Developing World Bioethics ISSN 1471-8731 (print); 1471-8847 (online)

Volume 3 Number 2 2003

CONSTRUCTING BLACK JEWS:

GENETIC TESTS AND THE LEMBA –
THE ‘BLACK JEWS’ OF SOUTH AFRICA
TUDOR PARFITT

ABSTRACT
This commentary examines the use of Y-chromosome testing to reconstruct
a genetic ancestry for the Lemba, a group in southern Africa that has long
considered itself Jewish. The commentary looks especially at the reasons
why this project drew such attention from the mainstream media.

GENETIC STUDIES ON JEWISH POPULATIONS

Recent years have witnessed a substantial number of genetic
studies dealing with the origins of various Jewish and would-be
Jewish groups. Perhaps the most widely publicised of these were
the various studies carried out on the Cohanim ( Jewish priests),
those on the origins of various Jewish communities around the
world including the Lemba, a small African Judaising tribe, and
more recently studies of Indian Jewish groups whose origins were
always something of a mystery.1 In terms of public perceptions,
all these studies were potentially explosive because they dealt with
what might be construed as the ‘racial difference’ between Jews
and would-be Jews.
When I became interested in the Lemba in the late 1980s no
one save a small handful of specialists had ever heard of them.
Now, on the Internet there are some 5000 entries on the Lemba

1
Mark Thomas, T. Parfitt, D.A. Weiss, K.I. Skorecki, J.F. Wilson, M. LeRoux,
N. Bradman & D.B. Goldstein. Y Chromosomes Traveling South: the Cohen
Modal Haplotype and the Origins of the Lemba – the ‘Black Jews of Southern
Africa’. American Journal of Human Genetics 2001; 66: 674–686. M.G. Thomas,
K. Skoreckiad, H. Ben-Amid, T. Parfitt, N. Bradman & D.B. Goldstein. Origins
of Old Testament Priests. Nature 1998; 394: 138–140. T. Parfitt. Descended from
Jewish Seed: Genetics and Jewish History in India: The Bene Israel and the Black
Jews of Cochin. The Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies 2003; vi: 7–18.

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and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 CONSTRUCTING BLACK JEWS 113

(admittedly not all of them to do with this African tribe – there

is, for instance, a Latvian musician called Lemba – but the great
majority discuss them and their ancestry). The media interest in
this tribe has been generated in very large part by the genetic
work, which purports to show that they are of Middle Eastern
origin and that the incidence of the Cohen Modal Haplotype
among Lemba men is much the same as is to be found in Jewish
populations.2 This story was carried on the front page of the New
York Times, as well as in countless newspapers throughout the
world, and was the subject of some documentary films, including
Nova’s Lost Tribe of Israel and was featured by the flagship 60
Minutes programme on CBS.3 Why did the story of the Lemba’s
genetic origins generate such media interest? Was it because
everybody knows that Jews are not black, or is it because at some
level they are assumed to be so?
As Sander Gilman has shown, a long European and North
American tradition maintains that the Jews in general are ‘black’,
metaphorically as well as literally.4 Nineteenth century anthro-
pologists assumed that Jews had a close racial connection with
blacks. According to Gilman, the ‘general consensus of the eth-
nological literature of the late nineteenth century was that the
Jews were “black” or, at least, “swarthy.” ’ Indeed, one late nine-
teenth century anthropologist explained the ‘predominant
mouth of some Jews being the result of the presence of black
blood’ and that ‘brown skin, thick lips and prognathism’ were
typical of Jews.5 If in some discourses Jews were thought to be black
and African, so too in the nineteenth century were Africans in a
vast number of cases thought to be Jews. Ethnographers, mission-
aries and travellers time and time again concluded that African
tribes including the Masai, the Zulus, the Xhosa, the Hottentots,
the Tutsis, the Ashanti and many more, were of Jewish origin.6

THE CASE OF THE LEMBA

A 50 000 to 70 000 strong endogamous tribe, the Lemba, some-
times referred to by others in South Africa as Kruger’s Jews, are

2 Ibid.
3
NOVA online. 2000. Lost Tribe of Israel. Tudor Parfitt’s Remarkable Journey.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/israel/parfitt.html
4
Sander Gilman. 1999. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of
Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton. Princeton University Press: 89.
5
Ibid.
6
Tudor Parfitt. 2002. The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth. London.
Weidenfeld and Nicolson: 205.

