Avichail approached the committee chair with evidence that he had “found the
lost tribe of Menasseh in India.” Like countless searchers before him, he had
spent decades touring the globe in search of the lost tribes.^75 Finally, the
gathering also included an anthropologist who was a specialist on the tribes.^76
All that was missing were Protestant missionaries and Jesuit globetrotters to
render the audience a compilation of ten tribes investigators across the cen-
turies. The discussion, however, did encompass the full trajectory of knowledge
produced in the ten tribes’ wake, as if all the knowledge accumulated over
millennia had drained into the Jerusalem meeting room.
The twenty-eight-page minutes of the meeting shows the discussants
arguing about how best to determine the location of the ten tribes, and how
to uphold or reject Avichail’s claim. Had the tribes undergone cultural, physi-
cal, and social transformations? Had they become “heathenized”? Was restora-
tion of these Israelites to Judaism possible, and if so, how best to effect it?
Finally, was reunion with these missing siblings a vital necessity?
The participants were skeptical and didn’t seem to want to uphold the
claim. After all, they reasoned, there are many claimants to ten tribes status all
over the world. They feared a deluge of millions of requests to immigrate to
Israel. The meeting was adjourned without a decision. But later on, amid some
debate, several hundred Mizu were indeed brought to Israel. How simple it
suddenly seems! Gone are conjecture and speculation. After debate, peoples
are definitively ruled in, or out.
As is well known, during the 1980 s and 1990 s, the Jewish state success-
fully brought thousands of Ethiopians to live in Israel. A 1973 ruling had
declared them “Children of the Tribe of Dan,” drawing on sources going
back to Zemah Gaon’s tenth-century response to the Qayrawanis on the
question of Eldad’s identity. So, too, the Mennashites from India, many of
whom ultimately landed in the settlements of the Gaza Strip, from which they
were removed during the disengagement in 2005. Astonishingly, a headline at
the time read, “A Lost Tribe Fears Being Lost Again.” The story began, “Up-
rooted 2700 years ago, the Ten Tribes are being uprooted again”—and with
breathtaking ease, a millennia-old story blotted out a much more present and
surrounding uprootedness, that of the Palestinians.^77
These ten tribers were not the only ones in the settlements. On April 6 , 2003 ,
the Israeli newspaperMa‘arivreported that a delegation of rabbis and settlers had
converted several hundred “Indians” in the Andes of Peru. The then chief
Ashkenazi rabbi, Meir Lau, had sent a delegation of rabbis to the site where
Garcı ́a, Montezinos, and Rocha had first found the ten tribes in the seventeenth
century.^78 Thus, hundreds of Andeans were brought “home.” More recent arri-
vals have since been sent, appropriately, to the senior settlement of Shavei
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