in Israel and elsewhere. These contacts improved the morale of the community, whose numbers increased to about 800 by 1971, until the rise of Idi Amin caused another decline in their fortunes. Under Amin’s reign of terror, the community was outlawed, its synagogues were closed (one by arson), and all contact between the Abayudaya and the outside world ceased. But after the dictator’s downfall in 1979, an enthusiastic reconstruction began. With outside help, youth groups were set up and unmarried young men organized themselves to study books and tapes sent from America. Now, these young men had become the leaders of the community of about 500 African Jews we were about to meet in a primitive village on a hilltop in Uganda.

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Our group—a Reform rabbi from Virginia and three members of his congregation, three social workers, four apprentice filmmakers, a doctor, and three others—disembarked at Entebbe, Uganda, on an early morning in June. We were met by two members of the Abayudaya, Mutusa Judah and Joab Jonadabu Keki, with a van and driver to take us the 200 miles to the village.

By the time we reached Mbale, where we intended to stay, it was seven in the evening and we were running about four hours late. Although we would have preferred to go directly to our hotel, Joab prevailed upon us to go on. The van continued slowly northward to the foothills of Mt. Elgon. Now the villages were smaller, the houses more primitive, the people even poorer than those we had seen along the way. The paved road became a dirt track, steadily more pitted and eroded. After about a half-hour, we turned onto another dirt road and began to climb. At the turn, I saw a sign etched with a star of David. At the top of the hill about 100 people were waiting.

It was a tumultuous welcome. They clapped; they sang; the women shrilled in a ululating tone halfway between a scream and a whistle. Some of the songs were familiar Israeli folk tunes: “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem,” “Hava Nagila.” We sang with them for a long time, and it was dark when we left for our hotel.

At eleven the next morning, we were to be introduced to the leaders of the community in the main synagogue, which sits in a compound with a school and two community buildings atop Nabukaye Hill. Built with a $1,000 donation from an American Jew, the synagogue is of brick and mortar, with a roof of corrugated tin. When the money ran out, the spaces for windows and doors were left unfilled. On the day of our visit, the synagogue was so packed some of the women sat on mats on the floor, and the children stood outside peering in. All told, there were about 175 people there to greet us.

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We sat at a table closest to the ark at the north end of the synagogue, the direction of Jerusalem. Before the introductions began, we were entertained by the Hatikvah (“Hope”) Choir, a group of about ten adults and teenagers accompanied by guitar and drum. They began with a “Welcome Song” in English, followed by “Shan’t Give Up” (“We shan’t give up/ Never, never shall we/ However few we shall be/ Never, never shall we”), a musical rendition of the 23rd Psalm, and a song which began “I love my Lord.” Then the community’s executive secretary introduced us to the leaders and the schoolteachers. Some names were so unfamiliar I may have recorded them incorrectly, but this is what my notes say: Joab Jonadabu Keki, chairman; Gershom Sizom, youth leader; Israel ben Shadrak, treasurer of the youth council; Berei Yerogi, rabbi and mohel (ritual circumciser); Uri Katula William, mohel; Aaron Kintu Moses, executive secretary; Ibrahim Daula, introduced as a son of Kakungulu himself (since he appeared to be about fifty-five years old, he may have been a grandson).

The only women presented to us at this ceremony were government teachers at the Nabweye primary school, and I do not know if any were Abayudaya.

After introducing ourselves in turn, we gave them the religious items, cooking utensils, and books on Jewish practice we had brought. That night, the young men would stay up until three o’clock examining the books, particularly the siddur (prayerbook) published by the ArtScroll company which contains detailed instructions and explanations. Since the Abayudaya learn mostly from materials sent from America, knowledge of Jewish ritual parallels fluency in English, which means, in its turn, that the young men, who study English in school, know more Hebrew and are more familiar with Jewish holidays and prayers than their elders, whose knowledge comes almost entirely from the Bible (in which they are, however, extraordinarily fluent). Except for the rabbi, all the officers of the community are under forty-five years old; most are under thirty.

Following the formal introductions and gift-giving, we visited the schoolhouse, a dilapidated building where we found the children standing quietly outside in the equatorial sun. Of the 285 children in this religiously mixed school, 185 are Abayudaya. They looked very young—from five to eight—but may have just been small. Both boys and girls had close-cropped hair, and the boys did not cover their heads as Jewish religious custom directs. Many were barefoot and wore threadbare garments. The school itself was partly roofless and was without tables or chairs.

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Though it was Thursday, the Abayudaya had arranged to conduct their Sabbath prayer service for us so that it could be filmed. (They were troubled not by the use of electricity—which, after all, they do not have—but by the filmmakers doing their “work” on the Sabbath.) As the synagogue’s American donor had also contributed about 30 copies of a Conservative prayer-book, the service was familiar enough, except for some hymns sung in the native language and some, like Adon Olam (“Lord of the Universe”), sung in a barely recognizable dialect which turned out to be a mixture of present-day Hebrew and the variant learned by the earliest followers of Kakungulu. Everyone, including the women, joined in these hymns, though participation in the other Hebrew prayers was spottier. (In other synagogues of the Abayudaya—there are four in all—the services are, we were given to understand, much more “traditional,” the Hebrew being of this strange, older kind.)

The men and women sat on opposite sides of the room, but there was no partition between them as in a normal Orthodox synagogue. The ark, covered with a white cloth, contained a printed Torah scroll from which the weekly reading was chanted with the help of a regular Bible text. The service was conducted in Israeli-accented Hebrew by Seth bin Jonadabu, the nineteen-year-old drummer from the choir. At its conclusion, the rabbi blessed the congregation with the threefold “priestly blessing,” partly in Hebrew and partly in Lugandan.

After the service and a lunch of mangoes, bananas, pineapples, and samosas, I visited the nearby grave-site of Kakungulu. Unlike more recent graves, it bore no Jewish signs or symbols. While examining it, I happened to touch the stone, and this did not go unnoticed. Later, one of the older members of the community commented that, according to the Bible, a person who touches a grave becomes unclean, and asked whether this was still the belief among Jews.

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The next day we visited Hamayony, a village of 750 people of whom 100 are Abayudaya. Here we met Samsoni Mugombi, an old man who had “studied with Kakungulu” and who was described as the spiritual leader of the community. We were also brought to the most austere synagogue I have ever seen: perhaps 25 by 15 feet, built of plaster-coated mud with a tin roof. The front and back walls were covered with Jewish signs and symbols—two tablets of stone, a menorah, stars of David—but there was no ark or Torah, and few benches or chairs.

Most of us spent Friday night—Sabbath eve—back at the Nabukaye compound. A number of the Abayudaya do not return to their homes until the Sabbath is over, and we stayed with them in the two community buildings, sleeping on a concrete floor in a room with no light. The toilet—a shed over a hole in the ground—was down a narrow dirt path about 75 yards away.

At the insistence of the Abayudaya, Sabbath services were conducted by the Reform rabbi in our party, after which we were fed with cold food cooked on Friday afternoon. Some in our party had prepared lectures on topics that might be of interest to the Abayudaya, and we now delivered them with the help of a translator. More interesting than the lectures, however, were the questions. One of us, for instance, had stated that according to Jewish religious law it was permissible to keep food warm on the Sabbath, and the Abayudaya, who traditionally maintained no fire at all on that day, questioned us closely about the procedures for this. Other questions were:

• What can you do if you don’t have money for Sabbath candles?
• Can a menstruating woman enter the synagogue?
• If a baby dies before being circumcised, is the child considered Jewish, and may he be buried in a Jewish cemetery?
• What oaths are forgiven on Yom Kippur?
• Did Moses wear shoes on Mt. Sinai when God gave him the Torah? (This question arose out of dismay at the recent discovery that shoes were worn in the synagogue in Nairobi.)

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Later that afternoon, as we sat together under a tree, we asked the officers of the synagogue whether it was true, as we had heard, that the community wished to go through a formal process of conversion to Judaism, and why. Their response was intensely moving.

The Abayudaya told us they wanted to be Jews because God’s love for the Jewish people was a special thing: only to the Jews had He given the Torah. Judaism, they explained, protected the Abayudaya from the harsh practices of their Gentile neighbors, which included female circumcision. The Jewish method of slaughtering animals was humane. They enjoyed their Sabbath rest—“You get refreshment in your body”—and Yom Kippur offered an opportunity to ask for forgiveness since “no man was ever free from sin.” Even if there is no direct reward from God in this life (except for Sabbath rest), in the world to come they would receive the reward God bestows on His chosen people.

That Sabbath afternoon under the tree the Abayudaya also offered us historical and practical reasons for wanting to be accepted by the Jews of the world. The fact that their ancestors had not been born Jewish was, they argued, no impediment; they cited Isaiah 56:6, Esther 8:17, and Zechariah 8:20-23 to demonstrate that anyone could be Jewish as long as he observed the Torah. Still, they felt ignorant of much Jewish practice, and, after some 70 years of persecution and decline, they feared their line might die out through intermarriage. To improve the Jewish content of their lives, and to be assured of survival, they wished to be accepted as Jews, by Jews. When we asked them if, like the Ethiopian Jews, they wished to emigrate to Israel, they replied that the Abayudaya had made their commitment to Judaism long before the creation of the state, and the majority would certainly remain in Uganda. Several of the young men, however, expressed a yearning to go: “It is a chance to be free. . . . Spiritually, we are already in Israel.”

Then they asked us what road they should take. Which Jews would accept them? Which would not? Some of us responded that Jewish life was diverse, and they should feel free to choose among different practices. Others emphasized that only an Orthodox conversion offered them the assurance of being accepted by all Jews everywhere. Despite being told that the Orthodox would encourage them the least, and demand from them the most, they asked that we arrange for an Orthodox rabbi to visit.

We ended our Sabbath with the havdalah service—with which the Abayudaya were not familiar—marking the division between sacred and non-sacred time, and said our farewells. It was a painful parting.

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Here is a rare phenomenon: a group of people who do not—unlike the Ethiopian Jews—claim ancient Jewish lineage, but who have spontaneously sought to become Jews and have maintained themselves without financial or, more crucially, intellectual and spiritual support from without. Exactly why examples of this phenomenon are so few and far between in Jewish history, and the larger question of Judaism’s attitude to converts (let alone proselytization), are beyond my scope here. One case, however, not widely known, may be pertinent to that of the Abayudaya.

Around 1930, in the small town of San Nicandro on the southeast coast of Italy, a wine grower named Donato Manduzio was inspired by a dream to preach the truth of the laws of Moses, and gathered about him 23 peasant families. It was not a propitious time for Italian Catholics to decide to become Jews. Manduzio and his followers were threatened by the fascists and by the local clergy; the rabbinate in Rome, fearful of its own precarious position, tried to dissuade them. Finally, in 1944, in the midst of wartime, their conversion was accepted. Manduzio died in 1948, and a year later the entire group moved to Israel, where they have been absorbed into the population. But could they have survived if there had been no Jewish community to welcome them at last?

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