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Is the Rabbi speaking only to the Jews or to descendants of all the tribes of Israel?

"And it shall come to pass on that day,
That the Lord shall gather from the flood of the river to the stream of Egypt,
And you shall be gathered one by one,
O children of Israel.

And it shall come to pass on that day,
That the great shofar shall be sounded,
And they shall come who were lost in the land of Assyria
And those who were oppressed in the land of Egypt,
And they shall bown down upon the Holy Mountain of the Lord in Jerusalem." Isaiah 27:12-13.

The present term "Jews" includes all the so-called "lost-tribes", not just members of the tribe of Judah.

From the time of David when Israel was divided into the Northern Kingdom (Israel) which comprised all but Judah and Benjamin, and the Southern Kingdom (Judah), which included only Judah and Benjamin, the name Judah (and particularly "Jew") began to develop into an iconic label for all of Israelite extraction. Much the same way as Kleenex is used generically as a term for all brands of tissue.

The known world at the time of the Jewish dispersion was the present Middle-East and parts of Asia Minor. The bulk of the nation of Israel (both Judah & Israel) were most probably "lost" through assimilation and intermarriage. The idea that homogeneous groups of Israelites survived to be dispersed to societies and cultures that did not yet exist, or were not known to the civilized world, is simply not realistic.

Individual tribal identity most certainly did not survive the Babylonian conquest. While some Jews (even at the time of Jesus) lay claim to identity to the tribe of Benjamin and Levi, the bulk of what are the Jews today simply do not know what tribe they hail from. They are a mixture of all the twelve.

Conquests by four different empires destroyed through assimilation, death, intermarriage any hope of identifying the tribes. If there were some groups that were carted off, or escaped to distant lands, there bloodlines were diluted past any recognition of identity. Genetically they would have ceased to exist. Where are the Phoenicians? The Carthaginians? The Amalekites? ...and countless others.

Also, to suppose that ALL the people of the tribes of the Northern Kingdom left Babylon, and only the tribe of Judah stuck around is simply far-fetched hooey.

If "lost tribes" would have survived, history would witness that evidence along the way, if nothing else, by the national religion, mention of Moses and Abraham, etc. in these peoples cultures.

That just simply is not the case. Any mention of those Hebrew patriarchs and religion by the peoples of Great Britain, Germany, etc. is through Christian conversion of Roman conquests of those barbarous peoples.

So, all of Israel is represented in what today is called a "Jew". Jewish belief is that the Messiah will sort things out. This is the Christian belief too. The only debate is who is, and who is not the Messiah. Not who is a Jew (Israelite). Why would one seek to find Israelites outside of present Jewry, anyway?