The Curious Case of Eldad ha-Dani
🗺️ Eldad ha-Dani turned up in Qayrawan, Tunisia, one day in the late ninth century, claiming to be of the lost tribe of Dan and possessed of halachot transmitted directly from Yehoshua.
Eldad ha-Dani is one of those figures who presents to us an historical what-if, almost an alternative history made as real as it can get. I can’t remember when I first encountered Eldad, but he’s remained a fascination for me, and I wanted to be sure to write him into the section of my book about the different movements in Judaism during the Geonic period, most notably including the movements that would coalesce into Karaism. What Eldad does is prompt us to wonder what would happen if a stranger rode into town with some compelling claims about possessing alternate Jewish laws, recognizably like our own, but also different. I thought I’d share Eldad’s curious story with you today, so you can have the fun of mulling over such questions—as well as encountering his fantastical travel narrative.
In this issue:
The story of Eldad ha-Dani (as in “of the tribe of Dan,” in English, often, “the Danite”) includes classic elements of a good tale: exotic traveler bearing tales of lost tribes and mystical rivers stuns the authorities with his novel knowledge—and captivates the interest rather than the ire of rabbis for centuries to come (well, for the most part). That Eldad was given a measure of legitimacy is a surprising turn in the story.
The Travels of Eldad ha-Dani
Sometime around 884, a man named Eldad turned up in the city of Qayrawan in Ifriqiya (present-day Tunisia). Qayrawan was a newer city that had been established by the Umayyads, the first large-scale caliphate after the Muslim conquests, though it (meaning the city) was a couple centuries old by the time Eldad arrived on the scene. Qayrawan boasted an important early medieval community of Jews in the west— beyond Babylonia, the Levant, and Egypt—so it was opportune that he made his way there. Speaking an obscure-sounding Hebrew that was said to appear Biblical in character, Eldad identified himself as being of the tribe of Dan, one of the ten lost tribes that had been dispersed in remote antiquity after the Assyrian defeat of the northern Kingdom of Israel.
The Danites, Eldad related, lived beyond the Pishon River in the land of Chavila, places mentioned in Bereshit 2:11, along with the tribes of Naftali, Gad, and Asher. The identity of the lands and rivers mentioned in that verse and in adjacent verses is debated by the classical commentators, who offer different suggestions, many of which do not square with Eldad’s purported origins. The leading theory places Eldad in Kush, today’s Ethiopia, which would make him an ancestor of the large community of modern Ethiopian Jews, who were indeed known to have had alternative, non-rabbinic traditions. There are, however, problems with this theory: Eldad’s language, as preserved, shows some influence of Arabic but not of Ge’ez (Classical Ethiopic), as noted by the letter from Qayrawan.1 Other commentators and contemporary researchers have suggested Abyssinia, Yemen, and even China. Some scholars have made the claim that Eldad was a Karaite or a Khazar, suggestions which have not been accepted.
According to Eldad’s account, there was an additional group of presumable Levites, the Bnei Moshe, who lived in a spot of land enclosed by the Sambation River (known also from rabbinic literature), which, in Eldad’s version, turned with dust and stones six days a week and quieted on Shabbat, such that the three local Tribes could communicate with, but not visit, the Bnei Moshe. He and a companion from the tribe of Asher had set out on a journey by ship, which ended in capture by cannibals. However, a local tribe, fire-worshippers who were enemies of the cannibals, inadvertently saved them from being dinner. Eldad and his fellow traveler were later ransomed by a Jew from the tribe of Issachar. There are some indications that Eldad visited the east before arriving at Qayrawan, though how far east is a matter of debate. His account may also have influenced the popular medieval Prester John legends about a Christian king ruling in Africa and coming into contact with the lost tribes, from which they entered the European imagination.
We do know that from Qayrawan, Eldad journeyed further west to Iberia, since the Sefardi R. Chasdai Ibn Shaprut writes, in his famous letter to the Khazars, of a figure claiming to be from the tribe of Dan and speaking a Biblical patois, who appeared in Spain at the time of his fathers. From Spain, Eldad drops out of the historical record.
Eldad’s Alternative Laws of Kosher Slaughter
Specifically, Eldad presented an alternate set of laws pertaining to the kosher slaughter of animals for consumption (chullin), which normatively proceeds according to strict, detailed, and specific strictures. The presentation of such alternate laws was doubly troubling for the Jews of Qayrawan: first, they challenged the correctness of the contents of the rabbinic law, and second and more fundamentally, they questioned the authoritativeness of the rabbinic transmission process itself.
