Furthermore, generations of scholars had already established the northern
affinity of the ten tribes. “The identity is obvious. The British Isles are to the
North west of Palestine—they are ‘afar off’ from there—they are in the
‘Western Seas’ and they constitute most emphatically a ‘North Country.’”^117
Carpenter and Hine did a sufficiently good job of establishing the identity
of the ten tribes as the Anglo-Saxons who resided in the British isles, but not of
explaining how they got there. The story of Israel’s path to the isles still needed
to be detailed. In 1881 , a fascinating study of Israel’s wanderings from Palestine
to isles in the northwest was published under the pseudonym “Oxonian.” Its
purpose was “to work out a connected account of the Wanderings of the Lost
Tribes between Palestine and Britain, which will at least show the possibility,
historical and ethnological, of our Identity with Israel.” And indeed,Israel’s
Wanderingstold a story of migrations to Europe in different stages: first from
Palestine to Arzareth, somewhere in Asia north of the Black Sea; then from
Arzareth—led by Odin through Scandinavia—to the British isles. The author
made brilliant use of the contemporary modern historiography of European
migrations, which had traced back to Asia the roots of most European lan-
guages and, therefore, ethnic groups. However, he was careful to suggest that
philology’s authority should be questioned: “The theory on which philology has
been resting hitherto—namely, that language is a certain test of race—has
been entirely cut away by the recent declarations of eminent philologists, that
language is only a sure test of social contact.” Languages do not constitute races; at
best, linguistic similarities can convey contacts between peoples and cultures.
Therefore, he concluded, “there is noknownfact in the sciences of race and
language which is violated by the supposition that the British belong to the
Hebrew race.”^118 Oxonian was well versed in nineteenth-century European
debates on the relationships among race, religion, language, and philology.^119
The desire to identify the inhabitants of the British isles with Israel was so
strong that Oxonian developed an elaborate story. It told how the tribe of Dan,
which we first met in Ethiopia, arrived in the isles well before the rest of the
other tribes and spawned the ancient Celtic culture. This contravened the
biblical story that mentions a mysterious migration of the tribe of Dan at
some point in early Israelite history. Eldad had used this story to establish
his Danite identity somewhere in Ethiopia. A millennium later, the same point
was used to establish a Celto-Israelite identity. Dan is the “remnant that
escaped” the Assyrian calamity.^120 The rest of the tribes follow the more
familiar story and arrive in Britain, now as Scythians, between the eighth
and the eleventh centuries. In the previous period, these Scytho-Israelites
inhabited the original biblical locations of northern Persia and then northern
Asia. Oxonian diligently showed that the description of migration in Esdras,
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