Eldad was able to make the world of the ten lost tribes real for his listeners
by blending it with tales and legends with which they were familiar. In fact, the
complete inaccessibility of the world of the ten tribes is one of the main
elements that serve him best in his tricksterism. His most basic trick is to
change the identities of the speakers delivering parts of the story: instead of
Talmudic sages speculating about the ten tribes, in his account the ten tribes
speak for themselves.
Eldad the trickster was well aware of what his purported persona entailed.
When he first introduced himself to the Jews of al-Qayrawan, he was careful to
describe the ten tribes in apposition to the two that remained, just as traditional
literature always set Judah and Benjamin against the missing ten:
It is a tradition among us that ye are the sons of the captivity [of] the
tribe of Judah and Benjamin under the dominion of the heathen in an
unclean land, who were scattered under the Romans who destroyed
the temple of our God, and under Greeks and Ishmaelites, may they
pierce their heart and may their bones [be] broken.^19
Echoed in this short passage are the ideas of Esdras about the ten tribes’
exile to a pristine other land, as well as the observations of Josephus and
Talmudic sages about the two different types of exile—the scattered Judah
and Benjamin under a foreign political yoke, as opposed to the free but
enclosed ten tribes. Here, however, we hear the story in reverse, from a
pseudo-member of the ten tribes who presents his account as “a tradition
among us[the ten tribes],” as if just as the Jews had developed their own
traditions about their lost brethren, the latter had done the same. In his
presentation of what we might term “the Jewish exile as seen by the ten tribes,”
Eldad is meticulous and creative. The Qayrawanis recounted: “their [the ten
tribes’] only language is the sacred tongue, and this Eldad the Danite under-
stands not a word of any other... , neither the language of Ethiopia nor the
language of Ishmael, but Hebrew alone, and the Hebrew which he speaks
contains words which we have never heard.”^20
As we shall see, these words that no one had heard are what would later
betray Eldad’s identity, but the trick worked for centuries, on the Qayrawanis
and many others. Since Roman times, or even before, it is doubtful if there
were Jews anywhere in the world who spoke only Hebrew—except of course
the isolated ten tribes (or, more recently, some contemporary Jews born in
modern-day Israel). The clever trickster also told the Qayrawanis that the ten
tribes possessed the whole Bible—but did not read the scroll of the history of
Esther, because they “had no part in that miracle.”^21 After all, the ten tribes did
not exist within the boundaries of the Persian Empire. Eldad was aware, no