The Lemba of South Africa circumcise their young, follow the Sabbath and don’t eat pork. But unlike other “lost tribes,” they have the genes to prove it.
by Judith Fein
I recently asked a Jewish friend from South Africa if he knew anything about the Lemba.
“Sure,“ he said. “We had a nanny working in our house. She was from the Lemba tribe.”
“They’re Jewish,” I told him.
“What? That’s nuts. No way. Check your sources. “
I did check my sources. I had read a book about them (Tudor Parfitt’s Journey to the Vanished City), saw a documentary (PBS’s The Lost Tribes of Israel) and decided I wanted to meet these ancient people, whose oral tradition spoke of an ancestral home in Sena, which is today thought to be in Yemen.
Two months ago, when I was in Johannesburg, I connected with a woman who knew a few Lemba She gave me the phone number of a Lemba man in Soweto, a township once known as a hotbed of the anti-apartheid revolution.
When I arrived at Edwin Mabudafhasi’s modest house, he was waiting outside with a smile on his face. Next to him were a half dozen old sofas, which he reupholstered to eke out a living.
“Come in, come in,” Mabudafhasi said. His native language was Venda but he spoke English and about five other African languages. As I sat down in his living room, I noticed a cushion embroidered with the name Jesus Christ.
It was a relic of the apartheid days, he apologized. The only place blacks could get a decent education was a Christian missionary school. Mabudafhasi, like many other Lemba Jews, was baptized.
“But we know who we are,” Mabudafhasi, now 71, said. “Like the Ethiopians, we are the lost tribes of Israel.”
Edwin went into the back room of his house and emerged wearing a tallis. He dragged out a huge plastic bag filled with yarmulkes and tallises, and plopped them on the sofa. Gifts of the Jews in Israel “and the USA,” he said. Several kippot fell on the ground and the fringes of the tallises brushed the floor. I had to gently explain these were sacred objects. Having not been raised Jewish, he had no idea.
The Lemba of South Africa, who number 50,000, practice a unique religion with many similarities to – and many differences from – Judaism as we know it. In the Limpopo region, the northern rural area where most Lemba Jews live, the elders speak of a book of laws that was lost a long time ago.
They follow dietary laws that prohibit pork, they commemorate a Friday night Sabbath with prayers and they circumcise their young. But they also practice animal sacrifice and revere an ancestral drum called the Ngoma Lungundu. According to Lemba legend, the ancient Lemba brought this drum with them on their trek from Sena and it protected them during times of war and turbulence. The drum is now lost, but its importance has been compared to the Ark of the Covenant.
Rudo Mativha, the 43-year-old daughter of the venerated and recently deceased Lemba leader Professor Matshaya Mativha, has fond memories of her youth. “On Pesach,” she told me over a pot of a tea, “we slaughtered a lamb, ate a flat, dry bread and greens that were slightly bitter. We told the story of the slavery in Egypt very quickly, and then we told our oral history, from Sena on down. My father could recite the generations back to Seremane, which probably means Solomon.”
She spoke of a Sabbath tradition of washing the hands after prayer and how men could not convert into the religion.
But like groups in Ethiopia, Thailand and India who claim to be “lost tribes,” there is much controversy over the Lembas’ status as Jews.
Seeking to unravel the mystery, Parfitt, a white Jewish studies
professor from London, took DNA samples from a group of 49 Lemba men in
the late ‘90s. What he found was remarkable: the Buba clan of the
Lemba, who claim ancestry from the man who led the Lemba out of Israel,
showed exceedingly uncommon genetic similarities with Cohanim from Sephardic
and Ashkenazi populations.
The so-called “Cohen model haplotype” sequence
of genes that is found in about 50 percent of Ashkenazi and Sephardic
Cohanim is also found in 53 percent of the Buba clan.
But despite this remarkable find, South Africa’s white Orthodox
establishment refuses to recognize the Lemba as Jews.
“When we went to the Board of Deputies in Johannesburg,
they said our story is all fabrication,” explained Mitavha, who
now heads the pediatric intensive care unit at one of Johannesburg’s
largest hospitals.
“The men agreed to be tested [for DNA], but then the
Board said we’re not halacha enough and have to convert back to
Judaism. They resent that we had to be baptized to go to school, and we
learned about Christ, who I still consider to be a great teacher. There
has been no acceptance by the Orthodox, until now. But it’s their
problem. It doesn’t change who I am and who I know I am.“
But the biggest obstacle for acceptance for many Lemba Jews is
that they don’t know who they are. While the traditions remain strong
in Limpopo, those that came to urban areas during the apartheid days retain
little memory of the ancient traditions. There is no synagogue in Soweto,
no Jewish cultural center, no place for Lemba Jews to worship or meet
white South African Jews.
On the day my husband and I met Mabudafhasi, we also met a young
man, Solly, who said he was Jewish but had no idea what it meant. Looking
at the pile of Jewish books Diaspora Jews had sent to Mabudafhasi, I got
an idea.
We opened the book labeled “Torah” and told Sonny to
close his ideas. “I want to tell you an African story,” I
told him.
Omitting the voluminous commentary at the bottom of the page, I
read him the story of Jacob, Rachel and Leah, He was mesmerized.
When he opened his eyes, he said he was going to start reading
the stories of his Jewish people – they weren’t that complex
or hard to understand. “I want to know what it means to be Jewish,”
he said, with great sincerity.
IF YOU GO:
South Africa Airways offers non-stop flights and has many special
deals: www.flysaa.com
Thuli, a Zulu tour operator who offers fascinating visits to Soweto
can, if previously arranged, take you to meet some of the Lemba who live
there. ATAMELA@webmail.co.za
In beautiful Capetown, be sure to visit the high-tech, interactive
South African Jewish Museum, which contains a wonderful reconstructed
Lithuanian shtetl and exhibits about the role Jews played in South Africa.
For more information: www.sajewishmuseum.co.za
If you stay at the world-class, boutique Cape Grace Hotel in Capetown,
they will probably do for you what they did for me; on Rosh Hashanah,
they sent a homemade apple-and-honey tart to my room. www.capegrace.com
For feedback, contact editor@sdjewishjournal.com.