hirling stones and sand, tumultuously flowing during six days,
and resting on the Sabbath, when the country was secured against foreign
invasion by a dense cloud of dust. With their neighbors, the sons of
Moses have intercourse only from the banks of the stream, which it is
impossible to pass.[67]

This clever fellow, who had travelled far and wide, and knew men and
customs, gave an account also of a shipwreck which he had survived, and
of his miraculous escape from cannibals, who devoured his companions,
but, finding him too lean for their taste, threw him into a dungeon.
Homer's Odyssey involuntarily suggests itself to the reader. In Spain we
lose trace of the singular adventurer, who must have produced no little
excitement in the Jewish world of his day.

Search for the ten tribes had now re-established itself as a subject of
perennial interest. In the hope of the fulfilment of the biblical
promise: "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from
between his feet, until he comes to Shiloh," even the most famous Jewish
traveller of the middle ages, Benjamin of Tudela, did not disdain to
follow up the "traces of salvation." Nor has interest waned in our
generation. Whenever we hear of a Jewish community whose settlement in
its home is tinged with mystery, we straightway seek to establish its
connection with the ten lost tribes. They have been placed in Armenia,
Syria, and Mesopotamia, where the Nestorian Christians, calling
themselves sons of Israel, live to the number of two hundred thousand,
observing the dietary laws and the Sabbath, and offering up sacrifices.
They have been sought in Afghanistan, India, and Western Asia, the land
of the "Beni Israel," with Jewish features, Jewish names, such as
Solomon, David, and Benjamin, and Jewish laws, such as that of the
Levirate marriage. One chain of hills in their country bears the name
"Solomon's Mountains," another "Amram Chain," and the most warlike tribe
is called Ephraim, while the chief tenet of their law is "eye for eye,
tooth for tooth." Search for the lost has been carried still further, to
the coast of China, to the settlements of Cochin and Malabar, where
white and black Jews write their law upon scrolls of red goatskin.

Westward the quest has reached America: Manasseh ben Israel and Mordecai
Noah, the latter of whom hoped to establish a Jewish commonwealth at
Ararat near Buffalo, in the beginning of this century, believed that
they had discove