Jewish Genealogy in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe held one of the smallest Jewish communities this site covers — perhaps seven and a half thousand people at its height in the early 1960s — and one of the most interesting, because it was unusually Sephardi for a British colony.

Almost everywhere else in the British world, a Jewish community meant an Ashkenazi community with a Sephardi fringe. In Rhodesia the Sephardim were a substantial minority in their own right, with their own congregations in Bulawayo and Salisbury, their own synagogues, and a Judeo-Spanish-speaking core that came from a single Aegean island.

Why was this community so Sephardi?

Because a third of its founding migration came from a single Aegean island.

The Jews who came to Southern Rhodesia after the Pioneer Column of 1890 arrived from three directions: from Britain, from Lithuania by way of South Africa, and — distinctively — from the island of Rhodes.

The Rhodeslis are the reason this page exists. They were Judeo-Spanish speakers, descendants of the exiles of 1492, who began leaving Ottoman and then Italian Rhodes around the turn of the twentieth century. In Rhodesia they went overwhelmingly into trade: wholesale and retail in the towns, and rural general dealerships and trading stores scattered across the country, often in places with no other Jewish family for a hundred miles.

They came in two ways. Some arrived through South Africa; many more came south from the Belgian Congo, where a large Rhodesli community had established itself in Katanga around the copper industry. The chain Rhodes, then Elisabethville, then Bulawayo or Salisbury is the classic pattern, and anyone researching a Rhodesian Sephardi family should assume a Congo leg until they have ruled it out.

Bulawayo Hebrew Congregation and the Salisbury Hebrew Congregation were founded in the 1890s, and separate Sephardi congregations followed in both cities. That separation is genealogically useful: it means Sephardi marriages and burials were recorded separately from Ashkenazi ones, so a researcher can often tell which community a family belonged to from the register alone.

One point of proportion. Barry Kosmin’s history remains the only serious study, and his figures show a Sephardi share of Rhodesian Jewry far above the South African level, where Sephardim were never more than a small minority. We would rather cite Kosmin than repeat a percentage second-hand, but the difference in scale is not in doubt.

Why must you search three countries at once?

Because between 1953 and 1963 there were no internal borders, and the families moved constantly.

Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland formed the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, with free movement inside it. Trading families moved routinely between Salisbury, Bulawayo, Gwelo, Umtali, Lusaka, Ndola, Livingstone and Blantyre, and marriages were made across the whole Federation. A family that appears in Bulawayo in 1950 may have registered a birth in Northern Rhodesia in 1955 and a death in Zambia in 1968.

Add the Congo and Mozambique, where the same families traded, and the practical rule is this: a Rhodesli family in central Africa should be searched across Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and the DRC as a single unit. Searching one country and concluding the trail has ended is the commonest failure in this field.

How did the community end?

Gradually from 1965, then all at once.

Emigration began with the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 and the sanctions and isolation that followed, accelerated sharply through the Bush War of 1972–79, and became general after independence in 1980. Young people went first, which is the usual pattern and which left an ageing community behind.

They went to South Africa above all, and then to Israel, Britain and Australia, with smaller numbers to Canada and the United States. The Jewish old-age homes in Bulawayo and Harare outlasted the congregations that built them.

Both the Harare and Bulawayo Hebrew Congregations technically survive, with very small and elderly memberships. Religious provision across the remaining communities of southern Africa is now largely handled by the African Jewish Congress and its travelling rabbi, who visits Zimbabwe among other countries.

A necessary note on the Lemba

People researching Jews in Zimbabwe will encounter the Lemba, a southern African people of Zimbabwe and South Africa who maintain traditions of Israelite or Jewish descent, observe dietary restrictions and endogamy, and whose Buba clan has been reported to carry Y-chromosome markers associated with the Jewish priestly line.

This has nothing to do with the subject of this page. Whatever the Lemba’s origins — and the genetic work is real but contested, and points at most toward a Middle Eastern or Yemeni connection — there is no Iberian or Sephardi element and no documentary link to the Rhodesli community. Tudor Parfitt’s work is the place to start if the question interests you. It is a separate subject and it deserves better than being folded into this one.

What records can you actually reach?

The National Archives of Zimbabwe

The starting point, and a better archive than most people expect. Founded in 1935 as the Central African Archives, it holds British South Africa Company records, government series, the Rhodesia Government Gazette, and — most usefully — civil registration and deceased estate files.

Estate files are the single best source, exactly as in South Africa. Rhodesia inherited Roman-Dutch law and with it the system of death notices filed with the estate: a death notice typically names the deceased’s parents, birthplace, marital status, spouse and children. For a Rhodesli who died in Bulawayo in 1965, the death notice may name parents born on Rhodes in the 1880s. There is no better document in this subject.

