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LOST TRIBES OF ISRAEL
Deporation of Jews by the Assyrians
After the death of Solomon in 928 B.C., ten of the Twelve Tribes of Israel — the 10 northern ones — broke off to establish the Kingdom of Israel. Solomon's son Rehoboam ruled over the southern Kingdom of Judah, which included only the tribes Judah and Benjamin and was relatively small in size compared to Solomon’s kingdom. The 12 tribes were said to have descended from the Patriarch Jacob. The ten ones in the north were the 1) Reuben, 2) Gad, 3) Zebulon, 4) Simeon, 5) Dan, 6) Asher,7) Ephraim, 8) Manasseh, 9) Naphtali and 10) Isaachar. They became known as the Lost Tribes of Israel when they disappeared after northern Israel was conquered by the Assyrians in 722 B.C. . Solomon's son Rehoboam ruled over the southern Kingdom of Judah, which included only two tribes Judah and Benjami
In accord with Assyrian policy of deporting the local population to prevent rebellions, the 200,000 Jews living in the northern kingdom of Israel were exiled. After that nothing was heard from them again. The only clues in the Bible were from II Kings 17:6: "...the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away to Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes." This puts them in northern Mesopotamia.
The fate of Israel’s 10 lost tribes, which were driven from ancient Palestine, ranks among history’s biggest mysteries. Some Israeli rabbis believe descendants of the lost tribes number more than 35 million around the world and could help offset the sharply increasing Palestinian population. Amos 9:9 reads: “I will sift the house of Ephraim among all nations, as grain is sifted in a sieve; yet shall not the least kernel fall upon the earth. [Source: Newsweek, Oct. 21, 2002]
Quotes from the Bible that refers to the Lost trobes include: “And he said to Jeroboam, Take thee ten pieces: for thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel, Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes to thee.” from 1 Kings 11:31 and “But I will take the kingdom out of his son's hand, and will give it unto thee, even ten tribes.” from Kings 11:35 In the A.D. 7th and 8th centuries, the return of the lost tribes was associated with the concept of the coming of the messiah. The Roman-erea Jewish historian Josephus (37–100 CE) wrote that "the ten tribes are beyond the Euphrates till now, and are an immense multitude and not to be estimated in numbers." Historian Tudor Parfitt said that "the Lost Tribes are indeed nothing but a myth" and that "this myth is a vital feature of colonial discourse throughout the long period of European overseas empires, from the beginning of the fifteenth century, until the later half of the twentieth". [Source: Wikipedia]
Websites and Resources: Virtual Jewish Library jewishvirtuallibrary.org/index ; Judaism101 jewfaq.org ; torah.org torah.org ; Chabad,org chabad.org/library/bible ; Bible and Biblical History: ; Biblical Archaeology Society biblicalarchaeology.org ; Bible History Online bible-history.com Bible Gateway and the New International Version (NIV) of The Bible biblegateway.com ; King James Version of the Bible gutenberg.org/ebooks ; Jewish History: Jewish History Timeline jewishhistory.org.il/history Jewish History Resource Center dinur.org ; Center for Jewish History cjh.org ; Jewish History.org jewishhistory.org ; Internet Jewish History Sourcebook sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Christianity: BBC on Christianity bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity ; Christian Classics Ethereal Library www.ccel.org ; Sacred Texts website sacred-texts.com
How the Twelve Tribes of Israel Came To Be
Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: If you have read the Hebrew Bible, saw Disney’s Prince of Egypt, or watched Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat then you almost certainly know about the 12 tribes of Israel. In many ways Israel is sort of synonymous with Jewishness and Judaism, people use it to refer to a nation, an identity, and a central group who share in God’s promises to Abraham and are the favored people of God. What you might not have known is that the history or, rather, histories of Israel are constantly evolving. A new book, Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel: New Identities across Time and Space, by Dr. Andrew Tobolowsky, who teaches at William & Mary, looks set to revolutionize how we think about the traditional story. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast May 1, 2022]
Twelve Tribes mosaic in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem
As it has come down to us, the biblical narrative is very Israel focused. In Genesis, the patriarch Jacob (the one who steals Esau’s birthright, has a vision of a ladder, and walks with a limp after losing a match to an angel) had 12 sons (and a daughter, but people are fairly disinterested in her). The tribes of Israel are the descendants of these sons. They migrated to Egypt during a famine and were led out of captivity by Moses. They violently conquer the Holy Land with Joshua, and each tribe was given its own portion of land. After that they were governed by first Judges and then monarchs like Saul, David, and Solomon. So far, so united.
