Nadene Goldfoot
Theory of Pashtun descent from Israelites
The 13th century Tabaqat-i Nasiri discusses the settlement of immigrant Bani Israel at the end of the 8th century CE in the Ghor region of Afghanistan, settlement attested by Jewish inscriptions in Ghor.
Historian André Wink suggests that the story "may contain a clue to the remarkable theory of the Jewish origin of some of the Afghan tribes which is persistently advocated in the Persian-Afghan chronicles."
These references to Bani Israel agree with the commonly held view by Pashtuns that when the twelve tribes of Israel were dispersed, the tribe of Joseph, among other Hebrew tribes, settled in the Afghanistan region".
"Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela of 12th century cites many large Jewish (Bani Israel) settlements in Media, Arachosia and Khurasan (Afghanistan)."
This oral tradition is widespread among the Pashtun tribes. There have been many legends over the centuries of descent from the Ten Lost Tribes after groups converted to Christianity and Islam.
Hence the tribal name Yusufzai in Pashto translates to the "son of Joseph". A similar story is told by many historians, including the 14th century Ibn Battuta and 16th century Ferishta. However, the similarity of names can also be traced to the presence of Arabic through Islam.
One conflicting issue in the belief that the Pashtuns descend from the Israelites is that the Ten Lost Tribes were exiled by the ruler of Assyria, while Maghzan-e-Afghani says they were permitted by the ruler to go east to Afghanistan.
This inconsistency can be explained by the fact that Persia acquired the lands of the ancient Assyrian Empire when it conquered the Empire of the Medes and Chaldean Babylonia, which had conquered Assyria decades earlier.
But no ancient author mentions such a transfer of Israelites further east, or no ancient extra-Biblical texts refer to the Ten Lost Tribes at all.
This is not true. Then 10 tribes continued to dwell in the realm between fact and fantasy in Jewish minds ever since their kidnapping. For the Jewish people, their memory has been preserved in the collective consciousness as a limb severed from the body of the nation and expected to rejoin it in the "end of days." Letters circulated by various Jews telling of having found them throughout the ages. Letters From Beyond the Sambatyon tells of such findings, I mention as one example.
Some Afghan historians have maintained that Pashtuns are linked to the ancient Israelites. Mohan Lal quoted Mountstuart Elphinstone who wrote:
Jacob and Rachel are in the center. Rachel is holding Joseph, Jacob's 11th son, since his siblings are already born in this picture. When she has Benjamin much later, she will die in childbirth near Bethlehem. Ben makes the 12th son of the 12 tribes of Israel. The story of Joseph has been dated during the Hyksos domination of Egypt of the 18th to 16th centuries BCE.
The interesting fact is that Joseph was not the name of any of the 12 tribes of Jacob. Joseph was the 11th son of Jacob, but had been tricked by his brothers who were jealous of him, being the son of Jacob's true love, Rachel, and sold to some traveling Ishmaelites. He wound up being very important and powerful in Egypt as the viceroy. His 2 sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, received land Joseph had been entitled to. They were among the 70 with Jacob who descended into Egypt at the time of the famine, moving out of Canaan.
Modern scholars figure the Exodus to have happened in 1578 BCE, and then the Assyrians took away the 10 tribes in 721 BCE. That means all 12 lived together for possibly 857 years. The USA has only existed for 245 years since 1776.That time seems forever. Look how we've changed though these long years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GROcMlaGTA being interviewed, Founder of Lost Tribes Study of Israel at Hebrew University in Jerusalem
Dr. Shalva Weil is a major researcher into the Lost Tribes of Israel. Shalva Weil was born in London and studied sociology (B.A. Hons.) at the London School of Economics (L.S.E). She received an M.A. at the Centre for Multi-Racial Studies, Sussex University, on a double identity conflict among Bene Israel Indian Jews in Britain, supervised by the psychologist Marie Jahoda. She then obtained a D. Phil. in Social Anthropology at Sussex, under the supervision of Prof. A.L. Epstein. Her doctoral thesis on "The Persistence of Ethnicity and Ethnic Identity among the Bene Israel Indian Jews in Israel" (1977) was based on three years' fieldwork among the Bene Israel in the town of Lod.
Shalva Weil, PhD, a Senior Researcher at The Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. In 2017, was GIAN Distinguished Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi. She has researched Indian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, and the Ten Lost Tribes and specializes in femicide, qualitative methods, violence, ethnicity, education, religion, and migration. (Becoming Jewish: Ch. 2 - The Unification of the Ten Lost Tribes with the Two “Found” Tribes).Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Dr. Shalva Weil has known all this, but has investigated further, holding a conference about it in February 2018, hosted by the The Association for the Bani Israel of Afghanistan. The purpose of the conference:
Kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Armoni: The Return of the Ten Tribes in Light of the New Age
Since then, people concluded it must be true with all the cultural evidence of their connection. Weil has published extensively on the Ten Lost Tribes historically and in contemporary times. In particular, she has written on the Beta Israel, the Bene Israel, and the Pashtuns, as well as on Judaising groups all over Africa, China and elsewhere. In 1991, she curated an exhibition at Beth Hatefutsoth: the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora on the Ten Lost Tribes entitled "Beyond the Sambatyon: the Myth of the Ten Lost Tribes". She is on the international board of ISSAJ [International Society for the Study of African Jewry, and presented a paper at their latest conference in Nairobi on the Jews of Africa.
