I want to begin with a number: 2,700 years.

That is how long ago, according to their own account, the ancestors of the Bnei Menashe left the land that is now Israel. They did not leave willingly. In approximately 722 BCE, the Assyrian king Sargon II conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel and deported its ten tribes into exile. They disappeared from recorded history almost immediately. For two and a half millennia, they existed only in prophecy, in longing, and in the unanswered question that has haunted Jewish tradition ever since: where did the ten tribes go?

Last week, 240 people from the hills of Manipur and Mizoram boarded a flight in northeastern India and landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. They walked down a red carpet in traditional attire, past a crowd of family members who had gone ahead of them over the previous three decades and were now cheering, weeping, and reaching out to touch them. Israel’s Minister of Aliyah and Integration Ofir Sofer was there to receive them.

“We are making history as we bring the entire Bnei Menashe community to Israel,” Sofer said. “There is no more fitting and moving time to welcome a plane full of olim than right after the state’s 78th Independence Day: welcome home.”

I am an Indian writer. I grew up knowing that India had Jewish communities: the Bene Israel of Maharashtra, the Cochin Jews of Kerala, and the Baghdadi Jews of Calcutta. That knowledge felt distant but real, a comfortable civilizational footnote. I did not know, until I began researching this story, that there was a fourth community, or rather, a fourth possibility, living not in the cosmopolitan cities of western India but in the forested, hilly, conflict-riven northeast, in two states that most Indians associate with insurgency and ethnic tension rather than ancient Israelite exile.

The Bnei Menashe changed that for me. And this week, they changed it for the world.

2,722 Years of Memory, Carried Without Paper

The Ten Lost Tribes disappeared from historical records after the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel around 722 BCE, giving rise to enduring speculation about their fate. The Bnei Menashe, which means “Children of Manasseh” in Hebrew, believe they are descended from the tribe of Manasseh, the largest of the lost ten.

Their account of how they got from Assyria to northeastern India is extraordinary. According to their oral history, after being exiled from the Kingdom of Israel, some members of these tribes migrated over centuries through regions including Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet, and China, while continuing to observe certain Jewish customs such as circumcision. They eventually settled around 400 years ago in the present-day northeastern........

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