the world that was ruled by the Persians and that some of the tribes were exiled “to
Afriki.” Three different figures are responsible for the African possibility as
we see it emerge during this period: Eldad, the first to speak explicitly about the
tribes in Africa; Rabbi Zemah Gaon, who turned this fantastic story into a legal
reality; and finally Benjamin, whose itinerary organized this possibility into
a coherent geography. This coherence of geography is possible thanks to what
historian David Abulafia identifies as the “lack of sharp lines” of demarcation or
boundaries, a lack that produced an array of political and cultural ambiguities
in medieval European geographical thinking writ large.^78
More than anyone before him, Benjamin was in dialogue with the geo-
graphical traditions of anoikoumenedominated by Islam and Christianity. This
did not, of course, transform the story of the ten lost tribes altogether, but
allowed for an intensive, often implicit dialogue between Jews and non-Jews
over the question of the ten tribes. Both regions were known as the limits of the
oldoikoumeneduring Roman times, and some of this status still lingered in
medieval times. Ethiopia enjoys a unique status in traditional Islamic law.
Before thehijra(migration) to Medina, Ethiopia was the first place to offer
haven to the early Muslims, who were persecuted in Mecca. Muhammad never
forgot this history. As a result, Ethiopia is neither of the house of Islam nor a
“land of war,” the only non-Muslim land in the world “immune from the
jihad.” “Leave the Abyssinians in peace, so long as they do not take the
offensive,” Muhammad is said to have declared in ahadithrecorded in the
eighth century.^79 Islam did not, however, leave the Abyssinians in peace so
quickly, and the several invasions of Ethiopia during the early phase of con-
quests failed miserably. Conversely, Islam expanded fast elsewhere in eastern
Africa. As a result, Ethiopia, the first Christian kingdom, became the symbol of
Christian resistance to Islam, and Europeans came to imagine it as a Christian
enclave, an enclosed nation, surviving within an Islamic territory. Central Asia,
as we have seen, is the original putative home of Prester John. The Central
Asian origins of an ancient group, the Scythians, would in the early modern
period give rise to the identification of them as the ten tribes. At the time of
Benjamin, however, this region had long been perceived as the original dwell-
ing place of many migrant groups and tribes that threatened the Islamic world,
such as Tartars, or Turks, and, soon, the Mongols.
The Mongols and Sambatyon
A century after Benjamin’s travels, the European perspective was quite differ-
ent. Famously, in 1241 , the Mongols appeared at the gates of Western Europe