The tale Shahan heard as a child displays the main features of the ten
tribes as imagined over centuries: martial, strong, always ready to show up or
to be found, never coming, and intimately connected to apocalyptic and
messianic visions dating back to the Middle Ages.^32 Such rumors were not
exclusive to Jews. Christians and Muslims, too, subscribed to them. And over
time, an array of peoples who were identified as being the tribes came to
subscribe to them as well.
The ten lost tribes story also lies behind a distinct genre of Indiana Jones-
type adventure fiction, on the rise since the early twentieth century. A good
instance isQuest for the Lost Tribes,a film by Simcha Jacobovici and Elliott
Halpern, one of the first in a career that has also produced a film on the lost
tomb of Jesus.^33 While not a focus of this book, some other examples are
illuminating. In one instance, Mark Lee’s 1998 The Lost Tribe,an expedition
comprising a relief worker, an anthropologist, a “black shaman,” and an
American journalist searches for the tribes in contemporary war-torn Africa,
encountering a variety of adventures and misadventures along the way.^34
Somtow Suchairtkul, in his 1988 sci-fi novel,The Aquiliad: Aquila in the New
World, imagines a Roman Empire that has expanded globally thanks to the
invention of steam power. The fictional Romans arrive in America, where they
experience a series of troublesome encounters—with Bigfoot, with space
aliens, with a time-traveler, and of course, with the ten lost tribes.^35
The origins of this specific literarytoposlie in the nineteenth century. In
some cases, the ten tribes served to promote a utopian social or religious order.
In 1901 , Father Thomas McGrady, a Catholic socialist priest from Kentucky,
situated a historical/utopian novel in “New Israel,” a “trans-arctic” kingdom
founded by the ten tribes, which had struggled against tyranny during Jero-
boam’s time.^36 In another “arctic” novel from 1903 , the MormonTrip to the
North Pole,a boat leaving San Francisco on April 16 , 1879 , drifts off course; its
sailors find themselves at the North Pole, where they find a mysterious
kingdom inhabited by the lost tribes, which “were sent to the Northwestern
part of Asia, and from there sent into the North Country.” The young widow of
King Manasherous (a clear allusion to the biblical Manasseh) rules. Her
husband had been murdered by the evil Captain Shenakeribous (an allusion
to Sennacherib, the Assyrian king who laid siege to Jerusalem in 701 bce),
who serves as the story’s villain. One Joe B. Lothare, a youth serving on the
boat, is the main hero and narrator. He immediately suspects that these are the
lost tribes and turns into a sort of anthropologist, whose main source of
ethnographic information is the Bible: “I refer to my Bible to investigate if
perchance this not be the Ten Tribes of Israel and I shall at least call them so,
from all these Bible readings and also on account of other information.”^37 The
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