Return of the Lost Tribes
From The Jerusalem Report, 1993
Could Israel be inundated with millions of Africans and Asians claiming Jewish descent? As the first members of the Shinlung tribe, from the remote Indian-Burmese border, undergo conversion in Israel, the notion is becoming ever less absurd. And Israel´s minister of absorption, Yair Tsaban, is clearly rattled by the prospect.
Sometime in the early 1950s, a farmer named Chala from the Shin-lung tribe on the Indian-Burmese border had a dream: God told him that the Shinlung were really the lost Israelite tribe of Menashe, and that it was time for them to return home, to Israel.
Some Shinlung considered Chala´s dream a prophecy. After all, even before converting to Christianity in the 19th century, the tribe had been monotheistic; and the old prayers had evoked the God of the Shinlungs´ ancestor, Menase which sounded very much like “Menashe.” They even possessed their own version of the Biblical Exodus myth: Centuries ago they´d been enslaved by a cruel Chinese king, and had escaped from their home on the Chinese-Tibetan border into Burma, crossed the Irrawaddy River and finally settled in India.
Still, the Shinlungs´ earliest origins were a mystery even to themselves. Perhaps the answer had appeared in a legendary Shinlung scroll, which the Chinese are said to have stolen, leaving the tribe bereft of its memory.
But now, Chala seemed to provide the missing scroll´s text. Inspired by his dream, a group of Shinlung packed up and, though no one knew the way, began walking to Israel. They were stopped by police and sent home.
The Israel-bound Shinlung persisted. They wrote letters to Israeli officials pleading for help in immigrating; the letters went unanswered. Meanwhile, some of the million-plus Shinlung began to follow a basic form of Judaism, practicing whatever rituals they could learn from Jews in Bombay. Beginning with no more than a handful of adherents, the Judaizers soon grew to over 5,000, observing Shabbat, circumcision, kashrut. They built a dozen synagogues in villages and towns spread through the northeast Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur where the mostly literate Shinlung live. Yet virtually no one outside India knew of the Judaizers on the Indian-Burmese border.
But now the Shinlungs, who began their journey to Israel with their aimless trek in the early 50s, are finally reaching their destination. On August 1, 36 young Shinlung were flown into Israel by a Jerusalem-based group called Amishav (My People Returns), which searches for traces of the 10 Israelite tribes who were exiled by the Assyrians 27 centuries ago and whose whereabouts have incited legend and speculation ever since. The young Shinlung were sent straight from the airport to Gan Or, a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, where they are now studying for conversion and working in agriculture, replacing Arab laborers whom settlers consider security threats.
The 36 Shinlung join another three dozen young Shinlung who have quietly converted to Judaism, both in India and Israel, with the approval of the chief rabbinate and settled here in the last few years. Despite the Shinlungs´ claim to Jewishness, conversion is mandatory: No Orthodox rabbi will accept the wholesale admission of the tribe into the Jewish people.
Sharon Benyamin, a young Shinlung with dark skin and Chinese eyes and a large knitted yarmulke, says that “thousands” of Shinlung are waiting to come here. The most obvious candidates are those 5,000 tribesmen already living a semblance of Jewish life. And, he says, his voice matter-of-fact as if recounting a commonplace tale, the entire tribe is “very interested” in learning about Judaism. Amishav plans to bring a group of young Shinlung families for conversion soon. “We are the first of many more to come,” says Benyamin.
The Judaizing Shinlung are hardly alone in insisting on a lost-tribe identity. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of far-flung groups most of them in the Third World claim to be descended from the 10 lost tribes, forming a kind of shadow Jewish people. Their members number in the tens of millions far more than the estimated 13 million Jews in the world today. Out of the blue, leaders of a group of four million Ethiopians living in the northern Gojam region, recently contacted the Israeli authorities requesting recognition that they too are descendants of the ancient Israelites.
For centuries, mystics and romantics have searched for the lost tribes, periodically “sighting” them in Tibet, Japan, Eskimo territory and South America. Most of those claims have been dismissed as the fantasies of eccentrics. But with the restoration of Jewish sovereignty, the whereabouts of the vanished tribes and their possible emigration to Israel has transformed quaint speculation into practical demographics.
The prospect of millions of lost Israelites converging on Ben-Gurion Airport in the years ahead is clearly a matter of some concern for Absorption Minister Yair Tsaban (see box, facing page). “Many people, especially in the Third World, want to emigrate to the industrial world,” he says, “and some of them see Israel as a way to achieve that goal.”
So far, he acknowledges, Israel is only having to absorb a handful of the Shinlung. But if their immigration is encouraged, and they settle down well, thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands could try to follow.
