At Israel's Doorstep In Africa

On a sweltering spring day in September, some 1,500 members of the Lemba community gather under a corrugated iron roof deep in the dusty foothills of South Africa's Northern Province in the town of Sweetwaters. Greetings of 'Shalom' are drowned out by the pulsating rhythms of local music blasting from speakers in the back of a parked minivan. Small children play with handmade wire toys in the loose sand. Nearby, a teenager sits cross-legged, a crackling radio glued to his ear. Women in vivid traditional dress and beadwork, men in dark suits, ties and Ray-bans, and youngsters in jeans and T-shirts all do their best to squeeze into a space that might comfortably accommodate less than half of them.

It's a big day for the elders of the Lemba Cultural Association (LCA). The annual Lemba/Hebrew conference entitled 'Blood Determines One's Race-Not the Tongue' is about to begin. The clan has assembled on this same patch of sunbaked land for 42 years. This gathering is designed to confirm the Lemba's identity as 'Grandsons of Abraham,' to help unite them as a family of black Jews.

M.J. Chirangwana, among the first to arrive, cuts a startling figure in a leopard-skin shawl. His jackal-skin hat is the same one he wears to perform circumcisions. We chat in the shade of a tall Muvhale tree rich with purple blooms. 'The Lembas are like this tree,' he tells me, running a hand along the bark. 'We have many different branches, but we are from the same trunk.'

Chirangwana needs no prompting to spell out what it means to be a Lemba. '[We] have been given strict instructions which [we] have preserved, through all hardships, until today,' he says. 'If you're not circumcised, for example, you're not considered a full Lemba. You're an outcast.' (The Lemba circumcise their sons at age 14.) He draws attention to various traditions that distinguish his people from other African tribes: The community has strict dietary laws. They don't eat pork, they never mix milk with meat, they use a special knife to slaughter animals. Lemba are forbidden to marry people from other communities unless both man and woman undergo a purification pro-cess. Their dead are buried with their heads facing north-toward Jerusalem.

Charles Mathelemuse, an expatriate Lemba engineer visiting from Germany, sits with us. He's proud to make the initial contribution to the LCA's Lemba Fund. He makes a point of coming back to his birthplace every year for the conference. In fact, he bought his green tunic and matching leather kippa especially for the occasion.

Loud ululating from a toothless elderly woman wrapped in pink-striped material signals the community leaders are being led to the cloth-covered table. She is silenced by an opening prayer from the Book of Jeremiah read by Chap- lain William Masala-Mhani, an ordained Christian minister, after which is heard a loud 'Amen.'

qRepresentatives of each of the 12 Lemba lineages, or subtribes, pay their respects to the honored guests, including an anthropologist and a geneticist who have taken an interest in them. Long speeches from each of 14 presenters are painstakingly translated into English by the LCA's general secretary. Each pause is punctuated by more howling and moaning.

The association's president, Matshaya Mathivha-Seremane, takes the stand. His resplendent blue velvet robe is adorned with a gold six- pointed star, at the center of which is a figure of an elephant. A white prayer shawl and kippa complete the dignified picture. 'We know who we are,' he says, after a hushed pause. 'Some people may distance themselves from us, but we knowSwe are descendants of David. I am a Jew. It's not just a question of acceptance. I bleed Jewish blood.' His words draw tumultuous applause.

Mathivha-Seremane bears the weighty responsibility of helping his tribe return to ancestral roots. He displays a patience learned over generations; he knows it won't be easy. 'It will take time for other people to accept us,' he remarks. 'Let them take all the time they need to reflect, think and find out the logic of things.' If it takes formal conversion to Judaism, he says, he's prepared to do it. 'Perhaps [the Jewish people] laid this groundwork to protect themselves, or even to exclude others, but they can't deny descent.'

If the Lemba have their Columbus, it is Tudor Parfitt, director of Jewish studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. At the invitation of the Lemba, who were moved by his writings on the Jews of Ethiopia, Parfitt visited their communities in South Africa and Zimbabwe and wrote about them in Journey to the Vanished City. When he finished his research he was not convinced of the Lemba's Jewish connection, but a subsequent visit to Yemen, where he stumbled on what appeared to be the tribe's place of origin, and DNA tests, convinced him that the puzzle he studied was incomplete.

For a better picture of the Lemba, Parfitt says, one must go deep into the settlements where spinach is cooked on open fires, corn ground into fine white meal and vegetable patches tended with loving care. Many of the villagers do not read, but the growing body of scientific evidence supporting their Jewish claim comes as no surprise to them.

I visit Mufanadzo Masengane, a pensioner living with her blind husband, Piet, in one of these villages in the Nthabalala area. She has no idea how old she is; her birth was never recorded. The elderly couple lives in a thatched hut with the kitchen in a separate structure. Her pride and joy, besides the chickens that scratch in the yard, are mud sculptures that harden and turn red in the sun, serving as the only bit of color in a drab brown yard. It's an art learned from her mother. One statue is of a large bare-chested seated man, another of a kneeling woman with a baby on her back, a third of an elephant lying on its side because its leg is broken.

A few dusty streets away, the small wall around Julia Munene's home is brightly painted. Munene uses a wheelbarrow to fetch water from a pipe that is a 30-minute walk from her house. Huge pumpkins are neatly placed side by side in an outside hut and spinach and tomatoes grow in her carefully tended vegetable patch.

