From Rhodes to Rhodesia: Zimbabwe Sephardic community’s history

Image of the Sephardic Evening celebrated at the Spanish Embassy./ Photo:Embassy

Among the more than 4,500 Sephardim that have been granted the Spanish nationality since October 2015, when the law regulating this right came into force, appears a member of one of Africa’s most peculiar Jewish communities, that of Zimbabwe.

The history of this community has a curious homophonic element, since it goes back to the Jews of the Greek island of Rhodes that, for different reasons, emigrated to the then British colony of Southern Rhodesia at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Jewish presence in Rhodes, constant since the Roman Empire, was suddenly interrupted in 1500, when the grand master of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Pierre d’Aubusson, ordered all Hebrews in Rhodes to convert to Christianity or leave the land.

Two decades later, Rhodes fell in the hands of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who decided to repopulate the Jewry with Hebrews from all the corners of his empire. Most of those repopulating were Sephardic, who were expelled from Spain barely thirty years before.

Four hundred years later, the Sephardim of Rhodes faced the tragic history of their ancestors again. The island had belonged to Italy since 1912 and the decision of Benito Mussolini of forming an alliance with Adolf Hitler halfway through the thirties forced many Sephardim to escape. Those who stayed suffered the consequences: after the island’s occupation by the Nazis, almost 1,700 Rhodian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, most of which were killed.

As a result of these events, around 800 Sephardim from Rhodes settled in Southern Rhodesia in the thirties, according to data provided to The Diplomat by the Spanish Embassy in Harare. Most of them did it in the capital, Salisbury (the current Harare), where they would have to build their first synagogue in the fifties.

Nevertheless, many of them decided to subsequently emigrate to Israel, South Africa or to other countries because of the country’s political and economic instability. According to the data provided by the Embassy, since 1948, at least 714 Jews from the old Rhodesia and the current Zimbabwe moved to Israel, especially during the civil confrontations of the seventies. The current Sephardic community in Zimbabwe has barely 50 members, more than a third of which are at least 65 years old.

Despite of not being many, Zimbabwean Sephardim maintain their strength, as it was proved on 2 March with the celebration, at the residence of the Spanish Embassy in Harare, of a Sephardic Evening, which was attended by almost the entire community, as well as by the Spanish Ambassador, Alicia Moral Revilla, and representatives of Algeria, Portugal, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Greece, Germany, the US and Italy.

Eduardo González

Fuente: thediplomatinspain.com