Israel to Let In Hundreds from Ethnic Group in India Claiming Jewish Descent

The State of Israel this month agreed to allow 899 members of a small ethnic group on India’s border with Burma (Myanmar) to immigrate under the constitutional provision for the “right of return” for any Jews.  The Indians, who call themselves the Bnei Menashe, are a few thousand members of a larger ethnolinguistic group called the Kuki, from around the far-eastern state of Manipur, who are related to the Mizo people of neighboring Mizoram state and the Chin people just over the border in Burma.

One flag used by Kuki nationalists in India

Also called the Lushai or Hmar, the Kuki–Chin–Mizo speak a language related to Burmese and Tibetan and are East Asian in their ethnic appearance, but Kuki oral traditions tell of descent from the Tribe of Manasseh, one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.  Scholars investigating the claims find some of the preserved stories and rituals to be too similar to ancient Judaism to be coincidental.  Genomic data have been inconclusive, as opposed to the well-documented diasporas among the Lemba of the South Africa–Zimbabwe border region or the Falashas of Ethiopia.  (See an earlier article from this blog on Jewish diaspora theories in the Americas.)  Also, researchers point out that meriting the migration tale does not necessarily mean that all Kukis are of Jewish descent.  A migration of Manasseh tribespeople centuries or millennia ago to what is now eastern India could have deposited cultural traditions which took hold, with their descendants in the group remaining more limited in number.

However, that is good enough for the Shevai Israel organization, which advocates for immigration of far-flung branches of the Jewish family, and clearly also for the Israeli government.  Indeed, there are already about 2,000 Bnei Menashe Indians in Israel.  But controversy plagues state relations at both ends of this migratory path.  In India, delegations from Israel have run afoul of Indian laws banning the conversion of populations of people from one faith to another (a legacy of India’s delicate relations between Hindus and Muslims, dating to partition and earlier).  Meanwhile, in Israel, the government has been accused of exploiting Kuki–Chin–Mizo migrants by settling them en masse in occupied parts of the West Bank and (formerly) Gaza Strip, in territories nearly two-thirds of the world’s countries recognize as a sovereign State of Palestine.  At one point, they were even the largest immigrant population in Gaza (though Menasseh’s territory, according to the Old Testament, is farther north, incluiding Tel Aviv, the Golan Heights, and parts of the west and east banks of the Jordan River).  To add insult to injury, some Kuki–Chin–Mizo Israelis in occupied territories had their homes dismantled by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government in 2005.

Back in Asia, most Kuki–Chin–Mizo consider themselves distinct, and oppressed, even though far from all identify as Jewish (most are Presbyterian, a few Muslim or Hindu, while some follow local religions).  Kukis want to carve out about half of Manipur state as a separate Kukiland state; this campaign has reignited in recent months after New Delhi’s decision in July to allow the Telugu nationality to split from Andhra Pradesh state as a separate state within India called Telangana (as discussed at the time in this blog).  Some Kukis even hanker for an independent “Greater Kukiland” called Zale’n-gam.  Rebels from the Mizo, who, as their name suggests, form a majority in Mizoram state, have been fighting for secession since the 1960s.  And the Chin are among several nationalities that have been fighting for autonomy and independence from Burma since the country’s founding dictatorship, in the 1940s, reneged on promises of federalism (as discussed in an earlier article in this blog).

Note: Those wishing to learn more about the Kuki–Chin–Mizo and their relationship to Judaism could do worse than to read Hillel Halkin’s excellent 2002 book Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Maybe They Could Call Themselves Jutes—Oh, Wait, That Name’s Already Taken

Geneticists from Israel’s Sheba Medical Center have found a genetic marker associated with the well-mapped Ashkenazic—or Eastern European Jewish—genetic profile in a population of a Colorado Indian tribe.

The tribe was not specified, but Colorado has only two federally recognized indigenous communities: the Southern Ute Tribe, and the Ute Mountain Tribe.  The Utes migrated to what is now Colorado from Mexico before statehood but after European settlement of North America began.

The marker is a “harmful modification in the BRCA1 gene,” linked to a higher risk of breast and ovarian cancer.  The shared ancestry is likely to be linked to Spanish colonialism in Mexico—Spain being a country which had a large Jewish population until the expulsions of 1492 (the same year Christopher Columbus sailed—and, heck, some people think he may have been part Jewish), but where much Jewish genetic residue presumably remained.  Historians are only just beginning to appreciate how many Jewish families maintained their traditions and identity discreetly or secretly in the Wild West and under Spanish colonialism.

However, crackpot anthropological theories, such as that put forth in the Book of Mormon (which also claims that God punished some human populations for their laziness by making them dark-skinned, and that Jesus Christ visited the cities of Mesoamerica), are likely to seize on the study as evidence for the supposed origins of Native Americans in the Lost Tribes of Israel.  Many Native Americans find these Mormon theories deeply offensive—not out of anti-Semitism, but in reaction to the implication that anything culturally sophisticated or commendable among indigenous people needs to be explained through some Old World connection, which is a common thread in crackpot theories of the peopling of the Americas.  (I could do a search for Mormon websites responding to the news, but I don’t really have the patience for it right now.)  Meanwhile, on this side of the sanity–insanity divide, there may also be attempts to identify the Utes as a genuinely remnant genetically-and-culturally Jewish population, like the Lemba of Zimbabwe and South Africa, who abstain from pork, circumcise, use the Star of David, and maintained Old Testament stories in their oral traditions long before they learned, in the modern period, that there were other populations that shared those traits.

Members of the Lemba ethnic group in Zimbabwe—almost certain descendants of emigrants from the Holy Land

Many early anthropologists, missionaries, and settlers noted similarities between some indigenous North American cultural practices and beliefs and those found readily in the Old Testament and in Jewish tradition.  Examples include occasional arguable monotheism, the levirate (the practice of a man, for example, marrying his deceased brother’s wife), organization into tribes and clans, matrilineal descent (a post-diaspora adaptation in Jewish kinship, still persistent), animal sacrifice, food taboos, oral traditions of a Great Flood, even very sparsely distributed instances of circumcision.  But these, it is now clear, are more attributable to the global widespread nature of some cultural traits—traits which many European settlers of the era likely had not known of at all except through reading the Bible.

The flag of the Southern Ute Tribe.  As flag designs go, it’s a bit ... busy, isn’t it?

If nothing else, these new genetic discoveries may explain some unusual moments from the history of the Wild West.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]