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The Disappeared
A Review by Caryl Phillips

I remember finding shelter some years ago beneath the flimsy tarpaulin of a tent on the outskirts of the town of Dimona in the Negev desert. My host was an African American from Washington, D.C. who, twenty years earlier, had uprooted himself from his New World "exile" and "returned" to Israel, the land that he imagined to be his historical place of origin. He had left behind a relatively comfortable life on the lower slopes of congressional politics and re-made himself as a new man, which involved changing his name and his garb. My host, together with the like-minded members of his exiled community, was clearly striving to make an economic and cultural contribution to the life of Israel, although the Israeli government was at best ambivalent and at worst hostile toward these "returnees," who, despite their protestations of "belonging," were not strictly classifiable as Jews.

My host gestured to the dusty, uninspiring landscape all around us and remarked on its beauty. To my eyes there was nothing attractive about the dust bowl in which we were marooned, and to undergo much hardship in order to migrate to such a place struck me as somewhat remarkable. But my host loved this place. As far as he was concerned, the land could have been jungle, prairie, or mountaintop: its actual topography mattered little, for its beauty was more emblematic than it was physical. A "return" to this land had given him the opportunity to close a historical circle and make himself whole. Viewed through a diasporal lens, the land was not only beautiful, it was also "home."

Hillel Halkin, an accomplished essayist on literary, cultural, and political issues, and an admired translator of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, is familiar with the multiple ironies and difficulties that surround a search for home. Born in New York City in 1939, Halkin migrated to Israel three decades later as a committed Zionist. He subsequently served in the Israeli army reserve, raised a family, and produced a distinguished body of work, the vast majority of which speaks to a deep personal and professional allegiance to his new country. Halkin's adult passage from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Israel has greatly affected all his subsequent writing. Sometimes it is the echo of Halkin's own migratory feet that stirs him to write, as in Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist's Polemic (1977), a series of six carefully crafted letters that attempt to give form and substance to Halkin's Zionist beliefs. More recently we find Halkin listening across a thousand years of history as Shmuel Hanagid, an eleventh-century Sephardic poet and Renaissance man, arrives in Granada. Halkin's translations of the poet's verse autobiography, in Grand Things to Write a Poem On: A Verse Autobiography of Shmuel Hanagid, have both fluency and passion. Yet it is Halkin's desire to grapple with the complex issues of belonging and membership that extend his political and literary meditations beyond straightforward questions of migration into the deeper mysteries of identity.

Halkin's remarkable new book finds him journeying out in search of the truth behind the mystery of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, who were driven out of their homeland by Assyrian conquerors and have never been heard from since. The fate of this deported and apparently vanished Jewish population has long fascinated both Jews and Christians. Countless theories -- some claiming to be scientific, others admittedly speculative, the vast majority of them highly implausible -- have been put forward to account for the approximately twenty-seven thousand people who "disappeared." On the face of it, the loss of such a small number of individuals might be considered to be of little consequence, certainly by the cruel standard of modern wars and displacements; but the subsequent diasporal wandering of the Jewish people, and the fact that the "loss" is included in biblical lore, has lent an almost feverish passion to the wish to understand what became of these original victims of exile.

Halkin is the latest in a long line of those who have sought to solve this mystery, and so we will better understand his quest if we know something about the Lost Tribes hunters who preceded him. In the eighth century B.C.E., the Assyrians overran and conquered both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah in biblical Palestine. In the wake of their conquest the Assyrians deported many tribes of Israelites to different regions of Assyria, but the Bible says nothing about where they went or what happened to them. Yet their eventual return was repeatedly predicted by the Hebrew prophets as being symbolic of God's eventual reconciliation with his chosen people. Jeremiah vividly imagined that final blessed day:

Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them from the coasts of the earth, and with them the blind and the lame, the woman with child and her that travaileth: a great company shall return thither.... Hear the word of the Lord, O ye nations, and declare it in the isles afar off, and say, He that scattered Israel will gather him, and keep him, as a shepherd doth his flock.

But still the tribes have remained irredeemably "lost" -- somewhere beyond a great "Sabbath River," which, according to the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, flows for six days a week and then, like the Jews, rests on the seventh day. Had a strange man who called himself Eldad the Danite not turned up in what is now Tunisia in or about 883 C.E., the idea of the Lost Tribes might not have taken on its present-day significance. This man spoke a strange and ancient Hebrew, and he rekindled interest in the Lost Tribes by telling the local Jews many amazing "facts" about his -- and their -- history, including that he knew himself to be a descendant of the Lost Tribe of Dan. Three hundred years later, in the middle of the twelfth century, Benjamin ben Jonah, a Jewish trader and explorer, left a record that has come to be known as The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela in which he catalogued the presence of Jews in Europe and beyond, and "reported" that tens of thousands of the descendants of the tribes were living in Kurdistan and other places in Central Asia.

