The ‘Lost Tribes of Israel’ and other ‘lost races’
Background
After the discovery of the New World late in the fifteenth century, Europeans tried to account for how the native peoples who inhabited the land had arrived there. The Bible explained how the peoples of the Old World had spread from the Garden of Eden and medieval writers developed hypotheses about how the three sons of Noah were the ancestors of the populations of the three known continents of Asia, Africa and Europe. These unexpected American Indians had to be explained somehow, as it was unthinkable that they had been overlooked by the divinely inspired Bible. The explorers also saw monuments they could not explain, some of them burial mounds resembling those of Europe, some of them mounds shaped like animals and some of them huge pyramids like those of Egypt. The peoples they encountered appeared to many Europeans to be too ‘simple’ to have built such structures, so they proposed a variety of elaborate explanations for how the Indians had arrived in the New World and for who had built the pyramids and mounds.
One early explanation was that the Indians spoke Welsh (presumably because it is a language that to most Europeans is more known than understood) and were therefore the descendants of the legendary Prince Madog who had sailed west in the ‘Dark Ages’. Others thought that the Native Americans practised Hebrew religious rites and that they were therefore the descendants of the ancient Israelites.
Native Americans have their own explanations for where they came from, generally regarded by modern scholars as mythological. However, the native peoples have become a loud political voice that has sometimes run into conflicts with academics and they often reject archaeologists’ views of their origins, disagreeing with archaeological and anthropological evidence.
The Israelite hypothesis
Very quickly after the
discovery of the New World, Europeans began to treat its
inhabitants as little more than their possessions. At first, few
of their fellow Europeans protested, but in the early sixteenth
century, Bartholome de Las Casas (1474-1566) became a champion of
the Native American cause. He spent many years trying to improve
the conditions under which they lived in the Spanish colonies in
the West Indies, Peru and Guatemala.
Las Casas believed that the Native Americans should be converted to Christianity, as he was convinced that they originated in Ancient Israel and felt that the Bible contained the proof that they were members of the Lost Tribes of Israel. He was not alone. A report by the seventeenth-century Portuguese traveller, Antonio Montezinos, reawakened interest in the subject. He claimed that there was a Jewish tribe living beyond the mountain passes of the Andes and that he had heard them recite the She‘ma Yisro‘el (the expression of the Jewish faith) and saw them observe Jewish rituals.
Menasseh ben Israel
(1604-1657), a respected Dutch Jewish scholar, was heavily
influenced by Montezinos’s story and wrote his best-selling
book, The Hope of Israel, which he dedicated to the
English Parliament. Meeting Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of
England, he petitioned for the recall of the Jews (who had been
expelled from England in 1290) and expressed his belief that the
dispersion of Jews to all corners of the Earth was the beginning
of the redemption. Certain Christian traditions claimed that when
the Ten Tribes of Israel were found and restored to the Holy
Land, the return of Christ to reign supreme was not far off.
There was thus a considerable vested interest among some
believers to identify the Lost Tribes. Now that Israelite tribes
had been discovered in the Americas, Cromwell must readmit the
Jews to England to bring about the Messianic era. Similar
sentiments were expressed, albeit in more humanistic terms, in
the second half of the eighteenth century during the American and
French revolutions. Some abolitionists claimed that the Messianic
Age would be ushered in when the slaves were freed and when the
native Americans, as descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes, were
converted to Christianity.
Having decided that some of the Native Americans practised Hebrew rites and were therefore ancient Canaanites or the lost tribes of Israel, this meant that they were in dire need of conversion. Groups like the Corporation for Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England were founded by English settlers, who believed that the Native Americans were lost Jews who would need to be reconciled with Christ at the end of time. Although the belief that Indians were Hebrews quickly faded, Edward Johnson (1598-1672), author of The Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour (published in 1654), argued that a mass conversion of Indians was necessary if America were to be the site of the new heaven and new earth. The religious concerns of early settlers eventually gave way to more overtly political speculations, leading to rather outlandish propaganda pieces like the Apocalypse de Chiokoyhikoy. This purported to be an account of the end of the world by an Iroquois prophet, denigrating the British to support the cause for American independence even among the Iroquois.