Nadene Goldfoot
Moses brought in Jews from Egyptian slavery to Canaan by 1271 BCE. Isaac was his son, and then Jacob was born to Isaac and Rebekah. Jacob married 4 women, becoming father of 12 sons of which the descendants of 10 living in the northern part of Israel were taken way by the Assyrians. The 10 tribes were known as the 10 Lost Tribes because no one knew of their fate. The did not return.
The Pashtuns of Afghanistan have members whose history does go back to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, a happening when the Assyrians attacked Israel in 721 BCE and took away much of the population. "Names of greater Pashtun tribes include the Rubeni, Gadi, Ashuri, Efridi, Shinwari, Lewani and Yousefzai, which clearly resemble the tribes of Reuven, Gad, Asher, Ephraim, Shimon and Yosef. The royal family of Afghanistan traces its origins to the line of King Saul of the tribe of Benjamin."
Shalva Weil, PhD, recently held a symposium about the Pashtun heritage in Jerusalem and the customs retained throughout all these years proving their past history. These same Pashtuns live in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Some are even members of the Taliban terrorists. They are all Muslims, but Pashtuns do have their own ethics of Pashtunwali. 
Jews in Germany could have migrated to Turkey, continuing to Afghanistan
Balkh was a main center for Jewish life in ancient Afghanistan. The city was said to have been the burial place of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel,6th century BCE taken to Babylonia, and the home of the prophet Jeremiah 7th to 6th century BCE. Today, Balkh is a district in Afghanistan.
Driving to Taliban-controlled territory doesn't take long. Around 30 minutes from the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, passing large craters left by roadside bombs, we meet our host: Haji Hekmat, the Taliban's shadow mayor in Balkh district. Across much of Afghanistan: the government controls the cities and bigger towns, but the Taliban are encircling them, with a presence in large parts of the countryside.
Pashtuns are the largest ethnic community in Afghanistan. It is widely believed they are an offshoot of the Pathans whose members are scattered across northern India and Pakistan. Both are today exclusively Muslim. Neither has any sympathy for modern Israel. Scientists are now trying to determine whether the Pathans themselves are directly descended from the tribe of Ephraim which was exiled from the land of Israel by the invading Assyrians in 721 B.C. Pathan folklore and culture are filled with references to an Israelite past. Medieval writings by Jewish travelers to Afghanistan mentions the Israelite origins of the Pashtuns. In more recent times, the connection between Pashtuns and Israel has been documented and discussed in documentaries by Simcha Jacobovici, well known as the Naked Archaeologist, as well as books by Rabbi Eliahu Avichail and Israeli president Yitzhak Ben- Zvi. Recently, the Internet has given us the ability to contact Pashtuns directly and do extensive research, which has confirmed the sources above.
Dr. Navras J. Aafreedi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Presidency University, Kolkata, where he teaches courses in Jewish History, Genocide Studies, Interfaith Relations, and Minority Studies. He is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), New York. He is the author of the monograph Jews, Judaizing Movements and the Traditions of Israelite Descent in South Asia (New Delhi, 2016), editor (with Priya Singh) of Conceptualizing Mass Violence: Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations
Dr. Navras Afreedi from the University of Lucknow is himself a Pathan and believes his distant ancestors were Jews from the tribe of Ephraim. He has been studying the link for years.
"It's great news that my research would be analyzed scientifically. I also hope that such effort will have positive ramifications and will bring the Muslims and Jews close and enable them to forget historical animosity," he wrote on his blog. 
The last king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah ,who reigned in Kabul until 1973, reportedly claimed his family was descended from what he called the tribe of Benjamin." Benjamin was one of the 12 tribes. The Tribe of Benjamin occupied land between Ephraim and Judah which included Jerusalem. King Saul, the first king of ancient Israel, was a Benjaminite.
The Taliban spare no effort in expressing their hatred for Israel. Any genetic link they may have with people of Jewish descent would be a dark irony. Shahnaz Ali, an Indian researcher from the National Institute of Immunohaematology in Mumbai, has received a grant from Israel to test the theory with DNA samples she collected from Pathans in India. She will conduct her research at the prestigious Technion Institute in Haifa. The research into the Taliban's Jewish roots will take many months. Long-lost family reunions are not being planned.
We are looking for the marker of the male line -Ydna. The present study addresses this lacuna by analyzing 190 Pathan males from Afghanistan using high-resolution Y-chromosome binary markers. In addition, haplotype diversity for its most common lineages (haplogroups R1a1a*-M198 and L3-M357) was estimated using a set of 15 Y-specific STR loci. The observed haplogroup distribution suggests some degree of genetic isolation of the northern population, likely due to the Hindu Kush mountain range separating it from the southern Afghans who have had greater contact with neighboring Pathans from Pakistan and migrations from the Indian subcontinent. Our study demonstrates genetic similarities between Pathans from Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which are characterized by the predominance of haplogroup R1a1a*-M198 (>50%) and the sharing of the same modal haplotype. Furthermore, the high frequencies of R1a1a-M198 and the presence of G2c-M377 chromosomes in Pathans might represent phylogenetic signals from Khazars, a common link between Pathans and Ashkenazi groups, whereas the absence of E1b1b1a2-V13 lineage does not support their professed Greek ancestry.
