Conceptualizing Diaspora: Tales of Jewish Travelers in Search of the Lost Tribes

I met Simcha Jacobovici in 1998 while doing my dissertation research in Uzbekistan. Long-haired, fair-skinned, and dressed in American garb, he was clearly an outsider like myself, and we introduced ourselves. I told him I was a cultural anthropologist doing fieldwork among the Bukharan Jews. He told me that he was a filmmaker collecting footage for a documentary about the ten lost tribes. I had heard the theory that the Bukharan Jews were among the lost Israelite tribes, but I considered it far-fetched and had trouble taking Simcha's enthusiasm about the possibility seriously.