Though Farissol was writing a few decades before the idea of total habit-
ability took final shape, he was aware of the problems arising from the
assumption that the world was totally inhabited. The crucial issue for him
was the ten tribes. Talmudic and medieval sources had no problem distancing
them ever farther. For Farissol, writing in the context of an exposed and
mapped world where all territories seemed to be accounted for, the idea of a
lost and unknown people was a problem that required care. His inclusion of
the ten tribes as a third category, after the inhabited and the newly discovered,
is an indication of this dilemma and an attempt to resolve it.
Farissol uses the termYehudim Segurim(enclosed Jews) when referring to
the ten tribes. As we have seen from Esdras on, the enclosure of the ten tribes
was implied in different and elaborate ways: they were in another land, con-
cealed, under the ground, beyond rivers and mountains or great walls; they
were invisible. Only the third-century Commodianus had explicitly used the
term “enclosed”:iudaei clusi.Abulafia had used the term “concealed Jews”
(Yehudim Genuzim). Writing in the sixteenth century, Farissol had difficulty
representing the tribes’ special condition in a world that seemed to be fully
exposed, or at least exposable; no river or mountain now seemed beyond reach.
So, for the first time, “enclosed” in its most simple sense seemed the only
possible descriptor. The hidden Jews were human islands, a real entity on the
world’s map—among us, but set apart.
Like most Italian Jews of his time, Farissol had followed David Reuveni
closely since his arrival in Italy. While it is clear that David’s appearance in Italy
in 1523 did not lead to the writing of theIgeret—Farissol probably was already
working on it well before—the work is closely related to him. Historian David
Ruderman points out that Farissol was greatly encouraged by the attention
given to the ten tribes by non-Jews.^76 David appears in the book despite
Farissol’s skepticism about David’s messianic aspirations, and he also sus-
pected David’s ten tribes identity. At moments, he identifies David as a man
from the ten tribes, but adds that “he might be from Yehuda”—that is, a
simple, garden-variety Jew. Farissol, even as early as 1525 , likely did not fully
believe in David.
Ultimately, though, the identity of David was far less important than the
challenge of inserting the ten tribes into world geography. To a certain extent,
Farissol wanted not only to incorporate them into the dramatic discoveries of
his age, but to do so in a manner that would conform to the contemporary
method of writing world geography as a form of agreement between experts.
This bore a burden of scientific proof from which Talmudic authors or Benja-
min of Tudela, for example, had been immune. To write about the tribes and
the world in Farissol’s day, scientific approval was required. It was in this
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