Soon after the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision regarding the Reform and Conservative conversions to Judaism of non-Jewish residents of Israel, which I wrote about last week, another and in its way even more dramatic pronouncement concerning Jewish identity came from a different quarter. This was the declaration by Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi, Shlomo Amar, that the 7,000 “B’nei Menashe” of northeast India will be recognized by the rabbinate as descendants of an Israelite “lost tribe” and encouraged to convert to Judaism and settle in Israel.

The subject of the B’nei Menashe is one that some New York Sun readers will be familiar with. This paper was the first to break the news, in the summer of 2002, that persuasive evidence had turned up to back the improbable claim of a little-known Tibeto-Burmese ethnic group called the Kuki-Chin-Mizo, living in a heavily Christian, tribal area on both sides of the Indian-Burmese frontier, that it had a historical link to the biblical tribe of Manasseh. Some of you may even remember that this evidence was marshaled in a then about-to-be-published book titled “Across the Sabbath River” and written by me.

As far as I know, the rabbinate’s decision, which was based on a report filed by an Israeli rabbinical delegation that visited the Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur last year, had nothing to do with my book. At the time that I researched and wrote it, in the years 1998-2002, there had been a growing Judaizing community in these two states for over 30 years, which – convinced of its “lost tribe” origins and calling itself B’nei Menashe or “Sons of Manasseh” – had made contact with an Israeli rabbi and adopted a traditional Jewish way of life under his mentorship and guidance.

What “Across The Sabbath River” did show was that the traditions cited in favor of such origins, far from being trivial or modern fabrications as all Western investigators had assumed, were in fact authentically ancient, significant, and far more numerous than had previously been recognized. In addition, the book proposed a historical hypothesis to explain how it might have happened that a small group from the biblical tribe of Manasseh, exiled from Palestine by the Assyrians between 730 and 720 B.C.E., made its way its way over the course of centuries to the remote jungles of southeast Asia. There, while blending in and intermarrying with local, religiously animistic Asian hill tribes, it continued to preserve some of its biblical customs and traditions until modern times.

It is important to recognize, then, that the Israeli rabbinate’s ruling, as unscientifically intuitive as it may have been, is no mere romantic religious fantasy detached from reality. In this respect it is different from a similar rabbinic ruling in the 1970s that declared Ethiopian Jews to be descended from the biblical tribe of Dan. That, although it had the valuable result of helping to pry open Israel’s gates to an imperiled Jewish community, was indeed wishful thinking without the slightest factual buttress. The case of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo and the B’nei Menashe shows every sign of being different.

Skeptical readers of “Across The Sabbath River” have often told me that they will be convinced of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo’s historical link to ancient Israel only if the DNA proves it. This reveals an ignorance of just what Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA analysis can establish. True, if X, who is alive today, and Z, who lived in the past, have the exact same pattern of DNA mutations, then X is indisputably Z’s biological descendant. The converse, however, is not the case, since even if X’s DNA does not match Z’s, they can still be linked, the discrepancy being explainable by outside intrusions in the chain of descent. In historical DNA studies, especially when looking for descendants of a small group that has merged in a large one, the lack of positive proof does not constitute negative proof.

Nevertheless, two recent DNA studies of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo have recently been undertaken. One, in which I collaborated, was carried out by Israel’s Haifa Technion on 350 samples. Although the final results of this study have not yet been tabulated, the findings so far do not indicate a correlation between any of these samples and DNA typical of the Middle East or Western or Central Asia – the regions through which a remnant of a biblical “lost tribe” would have wandered on its way to Southeast Asia.

On the other hand, a similar study performed by four Indian geneticists at Calcutta’s Central Scientific Forensic Laboratory, published in a preliminary form on the Internet site of the journal Genome Biology, claims to have found such a correlation in a statistically significant number of samples – and more remarkably yet, to have found a correlation between some of these samples and that of unique DNA patterns in Uzbeki Jews, who have “lost tribe” traditions of their own. While this study has yet to pass peer review and is open to methodological challenge, it just may turn out to be the scientific proof that the skeptics have been demanding.

After centuries of fruitless and often lunatic searches all over the globe for vestiges of the “Ten Lost Tribes,” which vanished from the pages of history soon after their exile by the Assyrians, it is mind-boggling to think that one may have been found in the farthest corner of the Indian Subcontinent. If it has been, nothing could be more fitting than its return to the land of Israel. After 3,000 years, it will be the longest round-trip in history.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.