Conceptualizing Ontological Security

The core thesis of ontological security theory, despite the varied levels of analysis used by scholars working with the theory, is that individuals and groups are invariably committed to maintaining the components of their identity – that is, whatever make them who they are and give them continuity such as culture, religion, territory, language, and the like – so that any factor or event which appears as an existential threat to, or tries to change, one or more components of their identity would be fiercely resisted or rejected (Giddens Reference Giddens1991; Kinnvall Reference Kinnvall2004; Laing Reference Laing1960; Rumelili Reference Rumelili2015). As Sigel (Reference Sigel1989, 459) puts it, “There exists in humans a powerful drive to maintain the sense of one’s identity, a sense of continuity that allays fear of changing too fast or being changed against one’s will by outside forces.” Similarly, Lupovici (Reference Lupovici2012, 812) defines ontological security as “security of being rather than security of surviving (physical security); and to maintain it, actors must not only be identified by others as having specific identities, but they also need to be able to assure themselves of who they are.” Kinnvall (Reference Kinnvall2004, 741–742) contends, for example, that the reason for anti-immigration and anti-globalization sentiments in the West stems in large measure from Westerners’ feeling that the key components of their identity – culture, territory, religion, say – are under threat from immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and the seemingly inexorable forces of globalization. Exclusionary nationalism and populism thus serve as the avenues for some Westerners to reaffirm a threatened self-identity. Ontological security involves trust in relationships between two or more parties, one that gets rid of existential anxiety. In deeply divided societies where conflicts amongst ethnic groups are ubiquitous, conflicts tend to become protracted despite well-intentioned peace negotiations because warring groups distrust one another and feel that acceptance of peace agreements would mean the erosion of components of their identity that matter for their continuity (Rumelili Reference Rumelili2015, 20–23; Mitzen Reference Mitzen2006). Ontological security is the “security not of the body but of the self, the subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates action and choice” (Mitzen Reference Mitzen2006, 344). Ontological insecurity, by contrast, is the extreme state “where anxieties that can no longer be contained by existing social and political processes are unleashed in varying ways and to varying degrees” (Rumelili Reference Rumelili2015, 12). The ontologically insecure “lacks a consistent feeling of biographical continuity, and … becomes obsessively preoccupied with apprehension of possible risks to his or her existence” (Giddens Reference Giddens1991, 53).

Prior to the development of the concept of ontological security, international relations scholars explained security mostly in terms of physical security – that is, the survival of states in an anarchic international society which includes strategies such as friendly alliances (balancing and bandwagoning), favorable geographies, and large militaries (see Waltz Reference Waltz1979; Bull Reference Bull1977). There was no concern for the ontological security of states. Though ontological security and physical security are analytically distinct, ontological security theorists contend that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive in that physical security could be necessary for ontological security as without the former a particular group’s being and identity might be quashed. Conversely, an entity could risk its physical security for the sake of safeguarding its ontological security (Mitzen Reference Mitzen2006). Accordingly, whilst ontological security cannot be reduced to physical security and vice versa, they are almost always intricately intertwined.

Although the first theorists of ontological security – notably, RD Laing (psychoanalysis) and Anthony Giddens (sociology) – were concerned about the individual level as a unit of analysis, international relations theorists adapted the theory to explicate state behavior with the contention that states do not care only about physical security (and survival) but also about the continuity of being and identity; and in some cases, states could sacrifice physical security for ontological security. But the shift from the individual to the state as the unit of analysis has been criticized in the international relations literature. For instance, there are questions regarding the age-old “level of analysis” problem as well as the anthropomorphizing of states as entities with emotions and anxieties. Indeed, scholars have argued that “resorting to the assumption of state personhood obscures important aspects of how the state, as an evolving institution, affects individuals’ sense of ontological security” (Krolikowski Reference Krolikowski2008, 111; also see Mälksoo Reference Mälksoo2015). These critics contend that whilst it is true that the state provides ontological security for individuals or groups, one cannot infer from this premise that states are unitary actors, have needs to be ontologically secure like individuals, or that they are ontological security providers. Kinnvall and Mitzen (Reference Kinnvall and Mitzen2017, 6–9) counter these by posting that the criticisms are not so much a critique of ontological security theory but of the assumption of the state as actor. Further, Mitzen (Reference Mitzen2006) and Steele (Reference Steele2008) address this “level of analysis” conundrum by accentuating that just as international relations theorists employ the notion of the “body” – which may be synonymous with territory or people – and emotions as an “as if” – that is, as an idealization (Vaihinger Reference Vaihinger1924; Appiah Reference Appiah2017) that may not necessarily reflect reality but is instrumentally useful to explicate reality – to delimit physical security and state behavior, the same heuristic could, in like manner, be employed in the case of ontological security. In other words, with ontological security the state could equally be personified and therefore considered a person with emotions and anxieties projected through its elites whose sense of self or agency may be threatened when the state itself is bedevilled by myriad factors in world politics. This explains why Rumelili (Reference Rumelili2015, 17) posits that “what makes it appropriate to apply the concept at the level of states is that the peace anxieties that are experienced individually and collectively by elites produce aggregate behavioral outcomes that are analogous to those at the individual level.”

The last decade has witnessed the flourishing of ontological security theory in sociology, political science, and international relations. Indeed, the framework has been employed to address theoretical and empirical conundrums ranging from globalization and religious nationalism (Kinnvall Reference Kinnvall2004), national belonging and nationalist politics (Kinnvall Reference Kinnvall2018; Skey Reference Skey2010), state personhood, security, and identity (Berenskoetter and Giegerich Reference Berenskoetter and Giegerich2010; Krolikowski Reference Krolikowski2008), domestic policymaking (Lupovici Reference Lupovici2012), memory politics and post-conflict reconciliation (Rumelili Reference Rumelili2018; Subotić Reference Subotić2016), information warfare (Bolton Reference Bolton2021) to governmentality and ideology (Marlow Reference Marlow2002), social movements (Solomon Reference Solomon2018), state denial of historical crimes (Zarakol Reference Zarakol2010), the European Union’s Eastern Neighbourhood Policy (Browning Reference Browning2018), state revisionism (Behravesh Reference Behravesh2018), conflict resolution (Rumelili Reference Rumelili2015), diaspora and transnational migration (Abramson Reference Abramson2019), human security (Shani Reference Shani2017), great power narcissism (Hagström Reference Hagström2021), and humanitarian interventions (Steele Reference Steele2008). Because of the diversity of conundrums that draw on the framework, some scholars – Steele (Reference Steele2019) amongst them – advocate that it should be regarded not so much as ontological security theory but as ontological security studies. What the various applications of the ontological security framework share in common, so it seems to me, is emphasis on the security of identity and continuity of routines without disruptions.

