Hebraist practices produced a wealth of new material on the ten tribes,
marking the beginning of a direct, if not quite transparent, dialogue between
Jews and Christians over the subject. As we have seen, Jewish and Christian
discussions about the ten tribes had long been carried out on separate tracks.
From this moment on, they would proceed through a more intense and direct
dialogue concerning not just their location but the meaning of their story as
well. If up until now only Jews discussed the tribes in terms of loss, from
now on the implications of their disappearance would be a Christian question
as well.
Only two decades prior, in the midst of David Reuveni’s escapade in Italy,
Abraham Farissol had gleefully noted that “now” the Christians “knew” about
the ten tribes. Farissol’s contentment underestimated the long history of
Christian sentiments about the ten tribes, yet suggests that the inclusion of
the tribes in hiscosmographia—a narrated cartography of the world—was part
of an ongoing Jewish-Christian dialogue over, among other things, the issue of
the ten tribes. The appearance of Arzareth in a cosmography prepared by a
Christian Hebraist signals the shift of geographical speculation about the ten
tribes from being an almost exclusively Jewish exercise to a Christian one as
well. This was one of many major shifts in the debate that came in the early
modern period.
Just as the Jewish and Christian texts and ideas engaged one another, so did
geography and biblical studies. Moreover, European geography during the period
was in many respects a religious, sacred project. Cosmographies were “the
discourse that brought together celestial and geographic exploration, represented
space and scale, and theorized the place of humans within nature.”^43 One’s
religious beliefs shaped one’s geography. During the sixteenth century, there
was also no “clear-cut distinction between cosmography and geography”; the two
terms “coincided in the writing of world geographies.” Geographer John Short
aptlyreferstoMu ̈nster and others as “cosmo-geographers” writing “geographies
of the world,” and defines their work as “adapting the cosmographical project to
write universal geographies at a time when the known world was rapidly increas-
ing in size and complexity.”^44 Mu ̈nster’s cosmography, a popular book published
numerous times well into the seventeenth century, was “an eclectic collection of
material, some old, some new, part old myth, part new fact.”^45 The 1628 edition of
his cosmography, for instance, identified the newly explored Southeast Asian
kingdom of Siam with the legendary Ophir.^46 This description is quite apt when
we come to evaluate the way in which Mu ̈nster, “a prisoner of classical errors and
medieval prejudice,” as Short mercilessly defines him, inscribed Arzareth on his
map.^47 “Arsare[t]” is seemingly no different than most of its other place names, a
mere notation with no boundaries or any other special markings or explanations.
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