It is important to note that some of Eldad’s halachot (as they have come down to us) hew almost verbatim to the Talmud Bavli, while others diverge more substantially. For example, Eldad states:
Our master Joshua said, from the mouth of Moses from G-d: One may not eat from the slaughterer from Israel of any sacrifice who is not knowledgeable in the laws of ritual slaughter. These are the laws of ritual slaughter: its pausing, its pressing, its thrusting, its deflecting, its tearing.
Halachot of Eldad ha-Dani, translated by Adiel Kadari2
This is a parallel to our Talmud:
ואמר רב יהודה אמר שמואל כל טבח שאינו יודע הלכות שחיטה אסור לאכול משחיטתו ואלו הן הלכות שחיטה שהייה דרסה חלדה הגרמה ועיקור
And Rav Yehuda says that Shmuel says: With regard to any slaughterer who does not know the halakhot of ritual slaughter, it is prohibited to eat from his slaughter. And these are the halakhot of ritual slaughter: Interrupting the slaughter, pressing the knife, concealing the knife under the windpipe or the gullet in the course of an inverted slaughter, diverting the knife from the place of slaughter, and ripping the simanim from their place before cutting them.
Well, almost: there is an important difference in the chain of transmission, namely that Eldad had the chain being extremely short and close to revelation (Hashem to Moshe to Yehoshua), whereas the Bavli attributes the law to the first-generation Amora Shmuel (founder of the academy at Nahardea, later Pumbedita) as transmitted by Rav Yehuda, his successor. The upshot, though, is that in both cases there is a reliable transmission, and this difference was perhaps not uncomfortable to the geonim.
In contrast, a halacha recorded in the name of Eldad by the Mordechai, an important late thirteenth-century compilation of Ashkenazi halacha by Mordechai ben Hillel ha-Kohen, is more clearly divergent from the Talmudic text:
כתב רבינו ברוך ראיתי כתוב בהלכות שחיטה שהביא רבי אלדד בן מחלי הבא מעשרת השבטים אמר יהושע מפי משה מפי הגבורה…(*ואסור השחיטה) [*והשחיטה אסורה] מיד אשה מיד סריס מיד זקן לאחר שעברו עליו פ' שנה ומנער עד שימלא י"ח שנה ע"כ:
Rabbeinu Baruch wrote: “I saw written in the laws of ritual slaughter brought by Rabbi Eldad ben Machli who came from the Ten Tribes: “Yehoshua said, from the mouth of Moshe, from the Gevura [G-d]… slaughter is forbidden at the hands of a woman, a eunuch, an elder who has surpassed eighty years, and a youth until he reaches eighteen years”—up to here are his words.
Mordechai on Chullin, no. 571
The Mishna in Chullin 1:1, however, definitively states that it is only the cheresh (deaf-mute), shoteh (cognitively impaired), and katan (minor) whose slaughtering is invalid. The implications of barring women and eunuchs (i.e., gender-related distinctions), the elderly (perhaps a cognitive assumption), and of defining a katan as one under eighteen (a novel legal principle) are potentially great. Even so, this halacha of Eldad’s retain the basic format and ethos of the rabbinic laws.
The Response to Eldad
The rabbinic leadership of Qayrawan therefore dispatched a missive to the gaon of Sura, R. Tzemaḥ ben Ḥayim, asking about the implications of Eldad’s halachic claims. (There is some debate about which gaon named R. Tzemaḥ is referred to in the letter from Qayrawan, with the consensus falling on R. Tzemaḥ ben Chayim, who was gaon of Sura from 889 to 895.) The letter sent from Qayrawan contains many salient details from which we know Eldad’s story.3 The Gaon’s response was remarkable:
בעסק ר׳ אלדד הדני ששלחתם לפנינו… ואל תתמהו על השנוי והחלוף אשר שמעתם מפי אלדד, שהרי חכמי בבל וחכמי א״י שונים משנה אחת בתיקון רב, ואין פוחתין ואין מוסיפין, ולפעמים תלמידים הללו אומרים טעם אחד והללו אומרים טעם אחר… וכל שכן המשנה שהיא דבר מסותם, עמוק עמוק מי יכילנו, ויש לומר שאינו כלל רחוק שאלדד זה שגג והחליף מרוב צרותיו שעברו עליו וטורח הדרך המענה גוף האדם. אבל המשנה תורה אחת היא, עליה אין להוסיף וממנה אין לגרוע, ואין אתה מוצא חלוף, לא חלוף בדבר גדול ולא חלוף בדבר קטן, אלא בתלמוד. שאנשי בבל גורסין אותו בלשון ארמית ובני א״י לשונם לשון תרגום (סורסי). ואף החכמים שגלו לכוש פתרו התלמוד בלה״ק שהם מכירים אותה. וזה שאין בו שם חכם לפי שכל משנה שהיו ישראל דורשין במקדש סתם היתה ולא היה בה שם חכם. והתורה אחת היא בין במשנה בין בתלמוד וממעין אחד הכל שותין.
