Jewish sources had depicted a violent appearance of the ten tribes as the first
step in the redemptive process that would usher in the coming of the Messiah.
Could it be that the Boxer Rebellion was the beginning of the messianic
process?
The violence was put down by international forces led by Britain, among
them a rather small U.S. contingent. Haga went with this latter group. He
tells us that he begged McKinley—“sobb[ing] in front of the president”—that
he be allowed to go with the Americanships. McKinley “willingly” agreed,
equipping Haga with a special letter explaining his mission and even paying
all of his expenses. This was the immediate context of Haga’s mission.
However, it had a much longer history. Haga was not just going to search
for the ten tribes. He was going to bring them back. His “soul was yearning”
to make a “new covenant” (Berit Hadash) with the children of the “Ten Tribes
who were torn away from us, a huge tear that does not heal” (qeri‘ah gedolah
she’eina mita’aha).^52 One cannot miss the messianic overtones. The phrase
“new covenant” in this context speaksvolumes. The Bible tells the story of
the children of Israel as a series of progressing covenants with God—first
with Abraham, then with the whole people at Mount Sinai. After the flood,
God made a covenant with humanity and vowed not to destroy it again.
Haga’s mission, then, was to pave the way for a new covenant, by bringing
back the ten tribes and overcoming the Sambatyon. The only report Haga
managed to send to his relatives from China was entitled “The Book of the
New Covenant with the River Sambatyon in the Land of China.” The odd
phrase,a“covenantwith...Sambatyon,”callstomindthenotionofSambat-
yon as not only a place but also a condition—a utopian, but exiled, state of
existence.
Here, then, was the old messianic yearning for restitution through reunit-
ing with the ten tribes and an end to exile. We have considered here just some
of the many stories from Jewish tradition that had this as their theme. Such
quests had intensified in the nineteenth century in the wake of new messianic
expectations based on the calculations of the Vilna Gaon (Eliyahu ben Shlomo
Zalman; 1720 – 1797 ). The Gaon, one of the greatest and most powerful rabbin-
ic authorities in Eastern Europe and a central figure in the rise of Jewish
Orthodoxy, placed great importance on the return of the ten tribes as part of
the messianic process whose beginning, he predicted, was imminent. Arie
Morgenstern has shown that, in the Gaon’s view—and this was a true innova-
tion—the ten tribes were supposed to take an active part in the renewal of
Jewishpoliticalinstitutions as part of the redemptive process. This new inter-
pretation triggered a new, more intense interest in the tribes, involving mostly
writing and speculation but also some real attempts to find them.^53
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