Anyone familiar with this group? " The Lemba, a Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa, have a tradition that they were led out of Judea by a man named Buba. They practice circumcision, keep one day a week holy and avoid eating pork or piglike animals, such as the hippopotamus. Several groups around the world practice Judaic rites or claim to be descended from Biblical tribes without having any ancestral Jewish connection. And there is no Buba in the records of Jewish history. But the remarkable thing about the Lemba tradition is that it may be exactly right. A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, the Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Aaron... " uoregon.edu
Not this particular group, but I have a book called Forgotten Branches, which discusses a Ugandan (I think- it has been a while since I read it) group of self-identified Jews. It makes complete sense to me. My Jewish line has intermarried through the ages, so I appear to be Celtic. I do not resemble the sabra Israelis, the Russians or many of my Sephardi relatives. But we are all Jews. So if a branch of the tree wandered south to escape whatever rule (Romans/Greeks/ Spaniards) and started taking local spouses, then those Jews will look like the native population after a few generations.
We're all Jews...I really appreciate that there is so much cultural diversity among Jews, and that despite our small population, there are Jews all over the world. Each group does Judaism a little differently. There has been at least some intermarriage through all Jewish lines. All my ancestors as far back as I can trace it were Jewish. Some were very dark, and some had light hair and blue eyes...there must've been intermarriage at some point. And the Israelites in the Torah, if they are our biological ancestors, were made up of a variety of different tribes in Canaan. It's not surprising that these "forgotten branches" exist. If anything, all that migration and intermarriage preserved Jewish So who's to say drumminmama (or any of us, for that matter) doesn't "look Jewish"?
But Jews are not a race. It's a group of people held together by religious belief and the culture that evolved out of that belief. You can talk bloodlines because of geographic proximity, but not as a "people". Technically, you're no different than Catholics or Mormons. As far as Canaan, it is rumoured that Jesus was actually a Canaanite. If you think that's strange, in Japan, there may exist the remnants of one of the lost tribes. x
Jews are in some ways different from Catholics and Mormons, though not biologically. I never said Jews were a race. I said Jews were a distinct people. A people in a social sense, not necessarily in a biological sense. There has been some evidence that there is common gene among most Jews, but that's got nothing to do with defining what it means to be a Jew. Supposedly, the Lemba do have that gene, while the Falasha don't. That doesn't exclude them from the Jewish people. Nowhere in here am I implying anything about Zionism, so don't bring that into it. But eugenics can be dangerous, and it's a slippery slope. As for Jesus being a Canaanite, it's definitely possible. I read somewhere that Moses may have been an Egyptian prince, reviving ancient Egyptian monotheism. Seems like Moses was a very early socialist leader. The story about the Israelites in Egypt was more about class than nationalism. Most of the Tanakh is full of archetypes and symbols that are common in a lot of mythology, and not distinct to Judaism. I'm going to have to read about the lost tribe in Japan...that's interesting.
Here go, http://www.biblemysteries.com/library/tribesjapan.htm And an excellent wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Lost_Tribes http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/israel/losttribes3.html x
Thanks for the links. That's really interesting. Yeah, that theory is possible. I don't think the parallels between Shintoism and Judaism are enough to support the theory, because these kinds of stories and rituals are not entirely unique to Judaism. That part seems like a bit of a stretch...but who knows? I do think that studying the origins of the language could provide some clues. It said that the etymology of some of those words is not Japanese. If these words do come from a Semitic language, then it is likely that they migrated that far. It's definitely possible. I wonder if Jews in Russia ever made it to Asia by going east through Siberia...? Though the religious parallels would have to be way more ancient than that.
