chief sages and prophets were exiled to Babylon and they founded the
law and they fixed the yeshiva [school] on the River Euphrates, from
the days of Jehoyakin, King of Judah, until this very day and formed a
chain of wisdom and prophecy and from them went forth the law to all
the people and as we have already told you, all drink from one well,
therefore, keep ye diligently what the sages preach unto you and the
Talmud which they taught you, turn not to the right or left from any of
their words.^48
This is blatantly political. Perhaps fearing Karaite challenges, perhaps
fearing challenges from elsewhere in the Jewish world, the Gaon could not
avoid capitalizing on the notion that the ten tribes were “pray[ing] for the wise
men in Babylon.” Again, the primordiality of the ten tribes carried with it a
special power of affirming certain histories. Indeed, this one nugget in the
account may well be the reason that the Gaon was amenable to Eldad’s story to
begin with. Thus, we encounter, for the first time, a use of the ten tribes story
for political purposes—in this case, the supremacy of the Babylonian rabbini-
cal establishment. It was by no means the last.
Contrary to the Gaon’s confidence in the supremacy and power of the
Babylonian rabbinical establishment, it did ultimately give way to history, ulti-
mately collapsing about one and a half centuries after his time and marking the
end of the notion of a single or definitive Jewish legal authority. His ruling about
the Danites in Ethiopia, however, was longer lasting and left a trail of rulings
concerning the Danite origins of the Falasha, today called the “Ethiopian Jews.”
Rabbi David ben Shlomo ibn Abi Zimra (Radbaz; 1479 – 1573 ), a Sephardic
rabbi, ruled, based on the Gaon’s response, that the Falasha are “without doubt”
(beli safek) from the tribe of Dan. Four centuries later, in 1973 , Rabbi Ovadia
Yosef—then chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel and to this day the highest Sephar-
dic legal authority—also ruled that the Falasha are the tribe of Dan. He
reiterated this position in another, much longer response to a query in
1985.^49 These rulings were the basis for Israel’s decision to bring the Falasha
to Israel and naturalize them according to the Law of Return.^50
Aside from legal issues, the entire Eldad episode marks a turning point in
the development of the story told in this book. Eldad expanded the geographic
horizons of the search for the lost tribes. Discussions up to his time revolved
around real but removed places that no one was meant to recognize. Eldad
himself maintained that the tribes were secluded, enclosed beyond Sambatyon:
they see nobody, and nobody can see them. But he assigned the tribes to
specific real locations in Asia, Arabia, and Africa. Working within an Islamic
geography, he also introduced China—the frontier of theoikoumeneafter the
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