The Kingdoms of Ararat: Zvi Kasdoi, the Ten Lost Tribes, and Jewish National Identity
The Kingdoms of Ararat: Zvi Kasdoi, the Ten Lost Tribes, and Jewish National Identity

Summary/Abstract: Zvi Kasdoi (1862–1937) was a Russian Jewish traveler and Zionist who, along his travels, encountered unfamiliar Jewish communities like the Jews of Georgia. Kasdoi’s 1912 book Mamlekhot Ararat [The Kingdoms of Ararat] is an account of the author’s travels in the Russian Empire’s Transcaucasus region, during which he encountered and observed Georgian Jews. As a proponent of Jewish nationhood, Kasdoi set out to explain how the Jews he encountered could be so culturally, linguistically, and even historically different from the Russian Jews with whom he was familiar, yet still be part of the same nation. Alongside the ethnographic observations that typically characterize travelogs, Kasdoi draws on the range of the Jewish canon, as well as classical Greco-Roman literature, and employs exegetical methodologies to argue that the Jews of Georgia were descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. The legend of the ten tribes allows Kasdoi to explain the differences between Russian and Georgian Jews while reifying their shared belonging to the Jewish nation. Additionally, through invoking the legend of the ten tribes, Kasdoi fuses the project of Jewish national revival with messianic expectation and proposes that, in the context of the Jewish national revival and Zionist movement, redemption was not only possible, but imminent. A study of Kasdoi’s Mamlekhot Ararat sheds light on the use of the legend of the ten tribes to bridge intercommunal Jewish boundaries and brings attention to the role of eschatological hopes within the discourse of Jewish national revival in late Imperial Russia.

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