Americas. In 1580 , thirty-six years after the first map with Arzareth appeared,
the French Orientalist and Hebraist archbishop Gilbert Ge ́nebrard ( 1537 – 1597 )
provided the track of the ten tribes from North Asia to the Americas. He did so
not in acosmographiabut in achronographia,a chronology of Israelite/Jewish
history largely based on Jewish sources. In the first edition of his chronogra-
phy, published in 1567 ,Ge ́nebrard simply notes that the Assyrians deported
ten tribes. In the 1585 edition, he adds a lot more. Ge ́nebrard’s notation is “ 3434
to the Creation,” the year the deportations of the tribes took place. Ge ́nebrard
goes into a lengthy explanation about their history after the destruction of their
state, quoting 2 Kings. Following the well-known passage from Esdras, Ge ́n-
ebrard states that they went “to a region called ‘Asereth’” (region voactur Asereth)
by crossing the Euphrates and the “desert of Tartary.” Alluding to Ortelius,
Ge ́nebrard locates Asereth/Arzareth first in the “Northern Regions” (partibus
Septemtrionis) in Asia or in the “Grand Tartaries” (Tartariae Magnae). His goal,
however, is America. The tribes then continued to walk through an “unknown
land towards Greenland” (terram ignotam versus Grotlandiam) until they
reached the outer boundaries of America. Thus, the tribes first went northeast
toward Tartary but then headed west. Now that we know that humans did cross
the Bering Straits to the Americas, Ge ́nebrard was not really far from the truth.
However, Ge ́nebrard’s concern was the ten tribes, and it is for this reason
that he needed to invent that unknown land, somewhere in the most distant
north, that connected North Asia and Greenland. It solved a geographical
problem stemming from his acceptance of two facts—Arzareth was in
North Asia and the ten tribes moved from it to the Americas—and covered
for any geographical inconsistency that a route from North Asia to America
near Greenland suggests. A look at Ortelius’s world map shows Greenland as
a very small island stuck between northwestern Europe and northeastern
America and very close to both; it is also very close to an unknown and
uncharted large island lying to its north. This unnamed island, which Ortelius
counts as part of several large bodies of land collectively named Septentrio,
touches Tartary. The route Ge ́nebrard limns seems a bit bizarre but makes
sense—from Tartary to Septentrio toward Greenland and then to America.
Ge ́nebrard was not the only one contending with the problem of passage to
America to solve it in this way. As for “why America?” Ge ́nebrard says that it
has been “long held by tradition and Kabbalah that the [ten tribes] are called
enclosed, also the Americans are enclosed by seas from every side, and also
America indeed is a large island, or peninsula.” While, for the most part,
America is separated by sea, the northern part of the continent is “covered”
and is not.^92 America is enclosed enough to be similar to the ten tribes’ home
but connected enough to allow for their passage to it.
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