The Old Testament of the Bible identifies twelve separate tribes as comprising the people of Israel, distinct lineages with lands apportioned to each. When the region of Samaria, in which many of these ancient tribes lived, was captured by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, the resident Jews were deported, separated, and dispersed. As a result of this diaspora, ten of those twelve tribes were lost to history, either as a result of their members dying off in exile or by the loss of cultural/religious identity through intermarriage with non-Jews and by acculturation.
However, the trope of the enduring survival of a lost tribe against all odds has a romantic appeal that has long been a major theme in historical ruminations concerning the “Lost Tribes of Israel.” The underlying assertion has been that at least some of those lost tribes managed to survive, through a number of factors, often by migrating to new territories where they practiced their traditional culture surreptitiously, their true identity unknown to the surrounding communities.
The searchers for the Lost Tribes of Israel have been a persistent lot, “finding” the lost Israelites again and again throughout history, in geographical locations as disparate and unlikely as India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, China, and Nigeria. One of the most outlandish hypotheses identified the Native Americans as descendants of one or more of the Lost Tribes. European scholars have most often attempted to prove this cultural connection through the use of trait list comparisons. Seekers of the lost tribes have compiled various lists of behaviors that characterize Jews and Native Americans, found similarities, interpreted these similarities as identities, and asserted that this proved a genealogical connection between them.
In some cases, these trait list comparisons were often brutally biased and spoke more to the scholars’ prejudices than providing proof of any connection between Native Americans and Jews. For example, in the late sixteenth century, the Spanish cleric Gregoria Garcia, using methodology that we would characterize as racist today, proposed the following similarities between Jews and Native Americans: both groups were cowardly, uncharitable, ungrateful, and loved silver (Huddleston 1967). In 1580, in a less bigoted approach, Spanish scholar Diego Duran noted that American Indians, like Jews, practiced circumcision, told stories about plagues, and had traditions of long journeys (Huddleston 1967). In 1650, Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel published a booklet titled The Hope of Israel, based in part on such trait list comparisons in an effort to demonstrate that the native people of South America in particular were, in actuality, descendants of the Lost Tribes who had long ago settled in the New World.
There are many underlying problems with trait list comparisons, not the least of which is that many of the traits used are so general and common that they cannot be used to confidently prove connections among geographically separate groups. Trait list comparisons have long ago been abandoned as viable science in anthropology: the strategy is viewed as little more than cherry-picking, producing the desired results for almost any two groups under comparison.
Nevertheless, the need to situate Native Americans in a biblical framework was vital to many thinkers in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. After all, the reasoning went, the native people of the New World must be descendants from Adam and Eve and survivors of the demographic bottleneck of Noah’s Flood (Noah and his immediate family being the only survivors). As a result, any historical interpretation that placed the Native Americans as an offshoot of a people who had gone missing in history after Noah was seen as an appealing solution to the problems posed by their identity, source, and origin. The combination of the supposed historical disappearance of multiple tribes of Israelites and encountering heretofore unknown and unrecorded groups of people in the New World appeared to simultaneously solve two mysteries. Where did all those Israelites go, and who are the Native Americans? It was obvious: the Native Americans are the lost Israelites.
Finally, the desire for proof for this biblically based perspective may have provided the motivation for the fabrication of fraudulent artifacts bearing Hebrew writing, amateurishly done and filled with orthographic and grammatical anachronisms, which were placed in archaeological contexts that seemed to connect them to ancient Indians (the Newark Holy Stones in Ohio, the Bat Creek Stone in Tennessee, and the Los Lunas Decalogue in New Mexico).
Kenneth Feder
See also America as the New Israel; Founding Myths; Mormon Mythology
Further Reading
ben Israel, Menasseh. 1650. Hope of Israel. London: Crown in Pope’s-head Alley. http://olivercowdery.com/texts/1650hope.htm.
Feder, Kenneth L. 2014. Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Huddleston, L. 1967. Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Lost Tribes of Israel—Primary Document
Barbara A. Simon, The Ten Tribes of Israel (1836)
Early European settlers were preoccupied with the question of how indigenous people came to populate the New World. Since they understood history through the lens of biblical teachings about the origins of the human race, they connected the prehistory of the New World to the accounts of people’s movements after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis. In this account, the author draws from the work of Spanish and English explorers and scholarly studies of ancient religion, folkways, and language to argue that the Aztecs were the Lost Tribes of Israel.