Given that my research is centered on ethnonationalism and nationalist self-determination, in this article I employ ontological security to refer to an ethnic group’s sense of identity and desire for continuity which may be threatened through repression, marginalization, and extermination. Ethnic groups desire continuity with their way of life; they want their identities secure. Although, in principle, the state is supposed to provide ontological security for every group that inhabits it, it is oftentimes the case, in practice, that state institutions are deployed to oppress and dominate people – especially national minorities as defined by ethnicity, race, sexuality, religion, and so on. The history of the modern state – as Mamdani (Reference Mamdani2020) remarkably reminds us – is the history of political violence, of oppression, of the making of permanent majorities and permanent minorities with catastrophic consequences for the latter. The Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Cambodian genocide, the Bosnian genocide, and the Rohingya genocide are all instances of the perversion of the state apparatus meant to provide ontological – in addition to physical – security for citizens and minorities. Minorities’ clamor for self-determination through independent statehood is almost always more acute when groups feel ontologically insecure. This is particularly the case of the Jews for whom the State of Israel is requisite to evade persecution, oppression, and annihilation in the aftermath of the historically accumulated discrimination that culminated in the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis under the auspices of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, the State of Israel is – for most Jewish people – a symbol of ontological security in order to preserve Jewish identity without the burdens of antisemitism. In other words, it is as much about the physical security (survival) of Jews as a people as about the security of Jewish identity. In the next section, I shall expatiate on the constitutive features of Jewish identity based on Jews’ historical narratives of their identity.

Ontological Security, Jewish Nationalism, and Jewish Identity

It is difficult to fix a starting point for Jewish history in large part because “it is not clear what Jewish means exactly and how it relates to or differs from overlapping terms used in the Bible, such as Israelite and Hebrew” (Efron et al. Reference Efron, Weitzman and Lehmann2018, 1). In other words, at various times, Jews have been called different names including Judeans and Judahites so that it is hard to decipher whether these all refer to the same ethnicity or people. What is clear, I think, is that Jews are not a monolithic ethnic group with a single essence as they are internally diverse and spread out across the continents of the world. Notwithstanding Jews’ internal diversity and the problematic of underlining when Jewish history begins, the great Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner (Reference Neusner, Neusner and Avery-Peck2001) divides up the history of the Jewish people into five significant epochs and events. First is the destruction of Jews’ first temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Second is the destruction of the Jews’ second temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE: this second destruction is the beginning of the Jews’ history as a political entity bounded together by similarity of social and religious experiences even though this did not entail territorial unity for Jewish people. Third is the Muslims’ conquest of the Near and Middle East and North Africa in 640 CE. During this period, Jews in Christendom and Islam were a tolerated, albeit subordinated, minority and the Torah was affirmed as a holy book very like the Koran and the Bible. Not only were the Jews permitted to practice their religion freely, the autonomy of the group was also asserted. Fourth, the American Constitution in 1787 and the French Revolution in 1789 both ensured secularism – that is, the separation of religion from the state – and gave individuals autonomy. This spread throughout the western world. With respect to Jews, it meant that they were given individual rights and lived freely in the west despite occasional persecutions. The final event is the Holocaust and subsequent foundation of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948, after the United Nations’ vote in 1947 to create a Jewish state in Palestine.

Depending upon how you look at it, Jewish history could be best summarized as the history of tensions between ontological security and insecurity for Jews in the diaspora prior to the creation of the State of Israel. Myers (Reference Myers2017, xxvi) defines this in terms of the convergence of two opposing forces: assimilation and antisemitism, where “[a]ssimilation … ensured cultural vitality, allowing Jews to survive for millennia in a variety of settings beyond their homeland. Antisemitism, meanwhile, guaranteed that the path of Jews to full integration was frequently blocked.” The occupations and persecutions did not annihilate the Jewish people, though it engendered their forced displacement and adaptation to other parts of the world including Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa in search of physical security with the hope of returning someday to the land – Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) – that is central to their cultural identity. The capacity of Jewish people to assimilate in, and quicky adapt to, novel environments despite occasional antisemitic attacks leads Slezkine (Reference Slezkine2004) to call Jews the “Mercurians” of our time.

Collective memories are central to Jewish experiences. These memories are grounded in religion – Judaism. According to the great British sociologist Anthony Smith (Reference Smith1995, 6), “[t]hese [collective] memories have been both local and popular – memories peculiar first of all to the various Israelite tribes and later to each of the scattered Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities – and pan-ethnic and canonical, that is, carried by the basic tenets and practices of Judaism.” Further, these collective memories are central to Jewish nationalism. As he puts it:

The rise of Jewish nationalism in the nineteenth century in Central and Eastern Europe is the product not just of the collective memories embedded in Judaism but of a conjunction of two other factors: the longstanding hatred of Jews which had made antisemitism ostensibly inevitable (physical security) and the desire for continuity of spiritual, religious, and cultural practices embedded in the Land of Israel for the Jewish diaspora who had been displaced by a series of pogroms, expulsions, and persecutions for eighteen centuries (ontological security). The central argument of antisemites was that Jews cannot be assimilated in European societies no matter how well the Jews are integrated in European societies; Heinrich von Treitschke’s article entitled “The Jews are Our Misfortune” is a paradigmatic example of this. Jewish nationalism – as part of the universal quest for self-determination embedded in nationalism and liberalism in the nineteenth century (Avineri Reference Avineri1981, 4–13) – was antithetical to the prevalent antisemitism that had seen the Jews persecuted in many parts of Europe (see Stillman Reference Stillman2009; Hertzberg Reference Hertzberg1997). The physician Leon Pinsker (Reference Pinsker and Hertzberg1997) wrote that antisemitism – or “Judeophobia” as he termed it – is a clinical disorder, a form of demonopathy that demonizes Judaism and Jews, and that “autoemancipation” is the ultimate solution to the perennial Jewish question in circumstances of uncertainties as to whether Jews can ever be fully integrated in European societies. As Frankel (Reference Frankl2009, 15) puts it: “a direct challenge to the security of the Jews in one country or another could not go unanswered, especially when, as was so often the case, it came in times of peace and relative tranquillity.” Jewish nationalism emerged in several forms in the nineteenth century with different proposals to settle Jews “either in the non-Jewish environment (autonomism), or in a socially reconstituted human milieu (Jewish socialism), or in a separate territory (territorialism), or in the Land of Israel (Zionism), or in a socially reconstituted human environment in the Land of Israel (Socialist Zionism)” (Friesel Reference Friesel2006, 296). The forerunners of Zionism – Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, Moses Hess, Judah Alkalai (see Katz Reference Katz, Reinharz and Shapira1996; Laqueur Reference Laqueur2003) – very like Zionist leaders such as Theodor Herzl (see figure 2), Max Nordau, and Ahad Ha’am all made a case for the creation of a Jewish state not only to protect diasporic Jews from antisemitic attacks but also to provide Jews with opportunity to return to the spiritual home central to their identity. Zionism had not only a political basis but also cultural and religious foundations. It could thus be argued that Zionism emerged from existential anxiety amongst Jews in the diaspora who longed for refuge in the Land of Israel – the cultural, religious, and spiritual home of the Jews.

