Lost Tribes Research Articles

William Apess, the “Lost Tribes,” and Indigenous Survivance

William Apess, the "Lost Tribes," and Indigenous Survivance Rochelle Raineri Zuck (bio) In January 1836 William Apess, Pequot writer, orator, public intellectual, and Methodist minister, delivered his now famous Eulogy on King Philip at the Odeon Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts.1 This eulogy, which marks the end of what we know of Apess's career as an orator, offers a powerful challenge to Anglo-American accounts of colonial New England history and concludes with a broader commentary on the treatment of Native peoples from the colonial era to the present time. He relates his own personal history to the larger story of the New England tribes. "And although I can say that I have some dear, good friends among white people," states Apess, "Yet I eye them with a jealous eye, for fear they will betray me" (Eulogy 310).2 This fear stems from the fact that white Christians, suggests Apess, have continually betrayed Native peoples and looked upon them as objects of curiosity, refusing to recognize their common humanity and, in the case of Christian Indians, their shared faith. He urges white listeners to acknowledge that American Indian wants are the same as their own and argues that all should be equal before the law. Participating in the familiar genre of the jeremiad, or political sermon, Apess, like many Protestant ministers before him, drew on the authority of the Old Testament prophets (like Jeremiah himself) and exhorted white audiences to remember their position as a supposedly "chosen people" and keep the terms of their covenant with God. As the intellectual and cultural descendants of John Winthrop and Cotton Mather, Anglo-New Englanders would have been sensitive to the rhetorical tradition in which Apess was working and the spiritual authority his eulogy invokes.3 As a Methodist minister, Apess was well versed in the jeremiad tradition as it was practiced in New England, and his sermons and political [End Page 1] writings constitute what might be called American Indian jeremiads, arguments that frame American Indians as a chosen people with a covenantal relationship to the Christian God by linking them with the biblical narrative of the Israelites.4 In his 1831 sermon Increase of the Kingdom of God and a companion essay entitled The Indians: The Ten Lost Tribes, both of which take up the theory that American Indians are descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel, Apess argues for a shared past for Native peoples and asserts their continuing presence on the North American continent. He exhorts white audiences to acknowledge American Indians' political, cultural, and spiritual rights and suggests that respecting these rights was key to the fulfillment of the covenant in which white New Englanders imagined themselves to participate. The lost tribes theory of American Indian origins also is discussed at length in the appendix to Apess's autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829 and 1831). Taken together, Apess's references to the lost tribes function as a warning to the "great American nation" that it should indeed fear the "judgments of heaven" for the poor treatment of American Indians/Israelites (Increase 106). Blending the secular and the spiritual, he argues that the connection between Indian and Jewish peoples has profound implications for contemporary arguments about Native sovereignty and their political relationships with the United States. Apess further links the lost tribes rhetoric and Indian land claims during his efforts on behalf of the Mashpee people in their legal battles with the state of Massachusetts in 1833-34, documented in his book Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe; or, The Pretended Riot Explained (1835).5 Apess's strategic reworking of the lost tribes theory constitutes an act of what Gerald Vizenor calls "survivance," a term that he describes in Fugitive Poses as "an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry" (15).6 First proposed by seventeenth-century Europeans, the lost tribes theory of American Indian origins represented American Indians as descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel, the original inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, who apparently disappeared from the historical record after they were attacked by Assyrians as punishment for turning away from the Hebrew...

The Payne-Butrick Papers (review)

