No Israelites tribes were lost – no such thing is recorded in the Tanach or Talmud! The idea of “lost tribes” is pseudo-history. According to this pseudo-history the Assyrians took ten tribes away (from the northern kingdom) to mysterious locations so that they are now supposedly lost and modern Jews are supposedly only descended from two tribes (from the southern kingdom). Except that never happened and the Assyrians actually exiled more people from the southern kingdom during an abortive invasion, than from the northern kingdom which they annexed.

The Assyrians moved some Jews from the northern kingdom from one part of Biblical Israel to another part of Biblical Israel but in the extreme north, and some to Nineveh and to Rages and Ecbatana in Media. Reuven, Gad and East Menashe originally lived in the region of Gilad east of the Jordan and in the days of Shaul had expanded eastward to the regions of Nodav, Yetur and Nephish. The Assyrian emperor Tiglat-Pileser conquered the lands east of the Jordan and took from them captives including the leader Beerah, whom he resettled in the region of Gozan in the north of Biblical Israel (which stretched to the Euphrates whose principal source stream in ancient times was explicitly the Habor). He also conquered much of the region of Naphtali and placed a governor over the region. He also took away the royal family of the northern kingdom and appointed a new king over them, Hoshea, who later rebelled. The Assyrian king Shalmaneser put Shomron under siege and eventually captured Hoshea whom he imprisoned. (According to legend preserved in the Chronicles of the Jews of Cochin, Shalmaneser also sent 460 Jews to “Teman” [originally the name of a location in eastern Sinai but later used for the entire south of Biblical Israel stretching to the Indian Ocean as had been ruled by David and Shlomo]. Their leader was Shimon of the tribe of Ephraim.) Shalmaneser’s son Sargon, conquered the rest of the northern kingdom taking the region “captive to Assyria” in the sense of annexing the region. He took away 27 290 captives from the capital Shomron in Ephraim, some of whom he resettled in the same region in the north of Biblical Israel as the captives taken by Tiglat-Pileser and some he took outside Israel to Nineveh, Rages and Ecbatana. (The story of Tuviah, which is largely fable, also speaks of a prisoner, Tuviah, whose family had come originally from a town Tishbe in Naphtali.) No mention exists in either Biblical or Assyrian sources of any other northern Israelites being relocated by the Assyrians! The vast majority of Jews taken captive by the Assyrians came from the southern kingdom during the invasion of Yehuda by Sennacherib (200 150 prisoners) not the northern kingdom.

The tribes of Shimon and Levi including the priests of the house of Aharon, in fact all lived (and survived the Assyrians) in the southern kingdom, not the northern. [The ten tribes of the northern kingdom are Ephraim, (West) Menashe, (East) Menashe in Gilad, Reuven, Gad, Asher, Dan, Naphtali, Zuvulun and Yissachar and not as “lost tribe” pseudo-history would have it: Yoseph, Reuven, Gad, Asher, Dan, Naphtali, Zuvulun, Yissachar, Shimon and Levi.] The Tanach notes that later king Chezkiyahu of Yehuda sent messengers to all Yisrael and Yehuda explicitly mentioning Ephraim, Menashe, Dan, Zevulun, and Asher and the city of Beersheba (of the tribe of Shimon). Representatives of all tribes were present in Jerusalem at the time of Yoshiyahu still later. The Tanach also mentions that after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem the earliest rebuilders of it were from Ephraim and Menashe. Christian tradition tells of Anna the daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher in the 1st century CE. In modern times, there are still Jews who can trace their lineage to David and are therefore of the tribe of Yehuda. Jews with the surname Lieb / Leon (and variants) are also understood to be from Yehuda (whose emblem was the lion) and so too Jews with the surname Wolf (and variants) are understood to be from Benyamin (whose emblem was the wolf). However around 4% of modern Jews know they are descended from the house of Aharon and another 4% know they are from Levi but not Aaronite. Jews with the surname Hirsch (and variants) are understood to go back to Naphtali (emblem the hart). There are also Jews with the surname Miller who trace their lineage to the tribe of Yissachar.

Those taken away from the northern kingdom to the extreme north did not assimilate – the Talmud notes a return of exiles at the the time of the prophet Yirmiyahu and Divrei Ha-Yamim also notes that descendants of the relocated people still lived where they had been moved to at the end of the later Babylonian exile. The region in the north of Biblical Israel to which Tiglat-Pilesar and Sargon had sent Jews, later became the location of one of the most important Yeshivot of the Talmudic age, that of Netzivim (Nisibis) which played an important role in the compiling of the Talmud Bavli! In the middle ages this was the site of departure of ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews for Europe during the time of Charlemagne. Hardly a case of any Jews being mysteriously lost!

The only mention of “lost tribes” is in fact in Midrashic fable in which those exiled by the Assyrians are described as living surrounded by the river Sambation [explicitly identified by Nachmanides as the river of Gozan] waiting to return – but this is a description of the Gozan-Netzivim region and is a wry joke about how the Jews of the Yeshiva of Netzivim still under Byzantine rule were cut off from the rest of Eretz Yisrael under Muslim rule. A similar wry joke alluding to the political situation is found in a discussion of where Charan is where Yaacov worked for Lavan, and it is claimed that it is unknown and we can never return there. On a literal level this is a bizarre claim as Charan has been continually inhabited and well known throughout history and is in fact a short journey from the Yeshiva of Netzivim, but it is actually alluding to a time when the two cities were ruled by different empires and one could not travel freely from Netzivim to Charan.