London Wallpaper: JEWS TO PASHTUNS

Is One of the Lost Tribes the Taliban?

Ilene R. Prusher

It was Seder night in Kabul, and the bread most afflicting me was the pile
of nan—Afghan flatbread—that our cook kept placing on the table just
before the guests were due to arrive. I repeatedly removed the offending plate
and explained to the cook—already baffled by my trying to give him the week
off—that there would be no bread served with this meal. He'd nod to show
he understood, but a few minutes later, I'd find the same pile of nan back
in its usual place.
I had planned for this Seder even before leaving home on the second of
what would be many reporting trips to Afghanistan, tucking a box of matzah in
my suitcase and wrapping two Haggadot inside my flak jacket. But
celebrating the Jewish people's liberation from slavery in Egypt was
proving more
complicated than just setting a proper table. My attempt to banish the nan and
the cook's determination to return it was just one of many challenges.
This was 2002, after all, in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, which
until the U.S invasion only months earlier had been controlled by the
fiercely repressive Islamist Taliban. Although driven from Kabul, the
Taliban were
hardly gone from the country and memories of their rigid rule—and their
Ministry of Virtue and Vice—were fresh. A colleague who was co-hosting the
Seder and I dared not reveal to our Afghani staff and guests—interpreters,
drivers and guards—that they were actually helping us observe a Jewish
holiday. Instead, we related the Passover story in metaphorical terms: Just as
you here in Afghanistan are celebrating your freedom from the oppression of
the Taliban and the terror of civil war, we commemorate the day of our
freedom from slavery. This is a feast to show our love of liberty,
our thanks to
God.
The Afghanis ate it up—and reached for seconds of my charoset.
The only guest in on the secret was my guide and interpreter, Mashal, a
member of Afghanistan's prominent Pashtun people. Gentlemanly son of a judge,
author of two books of Pashto poetry and master of four other languages,
Mashal had been running an Internet café in Pakistan soon after 9/11 when a
colleague of mine coaxed him into journalism.
A few days before the Seder, I found myself in an unexpected conversation
with Mashal. He and I were on one of our long car trips through the ragged
slate-gray Afghan hinterlands, scouting stories about Al Qaeda's evasion of
U.S. forces and local warlords who were besting America's plans for the
region. Somewhere between Khost and Kabul, Mashal raised a subject I had
considered best to avoid in these precincts.
"I, I, I want to find out more about the Jews," he said from the front
seat, craning his neck to talk to me as we bounced over the rocky road like
hot popcorn kernels. I didn't respond; instead, I continued to stare out the
window at the packed-mud buildings dotting the remote landscape, careful
as ever to avoid direct eye contact with the men we passed. "Because I
believe that they are related to us," Mashal continued, "and that maybe we, we
were once Jews."
"What?" I asked, as if I hadn't quite heard him, buying more time to
think. I knew there were peoples, from remote pockets of Africa to the far
corners of East Asia, who believe they are descended from the
Israelites. I had
not, though, heard this mentioned in regard to the Pashtuns, who claim a
proud martial history in Central Asia that long predates Islam. Also called
Pakhtuns or Pathans, they are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan,
whose populace also includes other Muslim groups like the Hazaras, Tajiks and
Uzbeks. More notoriously, Pashtuns make up the ranks of the Taliban.
Was I to believe that the likes of Mullah Omar—the Taliban luminary who
ordered public executions and floggings, made burka-wearing law, and gave
succor to Osama bin Laden—possessed even a molecule of Jewish ancestry?
"Once Jews?" I finally replied, turning to him and pulling up my
ever-slipping head scarf. "What do you mean?"
"We have all kinds of traditions that no other Muslims have," he said, "
like Saturday was the rest day. And many of the words in our language are
not related to any other language in the region. And I, I think maybe that's
because they are from Hebrew!" Mashal punctuated that last word with a
pleasing emphasis. His love of poetry had a way of seeping into the sweet
rhythms of his speech.
"Well, if there's something you want to know, I might be able to help," I
said, half-shocked to hear myself utter these words to an Afghan. "I'm
Jewish."
"Really?" He was exuberant. "You?" Our driver turned to ask what had
caused this sudden burst of enthusiasm, but Mashal dismissed him with a shake
of the head and a vague smile. Lowering his tone a notch, he said, "Wow.
That's great. I want to ask you a lot of questions."
