Community Magazine October 2009

26 COMMUNITY MAGAZINE Eldad Hadani Around the year 880 CE (4640), a mysterious man named Rabbi Eldad Hadani – “Eldad from the Tribe of Dan” – came before the sages of the time, claiming to be a member of the lost tribe of Dan who had inadvertently made his way to the civilized world. He was found to be an erudite scholar with proficiency in all areas of the Torah, and he earned the admiration of all the hachamim of that time. The most famous of them was Rabbi Semah Gaon, head of the great Babylonian yeshiva of Masa Mahsia, who wrote a detailed letter validating many of Eldad’s claims. Eldad gave a detailed description of the ten tribes, their kings, the wars they waged, and their way of life, as well as their exact locations. He recorded his claims in a treatise which is still in circulation today. It is clear from his description that the ten tribes had remained faithful to the Torah traditions passed down to them from the days of the First Temple. Eldad Hadani’s accounts are the first, and assumed to be the most consistent and authentic, of all descriptions of the lost tribes. For over half a millennia after Eldad Hadani, reliable news of the lost tribes remained sparse. The limited means of communication and travel made it exceedingly difficult to conduct a competent search or study of their whereabouts. However, in the late-15 th century, when, with the invention of the compass and other advances, the civilized world began discovering new regions on the American continent and parts of Asia, renewed interest in locating the vanished Jewish kingdom was sparked. Many books written by Jews and gentiles alike were published at this time which attempted to piece together the tidbits of information and different reports that surfaced concerning the lost tribes. Our sages tell us that the punishment of the ten tribes included being exiled from the land of Israel to a remote, uncharted land, isolated from the rest of the world, where they would remain until the end of days. At that point, according to the Midrash, the tribes of Yehuda and Binyamin will bring the ten lost tribes from their exile across the river Sambatyon, and return them to the land of Israel. RABBI E. C. ABOUD Finding the Ten Lost Tribes Part IX: I t seems as though they just fell off the map! Since the exile of the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the armies of the Assyrian King Sanheriv, the whereabouts of this illustrious people have remained a mystery. However, a number of isolated and ambiguous encounters with members of the ten lost tribes have been recorded over the centuries. Below are abstracts of some of the more famous such encounters.