What´s more, Tsaban continues, there are all sorts of other groups making similar claims of Israelite heritage. “In Somalia and Djibouti, for example,” he says, “there are 20,000 members of a group called `Ivru Adokeit,´ who see themselves as part of the Jewish people.” Will the Amishav organization that brought in the first Shinlung seek to bring these people here as well, he wonders? “Who knows how many relatives they would leave behind, who would then try to get here on a family reunification basis.”
Tsaban talks of eventually having to tighten the Law of Return, under which Jews are allowed to immigrate to Israel. In the shorter term, he believes a committee of experts legal, halakhic, historical and anthropological may have to be set up to examine the issue.
The Shinlung are unique among the “lost tribes” of Africa and Asia in having created Judaizing communities the others at most practice a few rituals resembling Jewish customs. Still, a cursory glance at recent Israeli history is enough to prove that the myth of the lost tribes can produce sudden and unexpected outbursts of “Jewishness.”
In the last three decades, two groups have made the transition from a misty 10-tribes identity into the Israeli mainstream: the Beta Israel of Ethiopia and the Bene Israel of India. As recently as the 1960s, the Jewishness of both groups was widely suspect; a mere 30 years later, tens of thousands of Ethiopian and Indian Jews live in Israel and have begun intermarrying with other Jews. And Israel is now taking in some of the Falas Mora Ethiopian Jews who converted to Christianity a possible precursor to the “trickle, then flood,” of immigration Tsaban fears.
Following the reign of King Solomon in the 10th century BCE, the 12 tribes of Israel split into two kingdoms Judah and Benjamin forming the southern Kingdom of Judah, and the remaining 10 tribes the northern Kingdom of Israel.
Two centuries later, the Assyrians invaded the northern kingdom and, in several stages, dispersed the 10 tribes. The exile was completed in 722 BCE, and the Kingdom of Israel disappeared. The rabbis blame its downfall on idolatry and licentiousness.
Scholars believe the 10 tribes were resettled in the region now embracing parts of Kurdistan, Afghanistan, northern Syria and Iran. But no one knows for sure where their descendants are today. “Can we really assume that in all these years they didn´t move?” rhetorically asks Shalva Weil, a Hebrew University anthropologist and one of the few recognized experts on the lost tribes.
Nor was 722 BCE the last time groups of Jews might have been cut off from the main body of the people of Israel. Communities have been “lost” since then, and may be the ancestors of some groups now claiming “lost tribe” descent.
For some communities, Israelite ancestry appears to be an indigenous tradition; for others, an idea planted by outsiders, usually Christian missionaries who noticed similarities between some of their customs and ancient Judaism.
Still others, especially some African tribes, so strongly identified with the Biblical saga of slavery and exodus that they assumed a literal Israelite ancestry, confusing metaphor for reality. Most groups possess only the barest traces of “Jewish” practice, ritual parallels that may either be a residual memory of Israelite ancestry or else simple coincidence.
The most intriguing groups among them include: THE PATHANS: In medieval times, Jews living under Christian and Islamic rule fantasized that powerful warriors from the 10 lost tribes would emerge from a hidden kingdom, defeat their oppressors and restore them to Israel. One group that could perhaps have fulfilled that role is the Pathans, fierce warriors who most recently helped defeat the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan.
Numbering at least 15 million, the Sunni Muslim Pathans live on both sides of the Afghani-Pakastani border (and as far east as Indian Kashmir) where part of the 10 tribes are believed to have settled. Indeed, the names of Pathan sub-tribes seem to echo those of the Israelite tribes: Rabani (Reuven), Shinwari (Shimon), Daftani (Naftali), Ashuri (Asher), Yusuf-sai (sons of Yosef).
The mostly illiterate Pathans have a centuries-old tradition of Israelite ancestry, and some still call themselves “Bani Israel,” the children of Israel. A retired Pathan diplomat living in the U.S. is translating a book on basic Judaism into Pashtu, the Pathan language, which the Amishav group plans to distribute among educated Pathans.
The late Itzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel´s second president and a lost-tribes enthusiast, was particularly interested in the Pathans. He interviewed Afghani Jewish immigrants in Israel who knew Pathans and who offered the following evidence for their Israelite origins: The Pathan royal house claims direct descent from King Saul, through a supposed grandson named Afghana; elderly Pathan women light candles Friday nights; Pathan men wear a four-cornered prayer garment with or without ritual fringes, depending on the witness.
Finally, some Afghani Jews claimed to have either seen or heard about secret sealed Pathan amulets, in which the Hebrew prayer “Shema Yisrael” was written. But those accounts, at least, seem fanciful: During a visit to the Pathans, as part of an Amishav mission to Kashmir in 1980, Shalva Weil examined one such amulet and found no Hebrew inside.
