he had sent to his relations, which was published in 1906 with Stempel’s
original account. The jacket copy read:
In this book one tourist will tell how he traveled with the forces of the
armies of America with the permission of President McKinley to
trace the sealed and the hidden of the Kingdom of the Chinese during
the war of the European kings in the year 1900 in China. He will
describe reliably the history of this pagan and savage people; their
customs, processions, laws, war stratagems, etc. etc. etc., and will shed
bright light on the Jews that are to be found there, and will prove with
clear cut signs and paragons that they are the true descendants of the
Ten Tribes exiled by the King of Assyria to Lahlah and Habor. He will
also resolve all questions about the River Sambatyon, and will provide
an honest call to unite with the Jews and remove the curtain
separating them and us, and many advantages will spring forth
from this for the sake of lifting Israel.^57
Ramaswamy observes that “loss [is] an irresistible and inevitable condition
of modernity.”^58 The urge to “heal the tear,” as Haga put it, could not be
resisted by latter-day Jewish travelers. To be sure, Haga was not the first Jewish
traveler who went to look for the tribes. But Haga’s journey was different in the
fusion of its contextual factors: modern global imperial expansion and the
globalization of transportation and communication routes combined with a
millennia-old aspiration for restitution and reunification with that which had
been so painfully lost. Unlike the Christian searchers of his time, Haga was not
looking for a “heathenized” or transformed ten tribes. He sought the very same
entity that had been lost 2 , 700 years before—ten intact, isolated tribes, which
had been carried away so many years before by the long-gone Assyrian king.
His was an atemporal search, framed and contextualized—enabled—by histor-
ical context. His loss was atemporal, but it was also a distinctly modern one, a
loss that was felt and expressed most strongly precisely when the chances of
overcoming it seemed most present.
But Haga’s ultimately tragic attempt to reach the tribes in China was most
striking in that he was determined not only to find the tribes but also to bring
them back and to renew and restore the covenant. The possibility of bringing
the tribes home was very real and could be accomplished through mundane
means, via the institutions of his day, including permission and financial
sponsorship from a major world leader and a knowledge of geography.
Haga’s journey signaled a vital departure from the traditional trajectory and
shape of Jewish trips seeking the ten tribes, which long had been, for the most
part, marked by a fictional expression of longing and yearning for their