The Payne-Butrick Papers. Edited and annotated by William L. Anderson, Jane L. Brown, and Anne F. Rogers. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. 2 vols. Pp. xxx + 363, viii + 561. Cloth, $150.00.)Reviewed by Daniel K. RichterThese two handsome books bring into print the contents of six manuscript volumes from the Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection at the Newberry Library in Chicago. How those many pages of ethnographic material on Cherokee people during the removal era came into the possession of turn-of-the-twentieth-century collector Ayer is unclear. But they are what survives of an extraordinary effort to document the Cherokees in the 1830s and 1840s undertaken by John Howard Payne, a New Englander perhaps best known as the man responsible for the lyrics of Home Sweet Home.After a modest international career as an actor and an undistinguished stint as ajournalist, and before being appointed as U.S. counsel to Tunis, Payne found himself almost by accident in Cherokee country as a guest of Chief John Ross in 1835. What began with a journalistic interest in Native American resistance to Federal and state removal policies became personal when Georgia troops crossed not only into Cherokee Nation territory but across the line into the state of Tennessee to arrest Payne and Ross on trumped-up charges of obstructing a census. Payne also stood accused of being an abolitionist and a French spy. After his release from imprisonment, Payne made it his business to publicize nationally the illegality of his arrest and the treatment of the Cherokees more generally, particularly in the Treaty of New Echota, which provided the legal basis for removal. Payne spent a few weeks in Cherokee country before his arrest in 1835, four months in Indian Territory after removal in 1840 and 1841, and some additional time with Cherokees in 1842. On that last occasion, he was employed by the U.S. government to investigate the results of the New Echota Treaty; his honest report got him fired.Along the way, Payne not only became deeply interested in Cherokee history and religion but met a man who probably knew those subjects more thoroughly than any other Euro-American. Presbyterian missionary Daniel Butrick lived with Cherokees for more than thirty years, from his arrival at the Brainerd Mission in Tennessee 1818, through the horrors of the Trail of Tears, until his death in what is now Oklahoma in 1851. The first of the six bound volumes at the Newberry is the result of Payne's collaboration with Butrick, a polished but never published manuscript of what Payne hoped would be the first of three books. An overview of Cherokee religious beliefs and ceremonies, the text is heavily - at times nearly fatally - infused with Payne's and Butrick's then common-place theory that Native Americans were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The third Newberry manuscript appears to be a rough draft of one of the subsequent books Payne envisioned. These compilations are valuable not only for the many nuggets of Cherokee traditions that peek through the interpretive scheme but because they attribute particular stories and pieces of information to individual Cherokee informants, and thus allow glimpses of distinct persons and perspectives.But in many ways the remaining manuscripts - which in this edition occupy the middle of volume 1 and all of volume 2 - are far more interesting. The second Newberry manuscript consists of miscellaneous notes that Payne compiled during his visits to the Cherokees. Sprinkled through lists of clans' and chiefs' names, transcriptions of laws and magazine articles, and other bits of information are biographical sketches of such well-known figures as Ross, Shoe Boots, and Sequoyah; notes on interviews with Native leaders; and accounts of the machinations of U.S. officials. Manuscript four, which opens volume 2 of the printed collection, consists of letters written to Payne about the Cherokees. …

Entangled Stories: The Red Jews in Premodern Yiddish and German Apocalyptic Lore

“Far, far away from our areas, somewhere beyond the Mountains of Darkness, on the other side of the Sambatyon River…there lives a nation known as the Red Jews.” The Red Jews are best known from classic Yiddish writing, most notably from Mendele'sKitser masoes Binyomin hashlishi(The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third). This novel, first published in 1878, represents the initial appearance of the Red Jews in modern Yiddish literature. This comical travelogue describes the adventures of Benjamin, who sets off in search of the legendary Red Jews. But who are these Red Jews or, in Yiddish,di royte yidelekh? The term denotes the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, the ten tribes that in biblical times had composed the Northern Kingdom of Israel until they were exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE. Over time, the myth of their return emerged, and they were said to live in an uncharted location beyond the mysterious Sambatyon River, where they would remain until the Messiah's arrival at the end of time, when they would rejoin the rest of the Jewish people.

One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism (review)