THE KASHMIRIS:Henry Noach, now a Conservative rabbinical student in Jerusalem, was also a member of that Amishav mission. While visiting the Kashmiri national museum, Noach met its director, Prof. F.M. Hassnain, who asked the young tourist where he was from. Noach whose ancestor, 19th-century American Jewish diplomat, Mordecai Manuel Noah, promoted the notion that American Indians were lost Israelites replied that he´d come from Jerusalem looking for traces of the 10 tribes. Hassnain became visibly excited. “I´ve waited for you for 30 years!” he said, explaining that he´d written a book tracing the Israelite origins of the 5 million Kashmiri Sunni Muslims.
That claim is in fact widespread among Kashmiris, who note that many places in Kashmir possess names which seem to echo Biblical sites like Mamre, Pisgah and Mt. Nevo. There is also a Kashmiri tradition that claims that Moses is buried in Kashmir, as well as Jesus, who is said to have come there searching for the 10 tribes.
When Noach asked Hassnain whether he wanted to “return” to his ancestral religion, he smiled and said, “First we were Jews, then Hindus, then Muslims. So why not be Jews again?”
THE CHIANG-MIN: This tribe, numbering about a quarter of a million, lives on the Chinese-Tibetan border approximately where the Shinlung say they once dwelled. Ethnically Chinese, they were monotheistic even before they converted to Christianity. According to their tradition, they are “sons of Abraham”; when they sacrifice an animal, they plant 12 flags around the altar, to recall their ancestors´ 12 sons.
AFRICAN TRIBES:In a parking lot on the Tel Aviv beachfront, 41-year-old Chima Onyeulo of the Ibo tribe of Nigeria washes cars and waits for the Interior Ministry to accept his application for Israeli citizenship as a “returning” Jew. The Ibo, says Onyeulo, a surveyor by profession, are descended from the Israelites; and though most Ibos are Christian, many tribal rites resemble Jewish practice, like circumcising boys at eight days. “Ask any Ibo man where his tribe is from and he will tell you Israel,´” says Onyeulo, who is writing a book about the Ibos´ Israelite origins.
According to Shalva Weil, West African countries like Nigeria, Senegal,Dahomey and Sierra Leone are filled with tribes claiming Israelite descent. Their members, some of whom practice a mixture of Christianity and Biblical Judaism, number in the millions. Weil, however, dismisses their Jewish claims.
Then there is the 100,000-member Lemba tribe of southern Africa.Lemba practice circumcision and don´t eat “impure” animals, which include pigs and creatures without split hooves. One Lemba version of their past claims the tribe left ancient Israel for Yemen and then wandered down Africa (The Jerusalem Report, July 15). But according to Tudor Parfitt of London University, author of a recent book on the Lemba, the tribe is probably descended from Muslim converts. They practice a religion influenced by Islam, Hinduism, the Bantu ancestor cult and, perhaps, Judaism which they may have learned from either Jewish traders or Ethiopian Jews. Only a minority of Lemba seem to believe their tribe is of Israelite origin.
The man who has made it his life´s mission to sift through the bewildering array of Israelite claimants is a soft-spoken, gray-bearded 61-year-old Jerusalem Bible teacher named Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail. In 1975 he founded Amishav, with the active backing of the late Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, spiritual mentor of the Gush Emunim settlement movement. Avichail´s most enthusiastic supporters remain members of the nationalist religious camp who, like him, see the return of the lost tribes as fulfillment of the prophets´ vision the messianic recovery of Israel´s ancient losses, not just of Biblical territory but of its vanished inhabitants.
Indeed, the search for the lost tribes touches a deep Jewish longing. For centuries, Jews understood their exile as punishment for spiritual unworthiness, a failed attempt at intimacy with God. The dispersion of the 10 tribes was the first national trauma, the beginning of exile. Recovering the lost tribes, then, promises a messianic reconciliation between God and Israel, a return to innocence.
At the same time, Avichail implicitly offers a more tangible gain: winning the demographic war with the Palestinians by filling the land with recovered Jews. Young Shinlung interviewed here seem especially keen on settling those parts of the West Bank that once belonged to the tribe of Menashe.
But Avichail is careful not to raise the prospect of an imminent mass immigration of rediscovered Israelites. As an Orthodox rabbi, he insists on the slow process of individual conversion for “lost tribesmen,” rather than their mass absorption into the Jewish people. “The messiah will ingather the 10 tribes,” he says. “Our job is to plant seeds of Jewish identity among them and build a bridge connecting them to Israel.”
Amishav is hardly able to do much more than that. Virtually penniless, it has 40 members in Israel and perhaps another 120 abroad one of whom, Dr. Erwin Moskowitz of Miami, paid the $20,000 to transport the most recent Shinlung group to Israel.
