most learned “Concerning the Disposal of the Ten Tribes of the Jews, which
were Carried into Captivity to Nineveh: Commonly Called the First Captivity.”
Rennell ( 1742 – 1830 ), one of the most important modern English geographers
and known for his works on India, was one of the first world oceanographers.
He considered the ten tribes to be one of the key “subjects of history and
geography,” and he included them in a massive study that sought to compare
and reconcile ancient and modern geographies.^22
Readers were thus exposed to a wealth of contradictory information
concerning the geographic location of the ten lost tribes. But the numerous
contradictory accounts did not result in the conclusion that there was no such
thing as the ten tribes. Rather than making the mystery evaporate, the contra-
dictions made it more acute. And all along, of course, to many, their location
remained a matter of great theological concern.
In 1750 , the Italian Isaac Lampronti ( 1679 – 1756 ), a rabbi and physician
from Ferrara, wrote an entry on “Sambatyon,” orFiume Sabbatico,for hisPahad
Yitzhak,a huge encyclopedia.^23 This source sheds light on the volume of tribes-
related geographical knowledge that had accumulated over the years since Ben-
Israel’s treatise and shows the degree to which the tribes were understood as an
elusive and problematic geographical item. A wide-ranging, well-educated
man, Lampronti did not hesitate to confront rabbinic authorities on questions
of Jewish law if science contradicted them. For the entry on Sambatyon,
Lampronti surveyed sources from antiquity to his time, covering virtually all
regions of the world. However, he appears to be selective in what cites. The entry
cites close to thirty sources, all by now quite familiar to us. Strikingly, none of
the sources quoted by Lampronti came from ancient or medieval Jewish text.
Also strikingly, some of his citations come from other encyclopedic works, such
as theUniversal Geographyby La Croix (c. 1640 – 1715 ) or theGeographical and
Historical Dictionaryby Thomas Corneille ( 1625 – 1709 ).^24 In all of these texts, as
Lampronti was careful to quote, the ten tribes were presented as a geographic
problem, a matter of debate and of differing opinions. But their existence was
factual enough to be included in encyclopedias.
This shows to what degree the issue of the tribes’ location had become
common in global geographical writing. And the absence of Jewish sources in
Lampronti’s list exposes the momentous transformation that geographical
knowledge concerning the ten tribes had undergone. From late antiquity
to the late fifteenth century, geographical information about the ten tribes
could be found almost exclusively in Jewish sources: Josephus, the Talmud
and Midrash, medieval biblical exegeses, the travelers Eldad and Benjamin.
The few non-Jewish sources, such as John of Mandeville and Marco Polo,
derived their information, if indirectly, from Jewish lore. Beginning in the
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