Yesterday Was Lent So Pesach Must Be Coming Right Up

The first regular money I ever made was right after I turned 13. In the faith of some distant relatives' of mine (presumably) that, for some reason I've never fathomed, I got sucked into even though my father warned me against it, when you turn 13 you're suddenly a man. At 1 minute before midnight (or your birth time... no one quibbles-- at least no one I know) you're not eligible to be a man and at one minute after-- BINGO! I'm not talking about getting laid here. I'm talking about being part of a minyan at a synogogue that was directly between my house and PS 197. Every day after I turned into a man my friend Stuie Cohen and I would set out for school early enough to get to the synagogue for shaharit, the morning prayers. We got $40 each and we didn't have to do a damn thing except be there and wear a yarmulke. (I have one sitting right here, a white one that says "Lieberman 2000," but that was long after I had ever been in a synagogue, not counting exotic ones in places like Yangon, Singapore, Mexico City and Cochin.) Anyway a minyan is like a quorum. I guess God doesn't hear the payers unless there are 10 men in the room wearing yarmulkes. Women and non-Jews don't count. A nonbeliever in a yarmulke does. (Actually I think they started counting women in the mid-70's, at least in Brooklyn, towards a minyan but Stuie Cohen and I had already made our nice pile of gold.) As it turned out, even with Stuie and I there to collect our $40 salaries, there still weren't 10 men. So they had this Black guy in a yarmulke and tallis (like a fancy tasseled blue and white, silky shawl) and they counted him as a Jew. I'm not sure if he was on the payroll of not; I was into minding my own business and not asking any questions that might jeopardize my $40 a week. Maybe he was the Yosi of his day. Or maybe he was a Lemba.

But this guy didn't look Jewish. Now, later I learned about the Ethiopian Jews and that was exciting to me because I was always fascinated with the idea of a kingdom of Sheba. But yesterday I was browsing around the BBC and came across a story on the Lemba of Zimbabwe, a tribe-- maybe a "lost Tribe"-- I had heard about and even seen a History Channel show on once which was about how they might have the Arc of the Covenant. They don't eat pigs and they circumcise their sons and wear yarmulkes and pit the Star of David on their gravestones. There are 70,000 of them and they speak a Bantu language.

Their oral traditions claim that their ancestors were Jews who fled the Holy Land about 2,500 years ago.

It may sound like another myth of a lost tribe of Israel, but British scientists have carried out DNA tests which confirm their Semitic origin.

These tests back up the group's belief that a group of perhaps seven men married African women and settled on the continent. The Lemba, who number perhaps 80,000, live in central Zimbabwe and the north of South Africa.

...Members of the priestly clan of the Lemba, known as the Buba, were even discovered to have a genetic element also found among the Jewish priestly line.

"This was amazing," said Prof Tudor Parfitt, from the University of London.

"It looks as if the Jewish priesthood continued in the West by people called Cohen, and in same way it was continued by the priestly clan of the Lemba.

"They have a common ancestor who geneticists say lived about 3,000 years ago somewhere in north Arabia, which is the time of Moses and Aaron when the Jewish priesthood started."

You think this is all unlikely? Do you think it's more likely that a right-wing extremist leader like Eric Cantor is a Jew?