Genebrardus, quotingEsdrasconcerning the wandering of the 10
tribes, saith, theArsarethisTartaria the Greaterand from thence they
went to Greenland.^53Ben-Israel also turns to more accepted scripture: “You must know that the
ten tribes were not carried away at the same time...as I shew in the 2 nd part of
my Reconciler [Conciliador].”^54 At the same time, Ben-Israel resorts to contem-
porary geography in order to explain what happened next:
I could easily believe the 10 tribes as they increased in number, so they
spread into more Provinces before mentioned, and intoTartary.For
Abraham Ortelius in his Geography of the world, and Map ofTartary,
he notes the place of [the] Danites, which he calls the Horde, which is
the same [as] the HebrewJerida,signifyingA descent.And lower, he
mentions the Horde of Naphtali.^55Ben-Israel is able to place the ten tribes in every place ever suggested. As
Conciliadorharmonized conflicting biblical verses,Hope of Israelreconciled the
geographical conflicts of the ten tribes story: some remnants of the tribes are
behind the Sambatyon, some in China, some in Tartary, some in Ethiopia, and
some in America. Rather than decide which of the conflicting sources is
correct, Ben-Israel establishes that theyallare. Accordingly, one could say
thatHope of Israelis a sort of an irenicon, an instrument of peace, expanding
the common ground between Jews and Christians and reconciling conflicting
opinions.^56 Ben-Israel is happy to use the apocryphal Esdras as a hermeneuti-
cal device; if the ten moved once, they must have moved again—and again.
Esdras’s logic served Ben-Israel well. If different parts of the tribes
were wandering, there was no contradiction between the accounts placing
them in different locations. The image that emerges is of nothing short
of a global migration. Ben-Israel never got to write his intended world history
of the Jews, butHope of Israelis a seventeenth-century world geography,
narrated through the search for the lost tribes—a cosmo-geography of loss.
In Farissol’sIgeret(which he cites), the ten tribes are in the old southern
location somewhere between Arabia and India. The meticulous Farissol
had little to contend with. In Ben-Israel’s account, they are everywhere. His
account reflects the various opinions that had proliferated in the century since
Farissol. In sum, “[t]he Tribes are not in one place, but in many; because
the prophets have foretold their return shall be into their Country, out of divers
places.”^57
Thus, it was in terms of the geography of the ten tribes that Ben-Israel
deviated from the Talmudic formula of a single location behind the Sambat-