> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Richard Hewitt - URL: https://www.smdp.com/communityprofiles-richard-hewitt/ - Published: 2007-08-27T15:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-24T02:41:23.000Z - Author: Guest Author - Tags: Sports, Santa Monica, #archive-import *Searching for hidden ties* *By GERRY SHIH Special to the Daily Press* There were times when Richard Hewitt had to choose between his parents in Santa Monica or the 12 siblings in a mountain village of four hundred yurts. Other times he had to choose between getting slammed by extremist Christians or staring down extremist Muslims. Just like that, the 43-year-old Santa Monica native spent 20 unorthodox years, pausing at life’s intersections and considering his 180-degrees worth of choices. But for a living, he has tried to convince others that between the polar extremes and mortal enemies, there perhaps exists a middle path where no one expected to find one. Today, Hewitt is darkly tanned, lightly bearded and lean, a rugged modern day Herodotus, amateur anthropologist, and breaks-chasing Kelly Slater rolled into one. Born into “a good Santa Monica family” with two Stanford graduates as parents, the soft-spoken Hewitt said he was a good kid and president of his class at Santa Monica High. He had a good life, good grades, surfing, sports, women, and friends. Then one day, while studying chemistry in the UC-Santa Barbara library as a biology major, he glanced at an atlas, and Kyrgyzstan caught his eye. “As someone who grew up on the ocean, addicted to surfing, I knew I had to go somewhere landlocked,” he said, shrugging off the contradiction. “I needed to just get away. I just had to go.” It was the apotheosis of spontaneity. He dropped out of UC-Santa Barbara that summer as a sophomore, packed his bags and left for Central Asia. From then on, his life would be deeply connected to the region. He would return to America to obtain an agriculture degree from Cal Poly, but most of his life would be spent in Kyrgyzstan. He would first live in Bishkek, the capital, and teach at the university. He would casually befriend his neighbor,who he didn’t know was the number one crime boss in Kyrgyzstan until a rival mob riddled his body with 30 bullets. He would eventually be adopted by a mountain family with 12 siblings. He would learn the language, build and live in yurts, and herd livestock. Then, the Santa Monican surfer’s affair with Kyrgyzstan took a dramatic turn when he studied its traditional literature and began publishing books propositioning the possibility that the people of Kyrgyzstan — now predominantly Muslim — may be the descendants of the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel. Although he quickly found himself in a dangerous ideological no-man’s land, he became convinced that Kyrgyzstan could be an example of how two religions locked in centuries of conflict could, and should, peacefully coexist. His evidence rested in the Manas epic, a traditional pre-Islamic epic poem of the Kyrgyz people describing the exploits of the ancestor hero Manas, who united the Kyrgyz tribes and fought for independence in the ninth century. At nearly a half a million lines long, the massive epic is considered the centerpiece of classical Kyrgyz literature, but scholars have offered differing opinions about the time of its origin. Islam was first introduced to the Krygyz tribes relatively late, and despite roughly 70 percent of the modern country claiming to be Sunni Muslims today, few are devout worshippers and the religion has remained a superficial element of the culture. Hewitt claims that there are an overwhelming number of passages in the Manas epic that resound in the Judeo-Christian scriptures. For example, the name of Manas’s father, Jakyb, sounds eerily similar to Jacob, the grandfather of Manasseh and Joseph’s father in the Torah. But according to Hewitt, in modern Krygyz and ancient Hebrew tradition, the grandfather often adopts the grandson as a son, making him a brother to his biological father and therefore explaining the father-son relationship between the Kyrgyz analog of Jacob and Manasseh. Furthermore, having lived in Kyrgyzstan for nearly two decades, Hewitt knew that many of the Kyrgyz traditional customs are curiously similar, if not identical, to those written about the ancient Israelites. Hewitt said the Kyrgyz customarily gather to eat a whole sheep in one night, like what Moses instructed in the Book of Exodus. He noted that the Kyrgyz also treat visitors by washing and giving cakes like Abraham in Genesis. “Time and time again we see these little similarities,” he said. “I’ve come across over 100 of these pieces and bit by bit I think it really adds up.” Hewitt’s ultimate theory is that either the Kyrgyz people came into close contact with ancient Semitic culture, or more intriguingly, they are in fact the direct descendants of the Tribe of Manasseh. His claim to have discovered a Lost Tribe is hardly new. For centuries, countless peoples, from Afghanistan to Japan to Ireland, have claimed descent from the Israelites. The Bnei Menashe people in Northern India continue to claim the Tribe of Manasseh as ancestors. Spanish and Portuguese travelers around the time of Columbus argued that Native Americans are descendants of Israelites, and that assertion remains a controversial bedrock of the Mormon Church. As featured on a PBS “NOVA” documentary, University of London professor Tudor Parfitt recently linked a group of southern Africans to the ancient Hebrews mostly through the same — although perhaps more rigorous — methods as Hewitt: Analysis of oral and written history, literature, and cultural customs and traditions. Hewitt doesn’t have the resources to conduct DNA testing like university faculty, but he is quick to remind that the worldwide DNA testing project conducted by National Geographic several years ago concluded that the Kyrgyz people indeed originated from the Middle East, although the time frame differed from Hewitt’s theory. Rarely, however, has a wide swath of people in a Muslim country been put forward as a candidate. To confirm his theory, Hewitt set about traveling around the country. He tells the story of approaching one mountain village and asking to speak to the “the person who knows Kyrgyz tradition best.” So he was taken to the yurt of an