Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America by Matthew Dougherty

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America by Matthew Dougherty Elizabeth Fenton (bio) Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America matthew dougherty University of Oklahoma Press, 2021 250 pp. The notion that populations described in the Bible had somehow migrated and settled across the Atlantic emerged in tandem with European arrival in the Western Hemisphere. Speculation about the origins of Indigenous Americans by Europeans typically ignored accounts given by [End Page 242] Indigenous people themselves and attempted to reconcile the revelation of these "new" continents with biblical accounts of the world's creation. The most popular version of these theories that cropped up in the colonial period was what Matthew Dougherty refers to as the "Israelite Indian" story in his book, Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America. Within these stories, European encounters with Indigenous American nations not only initiated a new era in human history but also solved a long-standing biblical mystery. According to the book of 2 Kings, the Assyrian Empire conquered the Kingdom of Israel around 740 BCE and relocated the tribes that comprised it to lands that appear on no known maps. Those ten tribes have been "lost" ever since. The Israelite Indian story presented the tantalizing prospect that those missing tribes, at long last and through the providence of settler colonialism, had been found. As Dougherty's book demonstrates, the story held particular importance to people living through the early decades of US nation-formation. Lost Tribes Found is an eloquent study of how the Israelite Indian story allowed a wide variety of people to situate themselves within the United States in an era defined by racial violence, territorial expansion, and religious change. Lost Tribes Found is an essential contribution to both the broad field of early American religious studies and the more particular study of religious nationalism. It offers a fresh perspective on stories of Israelite American origins, which persisted, despite all the evidence running counter to their claims, into (and in some corners beyond) the nineteenth century. It also persuasively suggests that the frameworks of providential exceptionalism and "manifest destiny," while useful, do not fully explain the development of competing claims to sovereignty in the early national era. Dougherty's main contention throughout the book is that "comparisons of Indigenous peoples to Israelites or Jews often articulated forms of religious nationalism in the context of an expansive U.S. empire. These nationalisms claimed that God had chosen some people—American Jews, Indigenous peoples, Mormons, or White settlers—to have territory and political sovereignty" (16–17). American nationalisms, helpfully plural in this reframing, come into being through their entanglements with religion. Rather than producing a single nationalism aligned with a particular faith tradition, Dougherty shows, Israelite Indian stories facilitated the proliferation of (at times competing) nationalisms within the ever-shifting American landscape. Central to this book's argument is the notion that Israelite Indian stories produced intense emotions in those who heard and believed them. Those [End Page 243] emotions, in turn, "became entangled with multiple nationalisms that reimagined or opposed the United States' growing empire" (4). The book's first chapter, for example, shows how Israelite Indian stories allowed Protestant reformers not only to imagine a singular "Indian religion" but also "to evoke in their White readers feelings of hope and anxiety about missions to Indigenous people" (24). Such a reading allows Dougherty to explain why Israelite Indian theories such as Elias Boudinot's foundational text on the subject, A Star in the West (1816), simultaneously express feelings of love for and kinship with Indigenous populations and treat the expansion of a white US empire as inevitable. Lost Tribes Found's third chapter shows how two outsiders to this tradition—the Pequot Methodist preacher William Apess and the Jewish utopian Mordecai Manuel Noah—used Israelite Indian stories "to evoke the pride and hope needed to nucleate new Indigenous and Jewish nationalisms" that could perhaps counter the nation's ascendant white nationalism (74). Although they address competing versions of the Israelite Indian story, these chapters together show how this story conjured feelings of hope for a future of American...