The Lemba are people living mostly in South Africa and Zimbabwe. They became known in the western world because of genetic studies in the 1990s that seemed to confirm their claim that the Lemba originated in ancient Judea and migrated over many stages to southern Africa. The DNA studies noted in particular a significant presence among the Lemba of the “Cohen Modal Haplotype,” which has been considered indicative of connections with ancient Jewish populations. This finding aroused considerable interest among Jews in North America and Israel, and generated a number of books, articles, and documentaries that proclaimed the Lemba, in the words of the title of a NOVA documentary on PBS, to be a “Lost Tribe of Israel.”
Noah Tamarkin’s intellectual interests encompass “the cultural anthropology of race, citizenship, and genomics with interdisciplinary commitments to Science and Technology Studies, African Studies, and Jewish Studies” (https://anthropology.cornell.edu/noah-tamarkin). The political and...
University of California Press