China occupied a special place in these quests. The Alsatian rabbi Abra-
ham Stempel had also been there and claimed to have found the ten tribes.
Stempel’s trip, too, came in the context of upheaval—in his case, in the midst
of the Taiping Rebellion, a devastating wave of violence that shook China when
forces led by a man who claimed to be Jesus’s brother swept the country.^54
Stempel was allowed to join the British forces going to China, arriving in
Shanghai in 1860. His tale is not unlike that of Montezinos: the Alsatian
rabbi saw a “great river” that reminded him of the Sambatyon. But interesting-
ly, he places the ten tribes in the province of Sichuan, known for its cloudy
mountains—and allusion, perhaps, to the cloud that covered the ten tribes in
one of the Talmudic passages. And, as in Montezinos’s story, the ten tribes
were initially unwilling to engage. After some hesitant overtures, a mysterious
man admitted to Stempel that he was the local rabbi in a ten tribes community.
In conversation with this “Chinese rabbi,” Stempel learned that the communi-
ty was “of the ten tribes that were exiled by King Shalmaneser to Assyria, and
then moved eastward to China,” where they had lived for “ 2450 years.”
Stempel’s account of China during the rebellion seems fairly accurate, but
he was also a trickster with an agenda about the vexing problem of Jewish
assimilation into European gentile culture. The Chinese ten triber, so reported
Stempel, was very proud of the fact that, even after 2 , 450 years the ten tribes
had kept their traditions. “We heard,” he told Stempel, of “the [European
Jewish] desire to become like the [gentile] natives of the lands in Europe.” As
long as this was the situation, concluded the Chinese rabbi, no reunion with
the ten tribes was possible.^55 Stempel—who was from the German world,
where assimilative tendencies were strongest and conversion to Christianity
at a peak—was really after a powerful argument against Jewish assimilation.
Stempel’s report was published in 1864 in the Jewish journalha-Magid.It
was this report that prompted Haga, who never doubted it, to try to reach the
ten tribes in China, seeing it as a sign from God that he should go to China.^56
Haga suffered greatly on his trip, evading death by a hair on numerous
occasions. In one sense, Haga’s mission was successful: he managed to tour
huge swaths of territory and produced a detailed and largely accurate account
of turn-of-the-century China, which he sent to relatives in Europe. In broader
terms, though, the trip was less of a triumph. While Haga apparently did—to
his mind—find the offspring of the ten tribes, he had little chance to write
about his discovery. He sent only one report while still in China, and then he
disappeared. His relatives eventually surmised, but there is no evidence for
this, that he was ultimately captured by the “Wrestling Chinese” (the Boxers),
imprisoned, and tortured to death. Perhaps the Boxers mistook him for a
Christian missionary. The only trace left of his journey was that first report
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