Reviewed by: One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism Abraham D. Lavender One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism, by Don Seeman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009. 240 pp. $46.95. One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism is an ethnographic study of the "Feres Mura" in Israel and Ethiopia. The so-called "Feres Mura" are the descendants of Ethiopian Jews, some of whose ancestors converted to Christianity in Ethiopia in the 1800s but have now reasserted their Jewish identity and desire to live in Israel. There are now more than 100,000 Ethiopians living as Jews in Israel, with about 20,000 "Feres Mura" who are the central concern of Seeman, although he also gives attention to "Feres Mura" still in Ethiopia. Seeman started research on the Beta Israel community in 1989, conducted research in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in the summers of 1992 and 1993 and in Israel between 1994 and 1996, and concentrated on Jerusalem and Haifa, including immigrant absorption centers, between 1998 and 2003. He clearly is an expert on the topic. One of his main arguments is that the "Feres Mura" must be viewed as "an integral part of the larger Beta Israel or Ethiopian Jewish community whose center is today in Israel" (p. 5). Seeman notes that the term Beta Israel is the term most commonly used today in both academic and historical contexts, and is frequently used by Beta Israel to describe themselves. He puts the words "Feres Mura" in quotation [End Page 183] marks every time he uses them, and advocates that another term should be used. In fact, as seen, he uses the more encompassing term Ethiopian-Israelis in the subtitle to make his point, this term being used to accurately include those "Feres Mura" who now live in Israel. Seeman emphasizes three spheres of state policy that impinge heavily upon the "Feres Mura": (1) immigration policy, (2) public health practice, and (3) the power of Israel's religious establishment. He also emphasizes the controversy over the policy of return to Judaism, a policy constantly under pressure to change, and which did change drastically during his years of research. Seeman reminds the reader that it was Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef 's ruling in 1973 accepting the Jewishness of the Beta Israel that set the stage for the eventual immigration to Israel of the Beta Israel, but that, after years of arguments both ways, this drastically changed in 2007 when Minister of the Interior Meir Shitreet "tried to galvanize public opinion to emend the Law of Return to withhold automatic citizenship from immigrant converts in order to remove the temptation of mass conversion by groups like the 'Feres Mura'" (p. 196). The Minister's position was, "No one should go looking for any lost tribes because I won't let them in any more. . . . Let them go to America" (p. 196). After an Introduction, the book is divided into seven chapters. In Chapter One, "A Death in Addis Ababa," in July 1992, a year after the "Feres Mura" dilemma "burst onto Israeli public consciousness" with the Operation Solomon airlift, Seeman introduces the reader to the "purity, authenticity, suffering, and a sense of belonging to a people and a nation" (p. 40). In Chapter Two, "The Question of Kinship," he gives a good historical overview of life in Ethiopia since the mid-1800s. Special attention is given to Abba Mahari, a leader of the Beta Israel in Ethiopia, who, in 1862, was among the leaders of a disastrous attempted exodus to the "Holy Land" of Israel because he believed that God was ready to gather diaspora Jews back to the land of their fathers. Mahari's various actions were also partly responsible for the failure of Christian missionaries who had tried to start conversions in the 1800s, especially after 1860. It is estimated that only .01 percent of Beta Israels converted in any one year during the century, and these were largely poor youth attracted by the carrot of a free education (p. 51). Despite very few conversions, charges of accepting Christianity have been a major source of accusations against...

Israelite Genealogies and Christian Commitment: The Limits of Language Ideologies in Guhu-Samane Christianity

Language ideological work on Protestantism has largely focused on how people engage in an intimate, immediate, and individualistic relationship with God, and the answer has been that they do so by sweeping away the debris—the history, the social relations, the sins, and the language—that keeps God at a distance. However, this focus has neglected the extent to which other Christian social formations play crucial roles in how Christians conceptualize their past, present, and future relationships to spiritual forces. In this article, I focus on Guhu-Samane (Papua New Guinea) discourses that circulate among Christians that their ethnic group is actually one of the Lost Tribes of Israel even as these same Christians denounce their own ego-centric genealogies as nothing more than histories of sinfulness. I argue that the renunciation of ego-centric genealogies and ego-centric pasts to create individual Christians depends upon the embrace of socio-centric genealogies and ethnic pasts to create the potential to be united Christians.

From Dalits to Bene Ephraim

The community of Bene Ephraim was established in the late 1980s in Andhra Pradesh by a group of Christianized Madiga who declared that they belonged to one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. The paper explores the extent to which Bene Ephraim narratives of origin have been and are being shaped by the responses of others on the level of national and international politics. It is demonstrated that while in the beginning the leaders of the community were keen to stress their affinity to the scheduled castes of India and portrayed their social and economic problems in terms of the upper and lower caste dichotomy, later on they modified their story of origin to dissociate the community from the untouchables. Their self-representation as victims of caste domination gave way to expressions of concern about the possibility of becoming victims of anti-Jewish terrorist attacks. The paper argues that this change in the way the Bene Ephraim chose to frame the socio-political problems that the community is facing was linked to their attempts to be recognized as a Jewish group and be accepted in the State of Israel. At the same time, it is also suggested that this tactic provides yet another example of a Dalit group attempting to attract the attention of the international community to their condition of discrimination by reinterpreting their plight in the terms that foreign audiences would be more familiar with and could relate to more easily.

