How It's Used

"Finally, at last, came the restoration of our national sovereignty in Eretz Yisrael, and the homecoming of Jews from more than 100 lands speaking many more than that number of dialects, which in many instances did not include Hebrew, and bearing even more than that many styles of life, dress, eating, prayer, etc. Now, all at once, questions were raised about the Jewishness of some communities, heretofore regarded longingly from afar as some of 'the Ten Lost Tribes.' Now all at once the variation of liturgies developed in the Diaspora is no longer the private concern of the respective congregations and communities, but is a focus of institutional power play."

—Moshe Kohn, "The 'one people' fiction," The Jerusalem Post, May 9, 1997.

"No point dispelling myths until we know what they are. So Feigon begins with a glorious rundown on Western misapprehensions. In the middle ages, Tibetan Buddhists were reckoned to be Christians whose religion had turned peculiar. Later scholars decided they were actually one of the lost tribes of Israel, which is why Hitler sent agents to measure their heads."

—David Newnham, "Demystifying Tibet, by Lee Feigon," The Guardian (UK), March 25, 2000.

"About 1,100 years ago, a Hebrew-speaking man named Eldad Ha-Dani appeared before the Jewish community of Tunisia and gave it the remarkable news that he belonged to the biblical tribe of Dan, one of the fabled 10 lost tribes of Israel. He lived, he said, in 'the fertile and gem-rich "land of Havilah" near "the seven kings of Cush" -- the biblical name for Ethiopia' -- alongside three other lost tribes, Naphtali, Gad and Asher.

"For Hillel Halkin, author of Across the Sabbath River, which is also an amazing tale of a lost tribe, Ha-Dani was the first to give the lost tribes a geographical identity, even if he himself was probably an impostor and the tribes he claimed to live among did not exist. In the centuries that followed, as Mr. Halkin shows in some fascinating background chapters, the lost tribes generated an enormous wealth of claims and speculation. But near the end of the 19th century, critical scholarship put to rest the notion that any of the tribes -- sent into exile by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser in the eighth century B.C. -- still existed."

—Richard Bernstein, "A Quest for a People Who May No Longer Exist," The New York Times, September 18, 2002.

"There is no Chinese documentation of this alleged circumnavigation -- since the records were destroyed by the anti-maritime lobby of Zhu Di's successors -- so Menzies has had to cast far and wide for hard or soft evidence. The European maps, if one can believe their dating and authenticity, suggest earlier exploration; but there is no hard evidence that it was Ming admirals who provided them. In fact, the roster of possible early visitors to the Americas is dizzying -- Vikings, Romans, Egyptians, Brendan, the Lost Tribes of Israel, Orcadians, Polynesians, Japanese, Indians, Burmese, Koreans, earlier waves of Chinese, even extra-terrestrials -- and most of their visits would have predated Zheng He's colleagues by centuries, if not millennia."

—Gary Geddes, "Confucius or Columbus -- who got here first?" The Globe and Mail, January 11, 2003, p. D8.

"But although the man described by Francis is finely portrayed, he never sheds the intellectual apparel of his age. His abolitionist views were so aberrant that they lacked any echo for another century. His stance toward America's Indians -- whom he suspected to be one of Israel's lost tribes -- looked to the future only in the sense that he believed their conversion would herald Christ's rule on Earth. As for the dislike of hairpieces, could anything be more Puritanical -- and less evocative of the American dream -- than a mistrust of makeovers?"

—Sadakat Kadri, "A Puritan of Convictions," The Washington Post, September 1, 2005, p. C02.

Links

Related on eAlmanac
The Twelve Tribes of Israel
The Thirteenth Tribe
The Thirteenth Tribe (Book)

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on the Ten Lost Tribes
The Straight Dope article on the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel
"Where Are the Ten Lost Tribes?" from NOVA (Public Broadcasting System (US))