“The ceremony of circumcision was performed ‘with a ‘flint knife,’ as is evident from the twenty-fifth verse of the fourth chapter of Exodus, &c. which induced Garcia to suppose that the reason why the Tecpatl, or flint knife, was held in such reverence, was on account of its connexion with circumcision: and Torquemeda says, that the Totomacs, a numerous nation, inhabiting a mountainous country to the east of Mexico, circumcised their children, “and that the High Priest, or the next in order and rank, performed the ceremony with a flint knife.” [1]—Monarchia Indiana, cap. 48, in Mex. Antiq. vol. vi.
“That the Mexicans believed the earth and the sun drunk up the blood of the innocent is clearly proved by a lord who in a speech to the king of Mexico, recently elected, takes occasion to caution him not to draw down on himself the anger of God. It may here be remarked that most of the speeches in Sahagun’s History of New Spain, have a strong unction of Jewish rhetoric; “the same complaisant mode of speaking of themselves as God’s peculiar people, the same familiar communication with deity beginning frequently as in Abraham’s dialogue with God, with the word ‘peradventure,’ the same unceasing solicitude after dreams, visions, and inspirations, the same manner of addressing each other as brethren, and finally the same choice of metaphors distinguish the compositions of the Jews and Mexicans, which may serve in some measure, to explain the specimens of Mexican eloquence.”
“The Lord’s slaying Leviathan, which the Jews understood to refer to the time of their Messiah, seems to be alluded to in the ninety-sixth page of the lesser Vatican, MS. “I cannot fail to remark that one of the arguments which persuades me to believe that this nation descends from the Hebrews is to see the knowledge they have of the book of Genesis; for although the Devil has succeeded in mixing up so many errors, his lies are still in such a course of conformity with catholic truth, that there is reason to believe that they have had acquaintance with this book, since this and the other four books which follow, are the Pentateuch, written by Moses, and were only found amongst the Hebrew People. There are very strong grounds for believing that this nation proceeds from them,” &c.
“In nothing did the civil policy of the Mexicans more closely resemble that of the Hebrews, than in their dedicating their children to the Temple, and afterwards sending them to be instructed by the Master or Rabbi, in the doctrines of their religion and moral and ceremonial laws. Torquemeda says, “that the ceremony of dedicating children to the military profession, was also a religious one. Amongst the Jews, all wars, not excepting their civil ones, bore a religious character,” &c. “And in Deuteronomy, directions are given to the priests … to accompany and exhort the soldiers to battle. The Interpreter of the Collection of Mendoza says, “that the priests likewise followed the Mexican armies, not only for the purpose of joining the combatants, but also to perform certain religious ceremonies, in which some analogy is discovered between the customs of the two nations. That the Incas waged war for the express purpose of compelling other nations to lay aside their idolatries and embrace the knowledge of the true God, we have the authority of Acosta and of other eminent historians, for asserting.”—p. 49.
“Father Joseph Gumelli, in his account of the nations bordering on the Oronoco, relates that they punished adultery like the ancient Hebrews, by stoning the criminals to death before the assembled people.”—Edwards’s West Indies, vol. i. p. 39, note.
“It is not a little singular, also, (as establishing that to be a fact which few persons would feel inclined to suspect) that, the Mexicans and the Jews should have believed that similar divine judgments (even when these were of a very peculiar nature) would follow the commission of similar crimes. The fifth chapter of Numbers records the extraordinary effect produced on a guilty woman whose husband was jealous by her drinking the bitter water in the trial of jealousy. And Torquemeda says, that nearly the same kind of threat was held out by the Mexican priests to induce the virgins to dread the vengeance of God when they violated their vow.”—p. 55.
Edwards observes in his History of the West Indies, “The Indians would not eat the Mexican hog or the turtle, but held them in the greatest abhorrence.” Gumilla observes, “Neither would they eat the eel, nor many other animals; and birds they deemed impure.” Even the Rev. Dr. Mather, one of the spiritual Israel, “who felt ‘necessitated’ unto the rooting out” the aboriginal Canaanites, and who published a work entitled ‘Magnalia, &c. Wars of the Lord,’ does admit, amongst other points of resemblance, which he could not but acknowledge, that these “savages had a great unkindness for our swine.”
Hearne, who published a work in 1795, entitled a Journey to Prince of Wales’s Island, remarks, “that some Indians who had killed an Indian at Copper River, considered themselves in a state of uncleanness, which induced them to practice some very curious ceremonies. In the first place all who were concerned in the murder, were prohibited from cooking any sort of food, either for themselves or others. They refrained also from eating many parts of the deer and other animals, particularly the entrails and blood; and during their pollution their food was never sodden with water, but dried in the sun, eaten quite raw, or broiled when a fire could be procured.”—2 Samuel xv.
Source: Simon, Barbara A. The Ten Tribes of Israel Historically Identified with the Aborigines of the Western Hemisphere. London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1836.