became again the domain of Jews. Seven centuries after Benjamin of Tudela
undertook to find the tribes in Asia, a Jew who converted to Christianity,
resumed the search. Joseph Wolff ( 1795 – 1862 ) is perhaps the nineteenth-
century figure most associated with romantic missionary travel and the quest
for the restoration of the ten lost tribes.^40 Born in a small town in Bavaria, the
son of a rabbi, David Wolff, Joseph called himself a “restored Israelite,” after
baptized into Roman Catholicism in 1812. Perhaps he was echoing the afore-
mentioned idea of conversion to Christianity as “restoration” articulated by
earlier theologians in the seventeenth-century.
Originally planning to be a Jesuit missionary, Wolff spent several years
learning Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean, and Syriac. In England, he joined the
Anglican Church and was naturalized as a British subject. The declared
purpose of his Oriental studies was to “preach to the Jews” in the “east.” And
indeed, he spent most of the 1820 s in the Middle East, preaching to everyone:
“Jews, Mohammedans, and other Sects.” But what gained him fame in Eng-
land and the United States, and among missionary circles worldwide, was a
lifetime of searching for the ten tribes all over Central Asia, Afghanistan, and
India.^41 There is perhaps no one more responsible than Wolff for making
eastern Persia, India, the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, and above all
Afghanistan hunting grounds for the ten tribes.^42 Wolff explained the impetus
for his travels:
In the first place, it was my earnest desire to make known to my
brethren of the Jewish nation, Jesus Christ.... Besides this, I often
asked myself, how my brethren fare, whose ancestors were scattered,
after the captivity of Babylon: those tribes of Israel, who, according to
the sacred oracles, shall be united to the house of Judah; and whose
present abode is a matter of speculation among many Christian
Divines, and Jewish Rabbies. The latter assign to them a fabulous
country, which they call “The land of darkness, beyond the Sabbathical
river.” Benjamin Tudela, and the Jews of Jerusalem boldly asserted,
that they were residing at Halah and Habor, which they state to be the
present Balkh and Bokhara. In the year 1829 , being then at Jerusalem,
I said to my wife, “Bokhara and Balkh are very much in my mind, for
I think I shall there find the Ten Tribes.” “Well,” she replied, “I have no
objection to your going there.”^43
Armed with Christian zeal, a training in both Jewish and Christian scrip-
tural traditions, and a love of what today would be called “exotic” travel (not to
mention an amenable spouse), Wolff was fueled perhaps most of all by his own
Jewish roots. He wrote his first memoir (of four) at the age of twenty-nine; he