From thence [Hamadan] it takes four days to Tabaristan, which is
situated on the river Gozan. Some 4 , 000 Jews live there.... Thence it
is seven days to Ghaznah the great city on the river Gozan, where there
are about 80 , 000 Israelites.... Thence it is five days to Samarkand,
which is the great city [in] the confines of Persia. In it live some
50 , 000.... Thence it is four days’ journey to Tibet, the country in
whose forests the musk is found.^62The dramatic move from real to ambiguous geography is palpable and
leaps out with the utterly out-of-context reference to Tibet. Benjamin is not yet
talking about the ten tribes, but what is already striking is the number of
“Israelites” (as opposed to “Jews”). As Benjamin moves discursively east, the
numbers grow from communities of up to several thousand Jews in Iraq to
communities of tens of thousands of Israelites in eastern Iran. Josephus’s “ten
tribes beyond the Euphrates, countless myriads whose numbers cannot be
ascertained” come to mind. One can sense that we are near ten tribes territory
with Benjamin’s choice of the phrase “the confines of Persia.”^63 Indeed, the
River Gozan, it seems, is the main axis of Benjamin’s geography:
Thence it takes twenty-eight days to the mountains of Naisabur by the
river Gozan. And there are men of Israel in the land of Persia who say
that in the mountains of Naisabur four of the tribes of Israel dwell,
namely, the tribe of Dan, the tribe of Zebulun, the tribe of Asher, and
the tribe of Naphtali, who were included in the first captivity of
Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, as it is written ( 2 Kings 17 : 11 ): “And he
put them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan and in the cities
of the Medes.” The extent of their land is twenty days’ journey, and
they have cities and large villages in the mountains; the river Gozan
forms the boundary on the one side. They are not under the rule of the
Gentiles, but they have a prince of their own, whose name is R. Joseph
Amarkala the Levite. There are scholars among them. And they sow
and reap and go forth to war as far as the land of Cush by way of the
desert.^64While the specific geographic identification comes from the biblical exege-
sis on the place name in 2 Kings, it is obvious that the most basic source for
information in this passage is Eldad. Benjamin’s four tribes are the same as in
Eldad’s story, as is the size of the tribes’ land—“twenty days’ journey.”^65 So too
the insistence that they “are not under the rule of the Gentiles,” the mention
that there are “scholars among them,” and the description of how they “go
forth to war as far as the land of Cush by way of the desert.” Suddenly, a real