Around 250 members of the B’nei Menashe Jewish community of Manipur and Mizoram, who claim descent from one of the “ten lost tribes of Israel”, landed in Tel Aviv on Thursday night . The B’nei Menashe, numbering around 7,000, belong to the Mizo and Kuki tribal communities across the two states. Though thousands of community members have migrated to Israel since the 1990s, the batch that arrived in Israel on Thursday was the first to be relocated under an Israeli government relocation programme. More will follow them. So who are the B’nei Menashe and what is the history behind their claim of descent from a “lost tribe of Israel”? First, what are the lost tribes of Israel? Around 722 BCE, the Assyrian empire conquered northern Israel and resettled many of the people living there. According to Jewish tradition, the banished people were part of ten tribes — Reuben, Simeon, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Ephraim and Manasseh.…