After the death of Solomon (ca. 930 B.C.E), things fractured. The Kingdom of Israel was divided into two Kingdoms: the Northern (which retained the name Israel and was occupied by most of the tribes) and the Southern, also known as Judah. In the eighth century B.C.E, the Assyrian army captured the Israelite capital of Samaria and carried the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom off into exile. While 1 Kings 11-12 is explicit that there were ten tribes in the Northern Kingdom, it’s unclear both how many tribes were located in Judah and which specific tribes went from the Northern Kingdom into exile. As Tobolowsky put it to me “there actually is no text that says, ‘these are the ten tribes of Israel that were exiled,’ or ‘these are the tribes who survived.’”
The members and descendants of the ten tribes who were forcibly migrated by the Assyrians are now known as the “Lost Tribes of Israel” and, like other lost peoples and things of the Bible — say the Ark of the Covenant, Enoch, or the Holy Grail — the lost tribes of Israel gleam with mysterious significance. Where are they? Will their descendants one day return to their homelands as the descendants of Judah did after the Babylonian exile?
Searching for the Lost Tribes of Israel
In the first century A.D., when wrote the "10 tribes are beyond the Euphrates until now, and are an immense multitude", a Greek chronicler wrote the 10 tribes decided to "go forth into a land farther distant in a place" called Azareth. Where Azareth was nobody knew. The word itself means "another place." In the A.D. 9th century a traveler named Eldad Ha-Dani appeared in Tunisia, saying he was a member of the tribe Dan, which now lived in Ethiopia with three other Lost Tribes. During the Crusades, Christian Europeans became obsessed with located the Lost Tribes, who they believed would help them fight against the Muslims and retake Jerusalem. During a period of end of the world prophecies in the Middle Ages, the desire to find the lost tribes became particularly intense, because the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel spoke of the reunion of the House of Israel and the House of Judah before the end of the world.
Over the years there were other reports of sightings of the Lost tribes, sometimes in associations with the mythical Prester John, a miracle-performing priest-king that was said to live in a distant land in Africa or Asia. Expeditions were launched to search for the Lost Tribes. When the New World was discovered, it was thought that the Lost Tribes would be discovered there. For a time various Indian tribes found in America where thought tot be the Lost Tribes.
The search for the Lost Tribes continues today. Africa, India, Afghanistan, Japan, Peru and Samoa are among the places where it said that the wandering Jews settled. Many fundamentalist Christians believe that tribes must be found before Jesus will return.Some members of the Lembaa, a South African tribe that claims to be a Lost Tribe of Israel, have the genetic Cohan marker. Some Afghans believe they are descendants of lost tribes.
Veteran Israeli journalist Hillel Halkin began hunting for the Lost Tribes of Israel in 1998. At that time he thought the claim that a community of Indians on the Burmese border descended from one of the tribes was either a fantasy or a hoax. Newsweek reported: “On his third trip to the Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram, Halkin was shown texts that convinced him that the community, which calls itself the Bnei Menashe, has roots in the lost tribe of Menashe. The documents included a will and words to a song about the Red Sea. The argument, made in his new book ‘Across the Sabbath River‘ (Houghton Mifflin), is not just academic. [Source: Newsweek, Oct. 21, 2002]
As founder of the organization Amishav (My People Return), Eliyahu Avichail trots the globe in search of lost Jews, in order to bring them back to their religion through conversation and direct them to Israel. He’s even hoping to make it to Afghanistan later this year. “I believe that groups like the Bnei Menashe are part of the solution to Israel’s demographic problems,” says Amishav director Michael Freund.
Lost Tribes of Israel in America?
Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: In 1644 Antonio Montezinos, a Portuguese traveler originally known as Aharon Levi, returned to Amsterdam with an astonishing story about the people he had encountered in the proverbial depths of South America. During his visit a native guide, named Francisco, took him deep into the mountains. A week into the journey he met a community of indigenous people who identified themselves to him as the Lost Tribes of Israel. Montezinos, who was originally known as Aharon Levi, was startled and astonished. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast May 1, 2022]
The story might have amounted to nothing had he not passed it along to a prominent rabbi named Menasseh Ben Israel. Ben Israel used it as the basis for his influential work Hope of Israel, a compendium of information about the whereabouts of the Lost Tribes of Israel, which was published in 1650. The book was intended to inspire his fellow Jews who had suffered and would continue to suffer social marginalization, legal oppression, and violent persecution at the hands of antisemitic Christian Europeans.
