4/16/00
I saw the program. I think it's great. I don't know how much of it is true,
but all of it seemed plausible.
I welcome the possibility that they are all decedents of the tribes. If
they are, they can be tested for the Kohan gene which would confirm, but
not necessarily deny the possibility as it did in the case of the Black Jews
of Zimbabwe.
I love the idea if it's true. The program showed all of them being welcomed
in Israel once some religious official OK'd them.
That all of these tribes were Easterners and Central Asians is what makes
it plausible. The claims of Western Europeans on the other hand, are absurd.
Geography counts.
Joshua2
==========
K wrote:
>
> 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.
>
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