chapter 4 The Search for the Lost Tribes
Kabbalah beyond the Sambatyon
By creating a national narrative that integrates elements of Jewish mysticism, Shimon Zvi Horowitz, the co-founder of the Sha’ar haShamayim Yeshiva, sought to reach a wider audience than the majority of Jerusalem’s Sharabian kabbalists. In certain respects, he was indeed successful. A case in point is his efforts to find the Ten Tribes – an idea that is part and parcel of his kabbal- istic approach. Horowitz tried to get Jerusalem’s Sephardic kabbalists on the bandwagon, but came up empty-handed. Moreover, his efforts to turn Sha’ar haShamayim into a center for expeditions of this sort drew mixed results. At any rate, this episode sheds light on Horowitz’s unusual eclectic worldview. In 1908, Shimon Menachem Lazar of Drohobycz (1864–1932), an editor and Hebrew scholar, came out with a thick tome on Ḥidot haHagadot haNiflaot al Dvar Aseret haShvatim vePitronam (The Riddles of the Wonderful Myths on the Ten Tribes and their Solution). The journal HaSchiloah had published an earlier, serial version of this work in installments between 1902 and 1903. At the end of the book’s introduction is a summary of Lazar’s approach to these same myths:
And this belief [in the Lost Tribes], which filled the hearts of our nation for some two thousand years, has been suspended in our time, the days of the Jewish Enlightenment, to the point that they have even ceased to think about the Ten Tribes, as though they never existed and were never created. Today, a misguided [sense of] embarrassment will cover the face of a Jew, even from the Orthodox party, on anything regarding the Ten Tribes. Like a nighttime vision in a dream, the memory of the Tribes has abruptly vanished from the congregation of Israel and has become the realm of the Christian English, some of whom are endeavoring to prove that they, of all people, are the Lost Tribes of Israel.1
1 Lazar, Ḥidot haHagadot, 5. The HaSchiloah version of this book does not contain the passage “a misguided [sense of] embarrassment will cover the face of a Jew, even from the Orthodox party, on anything regarding the Ten Tribes.” Lazar, “Aseret haShvatim,” 47. Important mate- rial on the book’s publication and its ideology is preserved in Lazar’s correspondence with Ahad Ha’am (Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg); Lazar, Letters to Ahad Ha’am, 1902 (ms).
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004321649_005
As an aside, Lazar noted “that also in our time in the year 1898 a band of Ye- menite Jews from Jerusalem went to the deserts of Arabia, to seek out the Sambatyon. One of them indeed boasted that upon travelling from South- ern Arabia to Eretz Yisrael its [i.e., the river’s] traces were revealed to him.” That said, Lazar was apparently unaware of two contemporaneous develop- ments: the distribution of the mythical literature on the Tribes in East Europe; and the intensive activity within the heart of the Old Yishuv in Jerusalem to find the lost Israelites. His book falls under the heading of the far-ranging re- search literature on this topic whose main conclusion was that the Tribes had assimilated and disappeared, so that it is no longer possible to find any remnant of this exile. Moreover, the authors of this corpus posited that these myths lack a solid foundation. As a result, any initiative to find the lost Jews is bound to be a wild goose chase.2 This literature put an emphasis on documents that are tied to past efforts to locate the Tribes as well as the outlook of the explorers. Furthermore, they toiled to reconstruct the Israelites’ history in the Diaspora until their extinction. The most prominent and influential of these writers was the Orientalist Adolf (Abraham) Neubauer. In 1888, he published an exhaus- tive Hebrew anthology on issues pertaining to the Ten Tribes and the Sons of Moses. Soon after, he released an English survey on the various explorers who placed their sights on this elusive prize.3
The Awakening of Explorers in Jerusalem
In stark contradistinction to these firm conclusions, new ideologically-driven explorers surfaced during this period who employed the research literature in
2 Mendel Wohlman also reached this conclusion in his 1907 study; idem, “The Sambatyon and the Ten Tribes,” 279–305. Countervailing this trend was Shmuel Ze’ev Goldman, Sefer Nidḥei Yisrael (1941). In the introduction (v), he wrote that “the reason that stirred me on to formu- late this book: that most of the books that were written on this topic were infiltrated by the spirit of the Enlightenment, and they built a stubborn and treacherous case. Moreover, the occupation with these books has produced a sad result, namely a couple of Torah scholars are talking about the above-mentioned topics as though they were a popular fable that is intertwined in the air.” At any rate, Goldman endeavored to verify the story of the Ten Tribes and the existence of the Sambatyon, not to actually find or support those who were searching for them. In the early 1900s, a couple of booklets focused on tracking the Israelites’ assimila- tion into various nations; see, for example, Israel Balkind, Where are the Ten Tribes? (1928). 3 See Neubauer, “Qvutṣim ’al ’Inyanei ’Aseret haShvatim;” idem, “Where Are the Ten Tribes,” 14–28, 95–114, 185–201, 408–423. Later on, the emphasis shifted to describing the worldview of groups that claimed to descend from the Lost Tribes. For a scholarly disquisition on the roots of this myth and its various incarnations, see Ben-Dor Benite, The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History. See also Veltri, “The East in the Story of the Lost Tribes,” 246–266.