interpretation, thereby affirming the monopoly on the interpretation of scrip-
ture claimed by the rabbinic establishment. For all of these reasons, these
“slight” discrepancies must be explained and accounted for. The Qayrawanis
speak of their “bewilderment” (temihah gedolah) upon learning of them.
The Qayrawani report indicates that much of the encounter between Eldad
and his hosts revolved around Eldad’s language:
[His is] neither the language of Ethiopia nor the language of Ishmael,
but Hebrew alone, and the Hebrew that he speaks contains words that
we have never heard. Thus, he calls a dove “tintar,” a bird he calls
“requt,” for pepper he says “darmos.” Of such as these, we have
written down many from his mouth, because we pointed the matter
out to him and he told us the name in the sacred language, and we
wrote it down.
The Qayrawanis served as linguistic anthropologists, taking meticulous
notes and examining the stranger’s Hebrew. In another place in their report,
they added, “Among [the ten tribes] there are no wild beasts and no impure, but
only cattle. There are no insects and no creeping things.... They reap and sow
themselves, for they have no slaves.”^44 The Qayrawanis interrogated Eldad
extensively about the rituals of the tribes.
All of this information was generated by a desire to know (Jewish) life in its
primordial form. As an Israelite whose people had been in total isolation for
over a millennium, Eldad represented a pure form of existence, a sort of control
group for Jewish development, the ultimate survival, uncorrupted by years of
encounters with foreign peoples, untainted by the yoke of non-Jewish rules.
For the Qayrawanis, Eldad represented authenticity, an opportunity to get in
touch with their own past as Israelites.
The Qayrawanis’ questions present a research protocol that would guide
future encounters with the ten tribes. In this early phase of ten-tribes-ism, it
was basic. In its more elaborate form, this protocol would come to demand the
extensive search for traces—for instance, of “Yahwehisms” among indigenous
tribes all over the globe. Hebrew was from the start an important feature of this
practice. The search for traces of Hebrew guided many such anthropologists as
they encountered Native Americans.^45 The Irishman James Adair ( 1709 – 1783 ),
for instance, based most of his well-known 1775 History of the American Indians
on attempts to show affinities between Hebrew and Native American lan-
guages: “The Indian dialects, like the Hebrew language, have a nervous and
emphatical manner of expression.... Their style is adorned with images, com-
parisons, and strong metaphors like the Hebrews.”^46 Another example is the
work of the Jesuit ethnologist Joseph J. Williams ( 1875 – 1940 ),Hebrewisms of