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Very long, and may play into why the Igbo (Biafra) region of the country is suddenly being hit with Muslim attacks in the very Nigerian war of all against all. Herewith the background section: [TheGuardian] Until the 1990s, there were almost no Jews in Nigeria. Now thousands have enthusiastically taken up the faith. Why?
Back in the 1970s, when Moshe Ben Avraham was growing up in Port Harcourt, in southern Nigeria, the town was small and fringed by bush villages, and there were no Jews in sight. Ben Avraham wasn’t yet Jewish himself; he wasn’t even "Ben Avraham", for that matter. His Anglican parents gave him the name Moses Walison — still his official name — and they raised him as a churchgoing boy. In this, they were no different from millions of others in their part of the country. One of the first demographic details anyone learns about Nigeria is that while people living up north are predominantly Moslem, those down south are just as overwhelmingly Christian. The minibuses sputtering up and down these southern highways bear slogans like "Jesus is Needful" on their back windows. On billboards, preachers hype their ministries; a prayer meeting is never just a prayer meeting — it is a "global mega powerquake" or a "harvest of miracles". Islam and Christianity have been in Nigeria for centuries, but Judaism has none of that conspicuous history or heritage. In his childhood, Ben Avraham knew nothing about Judaism, and he’d only encountered Israel as a biblical name: "Israel, Abraham, all those things," he recalled.
Then, in 1986, his father died, and a few years later, in the midst of a growing disaffection with his church, Ben Avraham fell ill: a cut on his tongue that set off a severe infection. At the time, he came across a Christian ministry called the White Garment Sabbath, and after one of its white-robed, barefooted priests healed him, he joined the group. In Nigeria, the White Garment Sabbath calls itself a church, and its prayer halls host icons of Christ on the cross. "But they told me that Saturday is the day of worship, the shabbat — not Sunday," Ben Avraham said. It was the first time he’d heard this, but when they offered him proof — careful readings of Genesis and Exodus — he wondered what else he’d been doing wrong. "On my own," he said, "I started to go deeper."
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A decade later, Ben Avraham took a further step, becoming a Messianic Jew — a member of a movement that spun out of Jews for Jesus in the US half a century ago, which considers itself to be a Jewish sect that nonetheless exalts Jesus as the messiah. To Ben Avraham, being a Messianic Jew didn’t feel very different from being a White Garment Sabbatarian. Both groups convened on Saturdays, prayed barefoot to God as well as Jesus, and slaughtered rams for Passover in accordance with old Jewish scripture. Ben Avraham opened his own hall of worship and called it Ark of Yahweh.
By this time, as the century turned, Port Harcourt was heaving with industry, on its way to becoming the biggest oil-refining city in Nigeria. It had offshore rigs, chemical skies and scores of visitors from other countries. In 2001, a Jewish-American executive with Shell, passing through Port Harcourt, saw Ben Avraham’s Ark of Yahweh and dropped in. "He told me that it should be called Ark of Hashem, because Jews don’t use Yahweh to call out the name of God," Ben Avraham said. They kept in touch. "He was the one who told me so much about Judaism, sent me books and introduced me to rabbis in the Holy Land." So when, in 2003, Ben Avraham spotted a small posse of Port Harcourt men in distinctively Jewish attire walking into a building on a Saturday, and when he followed them in to talk to them, and when their leader told him that the building was a synagogue and that they’d decided to worship only God the creator rather than the Holy Trinity, he was already well primed. "That was when I became fully Jewish."
Ben Avraham was an early member of one of the youngest, most surprising Jewish communities in the world. Previously, Nigeria hadn’t appeared even on the periphery of any map of the Jewish realm. There is no old text laying down a Jewish lineage for Nigerians, the way the Kebra Nagast, the 14th-century epic, purported to do for the kings of Æthiopia. No Sephardic Jews migrated here from Spain and Portugal, as they did to territories in northern Africa in the 15th century. No Jewish communities arrived as part of the colonial project and stayed after its end, as they did in South Africa.
Beginning in the 1990s, though, a number of people in southern and eastern Nigeria have become practising Jews, importing wholesale the rites of this unfamiliar faith and its foreign tongue. Seemingly, this turn has been spontaneous — which is to say, there have been no local rabbis at hand to pilot these Jews through their incipient religion, and there has certainly been no formal guidance from Israel, which refuses to recognise this as a Jewish population.
No reliable census of Nigerian Jews exists. The Jewish Fellowship Initiative, an umbrella body in Nigeria, maintains a list of about 80 synagogues, but their memberships are varying and fluid. Edith Bruder, a French ethnologist who studies Judaism in Africa, reckons there might be as many as 30,000 Nigerian Jews. Howard Gorin, a retired American rabbi who has toured the country’s synagogues three times — and is so beloved that he’s often described as Nigeria’s de facto chief rabbi — thinks there are no more than 3,000, although he hasn’t visited the country since 2008. Even that lower estimate, though, would outstrip the other major group in sub-Saharan Africa to adopt Judaism over the last century: the Abayudaya of eastern Uganda.
Last August, in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, a panel of rabbis from the US and Uganda officially converted 96 people to Judaism — the first such ceremony in Nigeria. Ben Avraham wasn’t among the 96, but he is ready to convert. When God gave Moses the law, he said, and when Moses passed the law to the children of Israel, "the children of Israel said: ’We will do, and we will follow.’ If conversion is the only way for us to be recognised as Jews, we will do. No problem! It’s very simple!"
Earlier this year, I travelled through Nigeria to dig into the extraordinary mystery of how Judaism popped up in Nigeria — a trip that began in the humid chaos of Lagos, near the south-western border, proceeded eastwards along the oil-rich coast to Port Harcourt and then up through the towns of Aba and Owerri, and finished in spare, rockbound Abuja, dead centre of the country. In all these places, there were synagogues — small ones, of course, but sometimes three or more to a city, with congregations ranging from the scrawny single digits to the impressive few dozen.
Much of this is Igbo land, populated by members of Nigeria’s third-biggest ethnic group. Nine out of every 10 Nigerian Jews are Igbo, and when asked about this near-total overlap, they invariably offer the same explanation. In their tradition, the Igbo descend from Gad, one of the sons of the biblical patriarch Jacob, and a leader of one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. As evidence, they point to Igbo customs that echo those in the Torah: the circumcision of a male infant eight days after birth, for instance, or the rules specifying when a menstruating woman should be considered "pure" or "impure". One man I met in Abuja had compiled a list of hundreds of Igbo words that sound similar to their Hebrew synonyms. Another played me a video of a traditional Igbo dance in which a man wore a blue-and-white checked wrap — the same colours as the Jewish prayer shawl. 
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