most crushing victory.^89 One can see the parallel between the breaking of the
Red Sea and the ten tribes crossing the river on their way to Arzareth as a basis
for a possible link between the two. There is also an interesting parallel
between the Father breaking the sea and leading the redeemed Israelites to
the promised land and the Son, Jesus, breaking the river and leading the ten
tribes to Arzareth.
But Postel the mystic offers a more recondite connection, using the Zohar,
the book of Splendor—the famous Jewish mystical interpretation of the
Torah.^90 The song’s second sentence, “I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath
triumphed gloriously,” contains the repetitive phrase “Ga’oh Ga’ah,” which
cannot be fully translated. In his 1573 preface to the Zohar, Postel noted the
shape of the Hebrew letter aleph, which occurs in the word Ga’ah (in voce Gaah
notandum est literam Aleph), explaining enigmatically that this shape points to
the ten tribes. Yet there is nothing in the verse from the Zohar about the
meaning of the biblical repetition “Ga’oh Ga’ah” that is connected to the ten
tribes. Esdras said that the tribes moved to Arzareth to be away from sin.^91 For
Postel, this is not enough. In his Arzareth, the tribes not only avoid sin, they
also confirm God’s glory. Postel’s Arzareth also brings us back to Ortelius’s
map of Asia, the only other text where it is said that the ten tribes confirm the
Lord’s glory in this place. And Ortelius’s notation next to Arzareth ended with a
cryptic remark about the ten tribes’ being renamed “Gauths or Gauthens,
confirming God’s highest glory,” after their arrival in Arzareth. Another im-
portant allusion to Postel’s theories about the ten tribes is the indication on
Ortelius’s map that the ten tribes’ original location was a place called Turcestan
from which they set out to Arzareth.
We can now understand Ortelius’s map better: the tribes originally lived in
the area from which the Turks also originated. They then moved to Arzareth
where they assumed the name “Gaoths,” and it is there that they confirmed
God’s glory. Clearly, Ortelius misunderstood Postel’s quasi-Kabbalistic take on
the word Gaoth and took it to be the tribes’ new name. However bizarre and
wild Postel’s ideas were, the inclusion of his Arzareth in Ortelius’sTheatrum
was crucial. Nothing else gave it stronger purchase than the combination of a
visual representation accompanied by an (enigmatic) text drawing on scripture,
included in one of the most popular and authoritative atlases of the time.
From North Asia to the Americas
The placement of the ten tribes in North Asia and Ortelius’s depiction of a
retreating Arzareth solved the question of how the tribes had arrived in the