But it was also taken up by Christians: first British colonizers who claimed that Native Americans were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. And, more famously, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who both identify themselves (who, genealogically were the descendants of European settlers) and Native Americans with Israel. For Ben Israel the “Jewish Indian” theory was about hope, for the British it was related to anxieties about linking the “New World” to the “Old.” The idea that America — or any people or nation — could “Become Israel” was enormously popular.
Are Ethiopian Jews and Pathans of Afghanistan Lost Tribes of Israel?
Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: Over the past few thousand years many individuals and groups have claimed either to know where the lost tribes are or to be their descendants. One famous example is Beta Israel, or Ethiopian Jews, who identify with the lost tribe of Dan. Discussions about the identification or histories of the lost tribes are often discarded as fanciful-after-the-fact mythologies that appropriate “real” Israelite identity for something else, while the biblical history of Israel is the “real history.” Dr. Andrew Tobolowsky’s book Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel challenges us to rethink this distinction and explores the multiple histories of Israel that exist outside of Europe and the Middle East. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast May 1, 2022]
For other groups, from antiquity to the present day, who claim this lineage “it’s more about the prestige ancient Israel has as the ‘chosen people,’ or it’s about positioning yourself as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.” The 12 tribes of Israel have a certain kind of divine cache, pedigree, or role to play in the end times. “From the medieval period on,” said Tobolowsky, “a lot of these visions are about the end of the world, bringing about the restoration of Israel by recovering the lost tribes and so on. In these cases, it’s about describing your group as one tasked with a sacred mission in the cosmic scheme. Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament imbue Israel with a lot of significance, and all the world’s Israels understand themselves as heirs to that significance.”
Some claim the Pathans — an ethnic group that live in western and southern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan and whose homeland is in the valleys of Hindu Kush — descended from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Some Pathan legends trace the origin of the Pathan people back to Afghana, a supposed grandson of Israel’s King Saul and a commander of King Solomon’s army not mentioned in Jewish scriptures or the Bible. Under Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century B.C. some of the banished Israeli tribes headed east, settling near Esfahan in Iran, in a city called Yahudia, and later moved to the Afghan region of Hazarajat.
In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pathans have a reputation for being fierce tribesmen who thumb their large noses at authorities and follow their own customs and codes of honor. Pathans consider themselves the true Afghans and the true rulers of Afghanistan. Also known as Pasthuns, Afghans, Pukhtun, Rohilla, they are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and by some accounts the largest tribal society in the world. There are about 11 million of them (making up 40 percent of the population) in Afghanistan. Links with Afghans and the Lost Tribes of Israel first appeared in 1612 in a book in Delhi written by enemies of the Afghans. Historians have said the legend is “great fun” but has no basis in history and is full or inconsistencies. The linguistic evidence points to Indo-European ancestry, perhaps Aryans, for the Pasthans, who are likely a heterogenous group made up of invaders who have passed through their territory: Persians, Greeks, Hindus, Turks, Mongols, Uzbeks, Sikhs, British and Russians.
Lost Tribe “Found in Zimbabwe”
Some members of the Lemba, a South African tribe that claims to be a Lost Tribe of Israel, have the genetic Cohan marker. Cohanim are members of priestly clan that trace their paternal lineage back to the original cohen, Aaron, the brother of Moses and a high Jewish priest. Cohanim have certain duties and restrictions. Cynics have long wondered if such a diverse looking group of people could all be descendants of the same person, Aaron. Dr. Karl Skorecki, a Jew from a Cohan family, and geneticist Michael Hammer at the University of Arizona found genetic markers on the Y chromosome among Cohanim that appear to have been passed down through a common male ancestor for 84 to 130 generations, which goes back more than 3,000 years, roughly the time of Exodus and Aaron.
