Eldad ha-Dani

Origins and early life

Eldad ha-Dani, 'Eldad the Danite', appeared among the Jews of Kairouan, in today's Tunisia, around the year 880, speaking a Hebrew of his own and announcing that he came from an independent Jewish kingdom beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, where the tribe of Dan lived with Naphtali, Gad and Asher, and that beyond the river Sambatyon — which rolled stones and sand six days and rested on the Sabbath — dwelt the sons of Moses.

Work and career

Where he really came from is unknown; modern scholars have looked to southern Arabia, and the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Encyclopaedia Judaica treat him as a real ninth-century traveller whose personality remains a mystery, while a minority once doubted that he existed at all. This fiche states plainly what the sources state: the man was a Jew and a merchant, and his travel narrative is legend — 'a nucleus of authentic laws wrapped in a historical romance', in Abraham Epstein's phrase.

Yet the legend mattered: the Jews of Kairouan, unsettled by his ritual laws on slaughter, which differed from the Talmud, wrote to the gaon Zemah ben Hayyim of Sura, who answered that Eldad's traditions were acceptable, and his account, the Sefer Eldad, was cited by Rashi and by Abraham ben David of Posquières and mentioned by Hasdai ibn Shaprut. For a thousand years it fed the hope of the Ten Lost Tribes among Jews and the legend of Prester John among Christians, and the question of whether the Jews of Ethiopia descended from the tribe of Dan, which Eldad first raised, was invoked as late as 1973 in the rabbinic rulings that opened the way for their emigration to Israel.