Spanish colonialism in the New World began with Christopher Columbus’s establishment of settlement on Hispaniola in 1493. Spurred by the discovery of gold, Spain pressed its claim and spread quickly, to Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba. By 1508, they were establishing themselves on mainland South and Central America, and 15 years later, Franciscan friars arrived to build missions across New Spain. Spanish colonial missions served more than one purpose: to convert the native peoples to Christianity while also pacifying them and acculturating them to Spanish society while the natural resources of their land were extracted. As the work of these monks among the natives of various regions continued, many ecclesiastics observed that these indigenous groups, far removed from each other by both distance and culture, seemed to keep Hebrew customs and resemble the Jews in some regards. Bartholeme de Las Casas went so far as to declare that they were “of the Lost Tribes,” an assertion that encouraged even further the efforts to convert them to Christianity, for the conversion of the Jews, as discussed in the previous episode, was seen as an important milestone on the road to the eschaton, or the conclusion of God’s divine plan for our world. Another view, however, suggested that Satan had led these fallen people into counterfeit Hebrew customs in order to make them resistant to Christian conversion, as were the Jews themselves, an argument that history has shown to be both anti-Semitic and inaccurate. These early, contradictory views of Spanish ecclesiastics regarding the Israelitish origin of the Native Americans can be observed clearly in the 1607 work Origin of the Indians of the New World and West Indies by missionary and chronicler Gregorio Garcia. He cites numerous perceived similarities between native peoples’ and Hebrew physical attributes, customs, dress, and religion, suggesting that the miraculous river crossing described in 2 Esdras actually represented the passage of the Lost Tribes across the Bering Strait. Many are the inconsistencies in his argument, such as that both the Jews and the Native Americans lacked cleanliness and that they both tended to bathe frequently. And if the bigotry against the Jews and the indigenous people wasn’t clear enough there, then consider his argument that both the Jews and Native Americans were ungrateful, the Native Americans to their Spanish colonial masters, and the Jews to the God that favored them, whose Son they had rejected. Perhaps most inconsistent was Garcia’s answer for why the natives of the Americas no longer spoke Hebrew when all the legends said that the Lost Tribes would only speak Hebrew. Well, clearly, he argued, their language had changed over time, but actually, he insisted, there are still traces of Hebrew in their various languages. Then again, he suggested, their language was entirely different only because the Devil had led them to take a new language so that they could not easily be converted to Christianity. Here, at the beginning of a new era in the search for the Lost Tribes, we see many of the same specious arguments, logical flaws, and racist themes that would come to characterize the more recent theories of what became of the northern tribes of the Kingdom of Israel after their deportation by the Assyrians.

With the regions previously believed to be the abode of the Lost Tribes having been explored more and more, the New World naturally became the next place where people believed the ten northern tribes of the Kingdom of Israel may have ended up. While the Spanish missionaries who first raised the notion gradually seem to have stopped believing it after decades of actually living among these indigenous peoples, the theory would emerge again in the 17th century, after a Portuguese man named Antonio de Montezinos, who had converted to Judaism and went by the name Aaron Levy, returned from some travels in South America during the early 1640s with the tale that he had discovered a tribe in the jungles of Ecuador that he was certain represented the remnants of the Lost Tribe of Reuben. He swore to the truth of this (as much as one can swear to the truth of a conjecture) in an affidavit, and in 1644 he told his story to Menasseh Ben Israel, a rabbi and diplomat, who believed him and took this as a sign that the Messianic age would soon dawn, when it was prophesied that Jews would be scattered over all the world. This spurred his composition of a book, The Hope of Israel, about which more will be said shortly. His book sparked interest and garnered support for the “Hebraic Indian” theory among Jews, who had previously dismissed the idea. And at the same time, Montezino’s affidavit was used as a central piece of evidence by a Puritan minister, Thomas Thorowgood, who spread the same theory among the English in his book, Jews in America, or Probabilities that Americans are of that Race. Support for the theory would continue, sporadically, through the 19th century and even in some circles up to modern day. Perhaps the best example of this theory’s mad proliferation of supposed evidence can be illustrated by the composition of the book Antiquities of Mexico, by Irish antiquarian Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough. So convinced was Kingsborough by the idea that pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations were actually the settlements of the Lost Tribes that he spent years and a fortune bankrolling the absurdly massive book, which reproduce ancient codices on huge pages that measured two feet by one foot. With more than five hundred of these gigantic pages in each volume and more than 9 volumes, one can reasonably assert that it became something of an obsession for him, and in the end, it consumed him, as the debt he incurred in printing the book put him in prison, where he contracted the typhus that would kill him shortly after his release. While unreadable, his work did end up furthering the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans because one Barbara Allan Simon wrote a book called The Ten Tribes of Israel Historically Identified with the Aborigines of the Western Hemisphere, which appears to have essentially been a summary of Kingsborough’s work. And so the theory was dispersed, through the years and across the world, despite the quality of its evidence.