Lemba
Steve Vickers of the BBC wrote: In many ways, the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe and South Africa are just like their neighbours. But in other ways their customs are remarkably similar to Jewish ones. They do not eat pork and food with animal blood, they practise male circumcision [not a tradition for most Zimbabweans], they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones. They have 12 tribes and their oral traditions claim that their ancestors were Jews who fled the Holy Land about 2,500 years ago. [Source: Steve Vickers, BBC News |::|]
“It may sound like another myth of a lost tribe of Israel, but British scientists have carried out DNA tests which confirm their Semitic origin. These tests back up the group's belief that a group of perhaps seven men married African women and settled on the continent. The Lemba, who number perhaps 80,000, live in central Zimbabwe and the north of South Africa. And they also have a prized religious artefact that they say connects them to their Jewish ancestry- a replica of the Biblical Ark of the Covenant known as the ngoma lungundu, meaning "the drum that thunders". The object went on display recently at a Harare museum to much fanfare, and instilled pride in many of the Lemba. |::|
"For me it's the starting point," religious singer Fungisai Zvakavapano-Mashavave told the BBC. "Very few people knew about us and this is the time to come out. I'm very proud to realise that we have a rich culture and I'm proud to be a Lemba."We have been a very secretive people, because we believe we are a special people." According to ancient Jewish rituals the redemption of the firstborn son requires payment to a Cohen. Only the Cohanim in prayer shawls are allowed to bless suppliants at Jerusalem's Western Wall. This is an inherited duty. The Cohan marker is found in half of the Cohanim studied in both Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities and among Jews of European ancestry and African ancestry. The marker as also been found in some Christians that have no knowledge of any Jewish ancestry.
Lost Tribes in India
Lost Tribes marker in Bombay In India there are a million or so Indians who believe that they descended from the Israelite tribe of Manasseh, which was expelled by the Assyrians 2,700 years ago. About of 5,000 of these follow religious rules listed in the Bible—including animal sacrifices.
Several hundred lost tribe members have come to Israel as immigrants and have been allowed to become Israeli citizens if they converted to Judaism. One Indian tribe member interviewed by the Wall Street Journal was a university graduate with a degree political science who came from Manipur, near the Burmese border. He said he came to Israel so he could follow his religious commandments. After his arrival he got a job working on a farm and spent much is his free time studying Hebrew, Judaism and Jewish customs.
The Mizo — an ethnic group that lives mainly in the small northeastern Indian states of Mizoram, Manipur and Tripura — claim to be one of the lost tribes of Israel. They have a tradition of songs with stories that are similar to those found in the Bible. Also known as the Lushai and Zomi, the Mizo are a colorful tribe with a code of ethics that requires them to be hospitable, kind, unselfish and courageous. They are closely related to the Chin people of Myanmar. Their name means “people of the high land.” [Source: Encyclopedia of World Cultures: South Asia, edited by Paul Hockings, C.K. Hall & Company, 1992]
The Bnei Menashe ("Sons of Menasseh") are a small group with about 10,000 members within the indigenous people of India's North-Eastern border states of Manipur and Mizoram near India's border with Myanmar. They say they are descended from Jews banished from ancient Israel by the Assyrians to India in the eighth century B.C. Over the centuries they became animists, and in the 19th century, British missionaries converted many to Christianity. Even so, the group says they continued to practice ancient Jewish rituals, including animal sacrifices, which they say were passed down from generation to generation. Jews in the Holy Land stopped animal sacrifices after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70. [Source: Lauren E. Bohn, Associated Press, December 25, 2012]
See Separate Article: BENE ISRAEL JEWS AND BNEI MENASHE (MAYBE A LOST TRIBE) africame.factsanddetails.com
History of The Twelve Tribes Narrative
Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: While Tobolowsky isn’t really focused on the historical problems with the traditional narrative about Israel (nor does it have to be, there are plenty of other histories problematizing everything from the Exodus to the Battle of Jericho, to even the existence of King David), he admits there are some difficult historical details in the story. It’s clear, he told me, that there is some kind of tradition about tribes in ancient Israel. He pointed to Judges 5, a passage that, he said, “many scholars think is the oldest text in the Hebrew Bible” that tells the story of a war between the Canaanites and the tribes of Israel. If you go read Judges 5, he said, you’ll notice that it “doesn’t include 12 tribes…In fact, none of the tribes most associated with the kingdom of Judah even appear in Judges 5.” In other words, the oldest literary layers in the Hebrew Bible may talk about tribes but not in the way that the traditional history does. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast May 1, 2022]
What’s interesting, he said, is that most of our biblical stories about the 12 tribes were written in a much later period by Judahite authors. This might lead us to be skeptical of the historical accuracy of these stories. “It’s a possibility,” he added “that the 12 tribes tradition was developed by Judahites, in a relatively late period.” But even if these traditions grew “out of an older, and genuinely historical Israelite tribal tradition… the vast majority of tribal descriptions we have are from a much later period, by mostly Judahite authors, and mostly in a world where even the Hebrew Bible tells us not all the tribes were still around.” In other words, and “regardless of anything else, we still have to ask… why are all late Judahite authors so interested in describing and redescribing [the tribes of Israel]. Why does [this history] matter to them, and what are they trying to do with it?”
