WITH NO CULTURE OF THEIR OWN:

Almost everyone who ever wrote about the Afghans has found it necessary to refer to the legend of supposed Hebrew origins. The impact of this popular belief was so strong that in the early decades of the 20th century, in an era of racism and antisemitism, Afghan scholars in Afghanistan took great pains to prove that the Afghans are of neither Jewish, Turkish, Mongol, nor Greek origin, but rather of pure Aryan stock; and that the Aryans' original home was in Afghanistan (it sort of was). Later on, the national airline was christened "Ariana." On the other hand, many rustic or overly religious Jews and Israelis are also prone to believe in the Hebrew origin of the Afghan tribesmen; and several books, written by the hunters of lost tribes, have appeared in the last three decades.

In fact, the Western (and Jewish) myth of the Hebrew origins of Pashtun tribes evolved out of a combination of the lack of their written history up to the late 15th and early 16th centuries; very low level of traditional Islamic knowledge among the Pashtuns up to the last decades (the emergence of the Taliban, "the students of Religion," was, partly, an answer to this ignorance); Anglo-Israelist views or awareness of the early-19th-century British scholars/officers in northwestern India; and the general noninterest/ignorance about "such remote places."

There are several arguments that are commonly brought up to claim the Hebrew origin of some Pashtun tribes:

1. Afghanistan is far away, and who knows how far the Lost Tribes of Israel might have traveled.

2. Some Pashtun women used to kindle lights at the end of the Muslim Friday holiday.

3. Some Pashtun tribesmen wear a shawl similar to tallit, sometimes with fringes.

These last two customs are not Jewish in origin but are Iranian imports.

The sudreh/sedreh is a sleeveless white shirt made of a whole cut of thin cotton with nine stitches and a small pocket (where good deeds are collected); it is worn by Zoroastrians, both men and women, along with a white woolen belt (kushtig/kusti/kostik) woven from 72 white woolen cords no more than a finger wide, with the strands divided at the ends into six knots of 12 strands each.

The Zoroastrian tradition acknowledges that sudreh and kushti are pre-Zoroastrian in origin; whereas the Pashtun tribesmen are no Zoroastrians, they are nominal Muslims (before the advent of Islam, most of them were Buddhists). What some accounts see as Jewish prayer shawls were simply a version of a sudreh.

As for the Friday lights, anyone versed in Zoroastrian lore would recognize the origins of the custom and its association with women's observance and rituals.

The myth of the Hebrew origins of the Pashtun was invented by the first Pashto-writing authors, who suffered from a grave inferiority complex toward the Persians and sought to glorify the Pashtun past. The myth was created in northern India in the courts of Pashtun and partly-Mongol conquerors, who extended their hospitability to Catholic missionaries and enjoyed listening to their stories, including those from the Bible.

True that the Persians have poetry and civilization, but we the Pashtuns can boast noble origins, their line of reasoning went.

The Pashtuns, the majority ethnic group in modern Afghanistan, appeared late on the historical scene. The only clue to their early history is their language, which belongs to the eastern Iranian branch. Nevertheless, their quick rise to dominance in the region in the 15th century was as powerful as it was late. Lacking the long and developed cultural and historical traditions of the Persians, some early Pashtun writers created a literary myth of the noble origins of their people which traced their genealogy to the biblical Israelites, filtered through Quranic traditions.

Tweet   @brothersjudd