By the seventeenth century, these "sightings" were getting a little out of hand. The Dutch rabbi and writer Manasseh ben Israel claimed that the Lost Tribes had been found in the Americas. It was a view that remained surprisingly popular among some down to the past century: in 1930, for example, Walter Hart Blumenthal published In Old America, a chapter of which is titled "The Red Hand Symbol in Aboriginal America and in Primitive Palestine." (An even stranger chapter addresses "Circumcision in Red America.") The fact that Halkin does not include Blumenthal's book in his exhaustive bibliography -- Halkin is a learned man, and in this chronicle of his eastern adventure he deploys his learning usefully while wearing it lightly -- reflects the sheer number of published texts that expound this and other half-baked theories. According to Halkin, "scholars" have at one time or another claimed the Lost Tribes to be, in their modern incarnation, the Welsh, Dutch, Danes, Zulus, New Zealand Maoris, or even Eskimos. When faced with a history of such quackery, what on earth would persuade an intelligent man like Halkin to join the long and generally undistinguished tradition?

Halkin made three separate expeditions as a "Lost Tribes hunter." The first journey he makes in the company of the veteran "Tribesman" Rabbi Eliahu Avichail. "Scholars and academics considered him a crackpot," Halkin scrupulously reports, but he is himself fascinated by this modest man's conviction, and he accompanies Avichail to China and Thailand on what turns out to be a futile, if fitfully amusing, search for "evidence." Despite Halkin's healthy respect for the elder man, Avichail's patent lack of curiosity in people or places, as opposed to his deep belief in the authority of books, eventually frustrates Halkin.

Mercifully, things improve when they press on to Aizawl, the capital of the Indian state of Mizoram. In this small territory squeezed between Bangladesh to the west and Burma to the east, a great number of the Indian population seem to identify passionately with Jewish practice and Jewish history, and with the country of Israel. The people have organized themselves into congregations, they have synagogues, and they have even petitioned the United Nations, albeit unsuccessfully, that they be formally recognized as a separate people (the Mizos) who have descended from the Lost Tribes.

It happens that Avichail has been instrumental in helping the Mizos come to terms with their desire to embrace Judaism. But Avichail has not discovered enough evidence to accept them as a Lost Tribe. What would count as evidence for the rabbi is determined by the definitions of Jewish law, and Halkin is frustrated by Avichail's inflexible orthodoxy. He accuses his elder of "turning Judaism into an exclusive club" by not bending the rules a little to accommodate these Mizo people.

Earlier in the week Halkin had received a visit from a Mizo man who spoke with a "sudden, hard candor": "I want to know who I am. Show me I was once a Christian, and I'll be a Christian. Show me I was a Jew, and I'll be a Jew. Show me I was an idol worshipper, and I'll worship idols. But show me who I am." It is a deeply affecting moment. Halkin is a writer, not a religious authority, and the human cry for help is what he most remembers. And it is this invincible humanity that will eventually bring him back to Aizawl, this time without Rabbi Avichail. But he is not stirred by this human cry alone. There are surprising empirical discoveries that demand to be investigated. During his first visit in the company of Avichail, Halkin noticed many linguistic and cultural coincidences between Judaic and Mizo practice that deeply puzzled him. "There were only two ways to think about it," he remarks. "Either a Tibeto-Burmese people in a remote corner of Southeast Asia had a mysterious connection with ancient Israel, or they were the victims of a mass delusion. Either way, there was a story to be written." He resolves to return to Mizoram, and to the neighboring state of Manipur, with two translators, one for each state. With his book contract in hand, Halkin begins to try to probe the mystery of why a small number of people in this otherwise Christian pocket of the world not only believe -- without any real evidence -- that they are descended from the "Lost" Jews, but harbor a powerful desire to "return" to their native land.

Free now of the double burden of Avichail's religiosity and the narrative task of explaining the background to the quest, Halkin's prose now gathers pace and becomes agreeably quirky, as humor and irony bubble to the surface. "The ultimate proof the Mizos are Jews: a small and never civilized people, they think they are better than everyone," the author writes in his notebook. He makes a heartfelt speech in a local synagogue that is meant to reassure the people of his good intentions: "I do not know who my distant forefathers were. My more recent ones lived in Russia. The color of my eyes and complexion tells me that they probably did not all descend from an ancient tribe of Israel. And there are many descendants of Jews in the world today who have nothing Jewish about them." He is, unsurprisingly, met with blank stares. Who is he? More to the point, they still want to know, who are they? Why will he not give them the answer to their question?

