Author Claims To Have Found Remnants Of Lost Tribe Of Israel
[Original headline: Book Says Indian Group Is Kin]
On August 29, 100 people from northeast India will make aliya to Israel. Known as the Kuki-Chin-Mizo in their native states, they call themselves the Bnei Menashe, or children of Manasseh, and they believe they are one of the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel.
Hillel Halkin rejects that claim, but in a new book suggests that while the Kuki-Chin-Mizo are not a lost tribe, some of their ancestors were. If Halkin's theory is correct, he will have found the first living remnant of the 10 tribes of Israel that were lost to history after their exile from biblical Palestine in 722 B.C.E., but whose memory was kept alive in religious and oral traditions.
Halkin presents his findings in a new book, "Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel" (Houghton Mifflin), that is already being challenged by experts in linguistics, ethnography and the ancient Near East. The book describes how, before the Kuki-Chin-Mizo were converted to Christianity by early 20th-century missionaries, they followed a religious tradition that included a circumcision ritual on the eighth day after birth, marked a holiday on which unleavened bread was eaten and used a language of prayer with numerous linguistic connections to biblical Judaism.
The main source of his information is a manuscript of folk tales, chants, legends and practices of this ancient religion, culled by a local researcher who descends from the "old people," a group that Halkin claims are the lost tribesmen who first brought these traditions to Southeast Asia.
Halkin, an American-born journalist and translator who lives in Israel, is convinced that the texts and memories in the manuscript are genuine, that they predate the arrival of the first missionaries and cannot be attributed to Christian, Muslim or post-biblical Jewish influences.
"The ultimate strength of my argument, even though I never use the word in my book, is statistical. Sure, there's a chance that any two unrelated cultures will have a highly similar word — say, 'selah' — that occurs as an instruction to the chanter of a religious chant or song," Halkin wrote in an e-mail to the Forward. But the Kuki-Chin-Mizo share numerous similarities. "Coincidence as an explanation for the facts cited in my book is a pure statistical impossibility."
Top academics in the fields of linguistics, anthropology and Near East studies remain skeptical of Halkin's theory. "A lot of unconvincing points don't add up to a convincing overall picture," said Sarah Thomason, a professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan. "The number of pieces of evidence isn't nearly as important as the question of whether any one piece of evidence is solid."
And to hear the scholars say it, there isn't a solid piece in the bunch.
Most of the academics interviewed for this article had not read the book, and almost all stressed that fair and complete judgment needed to be reserved until after reviewing Halkin's theory in its entirety. Still, they claim that Halkin is not a phonetician, linguist or anthropologist, but rather a good writer who fell — way over his head — into the tantalizing fantasy world of Lost Tribalism.
"There are also people who have said the British are one of the ten Lost Tribes because their name is Brit [Hebrew for covenant] and ish," Hebrew for man, said Ephraim Isaac, director of the Institute of Semitic Studies and a visiting professor at Princeton University.
The first problem, according to Thomason, is the source material. Halkin was particularly struck by the use of two Hebrew words in Kuki-Chin-Mizo priestly chants: "selah," which appeared at the end of one of the chants, just as it does in the Book of Psalms; and "aborizah," which Halkin believes is a corruption of the Hebrew words ha-borey Yah, meaning "O God the Creator." According to the author of the manuscript, Dr. Khuplam Milui Lenthang, biblical references in these chants could not have been learned from missionaries because they were known only by priests and were considered to lose their power, or even become harmful, if altered.
Halkin also insists that the biblical references are contained in priestly chants that would never have been deliberately altered under the influence of missionaries to include Old Testament references.
"No priest would have taken material from the Old Testament and inserted it into one of his sacred chants. This is inconceivable," Halkin said. "As a Jew, if I hear a Christian tell a story, I might retell it but I certainly wouldn't take that story and insert it into a prayer in the" Jewish prayerbook.
But according to Thomason, study of another ancient language, Sanskrit, demonstrates that sacred languages are always subject to outside influences, both deliberate and accidental. "There's all sorts of evidence that over 2,000 years no matter how sacred the language is, it will be changed — not beyond recognition, but enough that a few phrases are not going to convince any skeptic," she said.
Thomason was echoed by James Matisoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, who chuckled at Halkin's "selah" and "aborizah" theories. Even if the word is "selah," he said, it doesn't mean anything. One can randomly pick any two languages and 5% of the words will have both similar sounds and similar meanings.
"That's not evidence," he said. "What you need is parallel examples of the same sounds corresponding in many different words. You can never establish a relationship on the basis of one or two or three words."
Halkin acknowledges that he's no phonetician, but claims he didn't need to be: Kuki-Chin-Mizo has a corresponding Latin alphabet, and Khuplam himself transcribed the words just as they would be pronounced. And putting aside the linguistic connections, no one adequately addressed any of the ethnographic similarities: the eighth-day circumcision ritual; sacrifices on a four-cornered altar to a god named Ya, a possible abbreviation of Yahweh, and, strangest of all, an unleavened bread holiday — the last an especially noteworthy find, since the Kuki-Chin-Mizo are not bread eaters. Where could these have come from, if not biblical Palestine?
Some of Halkin's critics suggest that such Old Testament practices could have been transmitted from Christian missionaries who proselytized in the area beginning in the first half of the 20th century. Halkin counters, however, that the British did not translate the Old Testament into the region's native language until the late 1960s, and warned locals not to read it even in English because it was "outdated."
Though several of the academics interviewed found these warnings surprising, to Halkin, they're perfectly logical. "The missionaries were coming to a primitive people who couldn't read and write and they were out to save their souls — which doesn't involve the Old Testament," he explained. "It involves knowing that Jesus saves."
Halkin also dispenses with the idea that these references could be attributed to a roving Jew or Christian. Almost all the parallels with the Bible stop with the exodus from Egypt. Halkin also asks why a people would embrace an ancestry with a relatively marginal biblical character like Manasseh. "To what wandering Jew or Christian trying to teach religion to Southeast Asians would it occur to teach about Manasseh? Manasseh and not Jesus? Manasseh and not David?"
Halkin believes in his theory enough that he says he welcomes scholarly efforts to disprove it. Whether the academics will take him up on the challenge remains to be seen. Shalom Paul, a bible scholar at the Institute of Jewish Studies at Hebrew University and one of Halkin's kindest critics, admits that, while unlikely, it's not impossible that Halkin has found remnants of a lost tribe of Israel. "He has presented us with a wonderful, wonderful possibility," he said.
Lost tribe or not, some 4,000-5,000 Bnei Menashe from northeast India have been living as Orthodox Jews since the early 1980s, when Israeli rabbi and lost tribe hunter Eliyahu Avichail agreed to be the group's mentor. Since 1990, groups of Bnei Menashe have made aliya to Israel with the help of Avichail and organizations such as Scattered Among the Nations, a nonprofit organization devoted to isolated Jewish communities around the world. Before they are granted full citizenship under the Law of Return, they must undergo conversion.
Halkin claims he did not write the book to influence their aliya; indeed, at the end of his last trip to northeast India, he told a group of Kuki-Chin-Mizo flatly: "You're not Jews." "But," he continued, "you do go back, in one branch of your family, to the Israelites of the Bible." And, according to rabbinic legend, Manasseh will be the first tribe to return.
• Story originally published by:
Forward / NY | Alana Newhouse - Aug 16.02
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