Chapter 4

The Use of the Jew in Colonial Discourse

Tudor Parfitt

This is a draft version, different from the print version to appear in 2004.  Please do not quote in published material without the author’s permission.

 

A hitherto unobserved feature of colonial discourse is the astonishing way in which a construction of Jews, quite unrelated to any objective feature pertaining to the Jews of the time, was used throughout the world as a means of explicating unknown or little-known peoples of wildly differing characteristics.  This was in part because past Europeans were so imbued with the Bible that it was the first thing they turned to when in doubt, and thus the ethnography of the Israelites was the most available.  It was also because Western and particularly Protestant missionaries longed for the return of the Christian Messiah, before which long awaited event Jews had to be found in every corner of the globe; thus Jews were ‘invented’ in the most remote regions to facilitate the Second Coming.  Finally, it was a means of favoring certain ‘superior’ peoples in the colonial enterprise of divide and rule.  This stratagem, particularly in the African context, was a way of suggesting that anything fine or noble came from outside, from Europe or the Middle East.  Thus many peoples who appeared to have a more advanced way of doing things or who had ‘noble’ physical or social  features were perceived of as coming from elsewhere – very frequently from ‘Biblical lands.’  The factors that were adduced in this discourse vary from place to place and from time to time but they include such features as the supposed similarity of certain languages to Hebrew and, from the seventeenth century on, the physical and moral resemblance of many different peoples to Jews.  Religious features supposedly resembling aspects of the religious practices of Israelites were found among just about every society on earth.

Colonial discourse is the sum of prejudice, unspoken belief, stated ideology and assumptions that guided colonial societies in their enterprise.  It can be reconstructed to some extent through an examination of a wide variety of oral accounts, novels, political pamphlets, essays and colonial reports.  Each contributing text builds on its predecessors, creating an interlocking system, although not all texts contribute to a given stream of discourse.  What concerns me here is the way in which the encounter between European and ‘native’ frequently gave rise to the creation of imagined and mythic pasts for colonized or foreign peoples.  These imagined pasts languages, beliefs and origins, were extracted from notions which colonists carried with them into the field, and frequently served colonial purposes.[1]  They were projections born of colonial fantasies which were often far from malignant and which frequently sought to find links of kinship particularly with minority groups within the colonized or foreign populations.[2]

 It is clear that the European view of ‘elf’ and ‘other’ came under considerable pressure at the outset of European expansion.  With the discovery of the American continent in 1492 and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope a few years later Europe was obliged to expand its sense of an essentially binary European-Mediterranean world to include a new and undiscovered Africa as well as a new and distant American occident which kept moving west as the years went on.  As Susanne Zantop has said,  “It had expanded any simple self-other, Occident-Orient dichotomies, to include not just many others, but multiple, multivalent, constantly shifting ‘occidents’.”[3]  Anxieties about how to define the other in such new circumstances led to a new interest in questions of origin and language among others.

The discovery of these new and in some cases unsuspected lands can be seen as heralding European modernity.  It literally opened up new horizons for Europeans: “virgin territories” were to be possessed and exploited; “different” realities were absorbed, surveyed, and described; “strange” peoples were to be understood, integrated into existing categories, and subjected to European needs.[4]  In the following centuries increasingly sophisticated methods were applied to the dissection and categorization of the new religions, social systems and customs, not to mention the assiduous mapping of the regions themselves and the classification of the flora and fauna found within them.  Nonetheless, and this is one of the central arguments of this paper, the process of transformation from a world view which perceived the Orient and Europe as binary opposites, with Europe and the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean as poles, to something more complex was accompanied all too often by a utilization of old configurations in new and quite unexpected circumstances.

At the end of the medieval period the general assumption was that there were four main world religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Paganism.[5]  In time the more obvious of the great priestly and text-based religions of India, Japan and China could be more or less accommodated as an extension of this as the parallels between them and the known religions were so evident.  Comparisons were particularly frequent between Indian religions and Judaism and the production of texts of comparison has continued to this day.[6] In the nineteenth century such comparisons were almost commonplace.  C.T.E.Rhenius, for example, who was sent by the English Church Missionary Society to South India in 1813, noted that “the Vishnu and Siva sects and religious worship exhibit a strong likeness to the Jewish dispensation.”[7]  Similarly, as R.Lovett wrote of the Brahmins in his History of the London Missionary Society 1795-1895: “Each is an infallible pope in his own sphere.  The Brahman is the exclusive and Pharisaic Jew of India.”[8]  The real problem arose with the religious systems of Africa, the Americas and the Pacific and of the lesser known Asiatic religions.  Frequently the beliefs of such systems were compared to the religions or systems of the ancient world more or less known to Europeans, particularly to Judaism, and the religious systems of the ancient Near East, and were assumed to be derived from them.

From the very beginning of European expansion Judaism was employed in the decipherment of religions and Jewish ancestry was used as likely explanations for the peoples Europeans encountered.  With the European exploration and conquest of new continents this device was used more and more.  In the first stages the derivation of North and South American Native beliefs and customs from ancient Israel was formulated.  Certainly the Jews were not the only candidates to be enlisted in the battle to explain the existence and origin of the peoples of the New World, but they were among the first, and the discourse suggesting Israelite origins ran the longest and had the greatest influence.[9]  In the case of the Americas, over several centuries, first in the work of the Spanish historians and later in British, French and North American accounts,  the idea of Jewish origins for the indigenous peoples of the Americas was the dominant discourse and for much of the 400 year period between 1500 and 1900 commanded the attention of some of the greatest European and American thinkers.

