So he takes a different tack, reminding his readers that even within the finite
and fully exposed world, there could yet be places not out in the open.
As we reached the end of the eighteenth century and entered the age of
romanticism and romantic adventure, here was a final reason to go on search-
ing. If, earlier, the whole point was tofindthe tribes, in the romantic era the
point of attraction was perhaps their verylostness.The lostness of the ten tribes,
first encoded by Isaiah in the context of ancient Judah in the Assyrian world,
had now taken on its final dimensions.
Adventurers, Romantics, and Romantic Travel
In the romantic era, and particularly in the era of romantic travel, even if one
were not particularly invested in bringing the ten tribes back because of some
grandiose theological purpose, one looked for them simply because they were
an item to be found, something to report in the travel diary. They were
mysterious and the search for them exciting. At the very least, there was an
expectation that a traveler would make ironic mention of whether or not he had
run into them. Fictional romantic travel accounts routinely included an en-
counter with the ten lost tribes. Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Mu ̈nchhausen
( 1720 – 1797 ), famous for his unbelievable feats (and the syndrome named after
them), recounts inMu ̈nchhausen at the Pole:
I am not so strict a Christian but I can fraternally embrace a Jew. Here
I had stumbled upon the ten tribes of Israel unaccounted for in
Scripture, who had existed here under the good old law unknown to all
the world: in truth, they believed no nation existed but themselves.
Their temple was [a] fac-simile of that built by Solomon the apostate. I
intended to have sketched it, but as Saint Martin’s church is an exact
resemblance, I spared myself the trouble. These good people direct[ed]
my course to the north.^28
Other fictional travelers followed protocol and came across the tribes as well.
Don Manuel Alvarez Epriella, the fictional Spanish traveler created by the roman-
tic poet Robert Southey ( 1774 – 1843 ), is described as touring England in 1814.
Epriella/Southey writes of a visit to the Jewish quarter of an undisclosed English
town. There, he says, “I saw so many Hebrew inscriptions in the shop windows,
and so many long beards in the streets, I began to fancy that I had discovered the
ten tribes.”^29 Southey, of course, did not really think one could find the tribes. For
him, they represented the ultimate example of something that is gone, a fantasy
never to return.^30 An 1835 novel about the notorious pirate Blackbeard (Edward