this study tracks the emergence and transformation in Anglophone America of the “Hebraic Indian theory”—that is, the idea that Indigenous people are descended from Israelites, most often members of the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel. In such theories, the European “discovery” of Indigenous peoples was an event of apocalyptic significance because the reemergence of the Lost Tribes was assumed to herald a new age of the world. Fenton approaches the material from the study of early American literature and brings perceptive and wide-ranging analyses to a variety of texts. She examines not only religious narratives—including the Book of Mormon—but also scientific literature and novels to show how this theory changed from its emergence in Anglophone literature during the seventeenth century to its flourishing in the nineteenth-century United States. Fenton shows how, at their height in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Hebraic Indian theories allowed their authors to frame American colonialism within Christian sacred history. After the 1830 publication of the Book of Mormon, she argues, narratives about the Lost Tribes were increasingly separated from narratives about Indigenous peoples. This removed Indigenous people from a place of significance in Christian sacred histories and led to the decline of Hebraic Indian theories. The overall argument of the book is compelling, but its limited engagement with early Mormon millennialism weakens its account of this theory's decline.The first section of Fenton's work focuses on the development of Hebraic Indian theories in English-language texts between the mid-seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries. It begins with a chapter analyzing Thomas Thorowgood's Iewes in America (1650) and Jews in America (1660), which introduced this idea into puritan conversations in both England and New England. In contrast to Richard W. Cogley's earlier work on Thorowgood, Fenton focuses on scientific rather than millennial themes in these works. Thorowgood, Fenton shows, presented the Hebraic identity of Indigenous people in terms of probability rather than certainty. Hence, his work indexed shifts in European epistemologies away from deductive certainty and toward the construction of probabilistic knowledge. By relying on a mass of weak arguments rather than any single chain of reasoning, Thorowgood presented his readers with a form of Pascal's wager. Yes, it was improbable that “Indians” were Israelites, but the probability was high enough that settlers should convert them to Christianity just in case they were the Lost Tribes.The second chapter, which analyzes James Adair's A History of the American Indians (1775), shows how this probabilistic reasoning undergirded Hebraic Indian theories in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Adair's work gained credibility because it was based on seemingly empirical observations made during his decades living in the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations and trading with the Cherokee, Catawba, and Muscogee. He argued that these nations were “Israelites” based on alleged similarities in language and custom to the people described in the Hebrew Bible but did not attribute political or religious significance to this identification. Instead, being able to find Indigenous people in the Bible allowed Adair to argue that they shared a common ancestry with the rest of humanity.Adair's arguments, however, became the basis for later works that identified Indigenous people with Israelites to make religious and political points. Fenton's third chapter takes up these arguments as articulated in A Star in the West (1816) by the prominent evangelical donor Elias Boudinot and A Son of the Forest (1829) by the Pequot minister and activist William Apess. Boudinot's work recast Adair's arguments by framing them within God's supposed providential plans for the United States. If Indigenous people were the Lost Tribes of Israel, Boudinot argued, then their conversion would allow the United States to usher in the millennium. Apess, in turn, incorporated large sections of Boudinot's work into his 1829 autobiography, but put them to a different purpose: grounding his Christian identity in the “Israelite” past of his nation rather than the efforts of White settlers.The second section of Fenton's work focuses on the rejection and modification of Hebraic Indian narratives after 1830. The Book of Mormon, as the fourth chapter argues, was an important part of this process. First, and most simply, the Book of Mormon deflated evangelical interest in Hebraic Indian theories by associating them with a stigmatized religious movement. Second, Fenton argues, it eliminated the millennial significance of the conversion of Indigenous peoples by distinguishing them from the Lost Tribes. In 2 Nephi 29 and 3 Nephi 17, the Book of