Global Empire, the Ten Tribes, and Knowledge
The author of this anonymous query was not alone in his interest. Such queries
and commentaries appeared regularly in English publications of all sorts, for
both “the Gentleman” and “the Lady” reader. Asking about the ten tribes was in
part a matter of “universal entertainment,” as thePost-angel’s subtitle suggests,
and is a symptom of the emergence in the seventeenth century of a lay or
secular interest in the lost tribes. This is not to imply that the concerned
individuals were not religious or faithful; most probably, the overwhelming
majority were. Rather, the interest stemmed from titillated curiosity and was
not part of a broader theological quest. Learning about issues such as the tribes
was considered part of the English’s universal, that is, global education.^1
We have noted the popularity and authority of Abraham Ortelius’sTheater
of the World.The first (among many) English editions was published in London
in 1601.^2 “Whither went the ten tribes?” was a question in the purview of world
geography and also an “entertainment,” in the eighteenth-century sense. Com-
mon among queries to such publications as thePost-angelwere “where was the
soul of Lazarus while he lay in the grave?” and “[do] fleas have stings?” For
Britons of the less sophisticated sort, the ten tribes belonged in this same realm
of entertainment.
The answer to the ten tribes question, however, was not of interest only to
“rural Saxons.”^3 There was an avid higher-brow audience as well. Contempo-
raneous with thePost-angel,the brothers John (fl. 1690 – 1714 ) and Awnsham
Churchill (c. 1681 – 1728 ) publishedA Collection of Voyages,a widely subscribed
geographic journal with frequent notations about the tribes. Its circulation list
included “commissioners from the admiralty,” attorneys, attorneys general,
ministers, booksellers, merchants, and nobles.^4 John Churchill was at some
point in his career a politician, and he was well and widely connected. Geo-
graphical literature was wildly popular at the time, and most of its consumers
read religious literature as well.
The question “where are the ten tribes?”—with us since biblical times—
has undergone many transformations of context. The editorial observation that
the question was “not so difficult” did not, paradoxically, imply that its answer
was known; John Dunton ( 1659 – 1733 ), the journal’s editor, doesn’t actually say
where the tribes are. Rather, the answer was not so difficult in that, by the early
eighteenth century, there was an abundance of knowledge available to anyone
who wished to ponder it. Jewish and Christian views about the ten tribes had
meshed to a considerable degree (though they did not assign the same mean-
ing to the question), providing by way of answer a dense body of knowledge.