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Journey To The Vanished City

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In 1967 while still a high school student my Sunday School class was shown a documentary about the Falashas of Ethiopia. While I can barely remember details of documentaries that I saw last week, I still vividly recall details from that documentary I saw in 1967. When I saw this book, saw that Parfitt had also written about the Falashas, and this was yet another group of people who believed they held onto an ancient Jewish tradition.

To my surprise this book was even better than I expected; I couldn't put it down. Parfitt weaves the oral tradition of the Lemba people, historical scholarship parsed mostly from travel diaries, anthropological observation together into a travel monologue that both reveals a great deal about modern Africa while also tracing the Journey of the Lemba people. Eventually the journey he takes to find out about the Lemba becomes more interesting the the answers he may have found.

Parfitt starts with a simple question: why do the Lemba tribe of southern Africa believe they are Jews? His research reveals the limits on the transmission of self-knowledge through oral history. He also shows how diverse African culture really is. These are indispensible to understanding civilizations.

Westerners tend to assume that our received wisdom scripture is infallible. But its written form must preserve the final state of an early oral tradition. By following the oral memory of the Lemba backwards in time and geography, Parfitt vivdly shows how their tribal memories merge and diverge under the influence of nearby cultures and events. All Lemba regard themselves as Jewish, and say the Hebrew "amen" at the conclusion of prayers, but many of them also recite Moslem formulas in Arabic. So, were they originally Islamic, with Jewish ideas introduced under the recent influence of Christian missionaries? Or the reverse? What do their memories have to tell us about our own traditions?

Along the way, he meets chieftans, beaurocrats, and ordinary Africans, all of whom he reveals as distinct personalities. He patiently tracks down clues found in every version of the Lemba histories. As his collection of evidence grows, the mystery enlarges. This is detective anthropology, written stylishly, and with urgency. The Lemba are forgetting their myths and the traditions are vanishing.

I highly recommend this book for revealing nuances of African culture and history in a matrix of travel, character, and discovery.

This has been one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. Parfitt traces the origin of the Lemba, a self-described Jewish tribe in South Africa. Although its oral tradition is vague some elements recur persistently: "Our forefathers came from Sena... They came from the North... they built Great Zimbabwe...". Tracing backwards the journey that the Lemba took over the course of many generations, Parfitt travels North from South Africa to Zimbabwe, Malawi and, ultimately all the way to Yemen. Along the way, he encounters proof of the Lemba's passage and demonstrates that their oral tradition is, indeed, correct and they originated in Yemen.

Subsequent genetic testing brought further support to Parfitt's conclusion. This is detective work at its best, without the crime.

I am a great fan of travel adventure stories and rate this book as one of my favorites. Tudor Parfitt seems to be an unusual combination of intellectual and adventurer. Journey....is well written, entertaining and informative. I envy his students back in England as his classes must be the highlight of their college education. How exciting it must have been to be able to prove that the Lemba Tribe's oral tradition was correct. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Africa, travel, cultural anthropology or Jewish studies.

It should probably be no surprise that the two most peripatetic peoples in the ancient world, Jews and Africans, should sooner or later have encountered one another.

Tudor Parfitt, a British academic, traces the origins of a Southern African tribe known as the Lemba, whose history both recorded and unrecorded embraces a claim to Jewish ancestry and identity.

Relying on scant written data and on the Lemba's own oral traditions and reports by contemporaries, the author traces backward the journey that the Lemba took over the course of many generations. Parfitt travels North from South Africa to Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and, ultimately to Yemen.

Along the way, he confronts evidence of the Lemba's passage and demonstrates that their oral tradition is, indeed, correct that they originated in Yemen where they embraced Judaism. Subsequent genetic testing brought further support to the Lemba's claims indicating not only a high proportion of Jewish genetic markers but specifically those markers associated with the Cohanim, the Levitical priestly caste of ancient Israel.

Starting off from Lemba villages in Vendaland, South Africa where he encounters Lemba customs such a circumcision, food taboos and a devotional life that to all appearances seem Jewish, the author retraces the quasi-legendary path of the Lemba's forbears through Southern, central and Eastern Africa and the Arabian peninsula, along the way embracing the lore and romance of King Solomon's mines and the building of the walled city of Great Zimbabwe.

This is a delightful story, delightfully told. The author's writing style is lively, mixing the styles of the travel essayist, the novelist and the scholar and gives rise to a rarely-encountered kind of work that is so compelling that once begun it simply cannot be put down.

I had this book for about a year when I was going book crazy in preparation for co-writing a book about the Jewish communities in Nigeria. I finally got around to reading this book, while being delayed on a flight. I found the book to be one of those that is hard to put down. I like the fact that the book is told from the perspective if someone searching for the answer to a question and giving details of fortunes and misfortunes along the way. I normally am not good at reading books all the way through because of my hectic schedule.

