In the middle of the 17th century, Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel,
learned scholar and teacher of the future philosopher Baruch Spinoza, published
a surprising treatise on the destiny of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, in his
masterwork "The Hope of Israel."
The rabbi, inspired in the account of Antonio de Montesinos, a Sephardic Jew
who had been imprisoned by the Inquisition in Cartagena, Colombia. Montesinos,
who fled his ordeal and found refuge in the upland jungles of the Amazon,
averred before the rabbinical court in Amsterdam that he had made contact with
indigenous tribes that were actually descended from The Ten Lost Tribes.
Supposedly, they had established themselves in a very isolated region in
Ecuador, many centuries before the Spanish Conquest.
Menasseh Ben Israel’s book was one of many that insisted that some of the
Native Americans were descended from the Lost Tribes. In 1825, a fairly
eccentric American Jew by the name of Mordecai Manuel Noach, formally
inaugurated a provisional Jewish state in Grand Island, close to Niagara Falls.
And accompanied by his starry-eyed audience, Noach read the declaration of
independence of "ARARAT", proclaiming himself "Supreme Judge of
Israel" and urged all the world’s Jews to emigrate to Grand Island until
they could establish themselves in Palestine at some future date. In his
grandiose declaration, Noach called upon all Jews to come forward, not only
those of Europe but those of Africa, Asia, the Karaites, the Samaritans, and of
course, the American Indians in their condition of "remnants of the Ten
Lost Tribes of Israel." In 1900, the renowned author Sholem Aleichem
published his contribution to the ever-burgeoning theme: "The Little Red
Jews." In this short story, a Jew from the Land of Israel visits the
"small red Jews" who live beyond the mythical river of the Sambatyon,
which, according to medieval Jewish tradition, had been separated from their
brothers since the time of Babylonian exile.
We could easily fill many volumes with the stories of medieval travelers such
as Benjamin of Tudela and Eldad HaDani, who claimed to have found remnants of
the Tribes in their journeys in Asia and Africa, just as we are confronted by a
plethora of communities scattered throughout the globe who, in our own time,
claim to be the offspring of those exiled Tribes.
A HISTORICAL ACCOUNT
Let’s first have a look at the historical trajectory. The concept of lost
tribes dates back to the exile of the Israelite kingdom in 722 BCE. The kingdom
of Israel, which had separated from Judea following Solomon’s death, could
hardly survive the onslaught of the clashing empires of the ancient Middle East,
while it struggled on with its own internal crisis, idolaters against
monotheists, Elijah against the decadent Jezebel. Taken away to a definitive
exile in Babylon by Assyrian armies, these tribes were eventually dispersed
throughout the Middle East and we know virtually nothing of their fate. Whereas
the progeny of the tribes of Judea, Judah and Benjamin, were eventually
permitted to return to their lands under Cyrus the Great of Persia, a fact duly
recorded in the Bible, there are, curiously, no biblical records regarding the
whereabouts of the ten northern tribes. One passage in an apocryphal account in
Ezra IV assures us that the Assyrian king Shalmaneser forced them to cross a
vast river after which they arrived in arid lands uninhabited by human beings.
In those inhospitable climes, they retained their own faith, customs and legal
statutes.
And in the Middle Ages, when the notion of the unification of the remnants of
Israel with all the rest of the Jewish people seemed to provide the perfect
recipe for hastening the coming of the Messiah, the literature on the Tribes
flourished with redoubled vigor. Did not the Bible remind us that the Messiah
would appear when the Jewish people were gathered from the four corners of the
globe? This is precisely what motivated Menasseh Ben Israel, who wished to
complete the four-quarters diagram, and having found Jews throughout the planet,
saw no reason why the Messianic advent should tarry any longer. And so many
ancient voyagers told of their meetings with the Tribes, and of the great
hardships they braved while navigating the immense (mythical) waterway of the
Sambatyon. As medieval reasoning would have it, the temperamental river hurled
murderous rocks at all who dared to cross it, and its dangerous whirlpools only
enjoyed a temporary calm on Shabbat-the one day of the week in which Jews could
make no journey. Thus, only a miracle, or the coming of the Messiah, would join
together the disparate worlds of the Jews and their lost brothers.
