Where
are the lost tribes of Israel?
Lost Tribes:
Who were they and where are they?
By MJL Staff
The lost tribes are one of the biggest mysteries of Jewish history, and as you
might expect, there are plenty of people with their own theories.
Maybe the Igbo Jews of
Nigeria are one of the lost tribes?
Perhaps Bene Menashe, in Northern India, can claim
the title.
Or the Pashtun people of Afghanistan.
Or Native Americans.
These groups and many more have claimed to have
descended from the lost tribes of Israel.
The tribes being
spoken of are, of course, those of ancient Israel. The Israelites were divided
into twelve tribes (not including the Levites who were not landowners). Each
tribe was assigned a piece of the Land in Israel.
After King Solomon died around 922 BCE, the tribes split into two kingdoms as a result of a power struggle. The
northern kingdom consisted of Reuben, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar,
Zebulun, Ephraim, and Menasseh.
The southern kingdom was composed of Judah, Simeon,
and most of Benjamin (often it was referred to simply as Judah).
In 722 BCE Assyria invaded Israel, and the northern
kingdom was conquered. Many of the people who lived in the northern kingdom
were exiled, mainly to Assyria, Media, and Aram-Naharaim.
Archaeological evidence suggests that they were
eventually completely assimilated into these societies.
Meanwhile, some alien populations—Cutha, Ava,
Hamath, and Sepharvaim—were brought in to settle the northern kingdom, and
those groups all ended up assimilating with each other and with the Israelites
who remained in the north.
In 586 BCE the
Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar attacked the southern kingdom, and exiled much
of that population to Babylon. Though many lost their Israelite identity in
Babylon, plenty of them retained their connection to their heritage, and
eventually returned to Israel and rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem.
By that point the northern kingdom was lost.
Today’s Jews stem from the people of Judah (thus, Judaism).
Professor Tudor
Parfitt of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies
has studied the lost tribes for years, and has written an excellent and very
comprehensive book on the subject called—unsurprisingly—The Lost Tribes of
Israel.
According to
Prof. Parfitt, the lost tribes all assimilated into the groups around them, and
eventually disappeared.
At first, the people of Judah who returned to their
land may have wondered about being united with the other tribes. The prophet
Ezekiel even predicted that God would reunite the northern and southern
kingdoms some time in the future.
In the Talmud,
Rabbi Akiba is quoted as saying, “Just as the day goes and does not return so [the
ten tribes] went and will not return.” (Sanhedrin 110b)
However, over time dozens of theories have come
forth about the whereabouts of the tribes of the northern kingdom.
It is difficult to find a region of the world that
does not contain a group that has at some point claimed to have descended from
the lost tribes. In North and South America, Japan, China, Ethiopia, South
Africa, India, Nigeria, New Zealand, England, Ireland, Afghanistan, and Burma,
there are thousands who claim Israelite ancestry.
Parfitt does not believe any of these claims,
mainly because they all seem to stem from a sense of being different and
persecuted, rather than from any historical evidence. He argues that though
these people may identify as Jews, and sometimes even approximate Jewish
practices such as observing Shabbat, and only eating meat that has been
slaughtered in a specific way, their claims are based on legends, not lineage.
In some cases, when a minority group was persecuted
it was called “Jewish” to denote evil, and the historically-inaccurate label
stuck. Parfitt’s thesis is the accepted view of the academic world today,
upheld by a number of other scholars in the field.
However, the
contemporary Jewish community has accepted at least one group claiming to be
descended from a lost tribe: the Beta Israel, or Jews from Ethiopia, who claim to trace
their lineage to the tribe of Dan.
Their connection to Dan comes from a late ninth
century Jew called Eldad HaDani, or Eldad the Danite. Eldad showed up in
Tunisia speaking Hebrew and told the Jewish community there that he was a
member of the tribe of Dan, who had settled in the land of Cush (modern day
Ethiopia).
The Jews of Tunisia were not sure whether to
believe Eldad, so they consulted with the head of North African and Middle
Eastern Jewry at the time, Rabbi Tzemach Gaon, who affirmed Eldad’s story. In
the16th century a North African scholar known as the Radbaz repeated
this affirmation.
Today many scholars believe that Eldad came from an
Arabic speaking land and was nothing more than a harmless freeloader, or
employed by Karaites.
In 1973, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, then the chief
Sephardic rabbi of Israel, declared the Beta Israel to be descendents of the
tribe of Dan, relying on response from the Radbaz and Rabbi Tzemach Gaon.
Shortly after Yosef made this ruling the State of
Israel began aiding the members of Beta Israel who were being persecuted and
sought to escape Ethiopia. As Jews they were eligible for the Law of Return,
and subsequently more than 15,000 members of Beta Israel were airlifted out of
their homeland, and into Israel. Though some scholars still doubt the veracity
of their claims to lineage, the Beta Israel have been accepted as Jews by
nearly all of the rabbinic authorities in Israel today.
Assuming the
lost tribes assimilated fully into other groups around the seventh century BCE,
as Parfitt and others argue, these tribes’ descendents are now spread all over
the world, scattered in every region without any knowledge of their ancient
Jewish lineage. It is more than likely that these descendents are walking among
us today, and some of them may even be part of the groups that associate
themselves with the lost tribes. We will never know. But it is a great story.
Related
Posts:
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert-lost-tribes/
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