So far the Shinlung are Avichail´s most impressive success story. Avichail “discovered” the tribe in 1979, when the secretary of the Bene Israel immigrants association, Shimshon Shimshon, told the rabbi he´d received a strange letter from a group of people in distant Mizoram in northeastern India, saying they wanted to come to Israel. Avichail immediately wrote the group, and was startled to discover thousands of “Jews” dreaming of Israel. A year later, under Avichail´s auspices, the first two Shinlung came to Israel and were converted to Judaism. In 1991, Avichail traveled to Mizoram, and was greeted by crowds holding signs that pleaded, “Take us to Israel.” Avichail has become the spiritual father of the Shinlung, sending them religious books, prayer shawls and even Torah scrolls. His Jerusalem apartment is a gathering place for young Shinlung, who study Judaism with him. And crucial to their acceptance as Jews, he shepherds Shinlung converts through the rabbinic bureaucracy.
Avichail and his tiny band are part of a venerable tradition of searchers for the lost tribes. In the ninth century, a Jewish traveler named Eldad Hadani the surname means “of the tribe of Dan” claimed to have come from the powerful kingdom of the 10 tribes, where Israelite warriors anxiously waited to redeem their oppressed brothers elsewhere in the Diaspora. The only problem, said Eldad, was that the kingdom, somewhere in Africa, was surrounded by the mythical river Sambatyon, whose stormy and impassable waters calmed only on Shabbat, when Jews are forbidden to cross thereby ensuring the 10 tribes´ permanent severance.
In 1644, a half-mad Marrano named Aaron Levi de Montezinos arrived in Amsterdam with an incredible tale: During a trip to the South American region of what is now Ecuador, he´d met four Indians who recited the “Shema Yisrael” prayer in Hebrew and told of a hidden kingdom ruled by the Israelite tribe of Reuven. Inspired by the story, a prominent Amsterdam rabbi, Manasseh ben Israel,wrote a book called “The Hope of Israel,” which argued that the messiah would come only when the Jews were dispersed in every corner of the world; and the “discovery” of the lost tribes in South America meant that the messianic time was approaching. The book was especially popular among Christians in Puritan England, and its premise
that Jews must live everywhere as a prerequisite to the millennium helped convince Oliver Cromwell to readmit Jews into England, from where they had been expelled in 1290. Thus British Jewry owes its existence at least partly to the legend of the 10 tribes.
Indeed, the lost Israelite myth has generated powerful and sometimes bizarre consequences. It has helped create new religious denominations like the Mormons, who believe they are descended from the Israelite tribes, and spawned groups ranging from white supremacists to militant black nationalists.
The 19th-century Anglo-Israelite movement preached that the British and American peoples were descended from Israelite tribes who settled in the British Isles after the Assyrian exile, and that their success in dominating the world proved they were the real chosen people. Ironically, anti-Semitic survivalist groups in the United States today, like the Posse Comitatus and the Aryan Nations, are an ideological offshoot of Anglo-Israelitism.
On the opposite extreme are the Black Hebrews,an American sect born in the urban ghettos of the early 60s. The Hebrews preached that blacks are descended from the exiled Israelites, and appointed leaders called “princes” who assumed the names of ancient Israelite nobles. In 1969, Hebrews began infiltrating into Israel, posing as tourists and then refusing to leave.
Today some 1,500 Hebrews live peacefully in the Israeli towns of Dimonah and Mitzpeh Ramon, following a literalist Biblical faith combined with a “New Age” naturalist philosophy. No Jewish authority takes their claim of Israelite descent seriously; nor are the Hebrews interested in converting to Judaism, insisting that theirs is the true Biblical faith. By mutual consent, they remain on the Jewish periphery.
How, then, does a group claiming Israelite descent enter the Jewish mainstream? How does a lost tribe become found?
The two groups that most successfully made that transition are the Ethiopian and Indian Jews. Both communities achieved mainstream status, notes Weil, because neither was entirely “lost” to the Jewish world, but rather maintained sporadic contact with other Jews for centuries; nor did they practice another religion, at least not during the centuries they were known to world Jewry.
The unique circumstances of the Ethiopians and the Indians make them unsuitable models for other “lost tribes” hoping to enter the Jewish people. And yet an alternative model does exist: the Shinlung. According to the Shinlung precedent, the process would work like this: First, a belief in their Biblical origins inspires some within the tribe to create Judaizing communities. Then, outside Jewish interest is aroused. Finally, the Judaizers are formally converted. The converts become teachers spreading Judaism among their fellow tribesmen as some Shinlung converts have already done. And then new converts emerge.
Given the Shinlung precedent, it would not be surprising if someday groups of Pathans or Kashmiris or Lembas or as-yet-unknown claimants to Israelite ancestry decide to transform legend into tangible identity, and begin the long journey “back” to Judaism and the ancestral homeland.