Figure 2.

Portrait of Theodor Herzl

Source: Zatari Reference Zatari2018

To illustrate the interaction between physical and ontological security in Jewish nationalism, one needs to look at the disputes between Territorialism and Zionism, two movements and ideologies that emerged in the 1880s. For Territorialists – territorialism was championed by the Jewish Territorial Organisation (ITO) and the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization – like Israel Zangwill the Jewish question must be resolved by establishing an autonomous entity or state for Jews wherever is possible in the world so that the choice should not be limited to the Land of Israel (Alroey Reference Alroey2011, 3; Almagor Reference Almagor2019). The Territorialists were concerned not so much with ontological security but with physical security. Whereas the ITO’s proposals for Jewish settlement under the leadership of Israel Zangwill included places such as Mesopotamia, Ecuador, Cyrenaica (Libya), Angola, and Honduras, the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization under the auspices of Russian social-revolutionary émigré Isaac Steinberg included Australia (the Kimberley Plan), Suriname, Madagascar, French and British Guiana, Madagascar, New Caledonia, and the New Hebrides. By contrast, Zionists were concerned as much about physical security as about ontological security. This is why they insisted that the Jewish state must be founded on the Land of Israel. For Zionists, the Land of Israel is the spiritual center of Jewish people. It embodies the Jewish self: the history, culture, and religious heritage of Jews. According to Avineri (Reference Avineri1981, 3, emphasis in original): “What singled out the Jews from the Christian and Muslim majority communities in whose midst they have resided for two millennia was not only their distinct religious beliefs but also their link – tenuous and nebulous as it might have been – with the distant land of their forefathers. It was because of this that Jews were considered by others – and considered themselves – not only a minority, but a minority in exile.” The idea of reclaiming the historic homeland meant that Zionism went beyond merely resolving Jews’ physical insecurity from antisemitic attacks in Central and Eastern Europe; it was also concerned with the preservation of Jewish identity amidst the forced assimilations and dispersions that unjust treatments had wrought upon Jews for two millennia. Zionists, to put it more bluntly, maintained that Zionism was impossible without Zion. The “negation of the diaspora” – the assumption that Jewish identity is insecure, and Jewish emancipation is unfeasible, in the diaspora – was conducive to the Zionist project of establishing not merely a “State of Jews but a really Jewish State” (Ha’am Reference Ha’am and Hertzberg1997, 267). This pervasive sentiment in Zionism appealed to the ontological security needs of the Jewish diaspora who longed to return to the Land of Israel with the intent of reconnecting with their religious, spiritual, and cultural selves.

If the Land of Israel is inseparable from Jewish identity, so also is the Holocaust. In a poll in 2013 where American Jews were asked what it means to be Jewish, 73% underlined that Holocaust commemoration is essential to their sense of Jewishness (Pew Research Center 2013). Neusner (Reference Neusner, Neusner and Avery-Peck2001) posits that the events of the Holocaust delimited a wholly novel ecology for Jewish people. First, it raised the question of the problem of evil, and second, it redefined the social and political life of the Jews. These radical transformations in Jewish thought and political life must, I think, be explicated. The problem of evil – an age-old philosophical conundrum regarding the (ir)reconcilability of the existence of evil with belief in an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent supernatural being called God – in light of the Holocaust means that Jews commenced asking the following question: “where was God in Auschwitz?” In other words, if the good God whom the Jews had venerated and offered prayers to for centuries were alive and active, why did He allow the Jews to face such gruesome extermination by the vicious Nazi regime under the auspices of Adolf Hitler? Kessler (Reference Kessler2007, 51–54) has surveyed some responses to this challenging question: some ultra-Orthodox Jews consider the Holocaust as a punishment for the infidelity or unfaithfulness of Israel; others tend to conceive the Holocaust in instrumental terms in that without it, it would have been impossible to birth the current State of Israel; still others have had their faith shattered in large part because they believe that God deserted Israel – the “chosen people” – when they most needed to be saved from Nazi miscreants. With many Jewish theologians positing the notion of a limited God who is really not in absolute control of the world and others suggesting that God shared in the human suffering the Holocaust portends, there is no lucid consensus as much between Jewish theologians as between ordinary Jews with regard to the apposite interpretation of the gory event that saw the mass extermination of Jews in the European continent.

Regardless of the myriad interpretations of the Holocaust, it is incontrovertible that the State of Israel signifies ontological security for most, if in fact not all, Jewish people. It is little wonder, then, that the State of Israel asserts the right to territorial integrity and control over the Land of Israel – variously termed the Promised Land, the Land of Canaan, or the Holy Land which, according to the Tanakh, was given by God to Abraham and his descendants, Israel – in part because it perceives this as redemptive for the Jewish people in terms of evading annihilation and guaranteeing the survival of Judaism and Jewish cultural life. For, politically, Jews generally hold the view that the existence of the State of Israel is crucial to the physical security of the Jewish people – both for those who have now returned home after many years in exile and for those who, despite being in the diaspora, invariably want to feel the connection to the Land of Israel that is profoundly central to their historical and cultural identity. But the State of Israel is beyond political symbolism; it has a spiritual dimension, too. It is the spiritual connection to the Land of Israel which the State of Israel lays claim to that serves as the foundation of Judaism – the religion of Jews. Rabbi Tony Bayfield has written extensively – albeit from a theological perspective – about Israel as land and people basing his contention on the Jewish scriptures. Bayfield (Reference Bayfield2019) traces the connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel in the Book of Genesis where God required Abraham to leave his native land to a different one: based on this biblical narrative, Bayfield regards Judaism as a journey, one that begins with Abraham and continued through to the emergence of Christianity and Islam both of whom acknowledge Abraham’s unwavering faith in God as central to their own religious tenets. The Land of Israel – in Bayfield’s very original imagination – is integral to the religious life of Jewish people, for it is central not only to Jewish daily prayer but also to the Sabbath and festival prayers. Bayfield avers that without the Land of Israel Jews and Judaism would not have survived persecutions for centuries and could not survive today. From this perspective, it is axiomatic that the significance of the State of Israel is tied to its relevance to the practice of Judaism and the persistence of Jewish culture since it enables Jews to live out their Jewish identity devoid of totalitarian tyranny or compulsions to assimilate other cultures to the detriment of Jewish culture. This sentiment has been equally expressed by the Israeli journalist and author Yossi Klein Halevi (Reference Halevi2002) who sees the Land of Israel as central to his profession of the faith everyday as he faces toward Jerusalem to recite his daily prayers: it is such religious and spiritual experience that largely orientates Jewish cultural life.

