The search for the ten tribes has provoked nothing if not anger and
pathologizing. In their lostness, the tribes share the basic quality that attaches
itself to other losses: Lemuria, Atlantis, the kingdom of Ophir, El Dorado,
the Holy Grail, aliens from outer space, Prester John, Noah’s Ark, the lost
ark of the covenant—even the lost records of Iowa’s Johnson County. These
are often dismissed as legendary, as mythic, or as “noble lies,” concern with
them understood, at least tacitly, as pathology or, at best, as a sort of parlor
pastime.
The ten lost tribes have long invited such dismissals. Chief among them is
Allen Godbey’s monumental 1930 study,The Lost Tribes a Myth: Suggestions
towards Rewriting Hebrew History,which took issue with the proliferation of
ethnographies suggesting or “proving” the claims that one or another ethnic
group was a lost tribe. Godbey’s 800 pages refuted the work of ethnologists and
anthropologists of all sorts who claimed to have discovered the lost tribes in
various corners of the earth, or to have identified traces of Jewish ritual in the
practices of certain ethnic groups. More hostile still was archaeologist Robert
Wauchope, who in 1962 publishedLost Tribes & Sunken Continents: Myth and
Method in the Study of American Indians.“Charlatan, clod and scholars alike—
[most] have shared... attitudes and personality traits that give them as a group,
a certain identity.... [W]hat theories are these that so capture imagination
and fierce allegiance, and what sort of man [is] so obsessed with mystic and
religious interpretations.”^61 Yet often, outright dismissal of the tribes brings to
the fore the history of the labors of loss surrounding them. In a way, Wauchope
and Godbey have in fact paved the way for this study, by struggling to find
the meeting point of academic study and the various forms of “labors of loss”
represented by the predecessors they find vexing.
The Geographical Theology of the Ten Lost Tribes
Suppose an extensive continent, a new world, should have been recently
discovered, north east of Media, and at the distance of a year and half’s
journey from thence, inhabited by people whose religion is pure Theism.
—Barbara Simon,Hope of Israel( 1829 )
Where are the ten lost tribes? There is a strong complementary relationship
between theology and geography. Theological considerations frame the
tribes’ condition of simultaneous lostness and findability. The place of exile,
while difficult to find, is real—it is somewhere on earth, a real, if occluded,
geographic terrain. The possibility, indeed promise, that the tribes will be