This is the gap that Tobolowsky fills in his book. Whether you’re the kind of person who thinks that the 12 tribes are a complete fiction or the sort who thinks that they actually existed as discrete groups, people haven’t really been asking why ancient Judahites suddenly got interested in them hundreds of years later. The curious part is that it’s not just biblical authors who are fascinated by the 12 tribes: “all over the world”, said Tobolowsky, “people have been doing the same thing with the same tradition.” Why is that? Why are people interested in retelling this history and interweaving their personal and communal histories with it?
For the authors who wrote the Hebrew Bible, said Tobolowsky, this particular version of Israel’s history and identity had to do with positioning Israel against the Samaritans. The Samaritans were likely descended from the original Israelites (those who were not carried off by the Assyrians). Narratively clearing Samaria of legitimate descendants of Israel does some work in legitimizing Judah. “For these [Judahite] groups, their stories are about claiming a sort of local legacy and history, and you can sometimes see that in how their visions are designed to compete with each other.” What this means, though, is that the Israel of the Hebrew Bible, is, in fact, Judah’s Israel. It’s not, he said, “some sort of neutral, ‘original Israel’ it’s one of many versions of what Israel was” and just like other versions of Israel’s history it had real-world power.
Why the Lost Tribes Identity Is So Passionately Embraced
One unusual take on the 12 Tribes of Israel
Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: The number of different social, political, and religious groups who root their identities in Israelite history is surprisingly large. Tobolowsky told me that whenever he talks about his book someone will tell him about a new group he previously hadn’t heard about. One of his favorites, however, were the House of David baseball teams. These were semi-famous “Harlem Globetrotter-esque squads that traveled the country in the 1910s and ’20s and did all kinds of tricks and often wore big, fake beards… They would do things other teams of that time wouldn’t necessarily do, like play some of the great Negro Leagues teams. But it turns out their main goal was to serve as a kind of fundraising arm for a new religious movement, the ‘House of David.’ This was headquartered in Benton Harbor, Michigan and had among its goals the ‘ingathering’ of the 12 tribes of Israel.” As bizarre as it sounds, this isn’t a one-off of a story, there are plenty of examples of groups using the idea of Israel to do particular kinds of political, religious, fundraising, and social work. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast May 1, 2022]
For some readers all of this might seem iconoclastic, if not anti-Israel, or even antisemitic but that isn’t the case. Tobolowsky, who is Jewish himself, said that “one of the major points of the book is that lots of people besides the Jews think they’re descendants of Israel, too.” In some of these cases, he added, those who identify as descendants of Israel, “are marginalized groups who enjoy sometimes precious few rights by virtue of their perceived descent, and any time you talk about identity that’s something you should be very, very careful about.”
Equally important, he added, is that scholars are thinking in more complicated ways about identity: “We now know ‘national’ identities change all the time, whether you’re biologically descended from some original group or not, so if presenting that identity differently from the original group means you’re not ‘really’ them — well, every identity is fake then.” In other words, Tobolowsky isn’t saying that more traditional understandings of Jewish identity are somehow fraudulent, he is saying that identity is constantly in flux and constantly being built out of inherited notions of the past. “We can set aside questions of who that past really belongs to in order to dig into what is being built and how that is happening.”
The question of what’s historically true, he said, is sort of beside the point. It’s tempting to distinguish between the “biblical story” and the story of the “Lost Tribes” but, whatever their histories, “all of all these groups are using the exact same tradition in the exact same ways for many of the same reasons.” The story of the Israels of the world is fantastic and arguably brings people together to think about their commonalities and shared traditions. But that will not happen if we can’t see that history and insist on policing a single vision of Israel’s history.
Image Sources: Wikimedia, Commons
Text Sources: Internet Jewish History Sourcebook sourcebooks.fordham.edu “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “ Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions” edited by R.C. Zaehner (Barnes & Noble Books, 1959); “Old Testament Life and Literature” by Gerald A. Larue, New International Version (NIV) of The Bible, biblegateway.com; Wikipedia, Live Science, Archaeology magazine, National Geographic, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Times of London, The New Yorker, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, and various books and other publications.
Last updated March 2024