The Jews of Madagascar

Abstract During the colonial era, various accounts by missionaries and French administrators imputed ancient Israelite origins to some, if not all, of Madagascar’s Indigenous people. In that period, and then even more in the postcolonial era, various Malagasy individuals and groups internalized this ethnogenetic belief. Today, such proto-Jewish origin stories take on various theological shapes: levirate, messianic, kabbalistic, rabbinic. This chapter gives a brief description of the most recognizably Jewish of these communities—in terms of practicing a form of Judaism as it has evolved worldwide into the twenty-first century—that number in the hundreds, clustering around a handful of synagogues. Although not recognized as Jewish by the Chief Rabbinate in Israel, over one hundred of them have undergone ritualistic conversion by a U.S.-based Jewish outreach organization. Malagasy Judaism represents one of the more unconventional expressions of cultural anti-colonialism in a society that acutely recalls the period of French imperialism.