Zulu descendants of Israel

Zulu descendants of the lost tribes of Israel: In 1844 the British annexed Natal. The largely British settlers were acutely aware that to the north there was a powerful Zulus state, and as a result considerable interest in Zulu customs and traditions was generated. Captain Francis Gardiner (1794-1851), a commander in the Royal Navy and a devoted missionary, who was later to die of starvation along with missionary companions on a desert island in Tierra del Fuego, went on a journey traveling east from the Cape to Natl. Upon his first encounter with the Zulus, he took their customs to be “apparently of Jewish origin” and the Zulus themselves to be of Jewish extraction. The Zulu customs that led him to this conclusion included circumcision, levirate marriage, the festival of the first fruits, and a number of others. In 1835 Gardiner was sent to negotiate a peace with the Zulu chief Dingane at his winter home, Kwa-khangela, near present-day Eshowe. Upon his return after lengthy and detailed talks about every aspect of Zulu life, Gardiner reported that Zulu religious beliefs were quite simply “a remnant of pre-Christian Judaism.” As British power was extended farther east, the same discourse continued. Throughout the 1850s Zulus continued to be racially constructed as Jews. Their settled, pastoral life and their religious and social customs were evidence enough of this. G. R. Peppercorne, the magistrate of Pafana Location, observed to the Native Affairs Commission that “a general type of the customs and laws of the Ama-Zulu may be found in the early history of the Hebrews.” Zulu polygamy, marriage customs, even attitudes toward work were all described in the appropriate biblical passage. He suggested that any European who wanted to understand Zulu customs had only to read the Old Testament. Henry Francis Fynn (1803-1861), an English traveler, trader, and an acknowledged expert on Zulu customs, left behind a diary that is one of the best sources on the history of the Zulus. The diary covers the period from 1824 to 1036, when Fynn was living much of the time with the Zulus. “I was surprised,” he wrote, “to find a considerable resemblance between many of the Zulu customs and those of the Jews.” These included “war offerings, sin offerings, propitiatory offerings, Festival of first fruits… periods of uncleanness, on the decease of relatives and touching the dead, Circumcision; Rules regarding chastity, rejection of swine’s flesh.” Fynn concluded in the usual way of the Hamitic hypothesis that in view of “the nature of semblance of many of their customs to those of the ancient Jews, as prescribed under the Levitical priesthood I am led to form the opinion that the Zulu tribes have been very superior to what they are at the present time.” A similar analysis was made by John Colenso (1814-1883), the famous Cambridge-educated biblical scholar, mathematician, and Christian socialist who was ordained bishop of Natal in 1853. He arrived in Natal the following year and quickly became fluent in Zulu (he went on to publish a grammar and dictionary of the language). Colenso was convinced that the two Zulu names for God embraced perfectly the notions of the divine “contained in Hebrew words Elohim and Yahweh.” So close indeed were the resemblances, according to Colenso, that frequently he suggested that anyone who wanted to really understand the Bible had best study Zulu customs. Zulu “habits and even the nature of their country so nearly correspond to those of the ancient Israelites, that the very scenes are brought continually, as it were, before their eyes, and vividly realized in a practical point of view.” Practically everything about the Zulus, from their lunar calendar to the order of religious feasts, seemed to reflect an Israelite past.” The Zulu keep his annual feasts, and observes the New Moons as the old Hebrew did. From the book “Black Jews In Africa And The Americas,” (2013) by Tudor Parfitt pp. 61-64 Black Hebrew, Wentworth Arthur Mathew; founder of the Commandment Keepers,holding a Sefer Torah.