the following is from the Encyclopedia Judaica on the ten lost tribes of 
Israel. I'm enclosing it because it includes a list of peoples who were 
identified with them.

pat sloane

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Also:   Tribes, Lost Ten
TEN LOST TRIBES, legend concerning the fate of the ten tribes constituting 
the northern Kingdom of Israel. The Kingdom of Israel, consisting of the ten 
tribes (the twelve tribes excluding Judah and Benjamin who constituted the 
southern Kingdom of Judah), which fell in 722 B.C.E. and its inhabitants were 
exiled to "Halah and Habor by the river Gozan, and in the cities of the 
Medes" (II Kings 17:6 and 18:11; for details and conjectures as to their 
ultimate fate, see Assyrian Exile), but in general it can be said that they 
disappeared from the stage of history. However, the parallel passage in I 
Chronicles 5:26 to the effect that the ten tribes were there "unto this day" 
and the prophecies of Isaiah (11:11), Jeremiah (31:8), and above all of 
Ezekiel (37: 19–24) kept alive the belief that they had maintained a separate 
existence and that the time would come when they would be rejoined with their 
brethren, the descendants of the Exile of Judah to Babylon. Their place in 
history, however, is substituted by legend, and the legend of the Ten Lost 
Tribes is one of the most fascinating and persistent in Judaism and beyond it.
The belief in the continued existence of the ten tribes was regarded as an 
incontrovertible fact during the whole period of the Second Temple and of the 
Talmud. Tobit, the hero of the apocryphal book of his name, was depicted as a 
member of the tribe of Naphtali; the Testament of the 12 Patriarchs takes 
their existence as a fact; and in his fifth vision, IV Ezra (13:34–45) saw a 
"peaceable multitude... these are the ten tribes which were carried away 
prisoners out of their own land." Josephus (Ant., 11:133) states as a fact 
"the ten tribes are beyond the Euphrates till now, and are an immense 
multitude and not to be estimated in numbers." Paul (Acts 26:6) protests to 
Agrippa that he is accused "for the hope of the promise made unto our 
fathers, unto which promise our twelve tribes, instantly serving God, hope to 
come," while James addresses his epistle to "the twelve tribes which are 
scattered about" (l:l). The only opposing voice to this otherwise universal 
view is found in the Mishnah. R. Eliezer expresses his view that they will 
eventually return and "after darkness is fallen upon the ten tribes light 
shall thereafter dwell upon them," but R. Akiva expresses his emphatic view 
that "the ten tribes shall not return again" (Sanh. 10:3). In consonance with 
this view, though it is agreed that Leviticus 26:38 applies to the ten 
tribes, where R. Meir maintains that it merely refers to their exile, Akiva 
states that it refers to their complete disappearance (Sifra, Be-Hukkotai, 
8:1).
Their inability to rejoin their brethren was attributed to the fact that 
whereas the tribes of Judah and Benjamin (the Kingdom of Judah) were 
"scattered throughout the world," the ten tribes were exiled beyond the 
mysterious river Sambatyon (Gen. R. 73:6), with its rolling waters or sand 
and rocks, which during the six days of the week prevented them from crossing 
it, and though it rested on the Sabbath, the laws of the Sabbath rendered the 
crossing equally impossible. According to the Jerusalem Talmud, however 
(Sanh. 10:6, 29c), the exiles were divided into three. Only one-third went 
beyond the Sambatyon, a second to "Daphne of Antioch," and over the third 
"there descended a cloud which covered them"; but all three would eventually 
return.
Throughout the Middle Ages and until comparatively recent times there were 
claims of the existence of the ten lost tribes as well as attempts by 
travelers and explorers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and by many naive 
scholars, both to discover the ten lost tribes or to identify different 
peoples with them. In the ninth century Eldad ha-Dani claimed not only to be 
a member of the tribe of Dan, but that he had communicated with four of the 
tribes. David Reuveni claimed to be the brother of Joseph the king of the 
tribes of Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh who were settled in 
Khaybar in Arabia, which was identified with the Habor of II Kings. Benjamin 
of Tudela has a long description of the ten tribes. According to him the Jews 
of Persia stated that in the town of Nishapur dwelt the four tribes of Dan, 
Asher, Zebulun, and Naphtali, who were then governed "by their own prince 
Joseph Amarkala the Levite [ed. by N.M. Adler (1907), 83], while the Jews of 
