The purpose of this blog is to make the Friday night dinner (or Saturday lunch) table a bit more Jew-ish.... Please print and share.
Happy new year!Maybe you heard the news about the last Jew in Afghanistan?
It may be fake news.
Because... here's the shocker:
The Taliban may be (or have been) Jewish....?!!
Say what?
In his 1858 History of the Afghans, (Amazon link | full-text-download), Joseph Ferrier writes,
The majority of Eastern writers consider them to be the descendants of one of the ten tribes of Israel - and this is the opinion of the Afghans themselves....
Similarly, in his 1957 The Exiled and the Redeemed, Yitzchak Ben-Zvi writes,
The Afghan tribes, among whom the Jews have lived for generations, are Moslems who retain to this day their amazing tradition about their descent from the Ten Tribes.... The evidence in our possession is, of course, insufficient for practical conclusions to be drawn therefrom. The fact that this tradition, and no other, has persisted among these tribes is itself a weighty consideration.”
Hebrew University Professor Shalva Weil has written about this hypothesis as well.
Moreover, consider this compelling story and this commentary on it.
All of this leads to a very difficult question for your table:
If some of the Pashtun Taliban are indeed descendants of Jews.... does that make them Jewish?
Why or why not?
Wishing you a meaningful Yom Kippur and a
Shabbat Shalom
PS - That Jew-ish Afghan pic is of course clickable.
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