Around 250 members of the B’nei Menashe Jewish community of Manipur and Mizoram, who claim descent from one of the “ten lost tribes of Israel”, landed in Tel Aviv on Thursday night.The B’nei Menashe, numbering around 7,000, belong to the Mizo and Kuki tribal communities across the two states. Though thousands of community members have migrated to Israel since the 1990s, the batch that arrived in Israel on Thursday was the first to be relocated under an Israeli government relocation programme. More will follow them.So who are the B’nei Menashe and what is the history behind their claim of descent from a “lost tribe of Israel”?First, what are the lost tribes of Israel?Around 722 BCE, the Assyrian empire conquered northern Israel and resettled many of the people living there. According to Jewish tradition, the banished people were part of ten tribes — Reuben, Simeon, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Ephraim and Manasseh.For centuries, Western Jews have searched for the descendants of these “lost tribes” around the world, including in the Indian subcontinent.The Jewish community of Mizoram and Manipur believes it is descended from the largest of these tribes — Manasseh. B’nei Menashe literally means “sons” of Menashe or Manasseh. The community’s members believe their exiled tribe headed east, wandering for centuries through Persia (modern-day Iran) and Afghanistan before settling in what is today Northeast India.Story continues below this adBut how did members of the Kuki and Mizo tribes — who speak languages of the Tibeto-Burman family — begin believing that they were descended from a Jewish community that would have originated a world away?It begins, curiously enough, with their conversion to a different Abrahamic religion — Christianity.How Christianity paved the way for JudaismAcademic Gideon Elazar, in Jewish Communities in Modern Asia (2023), writes: “The identification of different groups of people in the region of upland Southeast Asia… as remnants of the tribes began with the highly successful efforts of Protestant missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century.” Baptist missionaries are believed to have brought the Bible to a people who had long believed in messiahs. This belief became a significant factor in the spreading of Christianity, with the missionaries often identified as the restorers of culture. Story continues below this adElazar notes: “In the case of the B’nei Menashe, it would seem that a similar dynamic was created as part of the violent resistance to Indian control over the region in the 1960s.” Around 250 members of the B’nei Menashe community landed in Israel on Thursday night. (Source: Facebook/Degel Menashe)Between the 1930s and 1960s Christian revivalist movements sprang up across Mizoram. So how did this lead to Judaism? Apparently with a dream.In 1951, a Mizo mystic named Challianthanga, or Mela Chala, claimed he had seen in a dream that Mizos, Kukis and Chins were descendants of ancient Israelite tribes, says Sayan Lodh, a PhD researcher at Presidency University. “I would guess that it was due to their dissatisfaction with the Christianity that was being practiced there,” says Lodh, whose research focuses on Judaising movements in India.The Judaising movement among the Chin-Kuki-Mizo tribes in Manipur and Mizoram actively developed after the late 1970s, he told The Indian Express. Story continues below this adAccording to Lodh, propelling the movement was an Israeli organisation called Amishav, led by a Rabbi called Eliyahu Avichail, which aimed to bring all the scattered tribes to Israel “to fulfill the conditions for the coming of the Messiah”.The group began expressing their interest in establishing ties with Jews and the state of Israel in the 1950s, and the Mizo Israel Zionist Organization was founded for that purpose in 1974. Lodh says they gradually started to research Israel, contacted the Jewish communities of Bombay and Calcutta, and even sent a letter to the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament). “By the 1980s, their transformation into Judaism was complete, with help from Amishav,” says Lodh.Story continues below this adMuch of the population in Mizoram and Manipur, however, remains Christian.Re-establishing linksContact with Rabbi Avichail was made in 1979. It was the Rabbi who saw a connection between the Biblical figure of Menashe and an ancestral figure invoked by the Kukis (Manmasi) and Mizos (Manasia).Avichail and others also set out to demonstrate that the B’nei Menashe maintained oral traditions associating them with the land of Israel, as well as certain Jewish practices.Beginning with the late 1980s, Rabbi Avichail and Amishav brought small batches of the B’nei Menashe to Israel on tourist visas, says Lodh. This was because Israel did not yet recognise them as “Lost Jews”, and India and Israel did not have a full diplomatic relationship before 1992.Story continues below this adAlso Read | Tracing the roots of B’nei Menashe, the ‘lost tribe of Israel’ living in IndiaThese people learnt Orthodox Judaism (Reform and Conservative Judaism are not very influential in Israel) and converted to it. “Some of them later returned to teach the Indian community about the religion and its customs,” says Lodh.In 2005, Lodh says, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel (the ultimate authority on Jewish religious matters within Israel) declared the B’nei Menashe the “Lost Seed of Israel”, officially recognising them as a lost tribe, based on inconclusive DNA evidence produced by scientists in Kolkata. However, scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa rejected these results and conducted their own tests, which were also inconclusive. In both cases, traces of the Cohen modal haplotype (a genetic marker found in some individuals identifying as Cohanim) were detected in a few samples. These findings, along with the Rabbinate’s ruling, led Israel to permit the migration of the B’nei Menashe to Israel, albeit in small batches; at times the process was halted. Story continues below this adIn recent years, notes Elazar, “several thousand of the Bnei Menashe have arrived in Israel, with the support of the Rabbinate and the somewhat-reluctant agreement of state authorities.”However, in his research, Lodh found that the B’nei Menashe face racism in Israel due to their physical features.Another Jewish organisation called Shavei Israel took over the work started by Amishav and supported the migration and settlement of the community in Israel from the 2000s to 2020. Since 2020, another organisation called Degel Menashe has emerged. Unlike earlier groups, it is run by members of the B’nei Menashe community.Story continues below this adFinally, in November last year, the Israeli government decided to fund the relocation and resettlement of nearly 5,000 B’nei Menashe members.The other ‘lost tribes’ During the second half of the 20th century, another Indian community claimed descent from a lost tribe — the Telugu-speaking B’nei Ephraim of Andhra Pradesh.This community claims to be descendants of the tribe of Ephraim who arrived in India via Central Asia approximately 1,000 years ago. The identification of the group with Judaism began with a voyage made by their leader Shmuel Ya’acobi to Jerusalem in the 1980s. “The group belongs to the untouchable Dalit caste, and the claim to Jewish descent is often viewed as a means to overcome harsh caste discrimination by attracting attention from higher castes and from Jews in the United States and Israel,” writes Elazar.Another group often associated with the lost tribes are the Pashtun of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many are interested in exploring traditions of their Hebrew heritage. However, unlike the B’nei Menashe, they are devout Muslims and the issue of conversion is highly sensitive.