Despite the common history which Jewish people share, Edward Kessler (Reference Kessler2007) notes that Jews are divided between what is constitutive of Jewish identity – that is, whether being Jewish means association with the State of Israel, the religion (Judaism), or the Jewish culture.Footnote ² According to Kessler, most Jews consider these three aspects as central to their Jewishness, but some others differ in various ways. For example, ultra-Orthodox Jews identify with the religion (Judaism) but do not support the creation of a Jewish state (because, they argue, it should be created by the Messiah, God’s anointed one), and they do not regard culture, save for religious customs, as central to Jewish experiences. Others – religious Zionists, Observant West Bank Settlers, and secular Israelis – pinpoint the Land of Israel as central to Jewish identity. Still others, like the Secular Diaspora Jews, connect their Jewish identity with the history, ethics, culture, and shared experiences of the Jewish people. Notwithstanding these discrepancies in interpretations of Jewishness, for Jews the State of Israel is intimately connected to ontological security to evade the threats to Jewish culture and religion embedded in the Land of Israel.

It is worth noting that the State of Israel does not possess only a Jewish identity; it, in fact, has multiple identities. Lupovici (Reference Lupovici2012) posits that the State of Israel has three identities that continually need to be ontologically secured: Jewish identity, democratic identity, and security provider. These tripartite identities are challenged at different times in Israel’s continuous engagement with Palestinians. This leads Lupovici (Reference Lupovici2012, 813), with the paradigmatic example of the State of Israel’s responses to the Second Intifada, to advance the theory of “ontological dissonance,” a phenomenon that occurs when “the potential solutions to a collective actor’s (for example, a state’s) various threatened identities – that is, the various ontological insecurities it faces – are in opposition, compelling the actor to choose among contradictory measures.” How can the state’s Jewish identity be reconciled with its democratic identity and its identity as security provider in circumstances of clashes with Palestinian Arabs? How to reconcile the fact that the State of Israel is a Jewish nation based on respect for the principles of Judaism with the cultural, ethnic, and religious heterogeneity of its populations? How can the Israeli state maintain its identity as security provider in its contestations with Palestinians without stripping itself of its democratic and Jewish identities? How can Jewish law which developed under conditions of exile accommodate or fail to accommodate the principle and practice of democratic citizenship? How is democratic pluralism in congruence with traditional Judaism? The State of Israel, as I say, was not established to accommodate heterogeneity, a characteristic of many modern states: multiculturalism was not, as I see it, built into its very fabric. It was established as a unique Jewish state to provide physical and ontological security for Jews with Judaism at its core foundation despite its formally secular status. This explains why Lupovic (Reference Lupovici2012, 822) asserts that

The questions I have raised regarding Israel’s myriad identities continually perturb the Israeli state. But they are also conundrums that should apparently trouble any ethnoreligious group that imagines kinship with the Jews and aspires to sovereign statehood for the purposes of curbing perceived discrimination and marginalization, too – namely, the Igbo. In the next section, I tease out the Igbo narrative of Jewish identity derived from the Hamitic hypothesis, focusing on the racialist undertones of the hypothesis and its implausibility in explicating the origins of the Igbo.

The Hamitic Hypothesis and the Construction of Igbo Jewishness

Before delving into the racist origins of the Hamitic hypothesis, I should like to state that the Igbo are one amongst the many ethnic groups in Africa that claim Jewish ancestry. From Ethiopia, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and South Africa to Cameroon, Ghana, Rwanda, and Nigeria, ethnic groups in Africa increasingly claim Jewish descent (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1999; Bruder Reference Bruder2008; Bruder and Parfitt Reference Bruder and Parfitt2012; Parfitt Reference Parfitt2013; Lis Reference Lis2015; Lis, Miles, and Parfitt Reference Lis, William and Parfitt2016; Devir Reference Devir2017; Gidron Reference Gidron2021). Miles (Reference Miles2019) divides emerging Jewish movements in Africa into three different categories: vague Israelitism, Hebraic eclecticism, and orthopraxis. The vague Israelitism is characterized by belief in Israelite ethnogenesis, the invocation of cultural and linguistic similarities with Hebrew, and the linkage of local experiences of oppression to the Holocaust. Hebraic eclecticism is characterized by the mixing of local cultural practices and Christian rituals with Jewish religious customs and the Judaizing of non-Jewish rituals and dogma. Finally, orthopraxis is characterized by strict adherence to the principles and practices of “normative Judaism” in terms of the observance of Jewish holidays and dietary laws, the study of the Torah and the Hebrew language, and so forth. The “Igbo Jews” fall into these three different categories. This is axiomatic from Bruder’s (Reference Bruder, Bruder and Parfitt2012, 31) categorization which divides the Igbo into three groups:

What binds together all the ethnic groups in the African continent – including the Igbos – that claim a Jewish heritage or Jewishness is undoubtedly the Hamitic hypothesis, an age-old racialist discourse which states that “everything of value ever found in Africa was brought there by the Hamites, allegedly a branch of the Caucasian race” (Sanders Reference Sanders1969, 521; Zachernuk Reference Zachernuk1994, 428–429; see also Seligman Reference Seligman1930). The Hamitic hypothesis derives from a biblical story in Genesis where Noah cursed Ham’s son Canaan.Footnote ³ Although the original biblical account does not make any reference to racial differences in its discussion of Noah’s sons – Shem, Ham, and Japhet – the association of Ham’s curse with blackness and Ham’s progeny as degenerate black people first appeared in the Babylonian Talmud, a collection of Jewish oral traditions, in the sixth century. The idea of associating the Hamites with blackness persisted through the Middle Ages and was generally accepted by the year 1600. Indeed, by the sixteenth century, Africa became the place of the descendants of Ham and Western interventions in the continent were based on two broad assumptions: first, that black people were too degenerate to fashion their own history, and second, that black people were – as a consequence of their supposed degeneracy – incapable of having their own history (Parfitt Reference Parfitt2013, 25). Once the Hamitic hypothesis was tied to economic gain, it was consequently employed as a moral, ethical, and ideological basis to contend that black people are naturally inferior to white Europeans and should be enslaved for economic purposes. For the idea that “blackness was an immediate consequence of the curse, that all blacks were born into slavery, and that all blacks descended from Ham was a useful pro-slavery argument” (Parfitt Reference Parfitt2013, 28). In other words, the Hamitic hypothesis not only coincided with black slavery, it was also used to justify the unconscionable immoral practice. As Sanders (Reference Sanders1969, 523) puts it:

It is in the milieu of the preponderance of the Hamitic hypothesis in the colonial epoch that “Judaised” Africans that Olaudah Equiano wrote his Interesting Narrative – the first known account to compare the Jews with the Igbo in West Africa. Equiano’s narrative forms part of colonial discourse; for, “[g]iven the widespread nature of the colonial theories maintaining that there were Israelite Lost Tribes in every spot on the globe, from the Americas to the islands of the Pacific, the London-based Equiano would have been hard- pressed not to be aware of them” (Parfitt Reference Parfitt2013, 40–41). In Equiano’s (Reference Equiano1999, 18) autobiography wherein he recounts his experience of the Atlantic slave trade and of his spiritual redemption, he compares the customs and practices of the Igbo society of his time to those of the Jewish people:

In a different passage, Equiano underscores cultural similarities between the Jews and the Igbo. Indeed, not only does he believe the differences in color between the Igbo and Jews are due to evolutionary climatic conditions but also that there are significant similarities in government, law, and cultural practices between the two ethnic groups:

As I have already underlined in the introduction, Equiano made these comparisons with Jews in order to “give added credibility to his work by invoking this, the conventional wisdom of his time, namely that there were Jews in [W]est Africa, and to give the impression that black Africans were civilized and humane and had a culture that, like British culture and European culture in general, had been influenced by Judaic ideals” (Parfitt Reference Parfitt2013, 41). Equiano’s idea of the Jewishness of the Igbo was further popularized by G. T. Basden – a British missionary who had served and lived in Igboland for about thirty-five years. According to Basden (Reference Basden1921, 31), in Igbo cultural practices, “[t]here are certain customs which rather point to Levitic influence at a more or less remote period. This is suggested in the underlying ideas concerning sacrifice and in the practice of circumcision. The language also bears several interesting parallels with the Hebrew idiom.” Basden’s detailed ethnographic account of Igbo village communities helped to solidify the assumption that Igbos are Jews.

Although Equiano’s use of the Hamitic hypothesis to contest the enslavement of black people in the heydays of slavery is absolutely remarkable, his claim that certain rituals and cultural practices are peculiar to Jews and Igbos is, I think, quite misguided. Take, for instance, Equiano’s supposition that names in the Igbo tradition as in the Jewish tradition almost always reflect some circumstance or event. He describes his case: “I was named Olaudah, which, in our language signifies ‘vicissitudes or fortunate,’ also, ‘one favoured, and having a loud voice and well spoken” (Equiano Reference Equiano1999, 18). Whilst it is interesting that he could compare the naming tradition of both groups, such cultural practice is neither peculiar to Igbos nor to Jews. Indeed, there are numerous groups within and beyond Africa for whom names and naming are not entirely arbitrary but embedded in cultural symbolism. Describing naming traditions in Africa, the eminent African theologian Mbiti (Reference Mbiti1969, 154) explicates that

A classic naming tradition in Africa – to buttress Mbiti’s argument – is that of the Akan which reflects the days in which a child is born. Names according to the particular day of birth include Kwadwo (Monday), Kwabena (Tuesday), Kwaku (Wednesday), Yaw (Thursday), Kofi (Friday), Kwame (Saturday), and Akwasi (Sunday). A male Saturday-born is called “Kwame” so that anyone who bears that name – the former president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, or the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, say – is automatically assumed to have been born on a Saturday. Additionally, in the Akan tradition, it is believed that people born on particular days possess certain attributes. For example, it is believed that a person who bears the name “Kwame” radiates good fortune and health – and males who bear the name are typically considered as intelligent and talented problem solvers. There are also names for twins, birth order, and special delivery of children. In the latter case, names are given according to whether children are delivered under special circumstances, and this could be whether they are born on the field (Efum) or premature (Nyaméama) or under happy circumstances (Afriyie) amongst numerous possibilities. Beyond the Akan naming tradition – and dare I say, beyond Africa – there are countless cultures (ancient and modern) with traditions that associate names with particular events, attributes, and circumstances so that to suppose, as Equiano and other theorists of the Hamitic hypothesis do, that there are cultural similarities unique to Igbos and Jews is anthropologically implausible.

But there is a substantial reason for why the Hamitic hypothesis is utterly misguided: the fact that this hypothesis is believed to be true by racists, anti-racists, nationalists, and cosmopolitans for varied purposes is not sufficient reason to suppose it is true. We cannot rely on Equiano’s account because it was based on received ideas in the west where he lived out his adult years and was largely influenced by insights from Christian authors in the west regarding Jewish customs which he himself underlined in his autobiography. To begin with, as I say, there is neither archaeological nor historical evidence to support the claim that the Igbos are one of the lost tribes of Israel in Africa or that they have a Semitic heritage. Chuku (Reference Chuku2018, 4) contends that “[t]he Hamitic theorists have ignored the importance of the corroborative use of multiple sources – oral traditions, archaeological, and linguistic evidence – in dealing with complex and complicated historical topics such as origins, migrations, and settlements. Incidentally, none of these multiple sources has supported that the Igbo originated either from ancient Egypt or the Middle East.” Similarly, regarding the falsity of the Hamitic hypothesis, the Igbo historian Adiele Afigbo (Reference Afigbo1983, 3) argues that “[n]ot only is there no concrete evidence in its support, but it is in conflict with what archaeological and linguistic evidence we do have.” Through historical linguistics we now know that the “Igbo language belongs to the Kwa subfamily of the larger Niger-Congo language family; glottochronology points to a point in time about 6,000 years ago when Igbo separated from proto-Kwa, assumed to be spoken in the Niger-Benue confluence area” (Harneit-Sievers Reference Harneit-Sievers2006, 19). And archaeologists and historians have discovered copious evidence of technology, farming, and trade in Igboland since 1000 BCE which disprove the Hamitic hypothesis (Isichei Reference Isichei1977; Oriji Reference Oriji1990; Harneit-Sievers Reference Harneit-Sievers2006). This implies that the Jews and Igbos are distinct groups with dissimilar histories, territorial settlements, and migration patterns. The Jews’ persecutions by Babylonians, Romans, and Nazis are not part of the historical narrative of Igbo people. The Zionist’s appeal to the Land of Israel as constitutive of Jewishness and the unwavering desire to return there is not part of the historical consciousness of the Igbo. This is precisely why, when asked whether there are similarities between the Jewish situation and that of the Igbo in terms of national consciousness during the Nigerian Civil War, Achebe (Reference Achebe1968, 36) contends that there is hardly any connection between the Jewish experience and the plight of the Igbo: for whereas the Jews were dispersed from their original home in the Land of Israel and always longed to return there, there was no dispersion or perennial longing to return home (in southeast Nigeria) for the Igbos. Classical and Modern Hebrew are not in the same language family as the Igbo language. However, the fact that the Hamitic hypothesis is erroneous in explaining the origins of the Igbo does not mean that it has no social power. Rather, the hypothesis has fundamentally attained the status of an origin myth amongst Igbos and used not only to comprehend but also to interpret and explain the state of affairs in postcolonial Nigeria.