elderly “whitebeard,” who granted an audience. Hewitt quickly ran into an obstacle. “When I took out the Bible, he refused to touch it or read from it,” Hewitt recalls. “He said he didn’t want to contaminate himself with that polluted and cursed book.” So Hewitt begged the elder to at least listen to him read a few passages from the Old Testament that he knew was echoed in pre- Islamic, Kyrgyz literature. Within 20 minutes the Whitebeard’s curiosity was piqued. Another twenty minutes and several passages later, Hewitt said the man asked “Can I have this book?” and upon receiving Hewitt’s approval, snatched it out of his hands and began reading with a pair of old Soviet-era eyeglasses. “His whole world view had changed in forty minutes,” Hewitt said. “At funerals, the village Mullahs \[Muslim clergy\] tell everyone that Torah or Bible readers cannot be buried by their people because it’s polluted. But the book they’re taught to hate has so many similarities to their culture.” The more Hewitt traveled and introduced his theory to locals, the more he felt like the Kyrgyz seemed like a people “without an identity.” They were a nation that was nominally Muslim, but completely different from the neighboring Uzbeks and Tajiks in native traditions. He said he was offering an alternative explanation of Kyrgyz history, a relief for many Kyrgyz hoping to identify with a more grounded heritage. “They don’t want to side with just either the American God or the Arabic God,” he said, explaining that many Kyrgyz felt uncomfortable being pulled into a global conflict of only two sides, framed in only black or white. “There were times when I spoke to the people furthest from the city, who loved their traditional culture, and they broke down in tears and thanked me because I shared with them these passages from the Torah,” Hewitt said. He appeared on Kyrgyz national television, and his first book was immediately accepted by a publisher who was trying to track him down for a book offer anyway. After personally convincing conservative Kyrgyz elders in village after village to give the Judeo-Christian scriptures a chance, Hewitt began to see a glimmer of hope and tried to look at the bigger picture. “Sometimes I think ‘What could be a better place on Earth to discuss the Middle Eastern conflict than an Islamic country with Hebraic background?’” he said. “People on both sides hate without even knowing what the other’s holy books are saying. The two religions don’t have to clash. Why does it need to?” Then he laughed and added,“They should just have a peace conference there, with the world leaders sitting around in a yurt.” Hewitt’s attempts to relate the modern Kyrgyz to the ancient Israelites have not been universally appreciated. Despite Islam’s superficial presence in Krygyrzstan, a wave of fundamentalist fervor has seemingly gathered strength steadily since the fall of the secular Soviet Union, and some extremists immediately decried Hewitt’s work. A Kyrgyz newspaper called for a Jihad against him in January of 2000, and a friend who worked in the Kyrgyzstani presidential offices advised him to leave the country and never return. In America, he has also been slammed by white supremacist Christian groups who have claimed that Anglo Whites, not Central Asian shepherds, are the true sons of Joseph. And despite winning the respect of many Kyrgyz scholars, he is also dismissed by Western academics who often see the Lost Tribes as a subject saturated with cultic fascination. “It is more common to hear the Pathans of Afghanistan making that assertion about the Lost Tribes of Israel,” UCLA anthropologist Nancy Levine skeptically wrote to the Daily Press when asked about Hewitt’s theory. “I don’t believe there is any support for that idea either.” Toward those who labeled him a Christian missionary, Hewitt firmly refused to be categorized. “I usually let others decide if they want to call me Christian, Muslim or heretic,” he said. “Sometimes my world view is closest to Christians because of the value I place on the sacred writings and Jesus, but other times our beliefs diverge terribly because I value the Qur’an and ‘pagan’ epics or traditions. I often worship in a mosque or a church, but I’d rather worship on a mountain or in the surf.” Despite authoring a few small books in Kyrgyzstan, Hewitt never managed to make much money. He has now found himself back in Santa Monica after stumbling into an intersection of converging misfortune several years ago. He caught his ex-wife cheating red-handed and divorced. Soon after, he was stunned by the news that his business partner, who unknowingly lost all of their joint investments in the infamous “Nigerian scam,” had fled Kyrgyzstan, leaving behind his wife and children, and much less any intentions of paying back Hewitt. He said the dual betrayal left him heartbroken and destitute by Santa Monica standards, but re-married a Swiss doctor working in Kyrgyzstan and has now temporarily returned to his hometown, hoping to make some money by writing screenplays. But first, he had to get over the culture shock and learn about America after years in the mountains. “After I came back this year I set out to learn about MySpace and YouTube,” he said. “That was a kick that lasted about two or three weeks.” On Aug. 29, Hewitt will speak about his extensive traveling experiences at the Santa Monica Public Library. Besides the small achievement of becoming an expert on Kyrgyz culture and wading into one of the most hotly debated issues in all of religious studies, what else did he learn in his travels that he could share? “When I’m traveling, I don’t say I’m from the U.S.,” he said. “I tell them I’m from California and they immediately say ‘The Terminator!’ It takes away some of the harshness of Bush and America.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/9f/559f9abc-8372-4a2e-8c2d-27386da4e363/content/images/2026/10/082707-02_01.jpg) of Richard Hewitt EXTRA, EXTRA! (Photo: Photo courtesy) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/9f/559f9abc-8372-4a2e-8c2d-27386da4e363/content/images/2026/10/082707-02_02.jpg) of Richard Hewitt SAY CHEESE: Krygyz children posing outside a yurt in Krygyzstan. (Photo: Photo courtesy) *Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 27, 2007.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/082707.pdf?ref=smdp.com)