Mormon affirmed the existence of the Lost Tribes but implied that they did not live in the Americas. It further distinguished them from the Lamanites, whom early Mormons generally identified with Indigenous peoples. This lacuna in the text invited early Mormons such as Parley Pratt, Eliza Snow, and Matthew Dalton to speculate about the existence of the Lost Tribes in a distant land, a planet out in space, or even within the hollow sphere of the earth. As Fenton shows, this speculative tradition remained a part of Mormon culture at least through the early twentieth century.The fifth chapter discusses the mid-nineteenth-century eclipse of Hebraic Indian theories in White Protestant circles using an extended analysis of James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Bee Hunter (1848). In this book, the naïve Methodist preacher “Parson Amen” stood for earlier evangelical writers—such as Elias Boudinot and Ethan Smith—who found millennial significance in the possibility that Indigenous peoples might be Israelites. Amen's enthusiasm blinds him to what the titular bee hunter, Ben Boden, knows: that the expansion of White settlement would lead not to the millennium but to violence and, eventually, the disappearance of Indigenous peoples. In place of Amen's vision of a millennial future for Indigenous people, Cooper substitutes a familiar narrative of their vanishing before the spread of White settlement. This narrative, Fenton shows, justified American colonial projects without the necessity of assigning a millennial significance to Indigenous peoples.The sixth and final chapter demonstrates the clear divorce between millennial expectation and Lost Tribes narratives by the end of the nineteenth century. It focuses on De Witt Clinton Chipman's novel Beyond the Verge (1895), which depicted the mound building “Chichimeca” ancestors of Indigenous peoples and their encounter with the Lost Tribes of Israel. The latter traveled through North America on their way to live in a miraculous land inside the hollow earth. Chipman's Chichimecas were not Hebrews, and so the text pushed against theories that attributed the earthwork mounds of North America to mysterious “mound builders” sometimes thought to be the Lost Tribes. As Fenton argues, however, he did hold out the hope for Indigenous people's future in a Christian millennial scenario. The sole Chichimec who accompanied the Lost Tribes into their paradise inside the earth was Nardo, a priest who had been converted to Christianity by a mysterious traveling Israelite. Allowed to join the Lost Tribes in part because of his Christianity, Nardo symbolized the potential uses of Christianity to incorporate Indigenous people into the future of the United States.Fenton's work offers a persuasive argument about the use of Hebraic Indian theories to position Indigenous people in colonial projects and, above all else, in a colonial sense of history. The epilogue, which connects these histories to modern debates about studies of Indigenous peoples’ DNA, makes the contemporary significance of this tendency clear. Those interested in Mormon studies will find her analyses of Lost Tribes narratives in Mormon culture especially interesting for their novel perspective on the reception of the Book of Mormon.Fenton's argument about the place of the Book of Mormon in these histories would have benefitted, however, from more consideration of early Mormon millennialism. As Fenton makes very clear, the Lost Tribes were not “Hebraic Indians” for early Mormons—Lamanites were. It is puzzling, then, that a book on Hebraic Indian theories analyzes Mormon views of the Lost Tribes rather than their views of Lamanites. An analysis of the place of Lamanites in such texts as Parley Pratt's A Voice of Warning and Instruction to All Peoples (1837) would have challenged Fenton's assertion that the Book of Mormon removed Hebraic Indians from millennial scenarios because it disassociated the Lost Tribes from Indigenous people. The fourth chapter argues, “The Book of Mormon, unlike the Bible, explicitly insists that the [lost] tribes remain whole and intact. . . . [B]ut its Lamanites are not the lost tribes, and the European colonization of the Americas was not the apex of human history” (141). On the contrary, early Mormon millennialism relied heavily on the idea that the “Hebraic” Lamanites would help to build the city of Zion, as well as on the idea that the arrival of Europeans in the Americas was part of God's plan to inaugurate the millennium.1 Given the depth of Fenton's other analyses, it was a disappointment not to see more examination of this millennial culture and Mormon views of Lamanites in this chapter.That omission aside, this is an excellent book that adds depth and complexity to our understanding of Hebraic Indian narratives. It would be valuable to anyone interested in the topic or in literary analysis of the Book of Mormon.