My findings include more for Pashtuns, but as for the R group, yes, I found this: https://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2018/09/what-haplogroup-do-pashtuns-be.html
*R1a1a-M17, Afghanistan's ethnic group, found in Eurasia, 51.02% in Pashtuns, in *****97 people carried this in the sample. ( Overall, only haplogroups R1a1a*-M198 (62.1%), L3*-M357 (7.4%) and G2c-M377 (5.3%) display frequencies >5% and collectively comprise nearly three-fourths of the Afghanistan paternal gene pool in one study ). 18 found in FTDNA's study, 8 from India, Bangladash, 9 known Pashtuns, Believed to have originated in NW Asia between 30,000 to 35,000 years ago.
R-M512 , 9 Pashtuns of Afghanistan, PakistanR1b1b2, In *****, 1 person was found in the sample. 3 from Pakistan in FTDNA's study
R2a-M124, found in India's Pashtuns 20.41%, In ***** 5 people carried this in the sample, 5 from FTDNA's testing , Much rarer than R1, found only i;n Indian, Iranian and central Asian populations.
Update 6/25/15: R1a1, R1b, and R1a1a or R1a-CTS6 is the Levite haplogroup. Read www.levitedna.org. for more information. Jeff Wexler discovered this line of Ashkenazi Levites. Analyses posted here. R1a1 is common among Ukrainians-thought to have originated there, Russians, and Serbs (Slavic speakers in Germany, as well as among Central Asian populations with admixture possible with Ukrainians, Poles or Russians.
A later 2005 study by Nebel et al., found a similar level of 11.5% of male Ashkenazim belonging to R1a1a (M17+), the dominant Y-chromosome haplogroup in Central and Eastern Europeans.; R-M269; R1b1a2a; R-V88 are found among Jews. R-L47-from R1a, Jewish
Pathans are Muslims and speak Pashto (or Pushtu). They are also known as Pashtuns, Pushtuns, Pakhtuns, and Pakhtoons. Historically, Pathans have been noted as fierce fighters, and throughout history they have offered strong resistance to invaders.
Pathans pətänz´ are a group of seminomadic peoples consisting of more than 60 tribes, numbering more than 26 million in Pakistan and more than 11 million in Afghanistan, where they form the dominate ethnic group (historically known as Afghans and now typically as Pashtuns). Pathans are Muslims and speak Pashto (or Pushtu).
The British attempted to subdue the Pathans in a series of punitive expeditions in the late 19th and early 20th cent. but were finally forced to offer them a semiautonomous area (see Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) between the border of British India and that of Afghanistan.
After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the new nation annexed the Pathan border regions, and a Pathan independence movement, called the Redshirts, was born. In the early 1950s, Afghanistan supported Pathan ambitions for the creation of an independent Pushtunistan (also called Pakhtunistan or Pakhtoonistan) in the border areas of West Pakistan. Several border clashes and ruptures of diplomatic relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan ensued. In the early 1970s thousands of armed Pathans pressed for increased autonomy within Pakistan, even demanding independence after the secession of Bangladesh (East Pakistan).
The Taliban of Afghanistan, and more recently, the so-called Pakistani Taliban are mainly Pathan-based movements. The Taliban who refer to themselves as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), is a Deobandi Islamist movement and military organization in Afghanistan, currently waging war (an insurgency, or jihad) within the country. Since 2016, the Taliban's leader has been Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada. In 2021 the Taliban was estimated to have 75,000 fighters.
The capital, Mazar and Jalalabad remain the only major cities still under government control as Taliban encircles Kabul. 14 Aug 2021
"The Taliban have said they aim to restore peace and security to Afghanistan, including Western troops leaving, and to enforce their own version of Sharia, or Islamic law, once in power. The Taliban are a movement of religious students (talib) from the Pashtun areas of eastern and southern Afghanistan who were educated in traditional Islamic schools in Pakistan. There were also Tajik and Uzbek students, demarking them from the more ethnic-centric mujahideen groups "which played a key role in the Taliban’s rapid growth and success". Their take on Sharia Law is an extreme one. They are the opposite of modern day thinking. Their ideology is medieval.
Many Pakistani Pathans no longer live in the regions bordering Afghanistan; there are sizable Pathan populations in Pakistan's major cities, especially in Karachi.
The total number of Pashtuns is estimated to be around 63 million; however, this figure is disputed because of the lack of an official census in Afghanistan since 1979. Pashtuns live in 7 countries with major populations: they have been in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India the longest. Wars and Taliban have caused much emigration.
Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, constituting around 48% of the country's total population. They have been the dominant ethnolinguistic group in Afghanistan since the nation's founding.
Additionally, Pashtuns are the second-largest ethnic group in Pakistan, forming 15% to 18% of the country's total population, and are considered one of the five major ethnolinguistic groups of the nation.
Pashtuns are the 26th-largest ethnic group in the world, and the largest segmentary lineage group. There are an estimated 350–400 Pashtun tribes and clans.
Resource:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1itX-No0Foo
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-afghan-pashtuns-and-the-missing-israelite-exiles-543181
https://www.ariel.ac.il/wp/mecarc/me-assessments/rope-bridge-relations-between-israelis-and-pathans-in-india-between-2007-2020/
https://muslimbaniisrael.wordpress.com/hebrew-and-israelite-traditions-and-customs-of-the-afghans-pashtunspukhtuns/bani-israelite-traditions-customs-of-the-afghans-pashtunspukhtuns/
Book: LETTERS FROM BEYOND THE SAMBATYON-the myth of the ten lost tribes, edited by Simcha Shtull-Trauring-based on an exhibition mounted at the Tel Aviv museum, first published in 1995
https://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/social-science/cultures/other/pathans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashtuns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shalva_Weil
https://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2018/09/what-haplogroup-do-pashtuns-be.html
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330822204_The_Tradition_of_Israelite_Descent_Among_the_Pashtuns_in_India_and_its_Contemporary_Ramifications