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114 TUDOR PARFITT

to be found in north-east South Africa and in various places in

Zimbabwe. Often referring to themselves as ‘the white men who
came from Sena’, they have a number of Semitic customs and
have tentatively been identified as Jews by missionaries and other
observers for about a hundred years. There is very little evidence
for this and what evidence there is I collected in my book Journey
to the Vanished City. Nevertheless, as I have shown elsewhere, the
project of identifying African and other groups as Jews was an
endemic part of the colonial enterprise.7 In terms of their actual
religious affiliation, most of today’s Lemba are Christians, al-
though there is a small minority who profess to follow the ancient
religion of the Lemba, and there are a number of Muslim Lemba
communities in Zimbabwe.
By and large the Lemba (at least to me) are visually indistin-
guishable from their Venda or Shona neighbours. However, this
similarity did not prevent those few intrepid travellers, who ven-
tured into Lemba areas in the past and acquired a conviction that
they were Jewish, from systematically finding phenotypical aspects
that proved this racial origin. One German observer said: ‘How
absolutely Jewish is the type of this people! They have faces cut
exactly like those of ancient Jews who live around Aden. Also the
way they wear their hair . . . gives them the appearance of Aden –
or of Polish Jews – of the good old type.’ An English writer in
the 1880s spoke of ‘the lighter skin and Jewish appearance’ of the
Lemba.8 In 1931, A.A. Jaques noted that the whites of the north-
ern Transvaal could distinguish a Lemba from his features, and
Jaques agreed with them, stating that ‘many Lemba have straight
noses, rather fine features and an intelligent expression which dis-
tinguish them from the ordinary run of natives . . . one does oc-
casionally meet with a Lemba who possesses strikingly Semitic
features. One of my informants, old Mosheh, even had what
might be termed a typical Jewish nose, a rare occurrence in any
real Bantu.’9 In fact, some of the early ethnographic work on the
Lemba included profile photographs to establish that they do
indeed have ‘Jewish’ noses.10
In 1942, an article by Louis Thompson, which included a
profile photograph showing ‘the Semitic features of the Lemba’
(essentially a prominent nose), noted: ‘As the blood of the Semite

7
Ibid.
8
Tudor Parfitt. 1997. Journey to the Vanished City. London. Phoenix: 265.
9
A.A. Jaques. Notes on the Lemba Tribe of the Northern Transvaal. Anthro-
pos 1908; 19: 245.
10
H.A. Stayt. 1931. The Bavenda. London. Oxford University Press: Plate XXI.

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 CONSTRUCTING BLACK JEWS 115

became more diluted with that of the Bantu, so did their arts
decrease . . .’11 The last citation is significant: it showed that for
the writer (and no doubt the feeling was widely shared) Jewish
blood was better than black blood. For this very reason, the
Lemba were regularly put in a higher category than other tribes.
In other words, because the Lemba, even as marginal Jews, chal-
lenged existing ideas about what Jews were supposed to look like,
so ‘Jewish’ physical attributes had to be found for them. These
ideas were soon internalised by the Lemba themselves. In a South
African compilation of ‘vernacular accounts’, M.M. Motenda
observed: ‘The Vhalemba in respect of their faces and noses are
well known to have been very handsome people, their noses were
exactly like those of Europeans’, and plate IV on this work shows
a profile of a Lemba with a prominent ‘Semitic-looking’ nose.12
When I was doing my fieldwork in Lemba villages in Zimbabwe,
I was urged to meet a man who everyone said was a typical Lemba
– he had a prominent nose and what they said was a ‘European
face.’ They were very proud of this man’s ‘look.’ But in reality, he
was the only Lemba I met in the Mposi chieftainship in Zimbabwe
who had this kind of look – he was atypical but presented as
typical. As with the illustrations in the small ethnographic litera-
ture, the Lemba were expected to look Semitic: if they were to
be thought of as Jews or Semites they had to correspond to the
stereotype. In fact, in recent fieldwork we discovered that in one
Zimbabwe village the majority of Lemba respondents maintained
that their ‘Jewish’ noses were one of the most important things
about them.
The colonial fantasies mentioned above were unknown to the
majority of the readership of the New York Times and other western
newspapers when the news broke of apparent genetic affinities
between the Lemba and Jews. For these readers, the idea that a
Bantu-looking central African tribe were apparently Jewish no
doubt came as something of a shock. The documentary films on
the Lemba developed the issues picked up by the press. The Lost
Tribes of Israel, for instance, clearly stresses the blackness of the
Lemba and poses the question of the possibility of Jewish ‘black-
ness.’ This film, and another like it, also emphasises the Jewish
attributes of the Lemba, showing them wearing Jewish skull-caps,

11
Louis C. Thompson. The Ba-Lemba of Southern Rhodesia. NADA (The
Southern Rhodesia Native Affairs Department Annual) 1942: 76–86.
12
N.L. van Warmelo, ed. 1940. The Copper Miners of Musina and the Early
History of the Zoutpansberg. Pretoria. Union of South Africa Department of Native
Affairs: 63.

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116 TUDOR PARFITT

Jewish praying shawls, and blowing a horn, which is suggested to

be a shofar by juxtaposing the Lemba scene with the image of
somebody blowing a shofar in Jerusalem at the Wailing Wall.

