On View April 2022- September 2022
Tudor Parfitt’s Remarkable Jewish Journeys documents Professor Parfitt's extensive travels over 40 years to some of the most remote Jewish communities on earth.
In 1984, Tudor Parfitt was asked by the London-based Minority Rights Group to visit Sudan, where it was thought Ethiopian Jews fleeing persecution and the Great Ethiopian Famine, were being deliberately poisoned in the refugee camps which had sprung up along the border with Ethiopia. As a result, he witnessed the covert Israel Operation Moses, which rescued over ten thousand Jews deemed by the Israeli rabbinate to be the lost tribe of Dan, from a wretched fate. He was told the full story by the Mossad agent who was coordinating the operation on condition that he would not publish until he got word from him. A few weeks later, the story was leaked in Israel and Parfitt was at liberty to tell the story of Operation Moses. This was his first encounter with the motif of the lost tribes and marked the beginning of a life-long journey which would take him to some of the most remote Jewish or would-be Jewish communities in the world from Japan to Syria, from Uganda to Zimbabwe, and from Yemen to Papua New Guinea.
Tudor Parfitt is Distinguished University Professor, the President Navon Professor of Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies, and Founding Director of the Program for Global Jewish Studies at Florida International University. He is Academic Director of the JMOF-FIU. He is corresponding fellow of the Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and Emeritus Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He has authored or edited 31 books and presented seven documentaries for the BBC, PBS, Channel Four, and the History Channel.
