Book Review : Strange Encounters in the Search for the Lost Tribes

The 13th Gate: Travels Among the Lost Tribes of Israel by Tudor Parfitt (Adler & Adler, 4550 Montgomery Ave., Bethesda, Md. 20814: $17.95), 184 pages)

“Twelve of the 13 gates of Jerusalem correspond to the 12 tribes, through which the prayers of each of them ascend to the heavens,” wrote an Hasidic rabbi of the 18th Century. “The 13th gate is for him that does not know his tribe.” Tudor Parfitt, a scholar of Hebrew and Jewish studies (but not a Jew himself), has traveled around the world in search of the lost tribes of Israel, and “The 13th Gate” is the anecdotal account of his pilgrimage to half a dozen obscure, exotic and remote Jewish and pseudo-Jewish communities.

Some are colorful and picturesque, some are baffling historical oddities, some are pitiable in their isolation and oppression and a few are downright pathetic. The question that troubled me, however, is whether all of these strange bedfellows truly belong in a book about Judaism.

Parfitt raises but does not resolve the issue. “To have encountered so many groups in quite different cultural situations throughout the world seeking membership in the community of Israel barely half a century after world Jewry was almost annihilated is in itself remarkable,” Parfitt reflects. “But a question which perhaps ought to be asked is: To what must Judaism be reduced before it stops being Judaism?”

Unmistakably Jewish

Parfitt has visited some remnant communities of the Diaspora that are unquestionably and authentically Jewish--notably the Jews of Syria, where an ancient and magnificent Jewish culture once flourished, and the Baghdadi Jews who have settled in Singapore and Bombay. The Jews who ended up in the Far East due to various accidents of history may have acquired some surprising colorations, but they are unmistakably Jewish in their language, their liturgy, their obedience to the Law, their love of Zion.

Above all, the dwindling Jewish community is cut off from Israel and the rest of the Jewish world, and lacks even a sufficient number of marriageable men for its daughters.

“We are not living in a prison here,” one despairing Jewish father says. “We are living in a tomb. Even our Judaism is dead. It has no contact with the real world. There is no way in which it can change.”

By contrast, some of the Jews whom Parfitt describes have been separated from Judaism not for decades but for millennia. He introduces us to the Bene Israel of Bombay, who claim to have descended from a party of Jews from Palestine shipwrecked on the Indian coast in the 2nd Century BC, and the Falashas of Ethiopia, who believe themselves to be the Biblical lost tribe of Dan.

But, as Parfitt points out, even if they are accepted as Jews, the Bene Israel and the Falashas embrace an expression of Judaism so archaic that it lacks even the most fundamental elements of the faith: the Talmud, the rabbinate, the Hebrew language.

Signs of Jewish Heritage

Parfitt ventures far beyond even these problematic Jews by introducing us to the Lemba tribesmen of southern Africa, who claim to have descended from the Falashas of Ethiopia but who can point to only the faintest signs of some dubious Jewish heritage. “We do not eat pork,” one Lemba tribesman says. “Then we have something like the Jewish shofar to call the Lemba to their assemblies: we use the rhinoceros horn.”

But he goes beyond the pale when he devotes a lengthy (and undeniably fascinating) chapter to two Japanese cults, the Beit Shalom and the Makuya, whose “philo-Semitism” is so bizarre that even the author, a generally sympathetic observer, appears to be nonplused.

These two cults, which are essentially Christian sects with an admixture of Buddhism and a manic enthusiasm for Jewish religious symbolism and contemporary Jewish nationalism, have invented a wholly new faith that cannot be called Jewish in any meaningful sense. They imagine that the tribe of Hada is a lost tribe of Israel, that the Emperor of Japan is of Jewish descent, that Jesus was not crucified but escaped to Japan. Both cults are ardent supporters of Israel (whose military prowess they especially admire), and the Beit Shalom have adopted Anne Frank as a kind of demigod.

“Of all the things that had happened to the (German-born) little Dutch girl, both before and after her death,” Parfitt writes, “the fact that she had become the saint of a remote Japanese Christian, Judaizing sect was perhaps the strangest of all.”