Also at the National Archives: immigration and naturalisation records, which for Rhodesli families will give Rhodes or, often, the Congo as the place of last residence.

Congregational and community records

Bulawayo Hebrew Congregation and Harare (Salisbury) Hebrew Congregation — membership, marriage and burial registers
The Sephardi congregations of both cities, recorded separately
Zimbabwe Jewish Board of Deputies, formerly the Rhodesian Jewish Board of Deputies
Cemeteries — the Jewish sections at Bulawayo and Harare, with partial coverage through JewishGen

Where these records are now is the crucial question, and the honest answer is that a good deal of the community’s documentation has migrated south and to Israel as the community wound down. Before writing to Zimbabwe, check the South African Jewish Board of Deputies archive in Johannesburg; the Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town, which collects Southern African Jewish material including Rhodesian; the Jewish Digital Archive Project; and Israeli archives including the Central Zionist Archives and the CAHJP, which holds the Sephardi Hebrew Congregation of Rhodesia minute-books.

JewishGen and the SIG

The Southern Africa Jewish Genealogy SIG covers Zimbabwe explicitly alongside South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique and others. Because it is organised regionally rather than nationally, it is the right tool for exactly the multi-country problem described above.

The Rhodes end

Italian civil registration for Rhodes, 1912–1943 — birth, marriage and death records kept by the Italian administration, and the best vital records the island’s community ever had
Ottoman nüfus registers before 1912
The Jewish Museum of Rhodes (Kahal Shalom)
Yad Vashem and the Arolsen Archives for the deportation of 1944, in which the remaining community of about 1,700 was sent to Auschwitz and around 150 survived

That last point governs how this material should be treated. The Rhodesli families of central Africa are not a branch of a community that still exists on Rhodes. They are much of what survives of it.

The Congo and the region

African Archives, Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brussels — colonial administration, including Katanga
National Archives of Zambia, Lusaka, and Mozambican records for Beira and Lourenço Marques
Belgian and Portuguese consular records

Press

The Rhodesia Herald (Salisbury) and The Chronicle (Bulawayo) for general notices, and the South African Jewish press, which covered Rhodesian community affairs closely since the two communities were institutionally intertwined.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Kosmin’s Majuta is still the only serious history, and it is from 1980. Nothing substantial has been written since, and the generation that could have been interviewed has largely gone.
The Sephardi congregations of Bulawayo and Salisbury have no published history. Their registers, if they survive, would be the core of one.
The Rhodes–Congo–Rhodesia–South Africa chain has never been traced end to end for any family, though the records exist in four countries and three languages.
The rural trading families are undocumented. Jewish general dealers were spread across small towns and sidings throughout the country, often as the only Jewish household for a great distance, and they appear in almost no communal record.
Nobody has established where the community’s own records finally went. That is a phone call and a letter, not a research project, and it would help everyone who comes after.

Organisations and repositories

National Archives of Zimbabwe, Harare — estates, civil registration, immigration.

Harare Hebrew Congregation and Bulawayo Hebrew Congregation; Zimbabwe Jewish Board of Deputies; African Jewish Congress.

South African Jewish Board of Deputies archive and the Jewish Digital Archive Project, Johannesburg.

Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, University of Cape Town.

JewishGen Southern Africa SIG.

African Archives, Brussels, for the Congo; National Archives of Zambia.

Jewish Museum of Rhodes (Kahal Shalom); Yad Vashem; Arolsen Archives; Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem.

Help us find records

Zimbabwe is one of the least documented communities on this site and the window is closing. We are looking for:

The registers of the Bulawayo and Salisbury Sephardi congregations — or any information about where they now are
Photographs or transcriptions from the Jewish cemeteries at Bulawayo and Harare
Family papers documenting the move from Rhodes to the Congo to Rhodesia — passports, Italian identity documents, trading licences, letters
Records of the rural trading families, who left almost no communal trace
Recordings or written traces of Judeo-Spanish as spoken in Rhodesia
Anything from the Zimbabwe Jewish Board of Deputies

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Zimbabwean Jewish research is rarely confined to Zimbabwe. A Sephardi family there will usually have arrived from the Congo, and behind that from Rhodes, and will have left again for South Africa, Israel, Britain or Australia — so the work spans four or five countries and the Italian, Ottoman, Belgian and Rhodesian record systems. The best single document is usually a deceased estate death notice, which names parents and birthplace. We will tell you honestly what can be established before you commit to it. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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