Tudor Parfitt

Tudor Parfitt (born 1944) is a British Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he was the founding director of the Centre for Jewish Studies.

Biography

Educated at Loughborough Grammar School he was sent to Jerusalem in 1963 under the auspices of Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). He studied Hebrew and Arabic at the University of Oxford and in 1968 was Goodenday Fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He completed a D.Phil at Oxford on the history of the Jews in Palestine and in 1972 was appointed lecturer in Hebrew at the University of Toronto. In 1974 he took up the lectureship in Modern Hebrew at SOAS. His interests are Hebrew and Hebrew Literature, Judaising Movements, Jews in Muslim countries, Jewish genetic identity and the discourses surrounding it, attitudes towards Jews and Zionism in South Asia and Jews in Asia and Africa. [ [http://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff31594.php Professor Tudor Parfitt : SOAS ] ] In 1984 he was sent to the Sudan by the Minority Rights Group to write a report on the Ethiopian Jews who were allegedly being poisoned in the refugee camps along the border with Ethiopia. His visit coincided with the Israeli operation to rescue the Jewish community and he wrote a book on the topic - Operation Moses. He was subsequently a founder member of the scholarly society SOSTEJE (Society for the Study of Ethiopian Jewry) and served as vice-president for many years. In 1985 he visited Syria to write about the plight of its Jewish community for the Minority Rights Group; this and other adventures figured in his first travel book - The Thirteenth Gate.

Tracing the origins of the Lemba and the Ark of the Covenant

His work in the 1990s on the Judaizing Lemba tribe of southern Africa brought him to international attention when he decided to test their claims of Jewish origin by analyzing their DNA. Front-page articles about his research appeared in newspapers throughout the world, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Nova and Channel Four documentaries discussed the research and it was also covered by "60 Minutes" in the USA.

On April 14, 2008 a new documentary aired on Channel 4 in the UK, showing Parfitt's search for the lost Ark of the Covenant which was the outcome of many years of research and which was also the subject of his 2008 book The Lost Ark of the Covenant. [cite journal |author=Parfitt T |title=The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Old Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark |journal= |volume= |issue= |pages= |year=2008 |month=Feb |pmid= |pmc= |doi= |url=] [ [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=517641&in_page_id=1770 www.dailymail.co.uk] ] . The search took him to Jerusalem and Zedekiah's Cave, a vast complex of caves underneath the city, to Jordan and Yemen, and then to Egypt and Ethiopia, and later to Zimbabwe. He concluded that the Ark of the Covenant was among other things a drum which had been led out of Jerusalem by Israelites in about 586 BC before the Babylonian invasion. The Israelites first moved east through Jordan and then settled in eastern Yemen in a town called Sena. However, agricultural stagnation caused by the possible breaking of a dam, forced the Israelites to cross over into Africa and they eventually settled in Zimbabwe. Genetic research into the Lemba people who inhabit the area around the Limpopo river shows that many Lemba males have a Y chromosome that is also found among the male descendants of the Jewish priesthood (part of the Levite tribe) in Israel. cite journal |author=Thomas MG, Parfitt T, Weiss DA, "et al" |title=Y chromosomes traveling south: the cohen modal haplotype and the origins of the Lemba--the "Black Jews of Southern Africa" |journal=Am. J. Hum. Genet. |volume=66 |issue=2 |pages=674–86 |year=2000 |month=Feb |pmid=10677325 |pmc=1288118 |doi=10.1086/302749 |url=] . Parfitt believes that the drum which always served as some sort of weapon was replaced on numerous occasions as the Israelites travelled and the final incarnation of the drum was eventually found in a museum cupboard at the Museum of Human Sciences Harare, which was shown by carbon dating to hail back to around 1350 AD - one of the oldest wooden objects ever discovered in sub-Saharan Africa.

Parfitt questions the Exodus depiction of the Ark of the Covenant and believes that it could never have been made so elaborately out of gold, given the circumstances in which it was produced. The biblical description of the Ark was written many centuries after the events of the exodus and Parfitt believes that the descriptions owe much to Egyptian art and design which were dominant in Israel during that period. Ancient Rabbinic sources maintain that there were two Arks: the simple one hewn by Moses and the later and more elaborate one, made by Bezalel. According to the rabbis, the golden Ark was kept in the Temple and was only seen by the High Priest. It was only once (and disastrously) taken into battle, when it was captured. This was the simple wooden object made by Moses himself—a wooden container made from acacia wood—which was the Ark of War. It is the descendant of this Ark that Parfitt believes he found in Africa.

However, his conclusions have been challenged by many. He introduced the remnants of a 650-year-old wooden and bowl-shaped war drum of an African tribe as the replica of the lost Ark of the Covenant, in the sense of the wooden container, without mention of the whereabouts of the contents of the Ark, and also made a statement that other Arks may well have existed. Nor did he mention where in Jewish tradition the Ark of the Covenant was ever described to have been used as a war drum - or why the Ark was spherical bowl shaped at its bottom, when it was made to house flat stone tablets as its primary purpose.

In March 2008 he published his book, "The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Old Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark " documenting his findings.

Publications

"The Road to Redemption: The Jews of the Yemen 1900-1950", Leiden: Brill, 1996 (Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies vol. XVII). x, 299pp. ISBN 90 04 105441

"The Jews in Palestine 1800-1882". The Royal Historical Society: Studies in History 52. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1997

London: Curzon-SOAS Near and Middle East Publications, 1999; Jewish Education and Learning (with Glenda Abramson), Reading, Chur, etc.: Harwood Academic ISBN 3718653249

*Between Africa and Zion: proceedings of the first International Congress of the Society for the Study of Ethiopian Jewry /edited by Steven Kaplan, Tudor Parfitt, Emanuela Trevisan Semi.. Jerusalem : Ben-Zvi Institute, 1995.

References

External links

* [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/israel/parfitt.html Nova Program on Tudor Parfitt's Remarkable Journey]

*Origins of Old Testament Priests (Thomas, Bradman, Parfitt, Ben-Ami, Goldstein), Nature 394 (July 1998) 138-40