History of the Jews in Angola

A very small community of Jews lives in Angola mostly in the capital city of Luanda with a handful scattered elsewhere of mixed origins and backgrounds.

These show that there was a significant Sephardic presence in Angola and Guinea-Bissau trading posts and that Portuguese settlements were crucial in the development of a Crypto-Jewish diaspora across the Atlantic region.

[2] Some historians claim that Paulo Dias de Novais (1510–1589), a grandson of Bartholomew Dias was a "Jewish" (probably meaning "Crypto-Jewish" or a Converso of some sort) colonizer who became "Lord-Proprietor" of Angola in 1571 who brought Jewish artisans to Luanda where a so-called "clandestine rabbi" was conducting services in a secret Luanda synagogue.

[4][5] Mariana Pequena, a black woman from Angola, was exported as a slave to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in the late seventeenth century.

After obtaining her freedom in Brazil, she began a relationship with a white Portuguese New Christian chose to convert to "Judaism" (perhaps meaning: Crypto-Judaism).

[6] Some of the Jews of São Tomé and Príncipe later settled in the Kingdom of Loango, along the coasts of continental Africa in what is now the Cabinda Province of Angola, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo.

There was a prior proposal to set up a Jewish settlement in 1886 by the Alliance Juive Universelle encouraged by the Portuguese Jew S.A. Anahory.

Tamar Golan left this post in 2002, but returned to Angola later on upon the request of the Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos in order to help establish a task-force, under the auspices of the UN, for the removal of landmines.

[19] In August 2012, the Angolan chancellor made a three-day visit to Jerusalem, where the governments of Angola and Israel ratified in Tel Aviv an agreement to strengthen the bonds between both countries.

Gaydamak was sentenced in absentia, and it was unclear whether he would ever serve the six-year prison term,[23] since he returned to Israel where he is known as a generous Israeli philanthropist.