The Samuel (Érythrée) Family

The cradle of the Jewish community of Eritrea lies on the other side of the Red Sea. The synagogue of Asmara was, according to sources, the sole place of worship of a small community originating from the Arabian Peninsula, established primarily in Massawa and in Asmara, capital of Italian Eritrea [Synagogue d'Asmara]. This fundamental fact shapes any reading of the Samuel lineage: its ancestors were in all likelihood Adenite and Yemenite Jews, whose commercial history traced the maritime routes linking Aden, Massawa, and the highlands.

Massawa, a hot and feverish port on the coast, was the first point of entry. It was from there that Jewish merchants, drawn by the opportunities of colonial trade — textiles, coffee, pearls, metals — made their way up to Asmara, a high-altitude city with a temperate climate, as the Italians made it their administrative capital from 1890 onward. The surname Samuel, common in the communities of Yemen and Aden, fits naturally into this movement. Sephardic and Eastern genealogy, as documented by contemporary communal databases, attests to the circulation of such names between the shores of the Red Sea [MyHeritage / Geni — Arbre Encaoua].

This migration was not a rupture but a continuation. The Jews of Aden preserved in Asmara their rites — a Judaism rooted in Yemenite and baladi tradition —, their language (Judeo-Yemenite Arabic, gradually supplemented by Italian), and their trans-Mediterranean family networks. The long history of southern Judaism, marked by coexistence and friction with Islam and Christianity, provides the backdrop for this migration: Jews were often a merchant minority whose status oscillated between tolerance and precarity [David Nirenberg, Neighbouring Faiths, 2014]. At the end of the nineteenth century, Italian Eritrea offered a relatively protective framework, conducive to the settlement of families such as the Samuels.

The year 1906 marks the institutional consecration of the community. In 1906, the Synagogue Asmara was completed in Asmara, the capital. It comprises a main sanctuary capable of accommodating up to 200 people, classrooms, and a small Jewish cemetery [History of the Jews in Eritrea]. This edifice was the beating heart of local Jewish life, and one may take it as given that the Samuel families were devoted to it — at services, weddings, and rites of passage.

The synagogue was not merely a place of worship: with its classrooms, it ensured the transmission of Hebrew and the Law, a condition of survival for a minuscule community within an immense country. Until the 1950s, the Jewish community of Asmara numbered nearly 500 people out of close to one million Eritreans [Synagogue d'Asmara]. This infinitesimal proportion — one half-thousandth of the population — speaks plainly to the demographic fragility of the community, and to the vital importance of endogamy and family networks for its preservation. The Samuels stood among its members as one of the pillar families of a world in which everyone knew one another.

The small Jewish cemetery of Asmara, mentioned in the sources, remains the most enduring material witness to this presence. A Jewish cemetery in Asmara preserves the names of generations rooted in the highlands. It is there, in all likelihood, that the first Samuels of Eritrea rest, their headstones — often bilingual, Hebrew and Italian — telling in their own way the story of a family that traveled from the Arabian Peninsula to the heart of Italian East Africa. Funerary epigraphy, in the Jewish world, has always been an archive of family memory, as attested by the communities of the Mediterranean diaspora [Tessa Rajak, The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome, 2001].

The history of the Samuel family of Asmara was inseparable from that of Italian Eritrea, from the protectorate of 1890 to the collapse of the colonial empire in 1941. The community experienced notable growth during the interwar period. In the 1930s, the Jewish community was further strengthened when many European Jews emigrated to Eritrea to escape Nazi persecution in Europe [History of the Jews in Eritrea]. Asmara thus became, paradoxically, a refuge for families fleeing Germany and Central Europe, who swelled the original Adenite nucleus.

This period is not without its ambiguities. The Italian fascist regime, allied with Nazism and the promulgator of the racial laws of 1938, might have struck the community hard. Yet the sources offer a more nuanced picture: the Jews of Asmara were relatively undisturbed during the fascist period [Synagogue d'Asmara]. The geographical distance from the metropole, the economic utility of Jewish merchants within the colony, and the relative indifference of the local administration doubtless account for this relative reprieve. Here, the archive tempers the collective Memory of a universal persecution: in Asmara, the European storm produced only diminished waves.

The family memory of the Samuel family — transmitted through descendants in Milan and Rome — would thus preserve the recollection of a prosperous Italian era, shaped by commerce, schooling, and an openly embraced cultural Italianness. This dual belonging, Oriental in its origins and Italian in its culture, is not unlike the trajectory of other Mediterranean communities that passed "from orientality to westernization" within the span of a single century [Claire Rubinstein-Cohen, Portrait de la communauté juive de Sousse, 2011]. In the absence of published nominative records concerning the Samuel family for this period, this chapter belongs to the intersection between a transmitted family memory and an established historical framework.

The Italian defeat of 1941 opened a British parenthesis rich in eventful episodes for Jewish Eritrea. During the British administration, Eritrea was often used as an internment site for Irgun and Lehi guerrillas fighting for Jewish independence in the British Mandate of Palestine [History of the Jews in Eritrea]. Asmara thus became a detention site for Zionist militants deported from Palestine — an episode that, as a consequence, brought the small local community into direct contact with resurgent Jewish nationalism.