An image of Spanish colonial abuse of American aborigines featured in the massive “Codex Kingsborough.” Public Domain.

Not all versions of this theory were the same. As indicated above, Franciscan missionaries saw the Lost Tribes in Caribbean island natives as well as mainland peoples, while the Viscount Kingsborough focused more on lost Mesoamerican civilizations. In his effort to negotiate the return of European Jewry to England, from whence they had been expelled by King Edward I in 1290, Menasseh ben Israel appealed to Christians there that wanted to see the end times begin by suggesting that, if Jews were already in every land but England, they only had to be let back in to England for prophecy to be fulfilled and the eschaton to unfold. But his theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans was also rather different. He argued that the Ten Tribes has crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas, but that the Tartars followed them, made war on them, and drove them down through Central and South America. He cited tenuous similarities of place names as evidence: the Yucatan being named after Joktan, a great-great-grandson of Noah’s son Shem, and Peru being a transposition of the name Ophir, one of Joktan’s sons. Much of the evidence for the theory that Native Americans were the Lost Tribes also relies on the perceived similarity of words, such as Antonio Montezinos’s claims, which came from the fact that he heard this Ecuadorian tribe chant something that sounded vaguely similar to the Jewish Shema prayer. The most cited piece of “evidence” is that certain tribes seemed to call their god by a name similar to the Hebrew name Yahweh, such as the Taíno name for their great creator spirit, Yaya. Customs between the two cultures were likewise linked according to perceived similarity, like measuring their time by nights, and washing their newborns. Some even suggested that prophecy foretelling the Lost Tribes would resort to cannibalism was fulfilled by these indigenous peoples that they suspected of cannibalism, and that the prophecies of plagues that would descend on the Jews were fulfilled by the many epidemics that Old World colonists introduced. It wasn’t long before counterarguments appeared, most notably in Hamon l’Estrange’s Americans no Iewes, or improbabilities that the Americans are of that race. L’Estrange correctly points out that, if you look close enough at any languages, you will start to see words that sound alike, and that there is no uniformity of religion among the many native peoples of the New World, not to mention the fact that many tribes were pantheistic rather than monotheistic. As for the customs, he rightly observes that computation of time by nights and washing of newborns and other parallel customs are common in a myriad of cultures. Nevertheless, even L’Estrange argued for a biblical origin of the Native American peoples, suggesting that, rather than the Lost Tribes, they were descended from Noah’s other sons, Japheth and Ham.

More scientific arguments as to the true origins and dispersion of indigenous Americans would eventually appear, with the prevailing theory being that Native Americans are descended from Siberian and South East Asian peoples who crossed the land bridge that formerly existed in the Bering Sea more than 10,000 years before the Israelites were deported by the Assyrians, and DNA evidence appears to support this. But long before such empirical resolutions to this mystery appeared, a variety of pseudo-archaeological hoaxes helped to forever cement the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans in the popular imagination. The first was in the early 19th century, when a man who claimed to be able to find buried treasure by scrying with a seer stone, an occupation that had landed him in court more than once as a disorderly person, turned his talents instead to founding a religion. With his head in a hat, staring at his seer stone, this man, Joseph Smith, dictated the Book of Mormon, supposedly divinely translating the “reformed Egyptian” of some engraved gold plates that he claimed an angel had led him to find, plates that he could not show to anyone. In the resulting book, it was “revealed,” among many other things, that Native Americans were descended not from the lost northern tribes exactly, but rather from Israelite refugees who lived in the time of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, who had crossed the ocean to settle in the Americas, along with one group from the time of the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages who crossed to America on covered boats that are described like submarines. Much of the Book of Mormon is clearly inspired by ideas that were then in the zeitgeist, like the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans and contemporary views against secret societies, which serves as proof enough that it was the work of Smith and not an ancient text. If you’d like to learn more about this, there is a wealth of further information in my historical novel, Manuscript Found!, which can be found on Amazon.

