In 1837 , the Reverend Jacob Samuel set out from Tehran to the Caucasus,
looking to see if the ten tribes were still in their oldest “place of hiding” since
biblical times. In hisRemnant Found,in which he recounts having found the
ten tribes in the contemporary Jewish community of Dagestan, Samuel pre-
sents a long and coherent case in support of the claim, drawing on a wide range
of sources.^48 Samuel, like Wolff a Jew who converted to Christianity, was
determined:
This discovery of the Ten Tribes at the present important crisis [the
rivalry between Russia and Britain] must appear a wonderful event.
The preservation of them through so many ages, in the very heart of
their enemies, must be acknowledged as a most signal act of Divine
Providence; and we need no stronger or more convincing proof of the
time of their restoration being at hand, when they shall be taken from
the place of their interment for near two thousand five hundred years,
and be restored to their own land.^49Once again, the question of exile had returned. And for nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century Jews, a way to solve it seemed increasingly close to
hand.
Wolff and Samuel escaped death, but Uziel Haga, who went to find the
tribes in China, was not as fortunate.^50 In 1900 , U.S. president William
McKinley ( 1843 – 1901 ) gave Haga, an Orthodox Jew who was an Eastern
European immigrant to Boston, permission to join the U.S. military and relief
forces being sent to China. Haga claimed that he had proof that the ten lost
tribes of Israel were hiding there; he wanted the chance to find them. The time
and the place of the mission were highly significant. Over a year earlier, the
militarized religious sect known as the Society of Right and Harmonious Fists
(Chinese,Yihe tuan) had erupted in China, triggering a wave of anti-foreign
and anti-Christian violence that sent shock waves throughout the world. The
mysterious Boxers, poorly armed but fully motivated with “fanatic zeal,” killed
about 230 foreigners, mostly missionaries, and tens of thousands of Chinese
Christians. At the peak of the rebellion, they invaded Beijing and besieged the
foreign embassies quarter. The Boxers believed themselves immune to West-
ern weaponry and employed traditional martial arts.^51
To the outside world, it seemed that the Boxers had appeared out of
nowhere. Thus, Haga, an American Jew, decided that the mysterious, violent,
anti-Christian, militarized movement was connected with the ten tribes. Vari-
ous sources had placed the ten tribes in China since as early as the eighth-
century Midrash. Many exegetes had insisted that Sinim in Isaiah’s vision of
redemption, from whence the ten tribes were to return, was China. Other