restitution and for the end of exile. Haga’s endeavor foreshadowed the coming
of a new Jewish quest for the ten tribes, one that would confidently find them—
and bring them back.
Over the centuries, geographical knowledge had grown; anthropological
accounts had accrued; and traveler after traveler had contributed his or her
latest knowledge about who and where the tribes were. Paradoxically, far from
limiting the field of possibilities—far from leading to the conclusion that
perhaps the ten tribes were no more, or never were—this body of knowledge
only served to make finding them ever more possible, and their loss ever more
acute. Haga’s “Book of the New Covenant”—and the very idea of a new
covenant—brings this study to a close. The publication of Haga’s book coin-
cided with the appearance of the first major movement that sought above all to
establish a covenant with all the world’s Jews. The story of Zionism, writ large;
its relationship with the various groups identified as the ten tribes; and other
Judaizing movements is well researched and represents a different type of
history than the one told here.^59 What matters most here is what Zionism
shares with Mormonism and British Israelism: the power to actually discover
the ten tribes.
To Search and Bring Back
In 1904 , Yaacov Jacques Faitlovitch ( 1881 – 1955 ) arrived in Massawa, Sudan.
David Reuveni had passed through this city/port centuries earlier on his
way to Europe. Faitlovitch, however, was going in the opposite direction,
toward Ethiopia—where rumors of the ten tribes’ existence had a long
history. A scholar trained in Europe who was active in lost tribes committees
in Tel Aviv, Faitlovitch marks the shift of ten tribes attention from Europe back
to Palestine, which at the time was the Zionist Yishuv under the British
Mandate.
Faitlovitch had studied Ethiopian languages at the Sorbonne’s School of
Oriental Languages and would later, in 1907 , complete a doctorate on the
subject. Born in the Polish city of Lodz, then under Russian control, he had a
self-assigned mission: to “discover the Falasha” in Ethiopia. As his biographer
Emanuela Trevisan Semi notes, Faitlovitch was motivated by a verse in Isaiah
( 49 : 6 ): “I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my
salvation unto the end of the earth.” And, indeed, Faitlovitch covered the
various (historical) edges of the world, traveling to Afghanistan, India, China,
and Japan to try to “create links between Jewish communities.”^60 But his
central and earliest focus was Ethiopia.