lost tribes that provided notices on them from traditional sources as well as
“wonderful news on the Jews of China.”^70 Another endorsement was from
Abraham Isaac Kook ( 1865 – 1935 ), chief rabbi of the Yishuv Palestine and a
great theologian of modern political Judaism.^71 A number of other dignitaries
and rabbis also endorsed the book. What mattered to Emanuel and the rabbis
was the place of the quest for the ten lost tribes within their own contemporary
context. In 1923 , Kook had written about the “thirst” and the “desire” to see the
“disappeared brothers” whose absence he likened to the “most basic deficien-
cies inflicted on Israel by the bitter exile.” The ten lost tribes, in his view, had
played a vital role in putting Jewry on the world stage:
Our eyes have seen the great wonders of how the idea of finding the
ten tribes became rooted so deeply.... [We saw] the return of our
brethren children of Israel to Britain... and from this development we
[see] the signs of some emergence of salvation in our days, after the
horrible pogroms, the war, and the British declaration concerning our
national home. Surely, this is all the act of God.^72
There was a clear progression as Kook saw it: ten tribes mania had led
to Britain allowing Jews to return to its shores and, later, to the Balfour
Declaration. Now, interest in the ten tribes might help bring them back
to the Holy Land—not to the biblical one, but rather to a national Jewish
homeland. British interest in the tribes was, in Kook’s view, hastening a
Jewishpoliticalredemption.
Kook’s direct referent of course, the “British declaration,” was the Balfour
Declaration, which recognized the right of Jews to a national home. Kook
recognized the various strands feeding Britain’s interest in the ten tribes and
the global implications. Chief architect of the potent theological interpretation
that considers the modern Jewish state to mark the beginning of redemption,
Kook forged a direct link between the ten tribes and Zionism. Just as redemp-
tion involved ending Jewish exile, it also meant ending the exile of the
ten tribes.
Zionism presented itself as messianism without a messiah, a movement
(and salvation) with its sole focus to bring all Jews into a modern Jewish polity.
The two other long-standing elements in the messianic package—the rebuild-
ing of the temple and the return of the ten tribes—were initially understood as
exceeding (or irrelevant to) the earthly charter of the Zionist movement. The
Zionists would leave them up to God. Kook’s intervention changed this view
and brought the ten tribes squarely into the Zionist frame. Faitlovitch, Kasdoi,
and Ben-Zvi took much the same view. Kook’s insertion of the ten tribes into
the Zionist context of a pending Jewish national home, promised by the British