MR. BENNETT Will you find them?
MR. STANLEY I will, sir.
MR. BENNETT Start immediately; draw on me as large a sum as
you like, and don’t come back until you have found all the Ten Tribes,
whom you must send to America as speedily as possible. And Mr. Stanley
takes the first boat—anywhere; and depend on it, the news will soon be
flashing along the line: “Glory! I have just found Tribe Number One.
The Reubenites are well, and send congratulations!”^37By the nineteenth century, a quasi-ironic culture had developed around the
search for the ten tribes, a precursor of the adventure stories that would center
on them decades later. This culture was so prevalent as to generate countless
parodies, sarcastic asides, and other popular cultural references.
Increasingly, the tribes existed in the realm of cavaliers and “Quixotism,”
and the search for them was considered a titillating adventure. A good example
is Ben Aronin’s fictional hero Raphael Drale, who searches for the lost tribes in
one of the earliest Jewish science fiction books.^38 But still, at least a small part
of the titillation lay in the possibility of their really existing. The 1903 A Trip
to the North Pole; or, The Discovery of the Ten Tribes, as Found in the Arctic Oceanby
O. J. S. Lindelof was an adventure story, to be sure. But its Mormon author was
quite serious about the theory that the tribes were at the North Pole. He was
religious, but his decision to dress up his argument as an adventure book was
connected to the romantic aspect that the search for the lost tribes had taken on.
Increasingly, though, as adventure and romantic discovery became their
context, the tribes were relegated to the realms of fantasy and fiction. An 1837
history of global circumnavigation criticized the fantastic depictions of Tahiti
by the French Louis Antoine de Bougainville ( 1729 – 1811 ). Obviously hostile to
and critical of the idea of French circumnavigation, its English author com-
pared Bougainville’s reports to “tale[s] better fitted for the dark times and
heated imaginations of the earliest adventurers; when Juan Ponce de Leon
sailed in search of the Fountain of Youth; when golden regions were sought for
every day; and when the lost tribes of Israel were so often found in the Islands
of the Caribbean Sea, or on the shores of Tierra Firme.”^39 The ten tribes,
increasingly, were for cranks.
The Search Returns to the Jews
The search for the tribes had begun in Africa and Asia and, with the British
Empire, had returned there. So, too, in the wake of empire, active searching