As time passes Halkin reluctantly admits that his search for evidence of a Mizo connection to the Lost Tribes seems to be failing. He seems almost relieved. Under Avichail's guidance, a small number of Mizos had actually resettled and were studying in Israel; and Halkin casts his mind back and recalls attending a Mizo wedding in Gaza. He ruefully remembers noticing the evidence of "Israelification" among these transplanted Mizos and wonders about the folly of Avichail encouraging such people to think of themselves as "belonging."

They were eager to try on their new identity, on which they had made a large down payment. They were heady with the ease of slipping into it -- and it was this that gave me pause. Once more an old life had been abandoned like a village in the jungle. When all was said and done, Avichail was not much different from the missionaries ... one wondered whether the children and grandchildren of the young couple beneath the wedding canopy would have to search for their identity again.

As Halkin's search for evidence stumbles, his mood is not improved by a local man's deliberate, if somewhat convoluted, attempt to cheat him out of money by faking evidence of a Mizo-Israel connection. Although the rational part of Halkin's mind is by now aware that he might well be wasting his time, he continues to encounter individuals who convince him that his instincts are correct. There are too many puzzling "facts" that cannot be explained as mere coincidence. It is too simple to dismiss these "facts" as the result of a case of mass auto-suggestion. He travels to Imphal, the capital of the state of Manipur, where he encounters an old man who unequivocally tells him that he is "of the tribe of Manasseh." The man continues:

"We Kukis do not belong to this place," he said of Manipur. "We have been here for hundreds of years, yet it is not ours. Have you ever heard of an entire people feeling out of place where their ancestors were born?"

Apart from the Jews, I confessed, I never had. "There you are!" he said, vindicated. "You see, we are not a happy people. We are always yearning."

"Nostalgic."

"Yes."

"For somewhere else."

"Exactly!" He was so happy that I understood.

But Halkin does not understand. He needs hard proof, and the absence of it is beginning to drive him to lethargy and despair. "From the synagogue upstairs came the sound of the morning prayer. Too lazy to rise for it, I followed it from my bed." Eventually he admits that his inquiries in both Mizoram and Manipur have reached their natural conclusion. "There was nothing left for me to do in Imphal." And then, as in all good dramas, just when we believe that all is lost, that what seems real is only imagined, the author makes the discovery that leads to a breakthrough and prepares the way for the final act.

A local ethnographer named Dr. Khuplam visits Halkin and shows him a manuscript. It comprises old chants, songs, and tales that the doctor has spent thirty years putting together from material that he has collected from the old people in the hills. The manuscript astonishes Halkin, and he asks his readers not to "prejudge the matter" that he is about to place before them. Halkin then unfolds his theory, based on the evidence of Khuplam's manuscript, as to why, having been previously filled with doubt, he is now convinced that the Mizo people are descended from the Lost Tribe of Manasseh.

What follows is a long and detailed chapter whose authority is bolstered not only by the evidence of Khuplam, but by the discoveries that Halkin has been all the while making, which have hitherto made little sense. Now almost everything falls into place for Halkin, and it is a testament to his superb grasp of story-telling that, as he makes his case, we not only listen to him, we also want to believe him. At one point he uses the word "suppose" ten times in the space of only two paragraphs, but he persuades us to accept this repetition as evidence of his painstaking process and caution, as opposed to evidence of the flimsiness of his argument. Halkin returns to Israel convinced of his theory, and then he journeys to India for a third time, specifically to see Dr. Khuplam and other "knowledgeable people" who might help him further to ground his ideas.

It is during this third and final visit that Halkin discovers that this obscure people "in a little known corner of Southeast Asia had a holiday reminiscent of the biblical Passover" whose origin they did not comprehend. This discovery is made all the more remarkable by the fact that the Mizo are not bread eaters, but for some inexplicable reason they know that they must sit down on this one day of the year and eat bread without yeast. When added to all the other discoveries, Halkin is now, as he tells the people, "107 percent sure" of their origins as the Lost Tribe of Manasseh. In the passage that follows, which is as moving as it is scholarly and persuasive, Halkin addresses the people and gives them their history. He is unsure of the chutzpah of his actions -- "a stranger who had spent only a few weeks among them, who didn't know their language, and had only a superficial knowledge of their culture, I was now expounding their own past to them"; but he justifies his presumption by relying on the authority of a "western education that enabled me to think about textual and historical problems in a way they were unaccustomed to."