A depiction of Joseph Smith’s claims that an angel led him to the golden plates and gave him the magic spectacles he used to translate them. Public Domain.

Smith was not the last to make claims about discovering an artifact that indicated Israelite settlement in ancient America. Nor even was he the first. In 1815, while ploughing his field, a hosteler named Joseph Merrick found a phylactery, or a box containing Hebrew texts that is traditionally worn during prayer. In 1860, David Wyrick discovered more than one stone inscribed with Hebrew in a Native American burial mound. Starting in 1890, James Scotford and Daniel Soper “discovered” thousands of objects in Michigan that seemed to support the theory. And in the 1930s, an archaeologist discovered a decalogue stone, inscribed in Paleo-Hebrew with the Ten Commandments, in New Mexico. All of these finds and their implications of pre-Columbian Semitic contact with the Americas have either been logically explained or debunked, and since discussing each would be a significant digression here, I’ll be devoting another post to them. To conclude, though, I would reiterate that modern science and scholarship have relegated this theory to the fringe, even though it is still believed by the Church of Latter-Day Saints and even by certain Native American groups who have embraced the idea of descent from Israel. Today, though, it should be clear to every sensitive and conscious person that the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans was very much anti-Semitic and represented yet another shameful aspect of colonialism. Identifying the Jews with a native population that was widely viewed as barbaric and primitive and in need of Christian salvation reveals a great deal about the global prejudice against the Jews, and the denial of Native American peoples’ own various histories and distinct cultures was just another form of indigenous erasure.

While this Lost Tribes theory was developing, another was growing back in England suggesting that the British themselves were descended from the Lost Tribes, rather ironic since Jews had been expelled from the country centuries earlier. British Israelism, or perhaps more accurately, Anglo-Israelism, began in 1649 with the publication of The Rights of the Kingdom by John Sadler, a friend and secretary of Oliver Cromwell’s. Also a millenarian and an acquaintance of Menasseh ben Israel, Sadler seems to have hoped that suggesting the British were of the Lost Tribes would further encourage the readmission of the Jews to his country and thereafter bring on the Millennium. His idea was seized and enlarged by one Richard Brothers in the 1790s, who turned it into more of a cult than an academic theory. He was not satisfied with identifying the British as the Lost Tribes. He further claimed that he was himself descended from the House of David and therefore destined to rule the “hidden Israelites” until the return of Christ. In fact, he went so far as to insist that he should reign as the king of England and to share with his followers prophecies that the king would die, leading to his arrest for treason and his imprisonment in an asylum for the criminally insane. Despite the fact that Brothers died a solitary and defeated man, halfway through the next century, Anglo-Israelism saw a resurgence, first in a popular tract published in 1840 which spread and gained traction among Bible study groups. The theory would further gain support in America in the 1930s among evangelicals struggling to reconcile their prejudice against Jews and their affection for the Hebrew scriptures.

The Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey, said to contain the stolen Stone of Scone, which in turn is said to be one and the same as Ireland’s Lia Fail, or The Stone of Destiny. Public Domain.

