own land.... I will save them out of all their dwelling places, wherein they
have sinned, and will cleanse them: so shall they be my people, and I will be
their God” (Ezekiel 37 : 16 – 23 ).
Lampronti’s strange phrase “accordingprincipallyto... Ezekiel 37 ”—as
opposed to other prophecies of return—begs some consideration. Why not
Isaiah? Why only Ezekiel, and why “principally”? The answer perhaps becomes
clearer if we think in light of the problem of locating the tribes in the context of
modern geography. Recall that Isaiah—the master of latter-day visions—
speaks of a highway bringing the ten tribes from specific geographic locations
(Assyria, beyond Euphrates, from the isles of the sea, from the north). Ezekiel,
on the other hand, typically talks about a reunion in dramatic visual—and
abstract—terms. Whereas Isaiah builds a highway to facilitate the tribes’ return
from named locations, Ezekiel’s reunion is effected as simply and inexplicably
as the two sticks merging in his hand. Lampronti, acutely aware of the
problems of locating the ten tribes in the discovered and cartographized
world, prefers this presentation. He, too, feels the need to escape geography:
“If someone, after all, still wonders how come these ten tribes can remain
hidden from the eyes of the geographers, particularly after the last navigations,
please consider how could the region of Las Batuec ̧as, in the kingdom of Leon,
between Salamaca and Placentia, remain hidden in the middle of Spain until
the time of Philip the Second.”^27
In other words, the familiar old hiddenness of the tribes did not derive
from some sort of mystical invisibility or enclosedness as Esdras, Eldad, Postel,
and many others had implied, but was simply a failure of modern geography.
Indeed, the modern navigations Lampronti mentions had made the tribesmore
hidden, because they had failed to produce them. This failure of geography
might in turn produce a failure of faith—one that Lampronti hastens to
remedy (in his readers and perhaps also in himself) with a return to scripture.
But whereas Isaiah might lead us back to geographical conundrums because of
his mention of specific locations, the more general and mystical Ezekiel does
not bother us with specific geography.
The failure of modern navigations to find the tribes brought with it the
final dimension of their lostness: over time, with progress, the tribes became
more lost in that even the most self-confident, scientific, geographical methods
and the close of the Age of Discovery had failed to point decisively to where
they were. The mystery had grown more mysterious than ever. Was there still
out there on the globe one place which had, against all odds, yet to be
discovered, traveled, and mapped? The sixteenth-century rabbi Maharal had
implied that an infinite number of new worlds might lie out there as yet
undiscovered; Lampronti already knows that this proposition is impossible.
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