The community there – which dates back to the 1980s, when a group of Christians converted to Judaism – was more isolated than the people I knew in India. He had never encountered a foreigner before, he said, let alone someone who was Jewish and interested in photographing his community. And yet here, again, I experienced a mutual curiosity and was granted intimate access to their lives.
Lost tribe Jews in northeastern India and north-west Myanmar are by some estimates a minority of less than 10,000. They are easily missed among the Christian and Buddhist populations of the region.
The 1950s saw the formation of several lost tribal communities in North India. British missionaries had converted most of the local population to Christianity, and some converts saw a connection between their old practices and the rituals of the ancient Jews they had read about in the Old Testament.