DNA, Israel and the Ancestors—Substantiating Connections through Christianity in Papua New Guinea

This paper critically evaluates the ‘transformative engagement’ between expatriate missionaries and the Gogodala of Western Province, PNG, in light of a recent claim for Jewish ancestry and Israeli nationality. This claim is based on the contention that the original Gogodala ancestors, whose migration to the area is detailed in formal ancestral narratives or iniwa olagi, were members of the Lost Tribes of Israel. In July 2003 this culminated in a visit by Professor Tudor Parfitt, Director of Jewish Studies at the University of London, to investigate. This paper examines the extent to which this claim for identification with Israel represents ongoing dialogue about the origins and nature of Gogodala Christianity, and outlines the extent to which Gogodala communities are substantially connected to places and people beyond their village, province and even country, blurring the boundaries between local and global through their engagement with Christianity.

Origin of the Yoruba and “The Lost Tribes of Israel”

Origin of the Yoruba and “The Lost Tribes of Israel”

The Children of Ephraim: Being Jewish in Andhra Pradesh (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The article focuses on the community of Bene Ephraim (the Children of Ephraim, in Hebrew), who in the late 1980s declared that they belonged to the Lost Tribes of Israel. This group stems from a community of the Madiga untouchables of Andhra Pradesh and at the moment has about 100 active members, who have embraced Judaism and have expressed a desire to move to the state of Israel. On the basis of a year‐long fieldwork among them, we suggest that their case problematizes conventional notions about the alleged ‘ethnocentricity’ of Judaism and presents a new challenge for public and academic debates about the meaning of being Jewish. At the same time, we demonstrate that Bene Ephraim are under pressure to modify their narrative of origin and to renegotiate community membership in order to become a more ‘conventional’ Jewish group in the eyes of Israeli authorities.

Front and Back Covers, Volume 26, Number 6. December 2010

Front and back cover caption, volume 26 issue 6Front cover PUBLIC ANXIETY AND PERSONAL GENOMICS When the University of California at Berkeley sent letters to incoming freshmen in the summer of 2010, inviting them to submit their DNA for genetic testing, the plan quickly attracted national media attention and generated heated debate. The New York Times covered the issue and the Center for Genetics and Society and Council for Responsible Genetics called for a halt to the project. After having their DNA analysed, students would be given information about three genetic codes relating to their tolerance for alcohol and lactose, and their propsensity for folic acid deficiency.Why did this apparently harmless educational and health project become so controversial? Nancy Scheper‐Hughes examines the issues that led to a legislative hearing in Sacramento and a California State Department of Public Health order to stop the results being communicated to Berkeley students.What does this entail for the future of medical genomics? For academic staff in the biological and medical genomics sciences at Berkeley it was a severe disappointment. In the eyes of anthropologists and other science, technology, law and bioethics faculty, however, the project raised ethical issues and public anxieties around the uses and disclosure of personal genomics data that urgently need to be addressed.Front cover design by Chris Girard /http://www.chrisgirard.com.Back cover ‘DISCOVERING’ IDENTITY The images on the back cover feature baby David, one of the youngest of the Bene Ephraim (Children of Ephraim), and Jacob Yacobi, a young man born around the time when his community announced its Jewish origin. While for their parents’ generation Jewish identity was in many respects an issue of choice, for them and other Bene Ephraim of their age groups Judaism is the tradition they were born into and raised with.In this issue, Yulia Egorova and Shahid Perwez report on the community of Bene Ephraim of Andhra Pradesh (India). Twenty years ago this group of former Madiga untouchables claimed descent from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, building a synagogue and embracing Jewish practice.Historians may debate ‘documentary evidence’ demonstrating a genealogical connection between Judaizing groups and other Jewish communities around the world. Geneticists – among whom reconstructing Jewish history has proved a very popular topic – might be interested in testing whether communities like Bene Ephraim have any connections to the Middle East on the molecular level. However, irrespective of their findings, for the children and young people who grew up as Bene Ephraim being Jewish is as much of a given as it is for children and young people from ‘conventionally’ Jewish households in the West.Their parents ‘discovered’ their identities by rethinking their history in light of the Jewish tradition. For their children these identities may turn into an ascribed status they will have to face, just as the participants in the ‘fortune cookie genomics’ project discussed in this issue by Nancy Scheper‐Hughes will have to live with the results of their tests.