Mashal's discretion confirmed my instinct that I could trust him. Still,
such confidence was not to be given lightly. This was hardly two months
after the murder of Daniel Pearl in neighboring Pakistan, an event that shook
many intrepid reporters to the core. Suddenly, to not hide one's religious
identity seemed reckless. Like the thousands of landmines still embedded in
Afghanistan's parched landscape, Jewishness could be hazardous to your
survival.
Later that day, I gingerly walked over one such landmine-strewn plain of
cracked earth, dry and gritty as nan. At regular intervals, we had driven
past gaggles of bright fabric flapping flirtatiously in the wind. Tied to
thin wooden poles in the ground, they looked from afar like sails attached to
the masts of sunken schooners trying to catch the breeze and move on.
Mashal said they marked graves, but I couldn't see how that could be.
I asked our driver to stop so I could take a photograph. He shrugged and
obliged, telling me to watch my step. As I neared the poles, my feet
crunching the dirt beneath me, I could see that Mashal had been right. The
flapping fabrics were head scarves from women who had buried loved ones here,
colorful signs of remembrance for those they mourned.
Up close, I found something even more surprising: stones scattered on
nearly every grave. A memory from early childhood rushed through my head—one
hand in my mother's, the other reaching down to place a pebble on my
grandfather's tombstone. I returned to the car in wonderment, retracing my
footsteps as I'd learned to do in a land as rich in mines as more fortunate
countries are in coffee beans.
I asked Mashal what the story was: Why the stones on the graves? This was
a peculiar Pashtun way of marking a visit to the deceased, he said.
"But that's what Jews do," I told him quietly. In all my travels, I had
never come across another people who preferred pebbles over flowers on a
loved one's grave.
"Really?" Mashal said, surprised, "I thought only we, we Pashtuns did
that."
Less than an hour later, we passed through a typically poor village on the
road back toward Kabul. Paint markings on some of the buildings caught my
eye. They resembled five-branch menorahs. I asked Mashal what they were.
"Oh, we call it nars," he replied. "People in the countryside put this up
to mark a celebration, such as a birth or wedding."
"Do all the peoples in Afghanistan do that, or just the Pashtuns?"
Iasked.
"This is only for the Pashtuns," he said.
It seemed uncanny. Menorah…nars. They sounded as if they shared the same
root. And unlike the Star of David, which did not originate with the Jews,
the menorah symbol had never belonged to another people.
Mashal and I raised our eyebrows and looked at each other. In the weeks
that followed, we were to come across further peculiarities of Pashtun
customs that would ring familiar. There is the tradition among many
rural women,
for instance, of lighting candles on a Friday. They then hide them in a
basket—perhaps to conceal their glow from censorious mullahs. There are
wedding customs: Some Afghans marry under a cloth that is similar to
the chuppa.
Another Afghan cloth, the uniquely Pashtun shoulder drape for men that
doubles as a ritual prayer mat, is called a tolia; Both its name and function,
I told Mashal, reminded me of tallit.
From then on, Mashal and I made a point of paying visits to Afghanistan's
Jewish sites: Gardez, where it's rumored that a Jewish warrior named Gabur
built an ancient fortress; Ghazni Province, where Pashtuns make
pilgrmoment/images to the tomb of a "Jewish saint" called Zikria; and
Balkh Province,
an ancestral area and possible cradle of Pashtun culture that once boasted
a large Jewish population that disappeared long before the country's other
Jewish communities in Herat and Kabul dwindled after 1948 and died out in
the 1970s. Mashal thought the Pashtuns might have acquired their name from
Balkh pronounced pakh-tu by most Afghans.
There are several stories about how the Pashtun people—spread throughout
Afghanistan, Pakistan and India—came by their Jewish roots. Many Pashtun,
Mashal pointed out, believe themselves to be descended from a legendary
figure named Qais Abdu Rashid, who might have been from one of the Israelite
tribes. Another theory is that Pashtuns are descended from Pithon, a tribal
descendant mentioned in First Chronicles, 8:35.
Curiosity piqued, I spoke to experts and consulted every book I could find
on Afghanistan and the lost tribes. It seems Mashal and I were far from
the first to wonder. One can find Muslim and Jewish references from the 13th
to the 18th centuries attesting to the presence of lost tribes of Israel in
the Pashtun territories in Afghanistan and Pakistan. These include the
1612 classic called Makhzan-i-Afghani, which was translated into English in
the early 19th century as History of the Afghans.
