In Pursuit of the Lost World

From left: Dr. Yulia Egorova, Prof. Tudor Parfitt and Dr. Navras Jaat Aafreedi on their joint Malihabad expedition

Agniva Banerjee, Lucknow Times, The Times of India, November 15, 2002

It was a hectic day. From the time he alighted from the Pushpak Express early morning, till 7:00 in the evening. In between there was a bumpy ride all the way to Malihabad, where it was quite an ordeal convincing 30-odd temperamental Pathans that giving mouth swabs would in no way interfere with their observance of the Ramzan fast. Still, there he was, 7:30 pm sharp, at the Taj Residency Bar for the appointment.

Tudor Parfitt Professor of Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Broadcaster, journalist, inveterate traveller and author of The Lost Tribes of Israel among other books and a string of bestsellers

"I became interested in Jewish studies in the mid-Sixties while I worked as a volunteer in Israel at the age of 19. I fell in love with Jerusalem, a spiritual place and a beautiful city," he says.

A man of many pursuits, Dr Parfitt was in Sudan in 1984 when he found himself in possession of a journalistic scoop. "I discovered that the Ethiopians were working with the Sudanese secret police to get the Ethiopian Jews, called the Falashas, airlifted to Israel in a clandestine operation"

A front page article in The Times was followed by the book Operation Moses, the story of the exodus of the Falashas from Ethiopia to Israel.

"A year later at a lecture in Johannesburg on this operation, I noticed some black people wearing Jewish skull caps. At the end of the lecture I talked to them and found they were a southern African tribe who called themselves Lemba and who staked claim to a Jewish heritage.

"I found it hard to believe but found that their rituals and practices were essentially Semitic in character. They said they had come from the North and went to a place called Sena, and from there they came to Africa via Pusela. I didn't know what that was. Neither did they but they kept saying Sena and Pusela."

That launched him on a journey that took him halfway across Africa to a remote corner in southern Yemen. "There I did find this place called Sena! Later I corroborated their claims on the basis of DNA tests."

A similar pursuit brought him to Lucknow "I am here to collect DNA samples of the Afridi people who live in Malihabad. I didn't know that Pathans also lived in Malihabad, but this promising young man Navras Jaat Aafreedi who's investigating into the Afridi's Jewish connection informed me about it."

Whether that connection is established or not, remains to be seen। But what all this research is leading to, is to establish the identity of several lost cultures in the world.

"People are getting an identity they didn't have before. The Blacks were brought to continents other than Africa as slaves. They lost their identity. But when some Black person in America learns that his ancestors belonged to say the Euroba tribe of Nigeria, he derives a sense of pride from it."

Dr Tudor says, "Genetics for the first time is giving us incontrovertible evidence that racism is false. The modern world since the Second World War has been at great pains to put different cultures on an equal footing. But the idea that the differences between people should not divide humanity but be a cause to celebrate has mostly gone unappreciated. Post-WWII, the modern world concentrates on similarities. Biology and genetics are showing us that we are literally identical."