Did Israel's Lost Tribes End Up in Afghanistan?
By Tom Heneghan
KABUL (Reuters) - Considering all they shunned and shattered in their quest for pure Islam, Afghanistan's now vanquished Taliban seem to have overlooked the awkward legend that they were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel.
The Pashtun tribes that produced the Taliban, one of the most zealous sects the Muslim world has ever seen, have traditionally traced their roots to the Jews who disappeared after the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century B.C.
The legend, which seems bizarre in light of Jewish-Muslim tensions since the creation of Israel in 1947, is the cornerstone of the complex genealogies delineating the proud Pashtun tribes of Islamic Afghanistan and Pakistan.
With Afghanistan in the news since September 11, Jewish-interest media and Internet sites in Israel and the United States have begun taking a closer look at the unusual legend.
Despite their virulent anti-Semitism, the Taliban themselves apparently ignored the legend that educated Pashtuns find historically unlikely and politically uncomfortable.
"They were only interested in the narrow religious aspect of things," explained Nehmatullah Ander, director of the International Institute for Pashtu Studies in Kabul.
The Taliban barred women from work and school, blew up the huge ancient Buddha statues of Bamiyan and banned television, kite-flying and squeaky shoes as insults to Islam.
They also declared that Pashtunwali, the strict Pashtun tribal code of honor and revenge, was un-Islamic and ordered Ander's institute to stop academic research into it.
"They opposed Pashtunwali, but only because they wanted Sharia (Islamic) law to be supreme in Afghanistan," Ander said.
Abdul Shukoor Rishad, the doyen of Afghan historians with 30 books on history and literature to his name, said Taliban intellectual pursuits were limited.
"The Taliban only published two books, and there were both about theology," he said.
OUT OF BABYLON?
The 20 million or so Pashtuns, fabled guardians of the wild mountains of eastern and southern Afghanistan and Pakistan's Northwest Frontier, boast a complex tribal society organized according to genealogies reaching back to Biblical times.
Their founding legend starts in the 10th century B.C. with Afghana, a supposed grandson of Israel's King Saul and commander of King Solomon's army unmentioned in Jewish scriptures.
It then jumps four centuries ahead to ancient Babylon, where emperor Nebuchadnezzar had taken the Twelve Tribes of Israel as slaves after conquering them in the 6th century B.C.
"There was not enough room in Babylon, so he sent 10 tribes to the east," Rishad recounted. "They settled near Isfahan in Iran, in a city called Yahudia."
Pashtun legend says the Jews then moved into the central -- and non-Pashtun -- Afghan region of Hazarajat, and later spread south to Quetta, in present-day Pakistan, and east to the Indus river.
Rishad rejects this theory, which first found its way into print in about 1612 in Delhi, where a Moghul court scribe wrote Makhzan-i-Afghani (Origin of the Afghans).
"This book was hastily written by enemies of the Afghans," Rishad said, adding it ignored ancient Persian, Hindu and Greek writings, including Herodotus, where no Jewish origin is ever mentioned.
Sir Olaf Caroe, a prominent British historian of the Pashtuns, called the legend "all great fun" but concluded it was too riddled with inconsistencies to be true.
JEWISH NAMES?
That has not stopped the quest for the Lost Tribes from turning once again toward Afghanistan, one of many countries where researchers hope to track down the vanished Jews.
"The Pathans (Pashtuns) have the custom of circumcision on the eighth day. This is a known Jewish custom," wrote Rabbi Marvin Tokayer in an article on a Jewish-interest Web site called Moshiach (Messiah).
"The Sabbath is considered a day of rest and they do not labour, cook or bake," he wrote. "Pathans have the custom of Kosher, dietary laws same as Jews."
"Dozens of Pashtun names and customs sound Jewish," the Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote. Researchers link Pashtun and Jewish tribe names such as Afridi (Ephraim), Yusufzai (Joseph), Shinwari (Shimon) and Rabbani (Reuben).
The Jewish Bulletin of Northern California recently recounted the legend that the name Kabul "stands for Cain and Abel."
This interest in the Lost Tribes legend exasperates Rishad, 80, who has fielded foreign queries about it for decades and is convinced the legend began with that Delhi court scribe.
"The names don't mean anything," he argued, adding that many Christian, Muslim and Jewish names shared common roots.
"Christians have names that were originally Jewish and they're not Jewish, are they?" he said.
Rishad is so convinced the legend has no basis in fact that he has turned down a large grant to research it further.
"There is an association in California that is searching for the Lost Tribes," he said. "When I was there in 1995, they were ready to provide me enough money for a new study.
"I turned it down because the theory is wrong. Afghans are not Jewish."
The population numbers of the Israelites (shown at my Profile) are startling. The Lost Tribes were in reality SO LARGE that there is little chance they could just disappear from history. They certainly were no scruffy little band of camel drivers sitting around a campfire at on oasis, picking their noses.
Do a websearch for the Lemba. They are Blacks in southern Africa who have a cultural tradition resembling Judaism. Their legends say they are descended from traders who were away from home, when the news of the fall of their homeland reached them -- so they stayed where they were and married locals... Black Africans.
Genetic tests on their Y-chromosomes indicate that indeed, their Male ancestors were largely Semitic, not Sub-saharan African. Furthermore, the "priestly" tribe of Lemba has many Y-chromosomes of the "Cohen Modal Haplotype"... In short, they really are Jews!
Not me, though... I'm a goy. My Irish mtDNA is identical to Helena's (no mutations in 20,000 years) and my Scottish Y chromosome is 2 single-step mutations away from the Atlantic Modal haplotype (descended from the Stone-Age colonists of Western Europe.)