This is a quirky, one-of-a-kind book that tells the story of the discovery of a Lost Tribe by letting us see all the false trails the author explored and discarded on the way
By Micha Odenheimer
"Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel" by Hillel Halkin, Houghton Mifflin, 400 pages, $28 Readers of the Bible, over the past 2,000 years, have often wondered what became of the Ten Lost Tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. According to the Books of Kings and Chronicles, the Assyrians drove them into exile about 2,700 years ago. But what happened then? Starting in the Jerusalem Talmud, which places these tribes in an inaccessible land beyond the magical river Sambatyon (the "Sabbath River" of the title of the book under review), they became the stuff of legend, the phantasmagoric alter ego of the exiled and subjugated Jews.
In Jewish consciousness, the Lost Tribes became the keepers of the flame of biblical-era Jewish independence. At every moment, the tribes and their armies were poised to return from the recondite corner of the globe to which they were confined, and save their Jewish brothers from humiliation and powerlessness.
Christians were also entranced by legends of the Lost Tribes. From the early Middle Ages on, the possibility of an eruption of biblical history into contemporary reality fired the imagination of all sorts of messianic or apocalyptic groups. As late as the 19th century, new religious sects such as the Mormons and the British Israelites gave the legend a novel, anti-Semitic twist, using it to invent the possibility of a chosen people more to their taste than to that of the Jews themselves. The Lost Tribes became a kind of Rorschach test in which people saw the missing part of their own national identity, the phantom limb, the ideal reality which can trump the imperfections of power, politics and ethnicity as is.
Poetic travelogue
The systematic mapping of the world's inhabitable regions eradicated hopes that a vast independent kingdom of Israelite warriors lay hidden in some undiscovered land. But lo and behold, it is the year 2003 and Hillel Halkin, a learned, skeptical and obstinate writer, seems to have discovered proof of a living remnant of a Lost Tribe. In this case, it's the Tribe of Menashe (Manasseh) and it has turned up in the most exotic of locales - a triangle nestled between India, Burma and Tibet. And he's written a quirky, one-of-a-kind book that tells the story of this discovery by letting us see all the false trails he explored and discarded on the way.
"Across the Sabbath River" is both poetic travelogue and hard-edged reportage. Like writers such as Peter Matthiessen and V.S. Naipaul, Halkin is capable of writing delicate, evocative prose that is at the same time sharp and unsentimental. The book contains large chunks of literary analysis, with sections devoted to the liturgy and folklore that might support the Lost Tribe thesis, and impressively supple deductions about their significance. It is also part detective story, with a kind of film noir subplot in which the cultural fog of a very foreign place makes it nearly impossible to tell who is innocent and sincere and who is trying to deceive.
Halkin makes a good case, although not a watertight one, that around 722 B.C.E., part of the Tribe of Menashe - perhaps only a single extended family or clan - began a migratory route that took them through Afghanistan, into China, and finally into a hilly jungle area that is currently part of the Indian state of Manipur. According to Halkin, other tribes who later migrated to the region were influenced by the Manassean clan, whose stories and rituals became part of their cultural heritage. Still, the most concentrated evidence of the Israel connection is to be found among the clans of the Mi Lui - literally, "ancient people" - who Halkin takes to be the original Mannaseans, and who are linked by ties of culture and marriage to the much larger Kuki-Chin-Mizo tribes.
The evidence of a link to ancient Israel includes Hebrew words, religious customs such as a spring holiday in which unleavened bread must be eaten, biblical legends and the possession of significant fragments of the Mannasean family tree that coincide with the genealogy given in the Book of Chronicles. Such information could have been imbibed from Christians sometime in the murky past, but Halkin argues fairly convincingly against this possibility. The book will surely open a discussion among ethnographers, Bible scholars and historians of Asia, and Halkin's methods and conclusions will be scrutinized and debated; the potential significance of the book's claims are wide-ranging and profound.
Charged atmosphere
But to me, the charged atmosphere that surrounds Halkin's quest, and in a sense produces it, are just as fascinating as ultimate questions of historical proof. Because "Across the Sabbath River" is not just about a Western Jew looking for a Lost Tribe. It's about a lost tribe that is just as desperately seeking a Judaic identity - and not only, or necessarily, in order to emigrate to Israel. It's thus a book that touches on a largely unexplored motif of potentially great significance: the meaning or interpretation which non-Western, non-Islamic ethnic groups attribute to Jewishness and Israel.
Halkin's adventures take place among the Mizo, Kuki and Chin, closely related tribes who inhabit adjacent areas in the eastern part of India and western Burma. These tribes live on the margins of their respective countries. Since the two countries gained independence in 1948, India and Burma have been fighting secessionist movements almost continuously in these regions. Religiously and ethnically, the tribes don't fit in with their respective national norms. Instead, they are part of a vast array of peoples scattered across Africa and Asia whose tribal identity is the strongest anchor of their collective lives.
