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Saturday, April 02, 2005

INDIAN ISRAELITES?
Amar: Bnei Menashe are descendants of ancient Israelites
By Yair Sheleg (Ha'aretz)

Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar decided on Wednesday to recognize the members of India's Bnei Menashe community as descendants of the ancient Israelites.

[...]

The Bnei Menashe community consists of close to 7,000 members of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo tribe, which lives in northeast India near the border of Myanmar (formally Burma). For generations they kept Jewish traditions, claiming to be descended from the tribe of Menashe, one of the ten lost Israeli tribes that were exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E. and have since disappeared.

[...]

I doubt very much that the group goes back to the Assyrian exile, but it's possible that they do have a Jewish origin. At any rate, their genetic profile seems to connect them to the Middle East.

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