The ten tribes, it seems, had a monopoly on lostness and on the condition
of being lost in an unknown country. Defoe was perhaps not surprised to see
that the first modern comprehensive history of the Jews had been authored by a
Huguenot refugee, Jacques Basnage ( 1653 – 1723 ), who settled in the Nether-
lands.^22 Basnage, who was undoubtedly inspired by Calvin’s emphasis on
schisms, wrote of the “body of ten tribes [that] remained in the schism.”^23
His favorite term for the tribes was “Schismaticks.”^24 The schism of the tribes
was not merely a singular event in history, but acondition of existence—and
mending the schism would come to be a hugely important goal.
Jews and the ten tribes featured still more prominently in early modern
scenarios of a millenarian or messianic nature, as is well researched.^25 Jews
and their conversion were central in almost every one. “The conversion of the
Jews in the 16 th and 17 th centuries was part of a package of ideas about the
approaching end of the world and the millennium,” the most popular target
years for which fell between 1650 and 1666.^26 The conversion of the ten tribes
was depicted as a harbinger of the conversion of their brethren from the
remaining two.
In Jewish millenarian thinking, too, the tribes featured prominently.
Waves of messianic expectation had erupted periodically since the expulsion
from Spain in 1492. As we have seen, the appearance of David Reuveni in Italy
and Portugal in the 1520 s and 1530 s entailed and fed a particularly acute
messianic aspiration among Portuguese conversos. The seventeenth century
was even more turbulent. The 1648 pogroms in the Ukraine brought a wave of
messianic expectations that culminated in the appearance of Sabbatai Zvi
( 1626 –c. 1676 ) in various parts of the Ottoman Empire just before the crucial
year 1666. As Gershom Scholem has shown, the ten tribes surfaced repeatedly
in the two decades before Zvi’s rise.
Various European Christian theologians and millenarians listened atten-
tively to the Jewish rumors about the coming of the ten tribes. While Jewish
sources were not fully explicit about the arrival of the ten tribes, Christian
rumors were unambiguous.^27 While the ten tribes issue was not particularly
salient in the messianic message of Sabbatai Zvi, certain Christian observers of
the movement were more than ready to insert it. The man most associated with
rumors about the appearance of the ten tribes during the days of the Sabba-
taian movement was Peter Serrarius ( 1600 – 1669 ), who, only a decade before,
was engaged with others in a dialogue with Manasseh Ben-Israel,^28 who stood
at the center of this cultural climate of intense interest in the ten tribes.
Ben-Israel’sHope of Israeland the circumstances of its writing and publi-
cation in 1650 first belong to the Spanish phase of the ten tribes’ history. Both
Ben-Israel and his hero, Antonio Montezinos/Aharon ha-Levi, came out of the
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