Matheus “because at the time I was eleven.”^68 (This letter arrived in Portugal in
1527 and was partly responsible for the demise of David and his fall from grace
in the Portuguese court. If Matheus was a liar, maybe David was one too.)
It is tempting to look for a direct connection between Matheus and David
Reuveni: both arrived in Europe and proposed military alliances and coopera-
tion against Islam. Aaron Aescoly, who dedicated years of work to David,
considered the possibility that Matheus was an imposter and even wondered
whether he and David had met at some point and exchanged views. But rather
than search for evidence of such links, I would like to focus on the African/
Middle Eastern realities that produced certain crucial aspects of David’s story.
As we have seen, the Yemeni Jews who reported on the wars between Prester
John and the ten tribes were in fact interpreting contemporary reports about
the events in Ethiopia between the 1460 s and 1480 s. News about clashes
between a zealous Christian dynasty and a Jewish opposition were read as
ten tribes wars. Just as Christian Europeans tended to translate the core
features of the legend of Prester John into Ethiopia, Jews from across the
Aden straits translated them along the lines of the ten lost tribes.
Ultimately, David’s story allows us to see how the ten tribes were present in
a complicated web of converging forces: European expansion in the Indian
Ocean, perceived global conflict between Christianity and Islam, hard-to-deci-
pher events in a still-mysterious African land. Clearly, David’s own creative
personality had a lot to do with bringing the ten tribes to Europe’s attention.
But what enabled his story was the long legacy of debates about the tribes that
placed them in the distant, old, southern edge of the world—somewhere
between Ethiopia, Arabia, and India—and furnished them with military prow-
ess. This legacy was created long before David and was part of the context that
received him. We return now to Italy and to the relationship between the ten
lost tribes and global geographical thinking.
Itinera Mundi:Lost Tribes in an Exposed World
In 1525 , two years after David showed up in Italy, Rabbi Abraham Farissol, a
resident of Ferrara originally from Avignon, composed the first Hebrew geog-
raphy of the world.Igeret Orhot ‘Olam^69 (Itineraries of the World) is a typical
Renaissance tome, similar to many other works produced at the time. It is, as
its author called it, acosmografia,based on the most recent news of the
geographic discoveries of, mostly, the Spaniards and the Portuguese. It is a
unique document, a Jewish global geography written in Hebrew as an “enter-
tainment.” Farissol says that he wrote it for the consumption of “those who