GENETIC RESEARCH ON THE LEMBA

What the genetic data appear to suggest is that the Lemba
male line did indeed substantially originate outside Africa. The
presence of a haplotype that may be associated with the Jewish
priesthood is, to say the least, intriguing in historical terms
because we know of no Jewish incursion into central Africa.
However, the more dramatic conclusion, that the genetic research
proves that the Lemba are Jews, is now more or less standard in
popular academic discourse. Steve Olson’s book Mapping Human
History includes a chapter entitled ‘God’s People’ in which a
couple of pages are devoted to the Lemba. ‘At this point’, he
affirms, ‘their Jewish ancestry on the male side seems assured.’13
But the truth is more ambiguous. As Olson himself points out,
the CMH is found fairly widely in the Middle East. All one can
really say is that the Lemba may be shown to be of Middle Eastern
extraction genetically and that the presence of the CMH is indeed
surprising and fascinating.
The effect of the genetic research on the Lemba is a topic of
my ongoing research. Broadly, the genetic research has very sub-
stantially underpinned the sense of the Jewishness in the Lemba
themselves. Over the past two years, this sense has given rise to a
new Judaism among the tribe. A growing number of Lemba are
now using Hebrew words and expressions, celebrating Jewish
holidays, and in some cases living lives according to the rules of
orthodox Jewish law (Halakhah). And even though no responsi-
ble Jewish religious authority has yet argued that any specific DNA
could affect the question of who is or who is not a Jew, a number
of groups throughout the world, particularly in the United States,
have taken the genetic research on the Lemba as an indication
that they are indeed Jewish. To these groups, the DNA results
appear as a vindication of the efforts made by the Lemba to have
themselves recognised by other Jews as Jews: the results were taken
as a weapon against what such groups perceive to be racist and
exclusive attitudes in Israel and among Jewry in general.
It is, broadly speaking, the case that until the genetic studies
were undertaken on the Lemba, no Jewish organisation had pre-

13
Steve Olson. 2002. Mapping Human History. London. Houghton Mifflin Co:
114.

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 CONSTRUCTING BLACK JEWS 117

viously shown any great interest in the tribe. However, since 1999
when the DNA work on the Lemba became widely known in the
United States, there have been a number of Jewish missions to the
Lemba – in themselves fairly remarkable events, as Jews are not
known for proselytism. The first such mission was by Yaakov Levi,
a Jewish educator who left the United States for South Africa in
December 1999 under the auspices of Kulanu, an American
organisation devoted to an inclusive view of who counts as a Jew,
and the discovery and reintegration of lost Jewish groups. His
mission was to bring normative Judaism to the Lemba.14 In
January and August 2002, two further missions led by Rev. Léo
Abrami, an American rabbi supported in the second case by
rabbis from Johannesburg, again brought the message of norma-
tive Judaism to the Lemba. I was present on the occasion of the
first Abrami mission and witnessed his passionate attempts to
wean the Lemba away from their Christian affiliations. Later, in
September 2002, I attended the annual meeting of the Lemba
Cultural Association and observed that for the first time they were
connecting this event with the Jewish New Year and that they were
using the Hebrew formula Shanah Tovah (also something they had
never done before), as well as a number of other Hebrew expres-
sions. Among some of the Lemba elite one can now perhaps see
the beginnings of a revival of a non-Christian Judaic religion, an
affiliation that again did not exist before the tests, or more pre-
cisely, that had been destroyed leaving little coherent trace. Rabbi
Abrami has observed that many Lemba are now ‘determined to
re-affirm their Jewishness and their allegiance to Judaism.’15

CONCLUSION
It is difficult to overestimate the role of the media in construct-
ing a definite Jewish ancestry for the Lemba. Geneticists and those
who reported their activities almost invented the Lemba as a
Jewish community for outsiders who would never have learnt
about the ‘Jewishness’ of the Lemba but for the mediatisation of
the genetic tests. As far as the Lemba themselves are concerned,
it was the elite among them who derived most value from the
media reports. It was the elite who had in the past attempted to
present the Lemba as Jews to the various organs of South African

14
Levi Returns from South Africa. Kulanu 2000; 7: 1.
15
A recent work gives an account of Kulanu’s objectives and the scope of its
interests. See: Karen Primack, ed. 1998. Jews in Places You Never Thought Of. New
Jersey. KTAV Publishing House.

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118 TUDOR PARFITT

Jewry. While previously they had no evidence to support their

claims, they could now use the DNA research as evidence and this
evidence proved extremely effective in opening new channels of
communication with Jews around the world, particularly in the
United States and South Africa. The influence of local realities
on the reaction of the latter group to the genetic tests should not
be overlooked. South Africa is a society where colour gradations
have had pre-eminent importance in the classification of groups.
The Lemba, who had always maintained that despite their black-
ness they were the ‘white men who came from Sena’ and who
thought of themselves as having western traits such as ‘Jewish’
noses, can now point to the genetic results as proof of a shared
physicality with the white Jewish elite of the great South African
cities.

Tudor Parfitt
Department of the Near and Middle East
School of Oriental and Africa Studies
Russell Square
London
WC1H OXG
UK
[email protected]

Acknowledgements
This paper forms part of a project funded by the Innovations in
Research initiative of the British Arts and Humanities Research
Board (AHRB). Dr. Y. Egorova was appointed Research Assistant
for this project. I am grateful to her for her contribution.

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003