Lost — and Found? - Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel - Book Review

National Review, Nov 25, 2002 by David Klinghoffer

Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel, by Hillel Halkin (Houghton Mifflin, 394 pp., $28)

Call it the romance of lost objects. A young woman's purse was stolen one day in the 1940s and turned up earlier this year, stuck behind a loose wall panel in a men's room in a diner. Evidently the thief had swiped the purse, extracted the money, then hidden the purse inside the wall. Workers doing renovations found it, identified the owner -- who was still alive, in her 80s -- and a reporter recently covered the reunion of the lady and her long-lost property. Though it included nothing more notable than a dry-cleaning ticket, a receipt for taxes paid, a note from a girlfriend -- that sort of thing -- the returned purse nevertheless made for a strangely compelling newspaper story.

The great-granddaddy of all such wonderful lost-object stories is that of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, originating in the Bible in the Second Book of Kings. It goes this way: After Solomon died, the kingdom that Solomon's father David had founded split in two, the Kingdom of Judah in the south, centered on Jerusalem, and the Kingdom of Israel in the north, centered on Samaria. Judah was populated mainly by members of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, while the other Hebrew tribes were concentrated in the north. In the 8th century b.c., Samaria and Israel were assailed by the Assyrian forces of King Tiglath-Pileser; the Hebrew population was deported to Assyria, never to be heard from again.

Where did the Lost Tribes -- Reuben, Asher, and the rest -- end up? The Bible and the Talmud adduce some cryptic hints. One source locates them in the vicinity of the legendary Mountains of Darkness, or possibly on the other side of the river Sambatyon -- the Sabbath River, said to be impassable every day but the Sabbath, when it freezes in mid-flow. In other words, says a view in the Talmud attributed to the great Rabbi Akiva, they are inaccessible, permanently lost, never coming back. Another view, recorded immediately following Akiva's and attributed to Rabbi Eliezer, is that the Lost Tribes in fact will someday return.

Who's right? If you believe Hillel Halkin -- and I do -- they both are.

Halkin is an understatedly brilliant journalist familiar to readers of Commentary magazine, an American living in Israel, a secular Jew. He traveled to a part of India sandwiched between Bangladesh and Burma and there found an ethnic group comprising the Kuki, Chin, and Mizo peoples of the Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram. The Kuki-Chin-Mizo people think they are a lost tribe, specifically the tribe of Manasseh, whom they call Manmasi or Manasa. Halkin is "107 percent" sure that mixed in among the Kuki-Chin-Mizo are the remnants of another ethnic group, called the mi lui or "old people," whose clans were indeed descended from long-ago-deported members of the tribe of Manasseh. With quiet humor and artful plotting, Halkin tells how he came to this view. Across the Sabbath River is a book of investigative journalism, full of quirky characters and extremely cool lore, as enjoyable to read as a novel.

Over the centuries, Lost Tribe hunters have advanced other claims as to the whereabouts of the tribes. Supposedly, lost Israelites have been found in China and Pakistan, less plausibly among the American Indians (a tenet of the Book of Mormon), even among the people of Great Britain (in which view, the most lunatic of all, the word "British" itself is Hebrew, from brit or covenant and ish or man).

Starting in the 1950s, certain Christianized residents of Manipur and Mizoram began having dream visions that indicated, to their satisfaction, that their legendary ancestor Manmasi was really the biblical Manasseh, eponymous founder of the tribe. Communities have since been formed there to practice normative Judaism, and some Mizos and Kukis have immigrated to Israel, where they blend seamlessly into a mix of Jews from around the world.

Halkin gives a charming, vivid portrait of this gentle people, once fierce headhunters and warriors, today tactful but proud; dismissive of neighbors belonging to other ethnicities, yet awed by Westerners. Theirs is an exotic culture, where the Jewish Sabbath is celebrated in mountainous jungles and one sees road signs advertising cures for strange ills: "leprosy? no problem! get cured!" Halkin obviously fell in love with them, and his admiration is conveyed powerfully. He never tells us how he feels, but simply shows his new friends in interaction with him and with others:

They were soft-spoken and trusting. On our way to Champai we were sideswiped by a minibus that crowded us to the edge of a precipice as it tried passing. In Israel, both drivers would have jumped from their vehicles, screaming. Tana [Halkin's driver] got out of the car, inspected the damage, spoke quietly to the other driver, climbed back behind the wheel, and drove off. I expressed surprise that he wasn't angry. Shmuel [his translator] said, "There's nothing to be angry about. The other driver took the blame. He'll pay for the repairs."