In the matter of R. Eldad ha-Dani… Do not wonder at the change and substitution you heard from Eldad, for the sages of Babylonia and the sages of the Land of Israel learn the same Mishnah with great precision, and neither detract nor add. At times these pupils give one explanation, while those give another…this is certainly so regarding the Mishnah, which is something unexplicated—“deep, deep down; who can discover it?” [Kohelet 7:25]. The Mishnah, however, is a single teaching, to which nothing may be added, and from which nothing may be detracted. You find no variation, neither in a major nor a minor matter, save in the Talmud: the Babylonians study it [i.e., by means of oral recitation] in Aramaic, while the tongue of those of the Land of Israel is the language of the Targum [i.e., Land of Israel Aramaic]. And also the sages who were exiled to the land of Cush interpreted it in the Holy Tongue, with which they are familiar. As regards it not containing the name of a sage, this is because every Mishnah-passage that the Israelites expounded in the Temple was without attribution, without the name of any sage. It is all one Torah, whether in the Mishnah or whether in the Talmud, and the same fountain from which all drink.
Letter of R. Tzemach Gaon, translated by Adiel Kadari4
While other geonim exhibit considerably less openness, and perceive alternate halakha as a distinct threat, especially when they had suspicions that it derived from the Karaite community, R. Tzemaḥ is notably magnanimous towards Eldad, referring to him with the title of rabbi. He argues that Eldad’s Masora (tradition) is the same in kind as the differing traditions of the Land of Israel and Babylonia, which resulted in the two different recensions of the Talmud, the Yerushalmi and the Bavli. Perhaps because Eldad’s laws of kosher slaughter were largely similar to rabbinic laws, R. Tzemaḥ found them unthreatening and assimilable within the ambit of rabbinic authority. It remains, however, a notably open attitude towards the possibility of other authoritative transmission paths for Torah.
The halachot of Eldad ha-Dani were much discussed by later medieval rabbinic authorities, most of whom accepted them as genuine and worthy of discussion, including, among others, the Or Zarua; the aforementioned Mordechai (note that above he refers to Eldad as a rabbi); Rashba; R. Estori (Ishtori) ha-Parchi; and the Mechaber, R. Yosef Karo. There were, however, notable dissenters too: R. Avraham Ibn Ezra5 and the Maharam of Rothenburg both regarded Eldad as a charlatan. It has been argued that whatever his true origin, the man calling himself Eldad was motivated by a desire to give early medieval Jews hope of an end to prolonged exile by emphasizing the possibility of Jewish sovereignty.
Reads & Resources
You can read some of the documents edited by Epstein on Sefaria in Otzar ha-Midrashim.
A recent book devoted to Eldad ha-Dani is Micha J. Perry’s Eldad’s Travels: A Journey from the Lost Tribes to the Present (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).
If your curiosity is piqued by Eldad’s adventures, there is also Zvi Ben-Dor Benite’s The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). I’ve not yet read it, but it’s on my reading list and I hear it’s fascinating.
“וזה אלדד הדני אפילו דבור אחד אינו מבין לא בלשון כוש ולא בלשון ישמעאל אלא לה״ק לבד.”
The original Hebrew is published in Epstein, Writings of R. Avraham Epstein [Hebrew], ed. A.M. Habermann (Jerusalem, 1950), which unfortunately I’ve not yet gotten a hold of, so for now, the English, as translated in Adiel Kadari, “‘All Drink from the Same Fountain’: The Initial Acceptance of the Halakhot of Eldad Ha-Dani into the Halakhic Discourse,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 13, no. 2 (2010), 220-221.
It was published in A. Epstein, Writings, and is translated into English in Perry, Eldad’s Travels.
Kadari, “All Drink from the Same Fountain,” 216-218.
See the Long Commentary to Shemot 2:22.
https://x.com/mosheduker/status/1676591838566793219
So interesting the divergence from the Bavli and what must have been in the imaginations of the commentators