The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (review)

Reviewed by: The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History Abraham D. Lavender The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History, by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 302 pp. $29.95. Readers of this book are in for a treat. From the title, readers might expect a tribe-by-tribe description and analysis of the ten lost tribes, but Benite's approach is very different. His goal is to show how the search for the ten lost tribes has, over two thousand years, been used as an motivation for and explanation of global exploration and as a major way to try to understand the world. From ancient explorations, to European imperialist expansions, to contemporary evangelical apocalyptic movements, Benite shows how the concept of the ten lost tribes has interacted with the search for "the edge of the world," expansion, colonialism, and the growth of geographical knowledge. The author integrates Jewish and Christian perspectives, covers more than two thousand years, explains explorations and expansions from a number of cultures and nations, documents numerous tribes throughout the world who have claimed to be a lost tribe, and explains how all these dimensions have affected both academic perspectives and national foreign policies. The tribes throughout the world who have claimed to be one of the ten lost tribes frequently do not, of course, overlap with the ten lost tribes claimed by Jewish history, but this only adds to the conceptual complexity of the ten lost tribes. Benite has shown that legend and reality do not always overlap but that the lost tribes concept still is a powerful global story of restitution, redemption, and wholeness. After a comprehensive historical Introduction, Chapter One discusses the first forced exile from Israel and notes how "[t]he thinly populated, poor southern kingdom, born in the tenth century, saw the destruction of its sister and rival northern Israelite kingdom by the Assyrians" (p. 45). Benite also [End Page 163] makes other important points: that the total Israelite population was not deported, that other smaller deportations added to the [inaccurate] idea of a complete devastation, that many other people were imported into Israel, that deportations from numerous areas for various reasons were typical of the Assyrian Empire, that as Assyrian power waned, "Judah was able to rise to a status of some regional significance . . . more populated, more centralized, and somewhat stronger in military terms" (p. 45), and that the exiles were able to "return to their land and rebuild the temple, which they did in 518 BCE" (p. 47). Chapter One concludes that the fall of the Israelite kingdom led to theological explanations of divine punishment, messianic promises of return, and speculations about the locations of the tribes. Chapter Two notes that the term "ten tribes" occurs only twice (in the same scene) in the entire Hebrew Biblical canon, and that a distinct entity of the "ten lost tribes" occurred only later in the postbiblical period. Chapter Three, " Tricksters and Travels," discusses several major world travelers who popularized the idea of the lost tribes, especially Eldad the Danite (late 800s C.E.) and the Spanish Jew Benjamin of Tudela (late 1100s C.E.). Chapter Four, "A Mighty Multitude of Israelites," continues the history of travelling writers and historians, with attention to David Reuveni and Rabbi Abraham Farissol of Ferrera, Italy. Chapter Five, "Concordia Mundi," continues the detailed recording of the travellers theme, i.e., the spreading of the concept of the lost tribes in the Jewish world. Benite begins with the story of Aharon ha-Levi, a native of Portugal, better known as Antonio Montezinos, and continues this chapter with documentation of other fascinating claims of the ten tribes being located in the Americas. He then turns to claims of the lost ten tribes being found in areas as diverse as Asia, Atlantis, Greenland, and the Canary Islands. Much of this chapter discusses historical claims of how the ten tribes made their way from Israel to the Americas. In Chapter Six, "Hopes of Israel," Benite documents that in the late 1600s the focus changed and England emerged as the location of the hottest debate. Protestants used the legend of the ten tribes' revolt against Judah's...

