AFRICAN DIASPORA?

Tribe follows mix of customs
DNA: Genes support a tribe's belief that it migrated 2,500 years ago from the Holy Land. (Baltimore Sun)

By John Murphy
Sun Foreign Staff
Originally published September 25, 2003

TSHINO, South Africa - The Jewish community in this dusty mountain village has some unorthodox customs to mark the Jewish new year. They slaughter a cow, eat its intestines, take snuff to expel demons and then, during an all-night ceremony held inside a hut with a cow dung floor, they dance, drink and sing, summoning the spirits of their ancestors for guidance in the year ahead.

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The 50,000 Lemba scattered among the foothills of the Soutpansberg Mountains in South Africa's Limpopo region have a number of traditions that have always set them apart from other African tribes.

They practice circumcision, they don't eat pork or mix milk with meat, as prescribed by Jewish dietary laws. They keep one day of the week holy, and they bury their dead with their heads facing north, toward Jerusalem.

According to Lemba oral traditions, the tribe was led from the Holy Land more than 2,500 years ago by a man named Buba, to a city in Yemen, and later crossed the Red Sea into East Africa, following a star that eventually brought it to present-day South Africa.

They say they adopted local customs during their journey, like other members of the Jewish diaspora. They intermarried with African tribes, embraced African rituals and forgot many Jewish rituals and scriptures. European colonizers later converted many of the Lemba to Christianity. The Lemba don't have rabbis, synagogues or copies of the Torah.

But their dietary laws and cultural practices, nearly identical to those in Jewish communities around the world, survived generation to generation, as did their belief that they share an ancestry with the Jewish people.

For years the outside world dismissed the Lemba's claims as sheer fantasy. That changed in 1999, when geneticists from the United States, Great Britain and Israel discovered some backing for the claims.

The researchers found that Lemba men carried a DNA signature on their Y chromosome that is believed unique to the relatively small number of Jews known as the Cohanim, who trace their ancestry to the priests of the ancient Jewish Temple and, ultimately, to Aaron, brother of Moses.

The genetic discovery might have had a greater impact on Jewish communities that had rejected the Lemba's claims than on the Lemba, who never doubted their ancestry.

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"The tribe as a whole is pretty ambiguous about what it is," says Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. "Its identity is fractured. They don't have a language that is their own. They don't have any formal leadership. They are shaky when it comes to what they are."

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Parfitt was the first historian to attempt to verify the Lemba's claims. At the urging of the Lemba's spiritual leader, Matshaya Mathiva, who died last year, Parfitt retraced their journey across Africa back to Yemen and discovered signs of the city where the Lemba claim their ancestors had lived.

Parfitt recounts his travels in his book, Journey to the Vanished City.

His research along with the DNA evidence have been key to helping the world understand the Lemba's origins. Still, he cautions, the question of whether the Lemba are Jewish has not been answered conclusively: "DNA itself doesn't make anybody Jewish. All it can do is say something about their ancestry."

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