Shomron (Returnees to Samaria), not far from ancient Samaria, the original
capital of the ten tribes—where it all began.
A well-known Talmudic proverb says: “He who loses one soul it is as if he has
lost the whole world.” Rearranged, there is a different truth in this phrase. Loss
creates whole worlds.
The story of the ten lost tribes is ultimately a story of profound loss, the
loss of a group of people, deported and disappeared. But the loss of the tribes
is not finished. It is not a past event but a living loss, sustained and felt
over millennia. With its multiple recordings, its inscription with theological,
geographical, and ultimately political import, it is a story encoded with
enduring meaning. It is not, however, only a story of loss. It is also a story of
creation. Once declared lost, the ten tribes went on to create, time and again,
the edges of the earth and the boundaries of the world; they have conjured into
existence whole places, such as Arzareth and Sambatyon; charted paths of
supposed migration across the face of the earth; built land bridges between
Asia and Europe and the Americas; inscribed real places with meaning and
rendered them intelligible. The ten tribes have provided centuries of world
travelers with itineraries and meaning. Whole peoples have been imbued
with meaning through reference to them. They have promised the hope of
redemption and humanity’s unity.
This book has been concerned with the history of this story, a history that,
as we have seen, moved from despair to hope; from here-and-now hope to
eschatology and messianism; from messianism to romanticism and adventure.
Ultimately, it moved to political resolution. But overall, the element that has
lent the story its enduring power, that has transcended history, is loss.
The profundity of this loss is reflected in the frequency with which some
observers of the Holocaust—like Avigdor Shahan, whose young friends were
murdered in their desperate flight from the Nazis across the Dneister River,
their Sambatyon—invoked the lost tribes in the effort to explain their grief.
By mid-December 1942 , the Jews confined by the Nazis to the Warsaw ghetto
had a fairly clear idea of what was going on in Treblinka, the camp to which
Jews from Warsaw were sent. German evacuations of the ghetto were well
under way, and earlier that month, 2 , 000 children had been taken away to be
gassed. Historian Emanuel Ringelblum ( 1900 – 1944 ), who was also confined
to the ghetto, meticulously documented the horrors around him. The chil-
dren’s parents feared the worst, but allowed themselves some slim hope.
Ringelblum comments on the Jewish refusal to believe that so many of
their number were being lost. He entitled his diary entry for December 15 ,
1942 , “The Ten Tribes”: