National Post (Canada)
http://www.nationalpost.com/news.asp?f=000415/260606&s2=world
Saturday, April 15, 2000
The other children of Moses
'Jews are totally shocked because the people I show in the film, who are
Burmese, Chinese, Indian and Afghani, do not conform to their stereotype
of what a Jew should look like. And this really bothers them.' -- Filmmaker
Simcha Jacobovici
Isabel Vincent - National Post
Stephen Epstein, Associated Producers Inc.
Simcha Jacobovici, a documentary filmmaker, spent four years seeking the
lost tribes of Israel. He believes he found them among people such as
the Pathan tribesmen of Afghanistan, above, who call themselves the "people
of Moses." The Hebrew carvings in the background are 2,300 years old,
located near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Ever since he became a documentary filmmaker in 1983, Simcha Jacobovici
has been on a quest to find the 10 lost tribes of Israel. In his first film,
Falasha: Exile of the Black Jews, he documented the plight of the
Ethiopian Jews or Falashas, believed to be descendants of Dan, one of the lost
tribes. Today, he believes he has found the other nine.
It's quite a bold assertion, even coming from Mr. Jacobovici, an Emmy
award-winning Canadian filmmaker who is known for a documentary style
that borders on guerrilla journalism. He has never been shy about swooping
down on a controversial subject and aggressively probe it.
His oeuvre includes tough films that have looked at parents selling
their children into prostitution in India and Nepal, relations between
Israelis and Palestinians, and why so many Jews have traditionally dominated
filmmaking in Hollywood.
Quest for the Lost Tribes of Israel, his latest film, which airs Sunday
evening on the U.S. cable network A&E, is no exception. In it, Mr.
Jacobovici, a self-described Indiana Jones with a video camera, travels
to some of the world's remotest places and meets people who practise
certain Israelite customs. Some of them even believe they are Jewish.
"I was amazed," said Mr. Jacobovici, 47, a devout Orthodox Jew who
founded his own synagogue in Toronto a few years ago. "In this film spirituality
meets history on so many levels that I still can't fully appreciate."
The film is a fascinating collection of mainly circumstantial evidence
that suggests that isolated groups of people in places as diverse as Tunisia,
China, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and India share certain customs
and beliefs that are strikingly similar to Jewish ones. Why do certain
members of the Pathan tribe, many of whom belong to the fundamentalist
Muslim Taleban movement in Afghanistan, call themselves the "people of
Moses"? Why do they light oil lamps on Friday nights, as per the Jewish
tradition, to ask God's forgiveness? Why do a group of men in a remote
part of China identify themselves as Jews and keep Menorahs in their homes?
Why do the Shin-tung tribe, who call themselves Manaseh and live on the
Myanmar-India border, have a star of David at the centre of their flag?
Why are so many Manaseh returning to Israel to practise Judaism? Could they
be the descendants of the Menaschetribe, one of the 10 tribes sent into
exile nearly 3,000 years ago when, according to the Bible, the kingdom of
Israel was invaded by Assyrian warriors?
Mr. Jacobovici makes a persuasive argument that the people he interviews
in the film are indeed the modern-day descendants of the lost tribes of
Israel, and he is the first journalist to document that these isolated
groups share some beliefs and customs that are extremely similar to
Jewish practises. He is so convinced of his findings that he is writing a book
about his travels, which spanned some four years.
Indeed, he seems completely unfazed by the fact that scholars of
antiquity have largely dismissed his film. For them, the notion that a group of
people forced into exile among dozens of different ethnicities could
hang onto their beliefs and customs over nearly 3,000 years belongs strictly
in the realm of religious belief. There is no sound historical evidence to
suggest that the people interviewed by Mr. Jacobovici are part of the
lost tribes of Israel or that the tribes themselves survived the Assyrian
melting pot, they say.
"Scholars don't count the oral tradition," says Mr. Jacobovici, who has
included a variety of scholarly voices in his documentary, most of them
vehemently disagreeing with his research. "But I'm looking at this as a journalist
and what I see is that there are certain funeral, marriage and eating practices
that are almost identical to Jewish ones," he says. "It's not any one thing, but a
combination of things that makes this real for me. And I can't just dismiss all of
this as coincidence."
In addition to the Israelite-like customs practised among groups that
are completely isolated from one another, Mr. Jacobovici found that the
locations of his "tribes" corresponded to names in the Bible, said to
have been sent into exile. For instance, the Bible lists one of the locations
of the tribes as Havor by the River Gozan. In the documentary, Mr.
Jacobovici finds a group of people living in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, which
he says may be pronounced as Pesh-Havor, near the river Gazni. For Mr.
Jacobovici the similarity in the names has to be more than mere coincidence.
"I used the Bible as a treasure map," he says. "I think it is more than
just a strange coincidence that these people are exactly where they
should be according to the biblical map."
The public response to his work has been tremendous, he says. Mr.
Jacobovici, a shrewd marketer, is definitely capitalizing on millennial
angst, reminding his audiences that the return of the lost tribes to
Israel is the fulfilment of a biblical prophecy, foreshadowing the Apocalypse.
The film has obviously touched a nerve. After its premiere on CBC last
week, the Toronto offices of Associated Producers, the production
company Mr. Jacobovici founded with his partner Elliott Halpern, have been
getting calls from many people -- American televangelists to Mormons -- who say
they are convinced that American Indians are one of the lost tribes.
For Mr. Jacobovici the reaction of some North American Jews has been
particularly interesting. "Jews are totally shocked because the people I
show in the film, who are Burmese, Chinese, Indian and Afghani, do not
conform to their stereotype of what a Jew should look like," he says.
"And this really bothers them."
Now that he has found the tribes, what will he do next?
"I want to recreate the route of the Exodus. I want to know if the
biblical story of Moses matches the archeological evidence," he says, venturing
into yet another scholarly minefield where the historians are bound to
disagree with his findings.
Mr. Jacobovici says he doesn't care. Armed with his well-thumbed Bible
and a video camera, the Jewish Indiana Jones says he is looking forward to
yet another adventure.
--
Kathleen
One consequence of Clintonism is that facts have
become irrelevant to political debate.... Under
the new Clinton Rules, by now imbedded in media coverage, it doesn't matter whether
something is
true; what counts is whether it works politically.
... Mr. Clinton has taken to lying with such
fluency that his whoppers are barely even
noticed. -Wall Street Journal
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