Thanks to Weird Jews who directed us to this Washington Times article about another tribe of Israel that once was lost and now is found: The B’nei Menashe, descendants of Joseph’s son Manasseh, live in Northeast India between Myanmar and Bangladesh and have returned to a Jewish way of life after been in exile for over 2700 years. Many of them would like to return to Israel, actually, but they’d better get in line: there’s still a whole lotta Falash Mura still in Ethiopia.
We grew up thinking all Jews were either Ashkenazic Eastern Europeans like us or Sephardic Middle Easterners. We always understood that there were ten other tribes that dispersed throughout the world, but we figured they’d assimilated with the locals and that was that. Each time new information surfaces about Judaism kept alive in crazy places like Burma (which makes ghetto Warsaw look like…well, maybe not Disneyland, but perhaps only the fifth circle of hell as opposed the first) the flame in our hearts gets bigger.
(Photo by Kulanu, Inc.)