DNA and legend notwithstanding, the Lemba clearly come from a different world than the Jews from whom they seek recognition. As much as they needed someone like Parfitt to study them, they may also need someone to champion their integration.

That person may be Rufina Bernadetti Silva Mausenbaum, a descendant of Portuguese Crypto-Jews who made her way back to the Jewish fold. Living in Johannesburg, she is a representative of Kulanu, an America-based Jewish outreach organization. The Lemba are not Jewish according to Jewish law, she cautions, 'but we share a common heritage, and we need to acknowledge that.'

Mausenbaum was a one-woman crusade behind the first youth exchange between the Betar Zionist youth movement and 12 Lemba youngsters earlier this year. 'Our goal was to show these kids what being Jewish is all about,' she says.

Since the Betar exchange, Kulanu has provided Mausenbaum with funding for various Lemba education programs. 'Kulanu has been very supportive of the youth program because the Lemba have not had any exposure to Judaism,' she says. 'This will provide a means for them to experience the Jewish way.

'We are not teaching them Judaism,' Mausenbaum adds. 'We are accepting them as Lemba.' But that could change. Kulanu has plans to start a Lemba school so that children can be exposed to Jewish culture from a young age. 'But at the moment, this is just a dream,' she says.

'Wanting to be recognized is all-important,' Mausenbaum asserts. 'A community cannot be accepted as Jews until they have made a conscious return. I went through it and now no one can question me or my children's legitimacy. I had to fight my way back into the fold.'

Meanwhile, the Lemba occupy a place at the Jewish doorstep. 'I can invite them for dinner on Friday night,' says Rabbi Norman Bernhard, former president of the Southern African Rabbinical Association, 'but I can't let them marry my daughter.' Bernhard believes that DNA doesn't constitute religious identity. 'It may strengthen their historical claim that they come from Jewish origins,' he says, 'but it doesn't do anything to solve the hal-akhic complications.' In the end, however, he would accept the offer from Matshaya Mathivha-Seremane. The kindest, most compassionate decision the rabbinate could make, Bernhard says, is to remove through conversion the question mark hanging over the Lemba.

Julie Gruenbaum Fax is religion editor at the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.

The enigmatic oral tradition of the Lemba, unraveled by Tudor Parfitt, has been supported by another record of the tribe's origins. This second record, however, is written in the language of DNA, which scientists have only recently learned to read.

Geneticist Trefor Jenkins of the South African Institute for Medical Research set out in 1996 to unravel the Lemba genetic code. He reasoned that if the original Lemba were, as they claimed, Semitic men who had taken African wives, it would show on the Y chromosome. Passing exclusively through the male line, the Y chromosome remains virtually unchanged through the generations.

DNA samples from 49 Lemba men were collected and decisively proved the claim: 50 percent of Lemba Y chromosomes were Semitic in origin, 40 percent Negroid, and the ancestry of the remainder unclear. Jenkins had shown the Lemba almost certainly came from outside Africa, but key questions remained unanswered. Semitic could mean Hebrews, Arabs, Assyrians, Phoenicians or others. Semitic genes were not proof of Jewish origin.

For that, the world waited for nephrologist and molecular geneticist Karl Skorecki. who set out to determine whether there is a genetic basis to the tradition that all Kohanim are descended from Aaron. Like Kohen status, the Y chromosome is patrilineal, passing from father to son. Could it carry unique features that would show Kohanim share a common ancestor?

Skorecki contacted evolutionary geneticist Michael F. Hammer at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and Neil Bradman of the Center for Genetic Anthropology at University College, London. Together they collected Y chromosomes from 188 Ashkenazic and Sefardic men in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel, 68 of whom believed themselves Kohanim. In over half of them, they found an identical variation in the DNA.

Rare in non-Jewish populations, this marker on the Y chromosome is now recognized as the genetic signature of the Jewish priestly family, known as the Kohen modal haplotype. The Jewish priesthood had received DNA affirmation. Here was a specifically Jewish gene, at least among Kohanim. Was it carried by the Semitic Lembas?

In 1997, Bradman contacted Tudor Parfitt, who toured South Africa scraping genetic samples from inside the cheeks of 136 unrelated Lemba men. Analyzed in London and compared with the DNA of Bantu, Yemeni, Ashkenazic and Sefardic men, the Kohen haplotype showed up in some 9 percent of Lemba-a rate similar to that in other Jewish groups, and almost double the proportion among non-Jews. More astonishing, however, were the findings in an elite Lemba subclan, the Buba. Among them, the telltale marker appeared in 53.8 percent of men tested-virtually identical to the incidence among Ashkenazic and Sefardic Kohanim.

Does the appearance of the unique Kohen gene in a black African tribe that claims Jewish heritage confirm they are Jewish? No, according to almost everyone other than the Lemba themselves. 'Who is a Jew?' is a question for rabbis, not scientists, and rabbis are unlikely to go the route of genetic testing. Skorecki, who set off the hunt, is 'delighted that's the case.' It would be wrong, he says, to propose a biological test for Jewishness. 'Being Jewish is a spiritual, metaphysical state,' he says. 'DNA is a physical characteristic, like the size of your nose.' Where does that leave the Lemba? DNA tests should be interpreted with caution, says Parfitt. All that can be said with certainty is that, 'at some point in history, Jews, or descendants of Jews, emigrated to the shores of Africa.'

-Wendy Elliman