All earlier speculation about the ten tribes had understood their lostness as
a geographic matter—they were beyond impassable barriers (a wide river, a
range of mountains), or in another land, or in Sambatyon, enchanted domains
that represented the edges of the earth. But by the mid-seventeenth century,
with the realization that the world has no real edges—humans could inhabit its
every corner—the ten tribes became lost notbeyondthe world, butinthe world.
The ten tribes ceased to be “spatially transcendent” and became lost instead in
an “immanent” world with no geographical “beyond.”^5
Biblical and, later, Talmudic and medieval discussions placed the ten tribes
outside the world in which these discussions took place—some by enclosing
them, others by placing them literally beyond the world’s limits or on its edges.
Before the early modern period, the ten tribes were simply lost, invisible, hidden,
beyond, or enclosed. In this regard, late sixteenth-century debates about the ten
tribes—which placed them in America or in northern Asia—can be viewed as
transitional. The beyondness of America, even the mini-beyondness of the
Canaries, was an important factor in the debate about these places as possible
residences of the ten tribes. As we have seen in the cases of Ortelius and Postel,
northern Asia was imbued with many old and familiar markers, and the north to
which the ten tribes were assigned was in large part a mystical and almost
unreachable one. More than a real place, it was where the tribes “sing to God.”
Yet the Canaries and America were, at the same time, real places which had been
“discovered.” They, by definition, were no longer beyond the world.
Of course, the old beyondness of the ten tribes did not disappear complete-
ly. It still worked well as a poetic metaphor, as exemplified in Milton’s famous
Paradise Regained:
Deliverance of thy brethren, those Ten Tribes
Whose offspring in his territory yet serve
In Habor, and among the Medes dispersed:
The sons of Jacob, two of Joseph, lost
Thus long from Israel, serving, as of old
Their fathers in the land of Egypt served,
This offer sets before thee to deliver.
These if from servitude thou shalt restore
To their inheritance, then, nor till then,
Thou on the throne of David in full glory,
From Egypt to Euphrates and beyond.^6
This is poetry. But in reality, the beyond that began as a mere geographic
notation, and that was later transformed into an “iron curtain” of sorts, had
dissipated by the seventeenth century.