If the Hamitic hypothesis which postulates the Semitic origin of the Igbo is, so to speak, an “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm, Hobsbawm and Ranger2012), so also is Igbo identity or Igboness which did not exist in precolonial Igboland. In precolonial times, the term “Igbo” was never used by the Igbo in reference to themselves as they were not a monolithic group but many different polities that did not – prior to colonialism – consider themselves one identity group. Igbo societies are often described as “segmentary” and “acephalous” though this has been countered by some scholars who contend that some like the Aro had chiefs and were not headless (Nwokeji Reference Nwokeji2010). Harneit-Sievers (Reference Harneit-Sievers2006, 112–113) avers that “[t]here was no Igbo ethnic identity in precolonial Igboland. The term ‘Igbo’ was applied locally to denote ‘others,’ ‘strangers,’ or ‘slaves,’ but it appears to have not been used as a self-designator, and certainly not to denote any larger group that included one’s own community.”Footnote ⁴ It would be an oversimplification, I think, to suppose that Igbo societies were – or are – internally homogeneous. In the past as well as in the present, the Igbo have never been a homogeneous ethnic group: there are as many dialectical variations as there are diverse customs and practices within Igbo societies. The various autonomous villages and communities that now constitute Igboland gradually accepted the designation of “Igbo” under colonial rule – especially in the 1950s when “the inhabitants of rural Igbo villages began to consider themselves as being Igbo” (Bruder Reference Bruder, Bruder and Parfitt2012, 38) – after they became aware of some cultural similarities amongst them. The unification of different Igbo societies as well as the formation and ossification of something called an “Igbo identity” is due to the work of colonizers, Christian missionaries, social anthropologists, Igbo cultural nationalists, urban migration, and anti-Igbo prejudices from interactions with non-Igbo ethnic groups (Harneit-Sievers Reference Harneit-Sievers2006; Bruder Reference Bruder, Bruder and Parfitt2012, 44–46). Theorists of social identity are agreed on the fact that social identities – ethnicity, religion, race, say – are dialogically constructed: identity is created as much by difference as by similarity (see Appiah Reference Appiah2005, 62–113; Jenkins Reference Jenkins2008). Applied to the Nigerian context, one could contend that Igbo identity is virtually impossible to grasp devoid of the presence of other identity groups such as the Hausa, the Fulani, and the Yoruba, amongst over three hundred other ethnic groups in Nigeria. In the absence of a common culture, language, and past amongst Igbo societies, the Hamitic hypothesis was appropriated by Igbos to fashion a shared history and identity that would enable them to extirpate the vestiges of colonialism. This is why Bruder (Reference Bruder, Bruder and Parfitt2012, 43) asserts that – with exposure of Igbos to Jewish experiences in the Bible, owing to the work of Christian missionaries – “[t]he colonised Igbo believed themselves to be the oppressed Hebrews of the Bible and projected their own lives into the narratives of Israel’s formative history.” Over time, Igbos have internalized the Hamitic hypothesis, reworked it, and employed it to make sense of their sociopolitical situation with the view to transform what they consider the deplorable state of affairs in postcolonial Nigeria. As Bruder (Reference Bruder, Bruder and Parfitt2012, 56) notably puts it, “In the Nigeria[n] State marked by post-colonialism upheavals, political ethnic conflicts, and economic uncertainty, the adoption of Jewish identities has been magnified as a coherent prospect and indicates various attempts by [the] Igbo to seek change at a cosmic, social, and supraindividual level through the restoration of a real or imagined past religious order.” Jewishness is therefore posited as the pristine Igbo identity.

When Equiano drew connections between Igbos and Jews in 1789, he absolutely had no idea of Biafra, nor did he intend the creation of the Republic of Biafra. Indeed, in his days, Jews and Igbos had no state of their own nor was there any lucid indication that they wished to create one. Put simply, Equiano had no nationalist agenda. Rather, his intention was to emphasize the humanity of black people and of the place where he was born in Africa prior to being taken captive and sold off to European slavers. Jewish nationalism and Igbo nationalism were practically non-existent in Equiano’s time. By connecting his narrative of Igbo cultural life to Jewish customs with copious amounts of citations from Christian theologians in his day to back his contention, Equiano could make a case against slavery as an abjection that subjugated human beings to unjustified cruelty. As we shall see, however, when Igbo nationalists started to forcefully invoke the Jewish connection beginning during the Nigerian Civil War – the apotheosis, in my view, of Igbo nationalism – they did not imitate Equiano to argue only for the similarity of customs between Jews and Igbos but also for the similarity of experiences of ethnoreligious deprivation and discrimination. For what Igbo nationalists saw in the Jewish narrative of identity that they could appropriate is the Jewish experience of the Nazi Holocaust with which they could make the case that Igbos were similarly at risk of extermination in consequence of their ethnoreligious difference in a state dominated by northern Muslims. This fear provoked existential anxiety within the Igbo society regarding their ontological security. Analogical reasoning served to recreate a novel Igbo identity based on shared experiences of discrimination and to attract international attention requisite for the nationalist project of self-determination. In the section that follows, then, I shall demonstrate the strategic appropriation of Jewishness by Igbo nationalists during the Nigerian Civil War.

