Living with the Lemba raises more questions than answers

Ten years ago, genetic tests carried out by British scientists revealed that many of the Lemba tribe in Southern Africa have Jewish origins. While that may have been the end of a very long story, for Professor Noah Tamarkin, it was just the beginning.

An anthropologist at Cornell University in the United States (US), Tamarkin has conducted field research in South Africa since 2004, including living with a Lemba tribe for a year. His new book, Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa, asks vital questions about being Jewish and South African.

Tamarkin grew up in the north east of the US, and along with teaching at Cornell, he is a research associate at the University of the Witwatersrand’s (Wits’) Institute for Social and Economic Research.

“Before I began graduate school, I only knew about South Africa from high school and college classes. It was really this project that brought me into connection with South Africa and South Africa’s Jewish communities,” he says. “From there, my connections grew: I came to know Jewish South African academics through my affiliations at Wits, and I came to know the Lemba people and their history of interaction and distance from other South African Jews.”

He was drawn to African and Jewish studies while growing up white and Jewish in the US. “I was very interested in racial justice and what it takes to achieve it. I was in high school when apartheid ended in South Africa, and this was formative for me in thinking about how the politics of race can transform,” he says.

“At the same time, I was also really interested in the complex ways that Jewishness has signalled race in different times and places. These two questions came together when I learned about the Lemba and their genetic studies in the early 2000s. So, while the interest was there, it was really this book project in its first iteration as doctoral research that led me more deeply into both African and Jewish studies.”

His first introduction to the Lemba was in a newspaper story that talked about them as genetic Jews. “I had no idea what that might mean, and more than anything, I wanted to learn what it meant to the Lemba. But I felt that if I just showed up and asked this question, I wouldn’t truly understand their answers. The larger context of their lives concerning religion, race, and otherwise would have been lost to me.

“Over the course of my research, I lived for a short time with a number of different Lemba people, but I spent many months living with one family in particular. Becoming part of this family has been incredibly meaningful personally, and in terms of my research, the intimacy of family bonds helped me to understand much more than I could have if I had remained distant.”

The villages he stayed in were all in Limpopo, and he also stayed with a few Lemba in various places in Gauteng. “The longest continuous stretch that I lived with the Lemba was one year, but the book is also based on additional shorter research trips over the past decade,” he says.

He isn’t the first researcher to live with the Lemba.

“A South African professor at Unisa [the University of South Africa], Magdel le Roux, also did extensive field research during which she lived with the Lemba, and British Jewish Studies professor Tudor Parfitt, who now teaches in the US, conducted research and was in fact part of conducting one of the DNA studies that brought the Lemba to my attention,” he says.

Asked if he observed any Jewish customs, rituals, or levels of observance, Tamarkin politely implies that this might be the wrong question to ask. “One thing I realised early on in my research was that there was a long history of various missionary writers and colonial ethnologists who would look for Jewish customs and rituals as a way to prove or disprove that the Lemba were really Jews.

“I didn’t want to participate in that kind of project – the proving or disproving – so rather than look for Jewish customs and rituals, I asked open questions about what it meant to the Lemba to be Jews, or as some preferred, Hebrews.

“This approach really shifted my understanding of what makes a custom, ritual, or observance ‘Jewish’, and made me think a lot about my own family traditions, and specifically what resonated with and what departed from normative ideas of what’s Jewish,” he says.

“I was really blown away by the transnational connections that the Lemba have made with various Jewish and Hebrew groups, and how they have so carefully thought through the kinds of exchanges that are meaningful for them.

“We think DNA can tell us whether the Lemba are really Jews. This book shows instead that DNA provides more questions than answers.”

Elaborating on this, he explains that “DNA studies, specifically genetic ancestry research, presumes that you can find distinct markers in a population that tell you about their migration history. Many people understand this to mean that your genetic ancestry tells you who you really are, because it tells you where you are really from.

“But the premise is wrong. For example, why do we think that past migrations only happened in one direction? Why do we assume that the usual state was to be settled in one place, rather than the complex migratory histories that archaeologists, bio-anthropologists, and historians routinely document? Why do we think that where someone is really from tells us who they really are? These are some of the questions that are raised for me when thinking about DNA.”

He writes that he was drawn to study the Lemba as a way to think about the complexities of Jewish identity – “questions about who and what is a Jew, and where are Jews, and questions about how people are grappling in post-apartheid South Africa in the wake of having been subjected to racial oppression their entire lives”.

Explaining how we can make these questions relevant to our lives as Jews in South Africa, he says, “The Lemba are Jewish South Africans, and they are also black South Africans. I think we start there to make these questions relevant to Jewish South African lives. Too often, when we speak of Jewish people, whether in South Africa or the US or elsewhere, we assume Ashkenazi histories and white experiences. We may know about many other Jewish histories, but these don’t necessarily shift our sense of self and solidarity.

“The kinds of racial oppression that the Lemba have faced in South Africa is outside of my personal experience, and it’s outside of the experience of white Jews in South Africa, but if we recognise that white Jewish experience is only one way that Jewish people experience race and racial oppression, it follows that these questions of Jewish identity and its complexity are at the centre of Jewish experience: they are already relevant, should we open ourselves to them.”

Asked if he thinks the Lemba will ever be accepted as Jews – and if they want to be accepted as Jews – he says, “The important thing to keep in mind is that there are many Jewish histories and cultures and many ways to be Jewish, and they don’t depend on acceptance by all Jews in order to flourish. We’re all enriched when we approach one another with curiosity and acceptance.”