MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | MONSTROSITIES | FALL 2026

Eldad Ha-Dani’s Broken Heart

In 884, a mysterious traveler appeared in the Jewish community of Kairouan (Tunisia), claiming to have come from the far-away Eastern land of four of the “lost” tribes of Israel: Dan, Naftali, Gad, and Asher. Eldad of the tribe of Dan, as he called himself, described their foreign practices, remnants of the time of the First Temple. The four tribes were perpetually at war with their neighbors, and their religious laws came directly from Moses. The baffled authorities wrote to their rabbinic leader, who replied that he had heard of the stranger and that the differences between Eldad’s laws and theirs were not so extreme. There was evidently no desire on the part of these diaspora Jews to join the lost tribes in their alternate exile––even though they exercised a kind of rule.

Eldad’s most striking assertions, however, were that the tribes spoke only a pure Hebrew language, and that although they somehow knew the entire bible, they “didn’t read the scroll of Lamentations, which would break their hearts.” The questions for my talk are: how is a “pure” language a form of monstrosity when it defies normative temporalities? And what does it mean in an early medieval context to refuse to mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples, to characterize Lamentations as a Jewish history that only destroys? Eldad’s text imagines the collision of two diasporic visions with radically different temporalities: one of multilingualism and lamentation and the other of a purity that renounces loss through violence.

Monstrosities
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