January 2004 The Real Miracle By Rabbi Alvin Kass Hillel Halkin, the eminent Israeli writer and translator, has just published a new book entitled Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel. The volume tells the highly implausible tale of a people living on a remote border of India, Tibet, and Burma who claim to be descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes who were exiled from the land of Israel in the year 722 B.C.E. by Assyria and never heard from again. The people call themselves B'nai Menashe, the children of Manasseh, after one of the lost tribes. One of the most likely facts that supports the authenticity of their claim to be Jewish is that, despite the paucity of their numbers, they have two synagogues whose members don't get along with each other. The goal of the community is to migrate to Israel, which would greatly improve their social and economic circumstances. The B'nai Menashe tell of their history in a manner which certainly titillates the imagination. Claiming that theirs was originally a sacrifice-based religion, they recount stories about creation, a flood, and a tower that greatly resemble the content of Genesis. They likewise speak of a circumcision rite performed on the eighth day after birth, a song of victory recited at the Red Sea, and a holiday in which they were only permitted to eat unleavened bread. The difficulty is that they have no written records of their past, and some of the folklore might have been absorbed as a result of exposure to the Bible by Christian missionaries. Even if they are not Jews there is something exciting about their claim to be part of a people cut off from their roots for three thousand years. Yet they adhered to their customs, retained loyalty to the land of Zion, and continued to believe in one universal God as they wandered about the Asian continent. Trying to discover the fate of the Ten Lost Tribes is one of the great pastimes of historians and travelers down through the centuries. In all likelihood, the tribes assimilated, intermarried, melted into the local population, and vanished from history. The famous Jewish historian of the first century Josephus writes in his Jewish Antiquities that there were still many of them around in his time. Of particular interest is a ninth century personality named Eldad Hadani who said he came from the tribe of Dan, and that his fellow tribesmen and others were living in the land of Kush, which is Ethiopia. That is especially fascinating because to this day there is a large black Jewish tribe in Ethiopia who call themselves ÒBeta Israel,Ó often referred to as Falashes. They follow the Biblical precepts after a fashion, use Hebrew, and observe Shabbat. Many of them have emigrated to the land of Israel, since conditions in Ethiopia are so terrible. Benjamin of Tudela, Spain, who lived in the twelfth century, is surely the best known traveler in the annals of our people. He went all over the world and relates that people told him stories about the tribes living in the Orient. In actuality, there was a Jewish community in the city of Kaifeng in China. There are written records of them and physical sketches which show that they looked Chinese, but there is no trace of them today. In all likelihood, we shall never know precisely what happened to those Israelites exiled 2700 years ago. The real miracle of Jewish history is that we Jews are around at all. Oppressed and persecuted, expelled and massacred for thousands of years, we have still endured. We are the survivors of that small group of Jews who came from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin in the South and were not exiled with the Ten Tribes in the North who represented 90 percent of the Jewish people. We are a remnant of the remnant. That we are, nevertheless, here to tell the story is a more astonishing mystery than the fate of the Ten Lost Tribes. Perhaps it is the ultimate proof that Somebody up there likes us!