This was indeed an extraordinary escape valve for the psychological pressure
created by the living conditions of the Middle Ages, just as it was an
admonition to Jews to not lose hope for the future. The prophecies perhaps,
would be fulfilled.
NATIVE AMERICAN JEWS
Thus, it stands to reason that many believed that the Ten Lost Tribes were to
be found in the farthest reaches of Africa and Asia. This is why certain
theologians in the New World, noting a similarity between the customs of some
Native American civilizations and those of the ancient Israelites, reasoned that
the latter were the forbears of the former. These myths and legends form the
bedrock of later postulates, allowing many isolated Jewish communities to claim
direct lineage with the Tribes. There may well be communities that are genuinely
related to the Tribes, but it is not my purpose to proclaim that the Tribes are
represented in our own time. In effect, the most convincing claim to this
illustrious paternity is that of the modern day Samaritans, numbering in the
thousands and citizens (the majority, that is) of Israel.
They are the descended from Jews who escaped the Assyrian conquest of Israel
and took refuge with their relatives in Judea, following the collapse of their
capital, Samaria.
But what of the other communities who claim to belong to the Tribes? Let us
mention them here: many Ethiopian Jews claim to descend from the tribe of Dan,
formerly of what is today the Gush Dan region in modern Israel. In a dispute
between the kingdoms of Judea and Israel, the Dannites refused to engage in
fratricidal warfare and fled, first to Egypt and later to Ethiopia. And this is
but one of many theories, others stating that the Ethiopian Jews are related to
Menelik, son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, or that they left Egypt in
the time of the Exodus but chose Ethiopia over Canaan, or that Jews who fled the
tyranny of the Greco-Roman empires fled to the African kingdom. And in India,
the ancient Jewish community of Bombay, the Bnei Israel, claim to be descended
from the Tribes, as does the entire Asiatic tribe of the Shinlung, specifically
from the tribe of Menasseh. In southern Africa, nations such as the Lemba of
Zimbabwe and Soweto, assert the same. An old tradition in the Syrian Jewish
community linked them to deportees taken by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, and, away
in the Far East, members of the sympathetic Japanese congregation of the Makuya,
believe themselves to come from the tribe of Zebulun.
MY PEOPLE RETURNS
And the question of the Ten Lost Tribes has gained an added impetus since the
founding of Rabbi Eliahu Avihail’s institution, Amishav, dedicated to
reintroducing these long-isolated communities into the mainstream of rabbinic
Judaism, in order to facilitate their emigration to Israel. During the 1980’s,
Avihail and his followers began to scour the globe in the search for the
remnants….and in 1994, "Amishav" brought 57 members of the community
of Manipur, on the Burma-India border, to the West Bank settlement of Kiriat
Arba in Hebron.
"Amishav" also collaborated in the conversion of "Native
American Jews" in the Mexican town of Venta Prieta and the Peruvian city of
Cajamarca, although in these instances it was known that the subjects were
Christians who wished to convert to Judaism, not returning tribes. And according
to Rabbi Avihail, who has thrown himself wholeheartedly into the theme of the
Ten Lost Tribes, millions of Pathan tribesmen in Pakistan and Afghanistan, are
also offshoots of the Tribes.
Just what would occur if the Jewish state opened the borders and admitted as
citizens all those who proclaim themselves to be of the progeny of the Tribes?
The implications are weighty and complex-and they merit a separate book. As has
been stated, since the panoply of literature is so vast already, a dearth of
information is hardly the problem.
If we accept all the current theories regarding the Ten Lost Tribes, then
many would pertain to groups which currently beyond the bounds of Judaism. For
example, the Mormons of Utah, the Black Hebrews of Chicago who claim to be the
real Jews, the lighter-skinned ones being a corruption of the original, and the
Jamaican Rastafarians, such as the famed reggae singer Bob Marley, who believed
to have been descended from the Ten Lost Tribes, exiled first to Ethiopia, and
then torn from their homes and brought to the Americas as slaves.
The theme of the Tribes is vast, rich in myth and legend. It is a great
repository of history and belief, and a point of origin for many very special
cultural entities whose background links them-on either the theoretical or the
empirical plane, with the ancient Israelite monarchy.
