TUDOR PARFITT AND YULIA EGOROVA GENETICS, HISTORY, AND IDENTITY: THE CASE OF THE BENE ISRAEL AND THE LEMBA ABSTRACT. The paper examines the impact of genetic research on the religious identity of the Bene Israel Indian Jewish community and the Lemba Judaising group of southern Africa. It demonstrates how DNA tests which happened to support the possibility of the communities’ legends of origin affected their self-perception, the way they are viewed by their neighbors, and their image in the West. It is argued that in both cases what accounted most for the Bene Israel and Lemba responses to the tests was the way the results were portrayed in the mass media, the history of the development of Judaism in their communities, and the local realities. KEY WORDS: population genetics; identity; Lemba; Bene Israel. INTRODUCTION From early mediaeval times the Jews have attempted to define their identity and their peoplehood in an abstract, more or less theological way, and also to determine their outer limits. Who belonged to this people? Where did they live? How different were remote groups of this people? What were their histories? The fascination the writings of Eldad ha-Dani, 1 the ninth-century Jewish traveler and romancer, the 12th-century traveler Benjamin of Tudelah, 2 and many others held for Jews in mediaeval and later times arose largely from the glimpses they gave or purported to give of the life of marginal members of the Jewish people in remote parts of the world. Groups that claimed Jewish status through conversion, such as the Khazars (Koestler 1976) in the ninth century or the Himyarites 3 five centuries earlier, fared badly in early Jewish historiography: they were almost totally ignored. But equally remote groups with an imagined bloodline to the Jewish people were of great interest. The outer edge, if you like, of this imagined blood-community always included the Lost Tribes of Israel shimmering faintly over the horizon of the known world, whose ongoing reality was taken to be axiomatic by the majority of Jews until fairly recent times. Whether different groups throughout the world—for instance, the North and South American Indians—formed part of this people or not was a hotly debated topic among both the Christians and the Jews from the beginning of colonial intervention in the Americas. Similarly, the periodic sightings of rep- resentatives of the Lost Tribes in various other parts of the world caused great, even messianic excitement as the conventional geography of the Jewish people Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 29: 193–224, 2005.  C 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. DOI: 10.1007/s11013-005-7425-4