Ontological (In)Security and the Social Power of Analogizing Jewishness

Prior to British colonialization of Nigeria that began after the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s, present-day Nigeria was just a combination of diverse ethnic groups inhabiting different territories. Put differently, Nigerians did not see themselves as “Nigerians.” The formation of what we could call a “pan-Nigerian identity” began in 1914 when the two protectorates of Nigeria – the Southern Nigeria Protectorate and the Northern Nigeria Protectorate – were amalgamated to balance the budget deficit of the northern region (Agbiboa Reference Agbiboa2013; Falola and Heaton Reference Falola and Heaton2008).Footnote ⁵ But the amalgamation of the two protectorates with extremely diverse ethnic groups – over three hundred of them – created what Ekeh (Reference Ekeh1975, 92) terms the “two publics”: in one public realm (primordial public) are “primordial groupings, ties, and sentiment” and in the other (civic public) are “military, the civil service, the police.” These two, Ekeh contends, have a dialectical relationship in postcolonial states such as Nigeria as ethnic affiliations interact with, and influence, public institutions.Footnote ⁶ Beginning in 1945, the incongruous publics engendered conflicts between different ethnicities in the northern region. For example, in 1945 there was a riot orchestrated by the Hausa against the Igbo in Jos (see Plotnicov Reference Plotnicov1971). Similar attacks by northerners against the Igbo living in northern Nigeria occurred in 1953. The fear of domination – that is, the fear of northerners that southerners had an ulterior motive to dominate the center and vice versa – led northerners to institute the “Northernisation policy” in 1954 which “aimed to reduce the [northern] region’s reliance on southern civil servants and professionals by expanding educational opportunities for northerners and curtailing employment of southerners, often by replacing them with more expensive expatriates while northerners received training” (Anthony Reference Anthony2010, 48). This did not sit well with southerners – especially the highly educated Igbo people – who felt that northerners sacrificed merit on the altar of ethnic and regional prejudices.

When Nigeria achieved independence from Britain in 1960, the two publics were not extirpated but instead were integrated into the new state, leading to fierce competition for political power amongst political elites from the three major ethnic groups: the Hausa and Fulani (concentrated in the northern region), the Igbo (concentrated in the southeastern region), and the Yoruba (concentrated in the southwestern region). Indeed, “[t]hese fears of ‘domination’ clouded any sense of national unity in Nigeria in the 1960s, as residents in each region increasingly came to fear that other regions intended to use the political system to enrich themselves at the expense of their Nigerian ‘brothers’ in other regions” (Falola and Heaton Reference Falola and Heaton2008, 165). The consequences of such fears were electoral fraud, thuggery, ethnic baiting, and political corruption. With the political scene bedevilled by fears of ethnic and regional domination, it would take a coup by mainly Igbo military officers and a countercoup by mainly northern military officers in 1966 to officially usher in ethnic bigotry on a large scale throughout the federation. The suspicion by northerners that Igbos harbored an ulterior motive of dominating the entire polity provoked anti-Igbo sentiments in the northern region where many Igbos had established businesses and worked in the civil service (Daly Reference Daly2020, 40–41). The suspicion by northerners that Igbos harboured an ulterior motive of dominating the entire polity provoked anti-Igbo sentiments in the northern region where many Igbos had established businesses and worked in the civil service (Daly Reference Daly2020, 40–41). This was worsened by the fact that the 1966 Nigerian coup d’état was engineered by mostly Igbo soldiers which led to the coup being dubbed, however wrongly, “the Igbo coup.”Footnote ⁷ This seemingly imbued Nigerian politics with ethnic coloration. So problematic were interethnic relations that there was an anti-Igbo pogrom perpetrated by northerners in various parts of northern Nigeria between May and September 1966 – just six years after Nigeria’s independence – that left over thirty thousand Igbos dead. The historian Samuel Fury Childs Daly describes the anti-Igbo pogrom in 1966 in the following way:

The anti-Igbo pogrom of 1966 led to thousands of Igbos in the northern region fleeing to the Eastern Region – where their ancestral homeland is located – in order to evade persecution from northerners. After a series of failed negotiations between the Federal Military Government (represented by Yakubu Gowon) and the Eastern Region (represented by Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu), the Eastern Region was declared an independent state called the Republic of Biafra on May 30, 1967 by Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. The declaration of independence of the Republic of Biafra plunged Nigeria into a civil war which occurred between 1967 and 1970. Over a million Igbos were massacred and starved to death by the Nigerian military forces with the support of foreign powers – especially Britain and the Soviet Union – during the civil war (Korieh Reference Korieh2013). As the conflict progressed, images of “Biafran Babies” came to symbolize everything that was wrong with the uncivil violence.

Indeed, it is within the context of the civil strife that analogies of Igbos as Jews became politically salient as they were employed by Igbo nationalists not only to engender collective self-consciousness amongst the Igbos but also to make claims for self-determination to persuade the international community to recognize the Republic of Biafra. Drawing on the Hamitic hypothesis that put forward cultural similarities between Igbo culture and Jewish culture, Igbo nationalists extended “imagined kinship” with Jews to instances of oppression in disparate contexts. The Nigerian Civil War can be considered – at least in my view – an episode in which Igbos struggled not only for physical security but also for ontological security in order to safeguard their identity even with knowledge of the fact that they could not defeat the stronger side, the Nigerian government. Igbo nationalists felt that key components of their identity – culture, religion, territory – were under threat from Muslim northerners so that Biafra, the short-lived secessionist state, symbolized ontological security for the marginalized Igbos in the course of the conflict. Although oil was a major factor in the decision of external powers such as Britain not to recognize Biafra’s independence (see Uche Reference Uche2008), the war had little or nothing to do with oil. This is precisely why Daly (Reference Daly2020, 57) argues that “[w]hat Biafra and Nigeria were fighting for was something larger and more abstract than control of the oil spigot. It was a contest over identity, ethics, and the political future.” In such contestations over identity, Igbo nationalists resorted to analogies of Jewishness drawing on memories of Jewish persecutions. Igbo nationalists regarded themselves – and were regarded by others – as the “Jews of Africa” in exile in Nigeria whilst the Nigerian state was equated with Nazi Germany (Heerten Reference Heerten, Fehrenbach and Rodogno2015). The idea behind the “Jews of Africa” slogan was to characterize Igbos as a marginalized ethnoreligious people attempting to create their own state in their ancestral homeland as the Jews did with the creation of the State of Israel. Hence, drawing on the Hamitic hypothesis, Igbo nationalists “Judaised” Igboness so that Igbo identity became synonymous with oppression in postcolonial Nigeria. Consider, by way of example, the statements of the Igbo writer Onwukwe Alaezi (Reference Alaezi1999, 134):