Khaybar are of the tribes of Reuben and Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh" 
(ibid., 72), as was also stated by Reuveni. Persistent was the legend that 
they warred with Prester John in Ethiopia, a story repeated by Obadiah of 
Bertinoro in his first two letters from Jerusalem in 1488 and 1489. The 
kabbalist Abraham Levi the elder, in 1528, identified them with the Falashas 
(see Beta Israel). Abraham Farissol gives a long account of them based upon 
conversations with David Reuveni not to be found in the latter's diary, while 
the most expansive is that of Abraham Jagel, an Italian Jew of the 16th–17th 
centuries, in the 22nd chapter of his Beit Ya'ar ha-Levanon.
Jacob Saphir (1822–1888) cherished the hope that he would discover the lost 
tribes. He tells the story in great detail of Baruch b. Samuel, a Jew of 
Safed who, sent to seek them, had visited Yemen and after traveling through 
an uninhabited desert established contact with a Jew who claimed to belong to 
the "sons of Moses." However, Baruch was murdered before he could visit them 
(Even Sappir, 1 (1866), 41), and in the following chapter Saphir transcribes 
word for word the evidence given by a certain Baruch Gad to the rabbis of 
Jerusalem in 1647 that he had met the "sons of Moses" in Persia, who gave him 
a letter to Jerusalem. He concludes wistfully, "Were I able to give full 
credence to this letter... I would subject it to a meticulous analysis and 
would learn from it matters of supreme importance, but the recollection of 
the fraud of Eldad ha-Dani brings suspicion upon Baruch the Gadite, for one 
supports the other... I have done my duty by putting the facts down and you 
may judge for yourselves and I will hear also what contemporary scholars say 
about it."
Various theories, one more farfetched than the other, have been adduced, on 
the flimsiest of evidence, to identify different peoples with the ten lost 
tribes. There is hardly a people, from the Japanese to the British, and from 
the Red Indians to the Afghans, who have not been suggested, and hardly a 
place, among them Africa, India, China, Persia, Kurdistan, Caucasia, the 
U.S., and Great Britain. Special interest is attached to the fantastic 
traveler's tale told by Aaron (Antonio) Levi de Montezinos who, on his return 
to Amsterdam from South America in 1644, told a remarkable story of having 
found Indians beyond the mountain passes of the Cordilleras who greeted him 
by reciting the Shema. Among those to whom Montezinos gave his affidavit was 
Manasseh Ben Israel, then rabbi of Amsterdam, who fully accepted the story, 
and to it devoted his Hope of Israel (1650, 16522) which he dedicated to the 
English Parliament. In section 37 he sums up his findings in the following 
words:
1. That the West Indies were anciently inhabited by a part of the ten Tribes, 
which passed thither out of Tartary, by the Streight of Anian. "2. That the 
Tribes are not in any one place, but in many; because the Prophets have 
fore-told their return shall be into their Country, out of divers places; 
Isaiah especially saith it shall be out of eight. "3. That they did not 
return to the Second Temple. "4. That at this day they keep the Jewish 
Religion. "5. That the prophecies concerning their return to their Country, 
are of necessity to be fulfilled. "6. That from all coasts of the World they 
shall meet in those two places, sc. Assyria and Jgypt; God preparing an 
easier, pleasant way, and abounding with all things, as Isaiah saith, ch. 49, 
and from thence they shall flie to Jerusalem, as birds to their nests. "7. 
That their Kingdom shall be no more divided; but the twelve Tribes shall be 
joined together under one Prince, that is under Messiah, the Son of David; 
and that they shall never be driven out of their Land."
The Latin work was translated into English the same year it was published, 
and ran through three editions in as many years, and Manasseh Ben Israel used 
this "evidence" of the dispersal of the Jews throughout the world as an 
argument to Oliver Cromwell in his appeal to permit the return of the Jews to 
England, then the only country which had no Jews. As long as this situation 
existed, the fulfillment of the prophecy that the coming (or the second 
coming) of the Messiah would take place only when the Jews were scattered in 
the four quarters of the world (section 35). Both through the translation and 
the correspondence which the story initiated between Manasseh Ben Israel and 
theologians in England, it played a significant role in creating the 
atmosphere which eventually brought about the return of the Jews to England.
[Louis Isaac Rabinowitz]



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