The Ten Lost Tribes
A World History
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- $38.99
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- $38.99
Publisher Description
The legendary story of the ten lost tribes of Israel has resonated among both Jews and Christians down through the centuries: the compelling idea that some core group of humanity was ''lost'' and exiled to a secret place, perhaps someday to return triumphant. In The Ten Lost Tribes, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite shows for the first time the extent to which the search for the lost tribes of Israel became, over two millennia, an engine for global exploration and a key mechanism for understanding the world.
As the book reveals, the quest for the missing tribes and the fervent belief that their restitution marked a necessary step toward global redemption have been threaded through countless historical moments--from the formation of the first ''world'' empires to the age of discovery, and from the spread of European imperialism to the rise of modern-day evangelical apocalypticism. More than a historical survey of an enduring myth, The Ten Lost Tribes offers a unique prism through which to view the many facets of encounters between cultures, the processes of colonization, and the growth of geographical knowledge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 10 northern tribes of ancient Israel exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E., might have been lost in "another land" as Deuteronomy poetically puts it, but they never vanished from the popular imagination, as NYU Middle East and Islamic studies scholar Benite lays out in his account of the enduring legends surrounding the lost tribes. As he recounts, people in all times and regions have been thought to be descendants of the lost tribes, whether Mongol invaders who terrified Europe or Native Americans, whose descent from the tribes was used to either justify or condemn their conquest and oppression. The tribes have been put to other religious and political uses, such as a proposal in 1524 for an alliance of the Church and the 10 tribes against the Muslims. Joseph Wolff, a 19th-century rabbi's son turned Anglican missionary, believed the Benee Israel of Bombay were the tribes' descendants; and 19th-century biblical scholar William Carpenter pointed to British Anglo-Saxons. Although solidly researched and tantalizing in subject matter, this latest by Benite (The Dao of Muhammad) is academic in tone and less engaging than Hillel Halkin's 2002 history/travelogue Across the Sabbath River. B&w illus.
