Chizuk Emunah Under the Microscope: Chapter 8

In chapter 8, Troki tells of his encounter with a Christian who challenged how the restoration of the tribes and the inheritance of the land is supposed to take place. Originally, each tribe of Israel was given a different piece of land. Modern Jews do not know to which tribe the individuals belong, so how can they be segmented into tribes again during the restoration?

Troki replies that the tribes were not destroyed in the Assyrian exile. Many of the exiles of the ten tribes returned and settled to Judah, even though the remnant of Israel was called "Jewish." He quotes the book of Esther, where Mordechai was called a Jew, even though he had descended from teh tribe of Benjamin. The descendants of the Kohen line and of the Levi line know their tribal origin. Those who do not know the origin of their own tribe will require divine aid.

I can pretty much agree with Troki in this chapter. Since this is an examination of Troki, however, I still want to take issue with a point similar to one that Troki is raising here.

Rabbinical tradition speaks of the ten lost tribes existing as distinct tribes in a land far away, something that a Haredi rabbi told me in the Kollel. These traditions are often taken literally by those who practice "Artscroll Judaism." A. Lukyn Williams refutes this tradition:

We know now that they do not exist as such, distinct and separate. Eldad the Danite in the ninth century, by adding real Haggadic knowledge to a very fertile imagination, was able to describe in detail the manners and customs of the Ten Tribes in Abyssinia or Ethiopia; Benjamin of Tudela again in the twelfth century recounted at length the tales told him by a certain R. Moses about the Ten Tribes in Samarcand; Prester John about the same time spoke of them in India, recounting from far older sources how "a river which comes from paradise, passes between us and the great country of the mighty Daniel, King of the Jews. This river flows all the week days, but remains quiet on the sabbath day"; but we in this twentieth century, to whom there is no longer any part of the surface of the earth unknown, except the South Pole, know that in no country whatever, however far from civilisation it may be, do the Ten Tribes dwell. The "travellers tales" have been proved to be false; the Ten Tribes as such do not exist. 

In the Second Temple era, records were stored on tablets to trace the ancestry of all the Jewish priests, and these records were stored in the temple itself. After the destruction of the second temple by Rome, the tablets were lost and priests could not longer verify their ancestry.

Tovia Singer disputes this claim asking "where is the reference for this?" Here it is:

Book 1 section 7 of Josephus states:

For our forefathers did not only appoint the best of these priests, and those that attended upon the Divine worship, for that design from the beginning, but made provision that the stock of the priests should continue unmixed and pure; for he who is partaker of the priesthood must propagate of a wife of the same nation, without having any regard to money, or any other dignities; but he is to make a scrutiny, and take his wife's genealogy from the ancient tables, and procure many witnesses to it.

And this is our practice not only in Judea, but wheresoever any body of men of our nation do live; and even there an exact catalogue of our priests' marriages is kept; I mean at Egypt and at Babylon, or in any other place of the rest of the habitable earth, whithersoever our priests are scattered; for they send to Jerusalem the ancient names of their parents in writing, as well as those of their remoter ancestors, and signify who are the witnesses also. But if any war falls out, such as have fallen out a great many of them already, when Antiochus Epiphanes made an invasion upon our country, as also when Pompey the Great and Quintilius Varus did so also, and principally in the wars that have happened in our own times, those priests that survive them compose new tables of genealogy out of the old records, and examine the circumstances of the women that remain; for still they do not admit of those that have been captives, as suspecting that they had conversation with some foreigners.

But what is the strongest argument of our exact management in this matter is what I am now going to say, that we have the names of our high priests from father to son set down in our records for the interval of two thousand years; and if any of these have been transgressors of these rules, they are prohibited to present themselves at the altar, or to be partakers of any other of our purifications; and this is justly, or rather necessarily done, because every one is not permitted of his own accord to be a writer, nor is there any disagreement in what is written; they being only prophets that have written the original and earliest accounts of things as they learned them of God himself by inspiration; and others have written what hath happened in their own times, and that in a very distinct manner also.

 While Josephus does not state it explicitly, he makes it clear that all priests had their complete ancestry written on tablets and stored in the temple. This is why all tablets are sent to Jerusalem, and why they had to make new tablets after the invasion of the forces of Antiochus because they desecrated the temple! So the next time Tovia Singer asks you how you know that ancient Jews had records of their ancestry stored in the temple, you can say "Josephus, Against Apion, Book 1."