The Nahmias Cipher Report

“Ethno-mathematician” Ron Eglash is the author of African Fractals, a book that examines the fractal patterns underpinning architecture, art and design in many parts of Africa. By looking at aerial-view photos — and then following up with detailed research on the ground — Eglash discovered that many African villages are purposely laid out to form perfect fractals, with self-similar shapes repeated in the rooms of the house, and the house itself, and the clusters of houses in the village, in mathematically predictable patterns.

As he puts it: “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”

Like the Bene Israel and Cochin Jews of India, the Lemba people did not fit neatly into most peoples’ perceptions of “what Jews look like.” As previously discussed in this blog, the Jewish diaspora is as varied as the people of the earth, however, in addition racism plays a large part of the discomfort people have with the concept of Jews of Color. The identification of the Lemba as Jews would have probably passed largely unnoticed except for their sub-Saharan ancestry.