There are no Jews known to be living in Somaliland, which declared its independence from Somalia in 1991. However, the territory can claim some interesting footnotes in Jewish history, beyond Israel’s move last week to become the first country in the world to recognize it as a sovereign state — even if it doesn’t yet have a Chabad House for Jewish tourists.
Located on the Horn of Africa, Somaliland sits at a historic crossroad of commerce and migration linking Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the wider Middle East. The territory once played host to small communities of Jewish merchants from across the Red Sea, and today remains home to a mysterious tribal clan that claims to be descendants of ancient Jewish ancestors.
“This is a story that is not well-known and hasn’t been widely documented,” said Asher Lubotzky, senior research fellow at the Africa-Israel Relations Institute. “Only a few pieces of evidence have been uncovered to piece it all together.”
Archival documents show that several hundred Jews from Yemen moved to Somaliland nearly 150 years ago, crossing the Gulf of Aden to live in northern coastal cities such as Berbera and Zeila, Lubotzky said.
After the Ottoman Empire consolidated control over Yemen in 1872, the country’s Jewish community saw new opportunities for freedom open up after years of living as dhimmis, an inferior legal status for non-Muslims. The new regime allowed Yemeni citizens to migrate more freely, and following the opening of the Suez Canal several years earlier, in 1869, the Red Sea was becoming a major global crossroad and trade route.
Most of those who could leave headed to Ottoman Palestine, spurred by messianic fervor and what they saw as a call to Zion. In 1881, the first major wave of immigration from Yemen, known as E’eleh BeTamar, saw about 2,500 move to Ottoman Palestine.
Undated photo of Yemenite Jews near Aden on their way to Israel (public domain)
However, several hundred Yemenite Jews headed towards the Horn of Africa and the nascent colonial ports of what would become British and Italian Somaliland, looking to trade in frankincense, myrrh, hides and livestock.
Details about the community are scarce, but several historical accounts, including reports from the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) archives in Paris, described the presence of Jews in these East African ports.
According to these records, the community soon expanded from Berbera and Zeila to southern ports including Brava, Mogadishu and Obbia, enjoying newfound freedom and economic opportunity under the territory’s European administrators. Business thrived as the Jewish immigrants used their international connections and language skills in Arabic and Hebrew to develop extensive trading networks.
Illustrative: Thousands of people attend a protest rally in Mogadishu, Somalia, Wednesday Jan.3, 2024 (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh)
During the early 20th century, the Jewish population in Somali towns peaked at about 300 people, mostly concentrated in Berbera and Mogadishu, according to research conducted by former Haifa University professor Yosef Tobi.
Several of these communities had synagogues, although most were destroyed when antisemitic Italian Fascists came to power in the country in the 1930s. Somali archeologists have also identified tombstones with Jewish symbols.
The community’s decline began with the rise of the Fascist regime and the outbreak of World War II, which made the position of the Jewish community increasingly precarious. When the State of Israel was declared in 1948, most of its members moved.
According to a 1949 report in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, only three Jews remained in Somaliland as of August 15 that year. According to a letter cited in the report, those Jews remained temporarily in nearby Djibouti to liquidate the affairs of the other Jews who had left, and intended to leave immediately afterwards.
Other sources suggest that a small number of Jews remained in the Somaliland area, maintaining their businesses there until Somalia, which controlled the territory until 1991, joined the Arab League in 1974.
The final Jews of Mogadishu
According to author Nancy Kobrin, there were at least two Jews living in Mogadishu, the capital of neighboring Somalia, until about 15 years ago.
Psychoanalyst and author Nancy Kobrin (Courtesy)
For about two years, from 2007 to 2009, Kobrin maintained an email correspondence with a 19-year-old Jewish man named Rami who lived with his widowed mother, Ashira Haybi, in the war-torn city. Kobrin discovered Rami through a blog he had started, in which he described the dangers and isolation of living openly as a Jew in Somalia.
“Ashira fought for her son to maintain Jewish traditions, even though doing so exposed them to great danger,” said Kobrin, a psychoanalyst and author whose 2018 book, “The Last Two Jews of Mogadishu,” recalled their relationship. “They celebrated the Jewish holidays privately, kept a kosher home, and even owned an old Torah scroll.”
As the country descended into war in 2009, when al-Shabaab rebels attacked government bases and killed hundreds of people, Ashira was reluctant to leave her home due to her family’s history there.
When communication with Ashira and Rami broke down that year, Kobrin feared the worst. But several days before Passover in April 2010, Rami reappeared on his blog, saying the two had moved to Aden, the city in Yemen where Ashira’s family had lived.