Two things happened in the 1940s and `50s that aroused interest among the Mizo, Kuki and Chin tribes in their possible connection to the Tribe of Menashe. One was the spreading influence of Christianity, which, despite strong competition from the Muslims, is the fastest growing religion in the world. Millions of Mizo-Kuki-Chin converted to Christianity, starting around the turn of the 20th century and with increased speed after World War II. The other was news of the founding of the State of Israel.
The spread of Christianity had a fascinating multiple effect on the tribes. It brought them the Bible, and although the Christians emphasized Jesus and the New Testament, the story of Israel also became known, and resonated deeply with the tribes. The prevalence of charismatic sects like the Pentecostals strengthened a tendency toward spiritual visions and prophetic revelations that probably already had a basis in their tribal culture. And at the same time, Christianity and its aggressive attempts to uproot "the old religion" of the tribe - animist practices such as sacrifices to jungle spirits - had a boomerang effect. It created a heightened anxiety about the end of tribal culture that intensified the search for a resurgent tribal identity.
In the 1950s several tribe members who had recently converted to Christianity had visions in which God revealed that their people were actually the Lost Tribe of Menashe. One of the visionaries linked this news with the message that God wanted the Mizo- Kuki-Chin to reject Christianity and return to Judaism and even to the newly founded State of Israel. Other visionaries and religious groups saw no contradiction between Christianity and their new identity as one of the tribes of Israel.
In the 1980s and `90s, Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail, a disciple of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who has made finding lost tribes his life's mission, began to lead a group of "Bnei Menashe," as they called themselves, back to normative Judaism. At present, about 400 members of the tribe have undergone Orthodox rabbinic conversion and are living in Israel.
Tens of thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Mizo and Kuki, for instance, have integrated a link to the Tribes of Israel into their own tribal identity. The Tribes of Israel movement is dynamic and growing - at least one Kuki-Mizo group now claims affiliation with the Tribe of Ephraim as well as that of Menashe. It's important to note that most of the groups that have an Israelite identity foster no delusions about gaining a one-way ticket to Israel, are very far from having adopted normative Judaism and still consider themselves practicing Christians.
Bolstering ethnic identity
Why the interest in Israelite identity? In a strange way, what made Judaism undesirable to the pagans to whom Paul wished to preach the Gospel - the link to a specific ethnicity - is precisely part of what makes it attractive to the Kuki-Mizo. In the face of the influence of Western mass culture and proselytizing religions such as Islam, Christianity and Buddhism, being affiliated with a Tribe of Israel is a way to maintain one's own ethnic identity while gaining an ancient spiritual and genetic pedigree. Of course if Halkin is right, Kuki-Mizo visionaries were also inspired by a kernel of strange but authentic truth.
Although the Kuki and Mizo peoples are unique, I think their case has something to teach us about the way the story of Israel is perceived by many groups in the non-Western world. By combining a universal God with ethnic specificity, the story dovetails with the need of these groups to bolster their ethnic identity, threatened by nationalism or modernity, while moving toward a more universal spiritual conception. The ancientness of Israel becomes a symbol for the ancient roots of culture, for the idea that the old need not be sacrificed on the altar of the new. Israel's endurance in the heart of Christian and Islamic civilization, and the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland, becomes evidence of the possibility that minority cultures can play enduring roles in a universal human narrative.
But the story of Israel, and the fusing of ethnic identity and metaphysical truth, can also be interpreted as advocating a noxious form of ethnic and religious chauvinism. There are glimpses of this possibility in Halkin's narrative, as theology spills over into politics. Several different groups and leaders of the Bnei Menashe compete with each other over who is worthy of Rabbi Avichail's good graces. Accusations of secret Christian beliefs are made by some groups against others, and some Kuki-Mizo have melded the Tribe of Menashe theory into a potentially secessionist political movement.
And, of course, there is the fact that so far, at least until Halkin's book, only the nationalist right wing, from among Israeli religious factions, has taken an interest in the Kuki-Mizo. Nearly all of those Bnei Menashe who have made it to Israel are living in settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, because these are the only communities that agreed to take them in.
Is this the best the Jewish imagination can do with the surge of interest in Israelite identity in the Third World? For the Kuki-Mizo-Chin do not represent a totally isolated phenomenon. Although they may be the only newly discovered living link to one of the Ten Lost Tribes, there are a plethora of other groups in Africa, South America and elsewhere who claim or desire some form of affiliation with the Jewish people. The standard secular Israeli attitude toward these claims is dismissive: Why should people obviously so removed from the experience and history of the Jewish people attempt to share our national identity? Most religious Jews are so caught up in guarding the fort of tradition that they also have little patience or interest in opening the gates or lowering the bridge. But I think these attitudes represent a failure of the Jewish imagination: The story of Israel has a life of its own, whether we like it or not, and it is our fate to have been charged with responsibility for this story.
For me, along with being an amazing tale of historical detective work, "Across the Sabbath River" should make us think about how to use the symbolic power of the story of Israel in a way that will bring blessing to us and to all tribal cultures who identify with our story.
[ via Haaretz ]
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