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“But whatever Basnage may have thought or have written at the end of the seventeenth century, the position was differently regarded a century earlier. Sanuto, the famous geographer of that period, whose African Atlas and Geography was published in 1588, shows a Jewish state distinctly marked as ‘Judaeorum Terra’, in Tabula X of his African Maps, the country extending some distance south of the Equator, and surrounded by mountains, a very considerable territory. John Pory, the English Translator of The History and Description of Africa, by Leo Africanus, writing at the commencement of the seventeenth century, contributed a chapter on ‘ The Religions of Africa’, in which he remarks: ‘At this day also Abassins affirme, that upon a Nilus towards the West there inhabiteth a most populous nation of the Jewish stock under a mighte K(ing). And some of our moderne Cosmographers set downe a province in those quarters which they call, the Land of the Hebrewes, placed as it were under the equinoctiall, in certaine unknowne mountaines, between the confines of Abassia, and Congo. And likewise on the north part of the Kingdom of Goiame, and the southerly quarter of the Kingdome of Gorhan there are certaine mountaines, peopled with Jewes, who there maintaine themselves free, and absolute the the inaccessible situations of the same.’ Pory would thus appear to have been of the opinion that there was a Jewish state in the region indicated by Sanuto, as well as other territories under Jewish rule in the vicinity of the Abyssinian Kingdom. Sanuto’s references to the ‘terra de’ Giudei’ are solely of a geographical character, and the position in which he locates the ‘Country of the Jews’ on the ‘African Tabula X’ is south-west, and near the Equator. He makes it adjoin the ancient Kingdom of Benin, which is placed to the west of the Jewish territory on his map.“