“It’s a sign from Hashem that I was able to log into my account,” he told Kobrin in his last correspondence with her, using a Hebrew name for God.
Kobrin suspects the family was murdered in Aden sometime after that, possibly after the Torah scroll they brought identified them as Jews. But their move may have had a larger historical significance beyond their personal lives.
“As far as we know, that marked the end of Jewish life in the area,” Kobrin said.
Children study in their classroom in Somaliland’s northwest port of Berbera, June 18, 2003 (Simon Maina / AFP)
The Yibir and claims of crypto-Judaism
There’s another Somaliland group that claims to be connected to the Jewish people, but its historiocity is somewhat more tenuous. The Yibir, one of the many clans living in the country, is potentially a crypto-Jewish group that claims to descend from ancient Jews who settled in the area centuries before the rise of Islam.
Asher Lubotzky, Senior Research Fellow at the Africa-Israel Relations Institute (Courtesy)
“Not much is known about the Yibir, but they have an oral tradition that they have Jewish origins, possibly connected with Ethiopia’s Beta Israel community,” Lubotzky said. “There is some speculation among scholars, but very little is actually known.”
According to Yibir lore, the group has maintained its own distinct traditions since its ancestors arrived in the Horn of Africa more than 1,500 years ago, possibly from Yemen.
According to some versions of the story, members of the clan were forced to convert to Islam nearly a millennium ago after its leader, Mohamed Hanif, was defeated in battle by a Somali saint named Yusuf bin Ahmad al-Kawneyn.
As a result of this defeat, the Yibir were given a low caste status, but received the right to collect a ritual “blood money” tax from other Somalis during weddings and births. This unique status forced members to isolate themselves from other castes and suffer oppression and degradation for centuries.
A semi-legendary queen named Gudit, said to have ruled parts of the Ethiopian Highlands in the 10th century, has been claimed by some to be of Jewish or Yibir descent, although most contemporary scholars reject this.
Today, Yibir communities are scattered throughout both Somaliland and Somalia, although its historical figurehead, Mohamed Hanif, is generally associated with Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland.
Yibir tend to live in extreme poverty, working in lower-caste professions like blacksmithing, leather work and folk medicine, and are often seen by others as cursed. They speak in a secret dialect of the local Somali language that forces them to maintain their distinction from other clans.
“They live a very difficult life comparable to the caste-based exclusion faced by Dalits in India,” Kobrin said. “Children in the clan can’t even go to school due to discrimination and bullying.”
Estimates of the tribe’s population vary widely. Kobrin cited an estimate by King Ahmed Iman Warsame of the adjacent Gabooye clan that as many as 1 million Yibir are alive today. However, a representative of the community told The New York Times in 2000 he thought the number was closer to 25,000.
King Ahmed Iman Warsame, King of the Gabooye clan, poses during a political rally on May 25, 2021, in Hargeisa, the capital of the self-declared republic of Somaliland (Mustafa Saeed/AFP)
Linguists offer as proof of the group’s Jewish lineage that the name of the group, Yibir, may be a Somali corruption of the Hebrew word Ivri (Hebrew). Various unusual words and seemingly foreign rituals also point to archaic Hebrew or Aramaic origins. Some of these rituals are similar to those of nearby Ethiopia’s Beta Israel community, whose Jewish heritage is broadly accepted by scholars, they note.
Claims that the group fled to Africa from Yemen in the fourth and fifth centuries CE seem to match migration patterns observed during this time. Jewish communities are known to have lived in Yemen, Ethiopia, and Egypt, and Jewish merchants traveled widely throughout the region, so it is not far-fetched to imagine that Jewish traders could have developed a satellite community there.
However, scholars are generally skeptical of these claims, saying that they are not sufficient to establish a clear historical lineage. More likely, they say, the clan’s status as a marginalized group led them to identify with the ancient Hebrews, or use it as a reason to justify their exclusion. Modern DNA testing has shown Yibir to be genetically indistinguishable from their Somali neighbors, with no markers associated with other Jewish groups in the Diaspora. That means that even if there were Jewish ancestors, their lineage has been entirely absorbed through centuries of local intermarriage.
Unlike Ethiopian Jews, Yibir generally don’t express interest in moving to Israel or embracing Jewish religious traditions. Those challenges lead many to doubt claims of the clan’s Jewish heritage.
“Ultimately, much of their story remains unknown,” Kobrin said. “We’ll need to learn a lot more to establish whether an ancient clan of Jews is living in the heart of Somaliland.”
