Jacob's Children in the Land of the Mahdi details the development of a prosperous Jewish Community in the Sudan. Eli S. Malka - one of the last living eyewitnesses to many of the events in this book - chronicles this group's history from its origins as an isolated group of eight Jewish families trapped in the turmoil of the Mahdi's revolt in 1881, through its period of growth, to its final demise a mere eighty years later.

Jacob's Children documents the lives of the Sephardic Jews in the Sudan through the twentieth century. Malka writes of this Community's most vibrant years from the 1930s and 1940s and insightfully describes the contacts made with the neighboring Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Eritrean Jews. This unique society began to disband during Wold War II, and this process was exacerbated by the Arab-Israeli conflicts that followed. As a result, most of the Sudan Jews were gone by the late 1960s.

The ancestry of almost all the Sudan Jews is provided herein, as well as family histories both in the Sudan and in their new homelands. Part 2 is an autobiography of the author describing his life in the Sudan. Wonderful descriptions of Sephardic life and culture are a bonus.