On the Jewish ancestry of the Lemba people of South Africa. How genetics can provide information to support historical claims of ancestry

Abstract

This thesis will discuss what genetics can tell us about the claim of the Lemba people of South Africa about their Jewish ancestry. It gives historical account of the exiles of the Jewish people throughout the ages, as well as describing the current Jewish Diaspora. It describes the tools available to population genetics for determing whether groups share a common ancestry. For the particular discussion on the Lemba people, polymorphisms on the non-recombining part of the Y chromosome is a very valuable tool. The oral tradition of the Lemba is described, and their tales of how their ancestors sailed from Yemen to settle in South Africa. Those claims have been supported finding a shared haplotype between modern Jews and the Lemba; the studies behind that discovery are described. Interpretation and discussion of this result is given.