Jewishness as an Evolving Paradigm

Abstract The number of communities claiming Jewish identity and adopting Jewish religious practices, but who fall outside the Ashkenazi-Sephardi-Mizrahi geographies, has increased over the past fifty years: for example, there are communities in Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, Madagascar, and elsewhere. The Bene Menashe living in Mizoram and Manipur in northeast India are the only group of recent origin to win the right to join the Jewish people and immigrate to Israel as an entire community (the Ethiopian Jews have made aliyah recently, but are not of recent origin). The goal of this chapter is to examine the thinking that led to the community-wide immigration of the Bene Menashe, and to show how the circumstances in which they acquired Israeli citizenship are evidence of a radically evolving paradigm for evaluating Judaizing communities beyond the boundaries of the Jewish mainstream.