Israelites in Africa: 1st Century CE
Channel: AnAfricanTheist
Date: 2008-08-15

Several texts show that by the first century CE, there was a massive Israelite population in Africa - specifically in the Egypt, Libya, Cyrene region.

Josephus Antiquities 12.1-2
"Ptolemy [took] a great many captives, both from the mountainous parts of Yehudim, and from the places about Yerushalem and Samaria, and the places near Mount Gerizzim, he led them all into Egypt, and settled them there. And as he knew that the people of Yerushalem were most faithful in the observation of oaths and covenants; and this from the answer they made to Alexander, when he sent an embassage to them, after he had beaten Darius in battle; so he distributed many of them into garrisons, and at Alexandria gave them equal privileges of citizens with the Macedonians themselves; and required of them to take their oaths, that they would keep their fidelity to the posterity of those who committed these places to their care. Nay, there were not a few other Yehudim who, of their own accord, went into Egypt, as invited by the goodness of the soil, and by the liberality of Ptolemy... When Alexander had reigned twelve years, and after him Ptolemy Soter forty years, Philadelphus then took the kingdom of Egypt, and held it forty years within one. He procured the law to be interpreted, and set free those that were come from Jerusalem into Egypt, and were in slavery there, who were a hundred and twenty thousand." 
http://earlyjewishwritings.com/text/josephus/ant12.html

Philo: Flaccus 6:43
"[Alexandria] had two classes of inhabitants, our own nation and the people of the country, and... the whole of Egypt was inhabited in the same manner, and ... Yehudim who inhabited Alexandria and the rest of the country from the Catabathmos on the side of Libya to the boundaries of Ethiopia were not less than a million of men" 
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book36.html

Josephus Antiquities, 14.7.2
"There were four classes of men among those of Cyrene; that of citizens, that of husbandmen, the third of strangers, and the fourth of Yehudim. Now these Jews are already gotten into all cities; and it is hard to find a place in the habitable earth that hath not admitted this tribe of men"
http://earlyjewishwritings.com/text/josephus/ant14.html