The information in this book is both enlightning and tragic in another. Of course the research points out that the Lemba have DNA that is of the Kohen Model type, and at the same time to see how much they have lost in terms of this heritage is the sad part. Yet, the book is truly a must and another one that I think should be a part of every Jewish library and Yeshivah.

The author's quest for the origins of the Lemba, a Southern Africa tribe with certain Semitic customs and a folk memory of Jewish origins, took him from Johannesburg via the Limpopo province of South Africa, through Zimbabwe and Malawi to Tanzania and ultimately to the Hadramaut in South Arabia.

In Johannesburg's Soweto township he encounters his first Lemba people and researches the tribe in Wits University library. Then he takes the train to Pietersburg where he visits Lemba scholar Professor Mathiva at the University of the North and makes excursions into the surrounding areas of the Venda and Lobedu tribes where he encounters Mojaji, the famous Rain Queen. The known history of the area, including the colorful figure of Joao Albasini, spices up the narrative.

In Zimbabwe his journeys take him to Bulawayo, the Matopo Hills, Mberengwe and Dumghe Mountains, Masvingo and the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. On the way he takes part in a Lemba tribal assembly. The next stage takes him to Malawi and a short way into Mozambique where he sees the town of Sena from afar. In Tanzania he visits Dar es Salaam, Bagamoyo and Tumbatu, concluding the African leg of his journey.

His research finally leads him to Yemen where he visits Sanaa, Aden and the Hadramaut towns of Habban, Terim, and ultimately, the town of Sena on the Wadi Masila, where he discovers that the Lemba clan names are familiar to the area.

Along the way he has funny ecounters with a wide variety of interesting people. The travelogue is interspersed with relevant quotes from an impressive array of explorers, missionaries, scholars and ethnographers, including Joao de Barros, Livingstone, Junod, Mauch, Schlomann, Schapera, Van Warmelo, Jacques, Von Sicard and Roger Summers. Their observations - including the legend of Monomotapa - are engagingly woven into his always arresting travelogue.

The Afterword contains the results of genetic research conducted in 1996/97 that shows a significant similarity in DNA between Jewish groups, the Lemba and the Hadrami of Terim and Sena. For more detailed and up-to-date information, please consult DNA and Tradition by Rabbi Yaakov Kleiman. The Buba clan of the Lemba has a high frequency of the Y-Chromosome type called the "Cohen Modal Haplotype" which is known to be characteristic of the paternally inherited Jewish priesthood.

For a very thorough ethnographic study of the Lemba, I recommend The Lemba: A Lost Tribe of Israel in Southern Africa by Magdel le Roux. It is a selective comparison between the social and religious practices of early Israel and the Lemba of today.

Journey To The Vanished City contains plates with black & white photographs, maps of Africa and Yemen, 18 pages of notes arranged by chapter and an index. The book is a most engaging read on account of the author's humour, wit and flowing narrative style. There is not one boring moment in this fascinating account of a journey in search of lost origins.

I think that this book is very important because it preserves the legacy of the Lemba on paper, a legacy that for centuries, has relied mainly on oral traditions. The Lemba tribe, who presently reside in various parts of Southern Africa, have kept a tradition for hundreds of years that they are Jews, and Parfitt takes the journey to explore these claims.

The author, Tudor Parfitt, starts off in the northern parts of South Africa in Vendaland, where many Lemba reside today. From here he goes to the Zimbabwe ruins, then to Malawi, briefly to war-torn Mozambique, up to the east coast, and off to Yemen in search of "Sena," where the Lemba attest that they came from. In all these areas he finds interesting facts through his research about the Lemba and their history.

There is no doubt that the Lemba contributed to the building and livelihood of the Great Zimbabwe civilization that flourished in the 14th century, but the big question here is just how big was their role? With the history of the Lemba becoming more popular, I think this debate is going to resurface once again as to who built the ruins.

This book relies on earlier descriptions of the Lemba by mostly European and Arab explores. Parfitt really makes good use of these. The book also highlights the indelible influence that colonialism has had not just on the Lemba, but on all African societies. It also underscores the prevailing attitudes that many "white Africans" today have on black Africans.

The genetic evidence presented in the afterword makes for a good ending to strengthen the core theme in the book. I highly recommend Journey to The Vanished City and I think it's an excellent, scholarly work.

There is not a dull line in this book - I just got it after reading the author's Ark of the Covenant. It is one of the most remarkable journeys across Africa and the Middle East written in the sort of prose that is fast disappearing. The subject matter you feel is real. the charcaters are real. It's a journey with a point. It's a real mission. And a wonderful read.

If you are the least bit interested in the history related to the Hebrew/Christian Old Testament, this is one of the most fascinating journeys trying to follow a Tribal traditional legend back in time. What the author finds seems to underwrite it's veracity.