For the Samuel families, this episode was likely decisive in awakening an Israeli consciousness. The internees, educated and ideologically seasoned men, must have mingled with the local community during services and holidays. The synagogue of Asmara, already flourishing, gained in visibility: it served as a rallying point for Jews from across the region, well beyond Eritrea. The synagogue served Jews from across Africa who came to observe the High Holy Days [History of the Jews in Eritrea]. Asmara was thus, for a time, a true spiritual crossroads of the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea.

This moment of radiance coincided with a global turning point. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 profoundly reshaped the community's horizon. In 1948, following the founding of Israel as a Jewish state, many Eritrean Jews emigrated to Israel. In the 1950s, 500 Jews still lived in the country. The last Jewish wedding at the Asmara synagogue was celebrated during that decade [History of the Jews in Eritrea]. For the Samuels, as for their neighbors, the pull of the new Jewish nation opened the way for a first departure to Tel-Aviv, a prelude to the more sweeping dispersions that would follow. The aspiration to return to Zion, deeply rooted in Jewish thought, found there its historical fulfillment [Léon Askénazi, La parole et l'écrit, 1999].

The fate of the Samuel lineage shifted irrevocably with Eritrea's entry into the long war that pitted it against Ethiopia. In 1961, the Eritrean war of independence began after Eritrea was annexed by Ethiopia, and Eritreans began fighting for independence. It was then that Jews began leaving Eritrea [History of the Jews in Eritrea]. Instability, economic insecurity, and the prospect of a prolonged conflict pushed families to seek refuge elsewhere.

The final blow came from the Ethiopian revolution. Things were no different under the dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam, beginning in 1974. The regime drove many Jews to leave the country, reducing the community to a few dozen members following the departure of the last rabbi in 1975 [Synagogue d'Asmara]. The rabbi's departure sealed the end of organized communal life: without a spiritual guide, without a guaranteed minyan, the community could no longer perpetuate itself. In the early 1970s, Jewish emigration increased [History of the Jews in Eritrea], and the Samuel followed this irreversible movement.

It is in this exodus that the current geography of the lineage took shape, consistent with our record: Milan, Rome, and Tel-Aviv. Italy, the former colonial metropolis, naturally welcomed the most Italianized families, drawn by the language, merchant networks, and already established Jewish communities. Israel received those carried by the Zionist ideal since 1948. This bifurcation — toward the West on the one hand, toward Zion on the other — is characteristic of modern Jewish diasporas confronted with the collapse of their world of origin; its echo can be found in the history of other communities around the Mediterranean basin forced into exile in the twentieth century [Eliahou-Éric Botbol, Vie et destin de la communauté juive de Tlemcen, 2000].

From the community of Asmara, only a symbolic presence remains today. The great synagogue of 1906, its cemetery and its steles still stand, tended by a handful of faithful — sometimes only one, according to contemporary accounts reported by the press. But communal life, as it once pulsed in the time of the Samuel family, has been extinguished. The lineage, however, survives through its descendants, and it is in this passage from community to family that Memory is now at stake.

In Milan and Rome, the Samuels have in all likelihood been absorbed into the rich fabric of Italian Judaism, while retaining an awareness of a singular origin: neither Sephardic from Spain, nor Ashkenazic from Europe, but Adenite from Eritrea — heirs to a Judaism of the Red Sea that passed through colonial Africa. This memory of origins, transmitted from generation to generation, constitutes the intangible treasure of the lineage. It connects to the deep conviction, particular to Jewish thought, that transmission — masorah — is the true locus of continuity, beyond geographical ruptures [Léon Askénazi, La parole et l'écrit, 1999].

In Tel-Aviv, the descendants of the Samuels who left from the 1948–1970s have integrated into Israeli society, among the many families who came from across Africa and the East. The Memory of Asmara there takes the form of a family narrative, transmitted during holidays and gatherings, where Italian, Hebrew, and the recollection of the ancestors' Arabic all intermingle. Contemporary genealogy, through collaborative databases, now makes it possible to partially reconstruct these scattered branches and to reconnect the threads broken by exile [MyHeritage / Geni — Arbre Encaoua, 2024]. This chapter, grounded in received tradition rather than archival record, belongs fully to transmitted Memory.

The history of the Samuel families of Eritrea condenses, within a modest lineage, several centuries of Jewish circulation. Born on the shores of the Red Sea, most likely originating from the Arabian Peninsula, it took root in Asmara at the turn of the twentieth century, in the orbit of the 1906 synagogue, flourished under colonial Italy, weathered the trials of fascism and war, then scattered under the pressure of the independence war and the Mengistu dictatorship. Today, as our entry notes, it is "nearly extinct on the ground yet present in Milan, Rome, and Tel Aviv through its descendants."

This trajectory illustrates a broader truth of Jewish history: the capacity of a community to reconstitute itself elsewhere when its world collapses. The regime drove many Jews to leave the country, reducing the community to a few dozen members following the departure of the last rabbi in 1975 [Synagogue d'Asmara] — and yet the lineage endures, transplanted but alive. The stone of Asmara remains the silent witness of a presence; the memory of the descendants is its voice.

At the close of this Great Book, we have taken care to distinguish the established from the transmitted. The History of the Asmara community is documented in its broad outlines; the particular history of the Samuels, for want of published nominative records, belongs more to reasoned probability and family memory. It is precisely at this intersection — between the community archive and the lineage narrative — that this book has sought to stand, with honesty and respect for this engulfed world of the Red Sea.