Jews and the Atlantic World: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Review Essay

Jews and the Atlantic World: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries:Review Essay Saul Lerner (bio) Atlantic History: Concept and Contours, by Bernard Bailyn. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Their Shared History, 1400-1900, by Thomas Benjamin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of American Racism, by Ronald Sanders. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978. Atlantic Diaspora: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800, edited by Richard L. Kagen and Philip D. Morgan. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom, and Revenge, by Edward Kritzler. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Historians writing about the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries have, increasingly in recent years, focused less on national than on Atlantic history. This perspective has been conveyed through the words of Bernard Bailyn, whose volume, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours, offers an explanation of the growing historiographical importance of the Atlantic perspective: The emergence of this interest in Atlantic history, as more than a geographical expression—as a subject in itself, as a historical conception, as an essential passage in the development of the world we know—has its own history. It is a [End Page 146] story that winds through the public life of the late twentieth century, through the interior impulses of technical scholarship, and through the social situation of those who write history. (p. 4) Consistent with this perspective has been a growing collection of studies of the topic, including one of the most recent, Thomas Benjamin's important work, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Their Shared History, 1400-1900. While the portrait that Bailyn paints (an example of which is Benjamin's book) of the origin of the Atlantic historiographical view developed out of the international perspective following the end of World War II and the Cold War, the Atlantic perspective has become ever more prominent in the writings of historians of the past three decades, as globalism has become characteristic of the way in which most nations have viewed themselves, their economies, and their relations with other nations. Such a perspective was part of a groundbreaking book, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of American Racism, by Ronald Sanders, who viewed the origin of American racism in Spanish intolerance during the Age of Exploration. Sanders attempted to show that the Age of Exploration, the colonization of the New World, and the origin of American racism all were aspects of the history of the Jew in the period. Sanders' argument portrays Spain from the fourteenth century onward as "fanatically intolerant," and this view came to dominate Spanish development in both the Old and the New Worlds. Religious fanaticism lay at the heart of Spanish racism. During the eighth century, Islam overran most of the Iberian Peninsula, and Christians were confined to a relatively small portion in the northwest. During the next three hundred years, gradually Christian forces gained strength and subsequently reconquered the entire Peninsula. By the mid-thirteenth century, this effort was partly successful, although for another century Moors retained control of part of the Peninsula. Sanders shows how the outbreak of anti-Jewish rioting, beginning in Seville on June 4, 1391, started off a wave of pogroms all over Spain. In such major cities as Cordova, Toledo, Madrid, Majorca, Burgos, and other areas, Jews were killed, synagogues were looted or turned into Christian churches, many Jewish communities were destroyed, and Jews were given the choices of death, conversion, or flight. These options were formalized by the Spanish Crown in the summer and fall of 1492, which marked a final chapter of the expulsion of Jews and Moors from Spain and the triumph of militant Christendom throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Sanders argues that Jews were among the earliest victims of Spanish fanaticism because Spanish Christians believed that Jews possessed tainted and heretical religious views. In the atmosphere [End Page 147] of heated fanaticism, Jews (and subsequently other peoples) were considered fundamentally tainted people, for they were not Catholics. Thus, Sanders held that...

Ethnographic Representation and the Politics of Violence in West Papua

■ This article examines how ethnographic representations of violence inflect contemporary understandings of West Papua and influence its politics. It describes how colonial depictions of perpetual warfare in the highlands became paradigmatic for the region. Recent forms of extreme tourism draw on these images in offering encounters with ‘lost tribes’ that undermine the credibility of West Papuan political actors. Similarly, an American mining company paid the Indonesian military for protection against the West Papuan resistance movement while ignoring the violence of state actors. However, the collapse of Suharto’s New Order Indonesia has facilitated the reinterpretation of merdeka (freedom) as social justice, suggesting alternative ways to conceptualize West Papua’s relationship to the Indonesian state. Recent efforts by West Papuan activists to mobilize the discourses of human rights and indigenous politics are contingent on displacing the narratives of violence that dominate popular understandings of West Papua. This article shows how ethnographic representations may have negative consequences for indigenous politics.

