{"id":2216,"date":"2002-07-28T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2002-07-28T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2002\/07\/28\/2002-07-28-india-s-jews-find-their-roots\/"},"modified":"2002-07-28T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2002-07-28T12:00:00","slug":"2002-07-28-india-s-jews-find-their-roots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2002\/07\/28\/2002-07-28-india-s-jews-find-their-roots\/","title":{"rendered":"India&#8217;s Jews Find Their Roots"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/timesofindia.indiatimes.com\/articleshow.asp?artid=16588182\">GO TO SOURCE<\/A><\/P><br \/>\n<P><\/p>\n<p>LONDON, ENGLAND, July 20, 2002: More than 2,000 years after they first claimed to have set foot in India, the mystery of the world&#8217;s most obscure Jewish community &#8212; the Marathi-speaking, Bene Israel &#8212; may finally have been solved with genetic carbon-dating revealing they carry the unusual &#8220;Moses&#8221; gene that would make them, literally, the original children of Israel. Four years of DNA tests on the 4,000-strong Bene Israel, now mainly based in Mumbai, Pune, Thane and Ahmedabad, indicates they are probable descendants of a small group of hereditary Israelite priests or Cohanim. Tudor Parfitt, Jewish Studies professor at London&#8217;s School of Oriental and African Studies, who initiated and led the research, says this is the first concrete proof that &#8220;exiles from Palestine made it as far as India and managed to maintain Judaism in the sea of Hinduism and Islam&#8221;. Their Indian appearance, cricket-playing, sari-wearing, curry-eating and Marathi-speaking habits led to a bitter battle for recognition as &#8220;real Jews&#8221; and for years they were not allowed to emigrate to Israel.<br \/>\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GO TO SOURCE LONDON, ENGLAND, July 20, 2002: More than 2,000 years after they first claimed to have set foot,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}