Ten Lost Tribes
Alongside Judah and Benjamin was part of the Tribe of Levi; which was not allowed land tenure, but received dedicated cities.
In Samaria, on the other hand, many Israelites survived the Assyrian onslaught and remained in the land, eventually coming to be known as the Samaritan people.
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, a professor of Middle Eastern history at New York University, states: "The fascination with the tribes has generated, alongside ostensibly nonfictional scholarly studies, a massive body of fictional literature and folktale.
Israel Finkelstein estimated that only a fifth of the population (about 40,000) were actually resettled out of the area during the two deportation periods under Tiglath-Pileser III, Shalmaneser V, and Sargon II.
[10][page needed] Many also fled south to Jerusalem, which appears to have expanded in size fivefold during this period, requiring a new wall to be built, and a new source of water (Siloam) to be provided by King Hezekiah.
[16]An Ashkenazi Jewish legend speaks of these tribes as Die Roite Yiddelech, "the little red Jews", who were cut off from the rest of Jewry by the legendary river Sambation, "whose foaming waters raise high up into the sky a wall of fire and smoke that is impossible to pass through.
According to Tudor Parfitt: As Michael Pollack shows, Menasseh's argument was based on "three separate and seemingly unrelated sources: a verse from the book of Isaiah, Matteo Ricci's discovery of an old Jewish community in the heart of China and Antonio Montezinos' reported encounter with members of the Lost Tribes in the wilds of South America".
The Book of Mormon claims that other groups of Israelites, besides the Nephites, were led away by God from the time of the Exodus through the reign of King Zedekiah, and that Jesus Christ also visited them after His resurrection.
The church also teaches that "The power and authority to direct the work of gathering the house of Israel was given to Joseph Smith by the prophet Moses, who appeared in 1836 in the Kirtland Temple. ...
The church believes the Book of Mormon to be a collection of records by prophets of the ancient Americas, written on plates of gold and translated by Joseph Smith c. 1830.
Additionally, according to the Book of Chronicles, King Hezekiah of Judah invited the survivors of Ephraim, Zebulun, Asher, Issachar and Manasseh to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover.
[6] According to researchers, the Samaritan community of today, which claims to be descended from Ephraim, Manasseh, Levi, and, up until 1968, also Benjamin, does in fact predominantly derive from the tribes that continued to live in the region.
Unlike the Judeans of the southern Kingdom, who survived a similar fate 135 years later, they soon assimilated ..."[30] The enduring mysteries which surround the disappearance of the tribes later became sources of numerous (largely mythological) narratives in recent centuries, with historian Tudor Parfitt arguing that "this myth is a vital feature of colonial discourse throughout the long period of European overseas empires, from the beginning of the fifteenth century, until the later half of the twentieth".
For example, in his Y-DNA studies of males from the Lemba people of Southern Africa, Parfitt found a high proportion of paternal Semitic ancestry, DNA that is common to both Arabs and Jews from the Middle East.
[35] These findings subsequently led other Judaising groups, including the Gogodala tribe of Papua New Guinea, to seek help in determining their own origins.
[38] However, the earthworks across North America have been conclusively linked to various Native groups, and today, archaeologists consider the theory of non-Native origin pseudo-scientific.
Recently (2000s), interest in the topic has been revived by the Jerusalem-based anthropologist Shalva Weil, who was quoted in the popular press as stating that the "Taliban may be descended from Jews".
[citation needed] According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the theory of Pashtun descent from Israelites can be traced to Makhzan-e-Afghani, a history book which was compiled for Khan-e-Jehan Lodhi in the reign of the Mughal Emperor Jehangir in the 17th century.
Some leading Israeli anthropologists believe that, of all the many groups in the world which claim to have a connection to the 10 lost tribes, the Pashtuns, or Pathans, have the most compelling case.
[75] The Igbo Jews of Nigeria variously claim descent from the tribes of Ephraim, Naphtali, Menasseh, Levi, Zebulun and Gad.
Historians have examined the historical literature on West Africa from the colonial era and they have elucidated that such theories served diverse functions for the writers who proposed them.
[78] McLeod drew correlations between his observations of Japan and the fulfillment of biblical prophecy: The civilized race of the Ainus,[sic: read Ainus] the Tokugawa and the Machi No Hito of the large towns, by dwelling in the tent or tabernacle shaped houses first erected by Jin Mu Tenno, have fulfilled Noah's prophecy regarding Japhet, "He shall dwell in the tents of Shem.
"[78]: 7 Jon Entine emphasizes the fact that DNA evidence shows that there are no genetic links between Japanese and Israelite people.
[79][80] They specifically adhere to religious practices which are similar to those which exist in Judaism and they also have a tradition of being a migrant people, with clues which point to their origin in either West Asia or North Africa.
According to the oral history of the Lemba, their ancestors were Jews who came from a place called Sena several hundred years ago and settled in East Africa.
Sena is an abandoned ancient town in Yemen, located in the eastern Hadramaut valley, which history indicates was inhabited by Jews in past centuries.
[83] In 1650, an English minister named Thomas Thorowgood, who was a preacher in Norfolk, published a book entitled Jewes in America or Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race,[84] which he had prepared for the New England missionary society.
Parfitt writes of this work: "The society was active in trying to convert the Indians but suspected that they might be Jews and realized that it had better be prepared for an arduous task.
[85] That some or all American Indians are part of the lost tribes is suggested by the Book of Mormon (1830) and it is also a popular belief among Latter-day Saints.
[18]: 57 Tudor Parfitt, author of The Lost Tribes: The History of a Myth, states that the proof which is cited by adherents of British Israelism is "of a feeble composition even by the low standards of the genre,"[18]: 61 and these notions are widely rejected by historians.