It is this same "western education" -- fed as it is by the authority of books, and unmoved by the special appeals of the human heart -- that, ironically enough after his admonitory words to Rabbi Avichail, now leads Halkin to fail the Mizo at the very moment when he is finally offering them hope. A local man asks the logical question of the Israeli who has proven to his own satisfaction that he has found descendants of ancient Jews: "Will the government of Israel recognize us through the cooperation of your good self?" And his question is met with the following.

"All that matters," I said, "is who you are and want to be. You're not Jews. But you do go back, in one branch of your family, to the Israelites of the Bible. That's amazing. What you do with it is up to you."

"But sir," [the questioner] appealed, "does not this make you and us the same people?"

"No," I answered. The word had rarely sounded so gross to me. "Some of our ancestors were the same people. That was a long time ago."

It was the best I could do.

Halkin's rejection of the Mizo is based on blood. They are not Jews. On this point he is, of course, correct: if one uses ethnicity and the existence of a Jewish genetic profile to determine membership of the tribe, then in all likelihood the Mizo will probably fail the test. Halkin apologizes. "I'm sorry I couldn't tell your people they're all full-blooded Israelite," he candidly observes. "I know that would have made them happier." But surely this is not necessarily so. What would have made them happier, I expect, would have been to know that the "fact" of their "belonging" might now clear a path for a return, so that they could go "home" and become whole people in a land that might, in the fullness of time, embrace them, and their children, and eventually their children's children. But as we know from Halkin's sobering memories of the Mizo wedding in Gaza, he has little faith in such "Israelification" for those who do not qualify by blood. By his own admission he is not a full-blooded Israelite, but he is quick to make his own case. "There are plenty of us half-bloods, though. There's been a lot of research into the subject."

Halkin is a Zionist, and also an extremely fine writer whose soul is in tune with the desires of the human heart. In this book, his ability to understand the desire of others to belong is strong and admirable. Yet it is not until he has found his evidence that the real drama of Halkin's book unfolds. Will Halkin find a way to accept these "lost" people -- be they "full bloods," "half-bloods," or "no bloods" -- as his brothers, and to welcome them as migrants into his world? In the end his answer is clear. He would prefer them not to attempt to integrate into his Israel. I understand that Halkin's preference is based on a realistic understanding of the hardships that would await these people if they acted upon their ancient identity -- and yet it strikes me as oddly cruel. Would it hurt that much to allow them a chance to belong? After all, only four hundred and fifty of them have migrated to Israel in the past decade, and in India only some thirty-five hundred are living as practicing Jews. Moreover, almost half of the recent emigrants from the former Soviet Union are not, according to rabbinical standards, Jewish. Does Halkin really fear that an attempt at "Israelification" in the wake of a Mizo migration might somehow damage the Jewish character? Does this account for his bluntness?

Halkin calls his rejection of the Mizo people "gross," and his word suggests an awareness of the conflict between his head and his heart. This would be a natural fissure in a writer who throughout the course of this book has proved himself to be an attractive mixture of assiduous detective and compassionate guide. But in the end, it appears, authority will prevail. Luckily for Halkin, when his own family left Russia for the United States there was no "blood" impediment to bar their migration and subsequent assimilation. True, Israel is not the United States, and there are few writers today who understand this better than Halkin himself.

In May 1998, Halkin wrote persuasively in Jewish World Review about the increasing complexity of Jewish identity in a multicultural world of frequent migrations and interchangeable nationalities. He asked a pertinent question: "Why is the Tel-Aviv-born-and-raised child of Thai parents who speaks Hebrew as his native language and relates to Israeli culture as his own not a Jew by nationality in the same sense that he would have been an American had he grown up in New York?" There is no easily packaged answer, of course; and as a result Halkin predicts a "chaotic" opening up of Jewish identity in the near future, a kind of national affiliation that will militate against family ties that are defined by "blood."

And yet he laments this change. Describing himself as a "secular Zionist," he admits to liking the "DNA" that creates the family bonding, and he regrets that inevitably "there will be a thinning out." The conclusion of his book suggests that Halkin remains somewhat conflicted about the desirability of a new, non-ethnic development of Jewish identity, although he knows, as he mentioned in his essay, that "the prospect of hundreds of thousands of native-born, non-Arab, Hebrew-speaking Israelis who are not Jews by halakhic standards is not merely a possibility; it is a near certainty." One wishes that he could have shared these words with his Mizo hosts, however much the words might have stuck in his throat. Had he done so, he would have helped these good people in their quest to return to what they call home and become members of the new Israel that Halkin so lucidly imagines.

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