In short, Anglo Israelism developed to argue that not just the British but other European nations as well were of the Lost Tribes, and then the U.S., Australia, and South Africa as well through migration. It claims that the Lost Tribes found their way to northern Europe and settled in England, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Holland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, northern France, Sweden, Switzerland, and parts of Germany. Like the theory of the Hebraic origin of Native Americans, this belief relies a great deal on fast and loose and questionable etymology. For example, the Danish are said to be the Danites, and the word “British” is claimed to be derived from the Hebrew b’rith, which means “covenant,” and ish, for “man,” making British mean “man of the covenant.” Likewise, the word Saxon is said by the believers of Anglo-Israelism to be from “Isaac’s sons,” or the “sons of Isaac.” The fact is etymologists who are educated experts derive the word Saxon from a Teutonic word that means “dagger,” which Anglo-Israelists account for by claiming without evidence that there were two different peoples called Saxons. A great deal of the Anglo-Israel theory also relies on a legend surrounding the so-called Stone of Destiny. Supposedly, this was a stone consecrated to God by Jacob and carried in solemn processions during the time of David, the stone believed to have been referred to in the psalm that speaks of “the stone which the builders rejected.” Many Christians view this line as a prophetic reference to Christ, but here it is seen as a physical object, perhaps also the stone on which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac. According to the Anglo-Israelist version of history, this stone was a cornerstone in Solomon’s temple until the Babylonians destroyed it. After that, it came into the possession of the Danites, who were said to be a seafaring people, and they sailed with it until they wrecked on the shores of Ireland. Now, perceptive readers may realize here that the timeline is fouled up. The Danites and the other Lost Tribes supposedly disappeared during the Assyrian conquest, long before the Babylonian destruction of the temple, but let’s not get caught up in minutia. They certainly don’t. So there in Ireland, the Danites established a nation, and the sacred cornerstone was revered as the Lia Fail, the Holy Stone of Ireland. The Irish claim that the Holy Stone remains there, at the Hill of Tara, an ancient ceremonial place, but the Scottish claim that the Lia Fail eventually came into their possession, becoming the coronation stone that they called the Stone of Scone. I spoke about this artifact briefly in a previous episode. King Edward I seized the Stone of Scone and turned it into the Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey, although there is further conjecture that the stone Edward Longshanks took was also not the real Stone of Destiny. Most late 19th century Anglo-Israelists seem to have believed the Stone of Destiny, Jacob’s Pillow, was still buried in Ireland in the Hill of Tara, the name of which they suggested was connected to the Torah. Others among them thought it was not the stone in the hill, but rather the Ark of the Covenant. Long story short, at the turn of the century, adherents of Anglo-Israelism dug up the Hill of Tara in several places, seriously damaging this historical site and, of course, failing to turn up the Ark or the Stone of Destiny, or any evidence to support their claim of descent from the Lost Tribes.

A manifestly anti-Semitic pamphlet written by Christian Identity founder Wesley Swift, which, disturbingly, is sold on Amazon even today.

Now, British Israelism may seem like a silly belief, or in light of the damage they did in Ireland, a harmful falsehood, but as it spread in the U.S., it transformed into an even more overtly racist ideology that provided pseudohistorical and theological rationale for domestic terrorism. It began in the 1950s, among fundamentalist evangelical Christian figures who were also involved with the Ku Klux Klan. To be precise, a Methodist minister and Klansman named Wesley Swift, a right-wing California politician named William Porter Gale, and a militant Klansman named Richard Butler adopted Anglo-Israelism and adapted it into a full-fledged racialist theology called the Christian Identity movement. These men took the idea of the Israeli origins of white Europeans in a more extremist direction, taking it all the way back to creation to assert that there were two creations, one of Adam and Eve, and one of the “mud people” who proliferated beyond the Garden of Eden. Their evidence is the separate mentions of the creation of mankind in Genesis 1 and 2, although scholars see these as two accounts of the same Creation, taken from two different sources but collected together in scripture. According to Identity adherents, though, the two separate creations were of white people and people of color. Then Eve’s original sin is believed by them to have been sexual in nature, that she engaged in intercourse with an outsider—the Serpent in their view being a “mud person” who had managed to enter Eden. So by their reckoning, the only unforgivable sin is miscegenation. The product of this miscegenation was Cain, the murderous brother, who was banished to live among the “mud people” for the murder of his brother Abel, a product of the union between Adam and Eve, and therefore a white person. According to their abhorrent beliefs, there are two lines of descent from Eve: through Cain, who would go on to manipulate and rule the “mud people” because he was in some part still superior to them, and then the line of Adam through his surviving son Seth. Therefore, rather than descendants of the Lost Tribes, per se, white people are the supposedly pure race descended from Adam, while all people of color are descended from the “mud people,” and the Jews, excepting Christ of course whom they count as being of their white race, are descended from Cain, corrupted by the blood of the “mud people” and still secretly manipulating and ruling over them through their conspiratorial machinations.

