ThePost-angel’s answer also shows the method of searching to have changed:
to find the tribes, look for the “greatest agreement in practice” and compare the
laws and customs of many nations so as to sleuth out the tribes among them.
By the eighteenth century, no group was really lost any more in the simple
sense of that word. All human groups were either already found or, at least in
theory, findable, discovered or discoverable. Paradoxically, this in a sense
rendered the ten tribes more lost than ever.
Finding the ten tribes now also meantidentifyingthem. In the early six-
teenth century, a cosmographer like Abraham Farissol could engage the simple
question of the tribes’ location. It was assumed that, if they could physically be
found, they’d be instantly recognizable. By the early 1700 s, after more than a
century of debate over the Native Americans and other newly discovered
groups, the ten tribes had moved from world history as the history of the
globe to world history as human history, and the tribes’ own history had been
normalized: they had been exiled, had migrated ever farther, and in the course
of movement through time and space had undergone various social and cultur-
al transformations. Consequently, discussions about them had come to involve
not only earlier questions about world geography, but also questions about
global human migration, cultural practices, and languages. Spanish discus-
sions had revolved largely around questions relating to the shape of the world—
as the discussions of Atlantis, Greenland, the Straits of Anian, and the Canaries
exemplify. Next, ethnography of a sort was increasingly the pivot. Now, the
moral and cultural status of the tribes emerged as the new concern.
Before the Americas theory, the expectation had been to find an intact
Israelite entity. In the Americas in the sixteenth century, however, empirical
experience led to the notion that the ten tribes had lost their old customs, and it
was the question of their Israelite-ness that drove the ethnographic and lin-
guistic investigations. Now, in the 1700 s, a new frame emerged: the ten tribes
had been “heatheniz’d”; the tribes had somehow fallen from grace but had not
physically disappeared. No matter that the whole world had been discovered
and held no further unknown peoples. The tribes were here among us, hidden,
waiting to be redeemed. Rather than geographic knowledge extinguishing
the possibility that the tribes were actually out there, it paradoxically increased
it. The idea that the ten tribes had evolved culturally opened the door
to an exciting new possibility: if they had changed over time and were the
descendants of earlier peoples, it was possible that recognized world nations—
anyone, perhaps even the Britons themselves!—could be the descendants of
the ten lost tribes. The ten tribes had become truly global: anyone could be a
candidate. The idea of cultural change preserved the lostness of the ten tribes,
transforming it into a new question, more complicated than its predecessor.
lu
(lu)
#1