The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History » (New Edition)

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is the author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China.

The legendary story of the ten lost tribes of Israel has resonated among both Jews and Christians down through the centuries: the compelling idea that some core group of humanity was "lost" and exiled to a secret place, perhaps someday to return triumphant. In this fascinating book, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite shows for the first time the extent to which the search for the lost tribes of Israel became, over two millennia, an engine for global exploration and a key mechanism for understanding the world.

As the book reveals, the quest for the missing tribes and the fervent belief that their restitution marked a necessary step toward global redemption have been threaded through countless historical moments—from the formation of the first "world" empires to the age of discovery, and from the spread of European imperialism to the rise of modern-day evangelical apocalypticism. Drawing on a wealth of sources and presenting a vast array of historical players—explorers, politicians, scientists, geographers, and theologians—the author traces the myth from its biblical formation up through the present day. We see how the lost tribes, long thought to lurk at the world's "edges," became a means for expanding those edges: as new oceans, islands, or continents were discovered, the ten tribes were used as an interpretive device that made the unknown seem known and the new, old. Thus, virtually every spot on earth, whether Argentina or Zululand, the American Southwest or Southeast Asia, has at some point been claimed as the true home of the missing peoples.

More than a historical survey of an enduring myth, The Ten Lost Tribes offers a unique prism through which to view the many facets of encounters between cultures, the processes of colonization, and the growth of geographical knowledge.

Publishers Weekly

The 10 northern tribes of ancient Israel exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E., might have been lost in “another land” as Deuteronomy poetically puts it, but they never vanished from the popular imagination, as NYU Middle East and Islamic studies scholar Benite lays out in his account of the enduring legends surrounding the lost tribes. As he recounts, people in all times and regions have been thought to be descendants of the lost tribes, whether Mongol invaders who terrified Europe or Native Americans, whose descent from the tribes was used to either justify or condemn their conquest and oppression. The tribes have been put to other religious and political uses, such as a proposal in 1524 for an alliance of the Church and the 10 tribes against the Muslims. Joseph Wolff, a 19th-century rabbi's son turned Anglican missionary, believed the Benee Israel of Bombay were the tribes' descendants; and 19th-century biblical scholar William Carpenter pointed to British Anglo-Saxons. Although solidly researched and tantalizing in subject matter, this latest by Benite (The Dao of Muhammad) is academic in tone and less engaging than Hillel Halkin's 2002 history/travelogue Across the Sabbath River. B&w illus. (Sept.)

Introduction Ten lost tribes and their places 1

1 Assyrian tributes 31

2 An enclosed nation in Arzareth and Sambatyon 57

3 Tricksters and travels 85

4 "A mighty multitude of Israelites" 113

5 Concordia mundi 135

6 Hopes of Israel 169

Conclusion To find the ten lost tribes 199

Notes 227

Bibliography 257

Index 293