Here is an example of how the ancients taught about the lost tribes, as well as the JEWISH QUESTION (taken from p80 : cog49.com/ft.pdf). It is based on certain precepts already taught in earlier texts.
[The multi-colored coat of Joseph is now worn by the multi-tribal melting pot of America], and the time has come for this providence nation to put forth its hand and grasp the responsibilities for dominion given Adam. There is an adversarial force that motivates this, but there is also clear reasoning in Scripture why America we has not known her identity as heir of the tribes, committed to the responsibilities and liabilities given Adam, before now. It also explains why the lost ten tribes have always been lost.
Two biblical stories of nearly the same event bear witness to this - the stories where both Abraham and Isaac, at different times, went to a city and denied their relationships to their wives. They said they were their sisters. The problem was other people were being jeopardized by a temptation to sin (against their wives) and each husband felt fear for his own life.
When we extend these two representations of this scenario to the third case, and take it for its value in sacred teaching, we see how it has also played out in the matrimonial relationship of the people of Jacob to the inheritance of God, which is their commitment (wife).
This explains why God divided Isaac's seed in the womb and pitted Esau against Jacob. As the fair, graceful and compliant world leader he was designed to become en masse, Jacob was naturally not also the type to boast of his intent to rule the world (and remember where that got Joseph). Instead, the people of Jacob would naturally deny their relationship to Jacob's covenant with God (his commitment) for a while (by believing they are not Israelites), while dwelling in a strange land (which has been mostly ever since the Assyrian captivity), then realize those being tempted to sin against God (by threatening the inheritance of Jacob) is his own brother. The laws of domestic relations then justify the matter while casting no fault on anyone in or out of the house of Isaac. So innocent people have not been tempted to threaten that covenant (because they could not displace the presence of Esau) and the dominion given Adam, embodied in Jacob, was not mortally threatened by anyone else either.
Abraham and Isaac, together, both established and affirmed the legal grounds of this bazaar marital behavior. Therefore, Jacob is on perfect legal grounds in following the same scenario. He is within established legal precedence in so doing. Two witnesses established the matter, and in the third instance, we have followed the same law. And the solution has always been preordained.
This is why the ten tribes have always been lost. The descendants of Jacob (the peace-loving man) have often tolerated, and even learned the narrative they are not heirs of the dominion given Adam, particularly in the third age. Jacob has not "lived in the house" of the commitment to being the people to rule the world. So Esau has claimed that inheritance century after century, and justifiably so, because under the laws of Moses it is the responsibility of a man to "raise seed" to his own brother if he is "dead to his commitment" and leaves a widow. But in the end, Jacob realizes he has always been steward of that inheritance and that he must retain it as the only means of his own survival.