Hardly a contemporary academic or journalistic work—from Sir Olef Caroe's
The Pathans of 50 years ago to the most recent histories of Afghanistan—
fails to mention it. British colonial official Mountstuart Elphinstone,
writing in the early 19th century, compared Pashtu to Hebrew in his book, The
Kingdom of Caubul. Israel's second president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, believed in
the Jewish lineage of the Pashtuns, as did Zahir Shah, the last king of
Afghanistan. Once, when asked about his ancestors, Shah claimed that the royal
family descended from the Tribe of Benjamin.
Jews I spoke with who had grown up in Afghanistan also immediately
identified with Pashtun-Jewish links. Their parents or grandparents,
they would
tell me, had always said, that of all Afghan peoples, they could expect
Pashtuns to treat them well on account of their shared heritage. In
Jerusalem, I
met with Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail, founder of Amishav ("My People Returns"
), a group that brings supposed descendants of the lost tribes—such as the B'
nei Menashe in India and the Shin-lung in Burma—to Israel. He flipped to
the map on the back cover of his book, The Tribes of Israel, and with his
finger traced for me the tribes' putative path from Palestine into Iran,
eastward across Afghanistan, and eventually into India and China.
Avichail's claims brought to mind other intriguing details that Mashal had
mentioned like some of the provisions of the complex Pashtun code of
ethics, pashtunwali, which have no apparent connection to Islam and are not
shared by other peoples of the region. These include exacting standards for
hospitality and the requirement that a man marry his brother's widow—a
stipulation also found in the Torah.
Recently, I had a long phone conversation about Pashtun origins with Dr.
Navras Jaat Aafreedi, an Indian historian on a research fellowship this year
at Tel Aviv University. He's been studying Muslim groups in India that
have traditions of Israelite descent. In one—a Pashtun tribe called the Bani
Yisrael—everyone shares the last name of Yisraeli. According to Aafreedi,
they believe that they are the descendants of a Jewish sahabi ("friend" in
Arabic) of the Prophet Mohammed.
"Why do they claim Israelite origins, if there is nothing to support it?"
he asked me. "Why do they take it seriously, and why are there others who
take them seriously?"
Tudor Parfitt, a British professor of Jewish studies and author of The
Lost Tribes of Israel, subjects the lost tribe theory to an unforgiving
academic light apparent in his recent book's subtitle: The History of a Myth.
Parfitt argues that the last traces of the 10 northern tribes, who were
exiled into Assyria and forced to assimilate, are Hebrew names recorded in
Assyrian army documents from the 7th century. He has concluded that this is
where the history of the lost tribes ends, and the myth of the lost tribes
begins.
A perfectly reasonable explanation for the cultural overlap, according to
naysayers, is that large numbers of Jews lived and traveled in the lands
that are now Afghanistan well before the arrival of Islam. As far back as the
7th century, Chinese travel writer Hsuan Tsang noted a large number of
Jewish communities there. Eventually, most converted to Islam.
Whatever the arguments for and against, many Pashtuns—my friend and
colleague Mashal among them—remain convinced they are related to the
Jews, or at
least deeply curious to learn whether they truly are. Their belief has some
interesting ramifications: In the ever-shifting power struggles among
ethnic groups in this part of the world, the Israelite card is used both for
and against the Pashtuns. Pakistanis in particular disparage the Pashtuns as
Jews, while some Pashtuns use the possibility of Israelite heritage as
evidence of having legitimate, ancient roots in the region. For the
religious-minded, a connection to Judaism is proof of having been
monotheistic even
before the arrival of Islam. And unlike other groups that may or may not be
descended from lost tribes, the issue isn't about to get swept up into
Israeli migration politics: the Pashtuns have no interest in emigrating to
Israel.
At my nan-less Seder this year, I will recall how Jews, as the descendents
of the Israelites, have probably wandered more than any other people.
Deuteronomy 10:22 tells us that, before slavery, "Your fathers went down to
Egypt seventy people, and now the Lord your God has made you as numerous as
the stars of heaven." Where those stars shine today is anyone's guess.
Ilene R. Prusher is a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor, and
is the Boston-based newspaper's Jerusalem bureau chief. She has spent the
last decade reporting from countries throughout the Middle East, East Asia
and Africa. Her articles have also appeared in publications such as the The
Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New Republic and The
Jerusalem Report.