History of the Jews in Zimbabwe

During the 19th century, Ashkenazi Jews from Russian Empire Ukrainian Polish Russia and Belarusian Lithuania settled in Rhodesia after the area had been colonized by the British, and became active in the trading industry.

Roy Welensky, the second and last Prime Minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, was the son of a Lithuanian Jewish father and an Afrikaner mother.

By the time the Rhodesian Bush War ended in 1979, most of the country's Jewish population had emigrated,[citation needed] along with many other whites.

Most Rhodesian Jews emigrated to Israel or South Africa, seeking better economic conditions and Jewish marriage prospects.

[citation needed] In 1992, President Robert Mugabe caused upset to the Jewish community in Zimbabwe when he remarked that "[white] commercial farmers are hard-hearted people, you would think they were Jews".

[7] The Lemba people speak the Bantu languages spoken by their geographic neighbours and resemble them physically, but they have some religious practices and beliefs similar to those in Judaism and Islam,[citation needed] which they claim were transmitted by oral tradition.

{cn}}[16] Genetic Y-DNA analyses in the 2000s have established a partially Middle-Eastern origin for a portion of the male Lemba population.

[17][18] More recent research argues that DNA studies do not support claims for a specifically Jewish genetic heritage.