One effective way Igbo nationalists successfully equated Igbo identity with the oppression of Jews was to frame the Nigerian Civil War as a genocide against Igbos. Igbo nationalists portrayed the war as genocidal, using photographers and journalists to shape local and global public opinion. The refugee camps in Biafra were variously described as Dachau, or “‘the camp of Belsen at its liberation,’ ‘Mauthausens of famine’ or as a ‘Buchenwald for children.’ Auschwitz, the most well-known site of mass annihilation, was repeatedly referenced, although the camps that had been liberated by Western allied troops were most frequently invoked’ (Heerten and Moses Reference Heerten, Moses, Dirk Moses and Heerten2018, 14). Posters of malnourished children with the title “Dear God, Not Again” were quite rampant in national and international media (see Heerten Reference Heerten2017, 182). The rhetoric of Holocaust was employed by sympathizers across the globe to explain the plight of Igbos during the gory conflict. For example, during an interconfessional protest rally in Manhattan on October 26, 1968, Rabbi A. James Rudin made the following statement: “In my mind’s eye the smokestacks of Auschwitz blur into the cities and the bush country of Biafra. In my wakeful and terrible visions I see the mass Jewish graves of Europe rapidly filling with starving and dying Biafrans” (Heerten Reference Heerten2017, 179). The Biafran press used the Holocaust to shed light on the plight of Igbos in Nigeria, arguing that it is not a requirement “for all Biafrans to be killed before a case of genocide is substantiated. Nazi Germany did not succeed in killing all Jews and yet genocide was the charge against German leaders at the Nuremburg trials. In the case of Biafra, there have been acts of genocide over a period of years establishing a pattern from which the intention of genocide can be inferred” (Anthony Reference Anthony, Dirk Moses and Heerten2018, 62–63). In several of his public speeches, Ojukwu – the leader of the secessionist state of Biafra – compared Igbos to Jews through the rhetoric of genocide. He contended that Europe and the world looked on in indifference as Igbos were massacred with reckless abandon:

As Israel was embroiled in the Six-Day War in 1967 with its Muslim neighbours, Ojukwu drew analogies between Israel’s fight with, and victories over, Muslim states in the Middle East region and the war between the Igbos and Nigerian government dominated by northern Muslims. For instance, he once averred that “[l]ike the Jews … we saw in the birth of our young Republic the gateway to freedom and survival” (Levey Reference Levey, Dirk Moses and Heerten2018, 181). And because the Nigerian government kept on receiving arms supplies from its allies – Britain and the Soviet Union – the Igbos felt that there was a global conspiracy to annihilate them like the Nazi Holocaust which saw a European-wide conspiracy to exterminate the Jews. A poem in the Biafran Newsletter captured this as follows:

This sentiment as to a global conspiracy against the “Jews of Africa” is also noted in the Ahiara Declaration in 1969 where Ojukwu invoked racial differences to posit the Igbo as a race that had been abandoned and oppressed by “white” and “yellow” races. For him, the only reason why the world was oblivious to the sufferings of the “Jews of Africa” during the war is in consequence of their black race. Had Igbos been “white,” so the argument goes, the world would have long come to their aid. As he put it in the Ahiara Declaration:

What could be gleaned from the secessionist agitations of Ojukwu, I think, is the necessity of immediate international intervention to ensure the recognition of Biafra’s status as an independent state in order to solidify the ontological security of Igbos and other minority ethnic groups within the Biafran territory. And the main goal of framing the war as a genocide against the Igbos – thanks in large measure to the longstanding Hamitic hypothesis that had already prepared the ground for such rhetoric of genocide comparisons – was to “ensure that the civilian population believed that the war was genocidal, especially amongst the Igbo, who, by mid-1968, comprised the bulk of the population still under Biafran rule. This narrative was also instrumental in creating the argument for genocide around the world” (Doron Reference Doron, Dirk Moses and Heerten2018, 75). Or as the British journalist John de St Jorre (Reference de St Jorre1972, 346) explains:

I said in the introduction that analogies are powerful so that the focus should not be on whether they are true or false but what they do in terms of their social power. Roy Doron and John de St Jorre are, in my view, absolutely right: the framing of the war by Igbo nationalists as genocide was not entirely vacuous. It had immense social power. On the one hand, the analogy gave the Igbos reasons to fight to the very end to defend their ontological security regardless of the devastating losses on the weaker Biafran side. On the other hand, the analogy touched the conscience of individuals, organizations, and states leading to varied reactions around the world. The Igbos’ invocation of Jewishness was largely successful in Israel as the Israeli public, press, and parliament came to see reflections of the Holocaust in the plight of Igbos in Nigeria (Levey Reference Levey2014). This is precisely why Israel aided – albeit in a clandestine manner – Biafra with weapons as well as humanitarian assistance. The military support was clandestine because Israel wanted to maintain good relations with African countries and therefore saw Nigeria as germane to that endeavor. American Jews and organizations lent moral and humanitarian support to suffering Igbos and equally made comparisons between the Holocaust and the mass starvation of Igbos in Biafra (Heerten Reference Heerten, Fehrenbach and Rodogno2015). But it is not only Israel and Jews that rendered assistance to Biafrans. African Americans did show care for suffering Igbos during civil strife (Farquharson Reference Farquharson, Dirk Moses and Heerten2018). The American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive – with its extensive political connections in Washington, fundraising ability, and advanced advertising campaign – used the rhetoric of genocide against Igbos to “galvanise public support in public support in the United States behind humanitarian intervention in Biafra, which facilitated a fundamental shift in American foreign policy for increased humanitarian aid during the Nigerian Civil War” (McNeil Reference McNeil, Dirk Moses and Heerten2018, 279). Regarding West Germany, Hannig (Reference Hannig, Dirk Moses and Heerten2018, 234) posits that, beginning in 1968, “[t]he varied voices of Biafra’s supporters had resonated to become a thundering chorus that the German government could not ignore, leading it to provide massive donations of humanitarian aid and to compromise its economic interests.” The representations of the sufferings of Igbos in global media as genocide engendered a global surge of humanitarian sentiments and activism. Humanitarian organizations that were founded in the aftermaths of the civil war include the Ireland’s Africa Concern (now Concern Worldwide), Germany’s Society for Threatened Peoples International (STPI), and Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières). The malnourishment of Igbos coupled with the claims of genocide provided other humanitarian organizations – Caritas Internationalis, Christian Aid, the International Committee of the Red Cross, (ICRC), Oxfam, Save the Children, War on Want (Britain), Gorta (Ireland), Nordchurchaid (Scandinavia), Mensen in Nood (Netherlands) amongst others – with the opportunity to fully engage, and consolidate their activities, in the humanitarian sector (O’Sullivan Reference O’Sullivan, Dirk Moses and Heerten2018, 263). This humanitarian activism was largely instigated by the analogies drawn between the plight of Igbos and the persecution of Jews under the auspices of Adolf Hitler. As Heerten (Reference Heerten2017, 203) notably puts it: