The House of Israel in Ghana

Abstract In 1976, in a distant village of Ghana, Aaron Ahotre Toakyirafa declared, following a vision, that before the Christian missionaries came, the people of his village had been following traditions that came from an ancient form of Judaism, and that they were the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Since then, the overwhelming feeling among the members of the community of Sefwi Wiaso is that they have returned to the religion of their ancestors. In reading the Bible, they interpreted and acquired for themselves the knowledge of Jewish-Hebrew traditions; and they are fervently committed to Judaism. This chapter examines how the revelation of Toakyirafa has endured in a country where Jewish life simply does not exist, and examines the sociopolitical context in which the assertion of the Jewish origins of the House of Israel community has been able to develop and continues to exist in very precarious conditions.