ars ago.

To return to the lost tribes: No land on the globe has been considered
too small, none too distant, for their asylum. The first country to
suggest itself was the one closest to Palestine, Arabia, the bridge
between Asia and Africa. In the first centuries of this era, two great
kingdoms, Yathrib and Chaibar, flourished there, and it is altogether
probable that Jews were constantly emigrating thither. As early as the
time of Alexander the Great, thousands were transported to Arabia,
particularly to Yemen, where entire tribes accepted the Jewish faith.
Recent research has made us familiar with the kingdom of Tabba (500) and
the Himyarites. Their inscriptions and the royal monuments of the old
African-Jewish population prove that Jewish immigrants must have been
numerous here, as in southern Arabia. When Mohammed unfurled the banner
of the Prophet, and began his march through the desert, his followers
counted not a few Jews. In similar numbers they spread to northern
Africa, where, towards the end of the first thousand years of the
Christian era, they boasted large communities, and played a prominent
role in Jewish literature, as is attested by the important contributions
to Jewish law, grammar, poetry, and medicine, by such men as Isaac
Israeli, Chananel, Jacob ben Nissim, Dunash ben Labrat, Yehuda Chayyug,
and later, Isaac Alfassi. When this north-African Jewish literature was
at its zenith, interest in the whereabouts of the ten tribes revived,
first mention of them being made in the last quarter of the ninth
century. One day there appeared in the academy at Kairwan an adventurer
calling himself Eldad, and representing himself to be a member of the
tribe of Dan. Marvellous tales he told the wondering rabbis of his own
adventures, which read like a Jewish Odyssey, and of the independent
government established by Jews in Africa, of which he claimed to be a
subject. Upon its borders, he reported, live the Levitical singers, the
descendants of Moses, who, in the days of Babylonish captivity, hung
their harps upon the willows, refusing to sing the songs of Zion upon
the soil of the stranger, and willing to sacrifice limb and life rather
than yield to the importunities of their oppressors. A cloud had
enveloped and raised them aloft, bearing them to the land of Chavila
(Ethiopia). To protect them from their enemies, their refuge in a trice
was girdled by the famous Sambation, a stream, not of waters, but of
rapidly w