Lemba (people)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Lemba have an African Bantu - ethnic group that in southern Africa in the countries of Zimbabwe , South Africa and Malawi live. You profess Judaism , Christianity or Islam . There is a hypothesis that they are direct descendants of the Israelites .

society

The Lemba do not form a socio-political unit, but often live with other groups, such as the Shona , Venda or Pedi , whose languages ​​they also speak.

The Lemba focus on the manufacture of trade goods, they are valued for their metalworking skills . In contrast, cultivation and animal husbandry only play a modest role.

They are traditionally organized endogamously , which means that they only married within their own ethnicity.

Middle Eastern ancestry

Some Lemba groups trace back to Arab ancestry. As early as the 1930s, an Arab influence on the Lemba was assumed due to customs, sagas and clan names.

Some of the Lemba, especially those in South Africa, consider themselves Jews . This hypothesis was primarily examined and championed by Tudor Parfitt . Your ancestors are said to have left Israel around 2700 years ago . At that time the Assyrians conquered the northern Israeli empire. Religious practices of Lemba that correspond to those of Judaism and suggest an origin from the Middle East are seen as support for this thesis . The Lemba do not eat pork, practice circumcision of the boys , they butcher their cattle, the male Lemba wear a kippah, and since the late 20th century stars of David have been depicted on their graves . However, most of these customs are not specifically Jewish, but are also practiced by Muslim or other African peoples.

According to their founding legend , the Lemba owned a portable traveling sanctuary , which is called Ngoma Lugundu ("drum of the ancestors") and which is said to have brought them from the "north" to their present home. Parfitt compares it to the ark of the biblical Israelites. In contrast to the Ark of the Covenant, it is not a portable shrine, but a portable, drum-like instrument. It was lost for several decades in the second half of the 20th century until it was rediscovered by Tudor Parfitt in 2007. Their age is estimated to be around 700 years.

Legend of origin

Oral tradition of the Lemba claims that they originally came from a town called Senna. Parfitt suspects that this could be in what is now Yemen . There are similarities between the name Senna and the name of the Jeminite capital Sanaa . There is also a place called Senna near Sanaa. The Muslim inhabitants living there have surnames similar to those used by the Lemba. Historically, there has been a large Jewish community in Yemen for a long time. Parfitt thinks it is possible that some ancestors of the Lemba came from Senna as merchants to Africa and are of Jewish descent. The Lemba would then be descendants of immigrant Jewish men with African women. At the end of the 16th century they are said to have migrated from the coast to the interior.

Genetic examination

The thesis of Jewish ancestry has been examined through genetic testing since the late 1990s. In 1999 and 2000, the British professor Tudor Parfitt carried out a DNA analysis of genetic markers.

DNA samples from Bantu (Africa), Yemenis and Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, including the Kohanim , the descendants of the Jewish priests, were compared. Only the descendants of Aaron were considered as Kohanim . A great similarity was found between the Y chromosome of the clan of the Buba of the Lemba and that of other descendants of the Kohanim. The Y chromosome is always inherited from father to son and the more similar it is, the closer is a common paternal ancestor. The Buba clan is one of the twelve Lemba clans and is considered to be the clan of priests among them .

In contrast, the Lemba do not differ from their African neighbors in terms of blood groups and mitochondrial DNA (female lineages). Recent studies have also questioned the genetic link with the Jewish Kohanim. The Y chromosome in question is assigned to haplogroup J and is known as the Cohen Modal haplotype . The examined Cohen Modal haplotype is common among the Kohanim, but is also widespread in other parts of the Middle East and is therefore not suitable for reliably verifying Jewish origin. A more detailed genetic investigation, however, found that the variant of the Cohen modal haplotype typical of the Kohanim is not represented in the Lemba.

Genetically, influences from the Middle East are currently detectable in male Lemba lineages, which could be traced back to the Arab trade on the east coast of Africa.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Thomas MG: Y chromosomes traveling south: the cohen modal haplotype and the origins of the Lemba - the "Black Jews of Southern Africa". At the J Hum Genet. 2000; 66 (2): 674-86. PMID 10677325
  2. ^ Hammond Tooke, WD: The Bantu-speaking Peoples of Southern Africa . Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1974, pp. 81-84, 115-116
  3. ↑ a b c Himla Soodyall, Jennifer G. R Kromberg: Human Genetics and Genomics and Sociocultural Beliefs and Practices in South Africa . In: Dhavendra Kumar, Ruth Chadwick (Eds.): Genomics and Society: Ethical, Legal, Cultural and Socioeconomic Implications . Academic Press / Elsevier, ISBN 978-0-12-420195-8 , pp. 316 ( google.com ).
  4. ^ Lost Jewish tribe 'found in Zimbabwe'. BBC
  5. ↑ [1] , Spiegel-online from January 12, 2009
  6. ^ MG Thomas, T. Parfitt, DA Weiss, K. Skorecki, JF Wilson, M. le Roux, N. Bradman, DB Goldstein: Y chromosomes traveling south: the cohen modal haplotype and the origins of the Lemba - the "Black Jews of Southern Africa ". In: American Journal of Human Genetics . Volume 66, Number 2, February 2000, pp. 674-686, doi : 10.1086 / 302749 , PMID 10677325 , PMC 1288118 (free full text).
  7. ↑ [2] , www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org, English, accessed on January 13, 2013
  8. ↑ - ( Memento of the original from May 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , www.worldjewishcongress.org, accessed January 12, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.worldjewishcongress.org
  9. ↑ http://www.enotes.com/african-lemba-tribe-reference/african-lemba-tribe ( Memento of December 29, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) , www.enotes.com, English, accessed on January 13, 2013 .