Jews had been established in Upper Egypt - the biblical Pathros - since before the fall of the First Temple in 586 BC and at Elephantine, the great ivory market on the southern frontier of that country, the Jews had a Temple which for centuries remained independent of the hierarchy in Jerusalem. It was not until the time of the Ptolemies that they abandoned it and apparently moved south up the Nile into the kingdom of Meroe.

As the story developed, it led into the fields of Gentile-Jewish relations, of ethnicity, linguistics, African history, the Inquisition and an armed Jewish struggle for freedom. It has been said that the best way to learn history is to write it. I have found it a rewarding experience, and in this book I have attempted to pass on something of this knowledge of a subject which has been unwarrantably neglected.

The cause of the neglect may perhaps be traceable to the prevalence of the traditional view that all Jews belong to the same race or, in other words, are descendants of the same ethnic stock which originated in ancient Palestine. Jews who were black did not fit into this picture. While they undoubtedly share a common religious and cultural heritage, the notion that Jews from the Mediterranean, from the Slav and Teuton countries, from India, Yemen and Ethiopia all share a common ancestral origin is clearly open to serious doubt. If that were accepted the Jewish communities in various parts of the world must all be the product of migration, as they were, for example, in the United States or South Africa. But this was not always the case. Before the rise of Christianity and Islam, the Jewish religion spread widely as a result of the distribution of ideas in the same way as Christianity or Buddhism.

Peoples migrate under political, economic or military pressure and take ideas with them but, equally, culture is disseminated by small groups such as traders, missionaries, adventurers or conquerors and by intermarriage. Christianity did not envelop the western world at the time of Constantine the Great as a result of a migration any more than Buddhism reached to the farthest corners of southern Asia or the English language and British