first modern researcher of the ten tribes who was burdened with the challenge
of proving their existence.
Farissol’s actual treatment of the ten tribes is rather disappointing, despite
the fact that they appear as a distinct item in the title page of theIgeretand
although he dedicates a whole chapter to David. Farissol does not have much
new to report and, by his own admission, resorts to the familiar Talmudic
“India.” The big change is that he includes the tribes for the first time within a
real charted geography.
Commenting several decades later, Rabbi David Gans ( 1541 – 1613 ) dis-
missed Farissol’s treatment of the ten tribes, calling itgimgum,which implies
stuttering or diffidence.^79 He also expressed dissatisfaction with another Ital-
ian writer, Azariah dei Rossi ( 1513 or 1514 – 1578 ), who had commented on the
location of the tribes in his hugeSefer Me’or ‘Enayim(Light of the Eyes, 1575 ).
Albeit not writing a cosmografia,dei Rossi, like Farissol, simply repeated
scripture and Talmud when he commented on the tribes’ location.^80 Gans
was dissatisfied that Dei Rossi and Farissol did not really provide any new
geographic news about them. Gans said he was preparing to write his own,
presumably superior, geographical treatise with a better account of the geo-
graphic location of the ten tribes. If he ever completed the task, the fate of this
book is not clear.^81
Historian Andre ́Neher explains that David Gans was already more in-
formed than both dei Rossi and Farissol.^82 But one could also say that David
Gans was too harsh in his judgments, missing the ultimate point: not to
provide new information about the ten tribes, but to better locate them within
newly charted territories. Which is what Farissol did. Whereas previously, the
ten tribes were located in an unknown location within the unknown world,
they were now located in an unknown location within known locations. As a
Renaissance humanist, Farissol realized that his real challenge was to engage
his wider intellectual audience, and it was in this spirit that he engaged the
challenge to inscribe the ten tribes into the new world geography of his day. His
effort underscores the predicament that the Age of Discovery presented to the
story of the ten lost tribes. How to remain lost in an exposed world is the puzzle
that would dominate its remaining chapters.
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