Although it may at first seem counter-intuitive for anti-Semites to identify themselves as the true Israelites, this explicitly racist evolution of the Lost Tribes theory must be seen in the context of white supremacists’ notion of so-called Aryan people as superior. By co-opting the place of the Jews as God’s Chosen People, these white supremacists were able to use existing belief structures to both exalt their own race and denigrate the Jews. According to the despicable claims of Christian Identity leaders, America is a Zion or New Jerusalem meant only for themselves, the supposed true Chosen People: whites, but it is overrun by “mud people,” and the government, which they believe the Jews control, will never help them drive out all non-whites. So they have created a religious belief system that demands armed resistance to the government. Christian Identity proponents have been instrumental in founding numerous paramilitary militia groups, some of whom openly admit that they refuse to acknowledge the authority of the federal government, groups such as the California Rangers, a paramilitary arm of the Christian Defense League founded by William Porter Gale in 1960, and the Posse Comitatus, the anti-Semitic survivalist militia movement that Gale later formed, members of which have engaged in tax evasion and counterfeiting and then killed federal marshals who attempted to arrest them. The Christian Identity theology spreads openly as a rationale among many armed citizen militias. In the 1970s and ‘80s, it drove the Silent Brotherhood, a so-called "Aryan Resistance Movement," to engage in counterfeiting and armed robbery in order to fund their plans for murder campaigns and the overthrow of the government. Thankfully, this neo-fascist terrorist organization was stopped, and most of its agents arrested, but it would be naïve to think that there does not remain a clear and present threat from similar cells of Christian Identity adherents. For example, Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber, was credibly tied to an anti-government, Christian Identity group, and even today, Thom Robb, the current leader of the Ku Klux Klan, preaches Identity Christianity to members who are regularly implicated in hate crimes and racially motivated violence.

These are not the only theories about what peoples may be descended from the Israelites. There have been claims that the Lemba, an ethnic group in Zimbabwe, are descended from Jews who left Judea, and that the Bnei Menashe group in northeastern India, who have adopted Judaism in more modern times, really are the descendants of the Lost Tribe of Menasseh as they claim to be. In Ethiopia, the narrative that the tribe of Dan settled there, in accordance with the tale of Eldad the Danite that I spoke about in a recent patron exclusive, remains persistent. A community of Jews in Ethiopia that calls itself Beta Israel embraces this narrative, tracing their presence there all the way back to the 4th century CE, though only unconfirmed rumors like Eldad’s story and rumors attributable to the Prester John legend place any Jewish presence there before the 14th century. Back here in the U.S., another group latched onto the Lost Tribes myth as a racial origin story, but rather than white supremacists, these were black religious communities. In the late 19th century, more than one black preacher, William Crowdy in Oklahoma and Frank Cherry in Tennessee, claimed through divine revelation to have discovered that black people were descended from the Lost Tribes. The idea spread during the 20th century, combining with black nationalist movements and resulting in a migration of these “Black Hebrew Israelites” to Liberia, and thereafter, to Israel, where they overstayed their visas and established a community under Israel’s Law of Return, despite the Israeli government not recognizing them as Jews. Meanwhile, some groups of Black Hebrew Israelites in America, much like their Christian Identity counterparts, developed an ideology of hate that encouraged violence. To these militant Black Hebrew Israelites, while they were descended from the Lost Tribes of the Chosen People, white Europeans were descended from Jacob’s brother Esau, or Edom, who was described as ruddy and hirsute. As Edomites were said in Obadiah to have done evil things to the Israelites, and were prophesied to have the same evil things done to them in return, proponents of this violent faction of the Black Hebrew Israelites have engaged in racially motivated violence against white people and against Jews, whom they call “fake Jews” and whom they blame for slavery. So, as we have seen, the legend of the Lost Tribes has been taken up in many cultures and nations, raised whenever confronted with an alien “other” and used again and again to justify fear of and violence against Jews and also other feared or resented races. Its history is as long and violent and misunderstood as history itself.

The Abode of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Part Two: Diaspora

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