Jews in Afghanistan
However, there were Jews, known as Jews, living in Afghanistan in the early medieval times. Little is known of their fate after the 12th century. Muhammad al-Idrisi (died 1166) wrote that Kabul had a Jewish quarter.
The more present times was a 19th century extension of the Persian Jewish community. Most Afghan Jews spoke Judeo-Persian, and their religious rites were to those of Persian Jewry, but they did not study the Talmud. We have two, the Palestinian Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud written during the Babylonian conquest of Jews a few hundred years after the Assyrian conquest in 597 BCE and again in 586 BCE, which took away 10 of the 12 tribes of Jacob. These Persian-connected Jews would have been cut off from the major group before they were even needed.
They had been untouched by modern influences and lived in a medieval atmosphere, confined in their ghettos and distinguishable by their black turbans.
There were some 40,000 Jews in Afghanistan a century ago, including many prosperous merchants. Successive governmental measure of repression after 1870 and in the mid-1930s drastically reduced the Jewish population. it seems that the aftermath of WWI and the growing Nazi element in Germany had affected even far-away Afghanistan.
Afghan Traditional Turban also known as Afghan Lungee is very common by the men of Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and India. The turban is very useful for fending off the desert sand, dirt and protecting the face from high temperatures and strong sunlight. In Afghanistan, it is called a lungee.
The Jews had formed a community of leather and karakul merchants, landowners and money lenders alike. The large Jewish families mostly lived in the border city of Herat, while the families' patriarchs traveled back and forth on trading trips across the mountains of Afghanistan. On the rocks of these mountains, their prayers were carved in the Hebrew language and sometimes even Aramaic, moving between the routes on the ancient Silk Road. Jews also settled in the capital city of Kabul.
Nearly all emigrated to Israel after the foundation of the State in 1948 and only some 50 remained in Afghanistan in 1990. There was one Jewish man left in Kabul, the capital. He was Simantov, and he was finally ready to make aliyah to Israel. Zabolon Simantov was literally the last Jew in Afghanistan and caretaker of only synagogue in Kabul on 29th October, 2014. His family lives in Israel, but he won't join them because, as he said, "there is no difference for him, Kabul, Moscow or Israel". He lived on donation from Jewish groups abroad. "But enough is enough for Afghanistan’s last Jew, and the prospect of the Taliban’s return has him preparing to say goodbye."
In 2021 the Taliban was estimated to have 75,000 fighters. From 1996 to 2001, the Taliban held power over roughly three-quarters of Afghanistan, and enforced a strict interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law. The Taliban emerged in 1994 as one of the prominent factions in the Afghan Civil War and largely consisted of students from the Pashtun areas of eastern and southern Afghanistan who had been educated in traditional Islamic schools, and fought during the Soviet–Afghan War.
An estimated 40 million-50 million Pashtuns live in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mostly organized into dozens of tribes, the Pashtuns live in the heart of the South-Central Asian region, which since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, has turned into the central front in the war on terrorism. The group is often associated with extremist Taliban members and Pashtun tribes are accused of sheltering international terrorists.
Since the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the region has seen more than 1 million Pashtuns killed and millions more displaced in various rounds of fighting in that country. But over the past five years, fighting has also devastated large parts of the once peaceful Pashtun border regions in Pakistan. Thousands of government soldiers, militants, and civilians have been killed.
Resource:
https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2018/07/jews-that-once-lived-in-afghanistan.html
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-afghan-pashtuns-and-the-missing-israelite-exiles-543181
https://www.ifcj.org/news/stand-for-israel-blog/afghanistan-jew-fears-return-of-taliban-longs-for-israel?g_acctid=706-685-4486&g_campaign=(US)%20Dynamic%20Ads&g_campaignid=1406159239&g_adgroupid=56093805820&g_adid=288428691022&g_keyword=&g_keywordid=dsa-19959388920&g_network=g&gclid=CjwKCAjwsNiIBhBdEiwAJK4khkZeqn8E7y8IQ9Y0_ei4aozXWOPwdEmUgOBQSBVMOwdQig9BOUaF3xoCkZoQAvD_BwE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Afghanistan
https://sites.google.com/site/aafreedi/
https://www.rferl.org/a/Pashtuns_Say_They_Are_Caught_In_Someone_Elses_War/1201761.html
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