The Imaginary War between Prester John and Eldad the Danite and Its Real Implications

After introducing Eldad the Danite and his literature, this article presents an “Entangled History” of the belief in a utopian land among medieval Jews and Christians. It does so by examining the relationship between the Eldad literature and the different versions of the letter of Prester John, first in Latin and then in the vernacular. These two tales of an imaginary land were popular among both Jews and Christians; the two societies shared the belief in the land of Prester John and his neighbors, the Ten Lost Tribes, and even exchanged information about these mythical lands. But Jews and Christians also used these stories against each other by retelling them with a bias to one side or the other. This literary interaction reflects the entanglement of these two societies, and its limitations, demonstrating how the two societies shared the same (imaginary) information and used it in similar ways—but to contrary ends.

In this issue of Occupational Medicine: Lost tribes

In this issue of Occupational Medicine: Lost tribes

Traditions of Israelite Descent Among Certain Muslim Groups in South Asia

The South Asian Muslim groups of Pathans, Kashmiris, Qidwais, and Bani Israil, in spite of being antagonistic towards Jews, Israel, and Zionism, claim Israelite descent, which is seen by some scholars as an attempt on their part to distance themselves from their pre-Islamic polytheistic past by fabricating fake genealogies ascending to the founders of Semitic monotheism, the supposed patriarchs, accepted by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. Their antagonism towards Jews stems from the negative interpretations of Quranic references to Jews and also from the Arab-Israel conflict. The religious Jews who take their claims seriously are those who perceive themselves as Jews as part of a larger group of Israelites, which also includes people who according to them have descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. Unlike the B'nei Menashe from northeast India, these Muslim groups have no desire to migrate to Israel. However, many religious Jewish organizations are keen on penetrating into their world and persuading them to do so. The involvement of religious Jewish organizations with these Muslim claimants of Israelite descent in South Asia can have some interesting ramifications for Jewish-Muslim relations and the world at large.

'The Bible in Stone': Pyramids, Lost Tribes and Alternative Archaeologies

Fascination with the Great Pyramid of Khufu is one of the cornerstones of alternative archaeology, with mystical or prophetic significance attached to its every dimension and measurement. In this paper I highlight the important contribution of the religious nationalist British-Israelite movement in the invention and popularization of pyramidology. Tracing the development of this esoteric subject through the first half of the 20th century, I demonstrate the importance of so-called pyramid prophecy in the development of British-Israelism as a nationalist and imperialist myth of election. By examining British-Israelite pyramidology in its historical context, I propose a critical approach to alternative archaeologies that focuses on individual narratives rather than ill-defined categories.

Christian Identity and the Politics of Religion

Since the end of the Second World War, one form of religion has been especially evident on the American extreme Right. Tracing its roots to nineteenth‐century Britain, Christian Identity emerged in the USA in the 1940s. Anglo‐Saxons, it claimed, were the original lost tribes of Israel, and the Bible was written not for the Jews, but for the white race. Taking a wide variety of organisational forms, Identity has experienced a number of bitter disputes. While some adherents argue that the Bible justifies vigilante violence, others insist that it does not, and where the doctrine has long been associated with the claim that Jews are literally children of Satan, in recent years leading Identity preachers have insisted that this is a false reading of scripture. As with other disputes among Identity believers, these arguments do not disrupt the foundational anti‐Semitism of the doctrine. It draws our attention, however, to the centrality of religion for a movement which envisages the coming of a sacralised new order and which, in some forms, has argued that a divine state has already come to pass, in the twelve years of the Third Reich.

A Romance of the Jewish East: The Ten Lost Tribes and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in Medieval Europe

A Romance of the Jewish East: The Ten Lost Tribes and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in Medieval Europe

Remarks on Avraham Firkowicz and the HebrewMejelis“Document”

T In the early 1840s several forgeries of Hebrew epigraphic material have been produced; these forgeries are associated with the name of Avraham Firkowicz/Firkovich, a Russian Jewish book collector and an amateur archaeologist. His discoveries were supposed to provide a revolutionising effect on the nascent Wissenschaft des Judenthums (Jewish Studies). On the margin of a re-edition of the Mejelis Document by the Finnish scholar Tapani Harviainen, this article makes justice to Firkowicz, analysing the cultural context in which the forgeries were made, such as the Haskalah movement, Orientalism, Christian missionary activity and Lost Tribes hunting.