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© Kamla-Raj 2004 Anthropologist, 6(3): 219-233 (2004)
Lost Israelites From the Indo-Burmese Borderlands: Re-Traditionalisation and Conversion Among the Shinlung or Bene Menasseh1
Shalva Weil
NCJW Research Institute for Innovation in Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel E-mail: msshalva@mscc.huji.ac.il
KEYWORDS Conversion. Lost Israelites. Re-traditionalism. Shinlung. Judaism
ABSTRACT This paper is an attempt to explain the conversion to Judaism by some members of tribal groups from the Indo-Burmese borderlands, who claim Israelite descent. In India, they are known collectively as the Shinlung; in Israel, they are called Bene Menasseh, or “Children of Menasseh”, linking them to the Biblical tribe. To date, some 700 Bene Menasseh have converted to Judaism by orthodox Rabbis in Israel. This article explores the connection between traditional religious beliefs and the new cognitive order. It is apparent that the conversion was part of a wider reaction to Christianity among tribal peoples of the Indo-Burmese borderlands and a desire to adopt elements of the pre-Christian religion and combine them in a modern ideology. The Judaizing Shinlung managed to dovetail a claim of affiliation to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, a common myth in Judaism and Christianity, with millenarian beliefs. On the basis of the lost tribe of Menasseh claim, the Shinlung are demanding a ‘return’ to the Holy land in the same way that other groups were ‘gathered in’ to the Jewish homeland. The transformations undergone by the Shinlung are rooted in indigenous religion, but also appeal to a modern, yet traditional identity of ethnic autonomy, the seeds of which can be found in a cultural identity producing common membership irrespective of divisive tribal aspirations. This form of re-traditionalisation can be associated with the quest for an alternative form of nationalism other than modern nationalism in North-East India. It dovetails past and future, ethnos and nation in a formulation which defines a community of history and destiny, thereby binding the Shinlung through another world religion to the Jewish ‘homeland’.
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