It has long been recognized that cultural legends very often have some type of real-life historical backgrounds no matter how distorted, exaggerated, embellished, or poorly-remembered they are. There may very well have been a man, or several men, named Hercules/Herakles or he may have originated as an amalgamation of the exploits of several strong-man rulers.
One tradition which was long thought to be merely or mostly legendary is the claim by the African Lemba tribe to have its origins from ancient Israel. The oral tradition of the tribe says that their distant ancestors were seven Jewish men who left Judea about 2,500 years ago and travelled through Yemen. These seven men settled in a place called Senna (possibly Sana/Sanaw, Yemen) before migrating into Africa where they married African women.
The Lemba have always been recognized as different by the local Bantu tribes.
According to modern-day historical theories, the Lemba began as Muslim/Jewish traders who assimilated into the local African Shona culture. It turns out that the story may be a little more complicated than that.
The Lemba tribe
consists of about 70,000 to 80,000 persons who are concentrated in Zimbabwe,
South Africa, Malawi, and Mozambique. Traditionalist Lembe wear yarmulke skull
caps, abide by kosher food restrictions, practice ritual animal sacrifices,
observe a weekly holy day, practice male circumcision, and their gravestones
feature the Star of David. In modern times, many Lembe have become Muslims or
Christians.
A South-African Protestant
missionary named Henri-Alexandre Junod (1863-1934) recorded in 1908 what some Lemba
elders told him:
“[We] have come from
a very remote place, on the other side of the sea. We were on a big boat. A
terrible storm nearly destroyed us all. The boat was broken into two pieces.
One half of us reached the shores of this country; the others were taken away
with the second half of the boat, and we do not know where they are now. We
climbed the mountains and arrived among the Banyai. There we settled, and after
a time we moved southwards to the Transvaal; but we are not the Banyai.”
The BaNyai (aka the
Nyai) are a Shona-related people who live on or near the Zambezi River. Shona
is one of the Bantu languages.
Where the Lemba story deepens: Y-chromosome DNA studies show that parts of the male Lemba gene pool are of Middle Eastern origin. The Buba, a Lemba priestly clan, test positive for
the "Cohen modal haplotype," (CHM) a specific genetic signature found
in Jewish priestly lineages (the Kohanim). Read about the CHM in a detailed
and highly technical article here https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2771134/
The World Jewish Congress has an interesting article about this subject: https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/lemba-tribe-in-southern-africa-has-jewish-roots-genetic-tests-reveal
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