Ever since Assyr­ia con­quered the north­ern king­dom of Israel some 2700 years ago, the des­tiny of the exiled Ten Tribes has cap­ti­vat­ed the imag­i­na­tion of Jews and non-Jews. Think of the excite­ment when researcher Tudor Parfitt recent­ly found a genet­ic link between the Jew­ish priest­ly class of Kohan­im and the Lem­ba tribe of south­ern Africa, or the con­tro­ver­sy when the Chief Rab­binate of Israel in 2005 rec­og­nized an eth­nic group liv­ing in East Asia as ​“descen­dants of Jews” from the Bib­li­cal half-tribe of Menasseh. 

The arche­o­log­i­cal record con­firms the Bib­li­cal account in 2 Kings that the Israelites were deport­ed to dis­tant lands in the Assyr­i­an empire, but the facts end there. NYU pro­fes­sor Zvi Ben-Dor Ben­ite traces the unfold­ing of the rest of the sto­ry in leg­end. Post-Bib­li­cal Apoc­rypha, espe­cial­ly 2 Esdras, envi­sioned the Ten Tribes hid­den behind moun­tains and a mirac­u­lous riv­er and liv­ing proud, strong, free, and inde­pen­dent lives. That envi­able state con­trast­ed with the all too vis­i­ble dis­per­sion and des­per­a­tion of the Jews of the South­ern King­dom after the destruc­tion of the two Tem­ples, and gave them hope and comfort. 

Where exact­ly were these pure, dis­tant, hid­den Jews? They were always imag­ined to be at the edge of the known world. As con­querors and explor­ers extend­ed the bound­aries of what was known, the lost tribes reced­ed to those far hori­zons. Trav­el­ers in the Mid­dle Ages, some cred­u­lous (like Ben­jamin of Tudela) and some deceiv­ing (like David Reuveni), brought back sto­ries of the tribes that sug­gest­ed they were scat­tered from India to Ethiopia. After the Euro­pean encounter with the New World, there were leg­ends about hid­den Jews in the jun­gles of South Amer­i­ca, as well as spec­u­la­tion that native North Amer­i­cans were descen­dants of the lost tribes. 

Some­times a pur­port­ed con­nec­tion to the Tribes sup­port­ed claims of priv­i­lege, as with British the­o­ries of Ten Tribes ances­try. More often, though, the belief in the per­sis­tence of the Ten Tribes resem­bles the Shi­ite faith in the occlud­ed Twelfth Imam or the Czech nation­al sto­ry of the Hus­site war­riors hid­den in Mt. Blánik. Just as the Hus­sites are said to stand ready to aid the Czech peo­ple in their time of need, and the Twelfth Imam is to emerge to bring sal­va­tion as Mah­di, the Ten Tribes were imag­ined to have a large army ready to defend the Jews. They offered the con­so­la­tions of strength in the face of loss, even­tu­al tri­umph fol­low­ing defeat, suc­cor amid dis­tress. Zvi Ben-Dor Ben­ite weaves the reli­gious, leg­endary, and sci­en­tif­ic his­to­ry of this idea into a col­or­ful and enchant­i­ng sto­ry, told in schol­ar­ly detail with a deft per­son­al touch. Bib­li­og­ra­phy, index, notes.