Igbo-Israel

About the Book

The legend of the Lost Tribes of Israel remained for scholars, historians, archeologists, anthropologists and Hebraists a fascinating topic for millennia. When Israel faced an imperial conquest in the hands of the Assyrian empire in 722 BC, as earlier warned by prophets Isaiah and Hosea, the nation also went on exile and into what seemed oblivion. A people who for penalty of apostasy became a dispersed people across the globe for nearly three thousand years, creating a puzzle of identity and location for so long has suddenly began to emerge from the shadows of time. The account of their journey and experiences over this period had largely remained conjectures as they assimilated amongst foreign cultures. The Igbo, sojourned in the two sides of lower Niger, one of Africa’s great rivers second only to the Nile and like other exiled tribes of Israel, was relatively unknown to those who never had any contacts with them. The era of transatlantic forced migrations and European colonization opened this connection. The exposition of a people’s beliefs, behavior, attitudes, and values within religious, cultural, and political context had only affirmed their origin and identity.

About the Author

Odi Arinze Robert Moghalu was born in the besieged breakaway republic of Biafra in 1967 in a postpogrom, blockade-induced famine and vicious war that cost two million Biafra lives, the worst in Africa’s multifarious twentieth-century conflicts in scale and severity. Odi’s fortunate survival with postwar family and community support helped his growth and development, but this epic continued to stir inquisition into his people’s identity. This book, Igbo-Israel, became the outcome that quest. Mr. Moghalu worked in Nigeria as a human rights activist and journalist and in the United States as an educator in California.