From the fifteenth century on the idea - often fiercely defended - that given peoples were derived from ancient Israel or from some specific tribe of the Lost Tribes of Israel became quite astonishingly widespread and was attached to just about every corner of the globe and to a wide variety of peoples from the Eskimos to the Australian aborigines.[10] These views postulated that various peoples were indeed genealogically connected to the people of Israel and that their beliefs and practices were vestiges of the ancient Israelite religion; often their languages were explained as being cognate to Hebrew or other Semitic languages.  The importance of Hebrew in the Medieval world was that it was widely considered as one of the first languages of mankind.  It was with the Hebrew words va-yehi or [let there be light], after all, that God had created the world in the first place.  By the time of the Renaissance historical etymology took over as national pride began to assert that modern languages, such as French[11] or Flemish, could be identified as the world’s first language, or, at any rate, were closely connected to it.  In De Vulgari eloquentia Dante mocked the remote hamlets wedded to the uplifting notion that their miserable dialect was the language of Adam and that they were privy to the secrets of the language of Paradise.  But alongside these vainglorious claims on behalf of one’s own language, nation and village, there were also insistent claims made on behalf of Hebrew.  The idea that all languages ultimately derive from Hebrew, developed, for example in Père Louis Thomassin’s work of 1690, La Méthode et d'étudier d'enseigner chrestiennement et utilement la Grammaire ou les Langues par rapport à l'Ecriture sainte en les reduisant toutes à l'Hébreu, no doubt underlay this.[12]   As we shall see in the colonial context, the use of Hebrew to explain the unknown languages and civilizations of the world becomes a key feature of the orientalist discourse.

In a similar way the myth of the Lost Tribes  became a useful channel for understanding unknown peoples and races, and as a means of labeling human entities for whom there was no readily available label.  It is extraordinary that in the seventeenth century a Congregationalist missionary, Cambridge educated, could announce that “fruitful India are Hebrewes, that famous civil (though Idolatrous) nation of China are Hebrewes, so Japonia , and those naked Americans are Hebrewes, in respect of those that planted first these parts of the world.”[13]

Of course all sorts of glimpses of strange and exotic peoples had been vouchsafed medieval Europe before the great expansion which followed the age of exploration.  Much of the interaction with the Indian sub-continent and the Far East, slight though it was, came about as a result of the spice trade in its various forms.  This interaction led to the exchange of desirable goods, and the exchange of strange and unlikely stories, artistic devices and motifs.  Travelers’ tales and books added to the store of knowledge and in due course themselves created a rich mulch in which Europeans’ views of much of humanity were grown.  However it was only with the establishment of physical (albeit fluctuating) frontier zones with these exotic societies, frontier zones which were created typically at the beginning of the colonial era, that a real symbiosis started to occur.  Symbiosis is perhaps not  quite the mot juste; certainly in most cases Eastern and African societies were much more influenced by the West than the West was by them, but none the less there was a flow both ways.  Clearly in the sort of frontier situation typical of the colonial experience, a struggle for political as well as economic mastery is implicit and part of this struggle is the not entirely innocent  attempt to better understand the adversary.  Both sides were compelled to engage in this difficult exercise of comprehension.[14]  From the moment of discovery of these new worlds and their inhabitants  increasingly sophisticated methods were applied to the dissection and categorization of “savage” social systems and customs not to mention the assiduous mapping of the savage regions themselves and the categorization of the peoples, flora and fauna found within them.  Europeans undertook the task of explicating the phenomena they discovered through historical models.  Already among intellectual elites the role of history in determining how we should see the world was paramount.  It is widely known that conservative figures such as Disraeli and Coleridge attempted to fight against the greed of their society in the recreation of a concept of community salvaged from the Middle Ages.  Both William Morris and Richard Wagner at varying points in their very different careers found useful historical models in Nordic myth. Fichte saw the future of Germany through the past of the communitarian morality of the medieval German city, many Zionists a Jewish future through the recreation of a long dead Judean polity.

For the better comprehension of the unknown parts of the world and their perplexing inhabitants two kinds of historical text served more than any others: the Bible and the Greek and Latin Classics.  These texts of course were the main educative texts of Europe and it is not therefore surprising that they were turned to with such regularity; indeed it can be said that in some ways they served as maps to these unfamiliar territories and to their inhabitants and their beliefs.  It may in addition be noted that the missionaries who were often the most persistent enquirers in the frontier situation were particularly prone to drawing on their sacred texts for illumination.  This was no doubt especially true of the British, American and German Protestants who had been influenced by the Great Evangelical Revival of the nineteenth century and who played such an overwhelming role in world wide missions.

In the British context, the missionaries themselves were characteristically of relatively humble origins, members of the upper strata of the working class and the lower ranks of the middle class.  Robert Moffat, the influential missionary who spent important years at the court of the mighty Ndebele king Lobengula, was a gardener.  Norman McLeod, who worked in Japan as a missionary, had previously worked in the herring industry.  The great Livingstone had started his working life in a cotton mill.  The same goes for many of the other missionaries mentioned in the following remarks.  Such men had a good knowledge of the Bible, but not perhaps of much else.[15]  Practically all the Protestant missionaries explicitly believed in the Bible as an undifferentiated body of information and as their sole and infallible source of authority both for belief and praxis.  It was, in every sense, their guide to life.  It was  natural then that they should have sought in its pages the explanation for the strange things they encountered.  Their reading of the Bible was mediated by a European culture in which Enlightenment concepts were present; the Bible was an infallible source but the way it was understood was a way specific to a time and a class.  In this case, specifically, ideas equating noble savages with Jews were extracted from scripture and scripture was mined to explain strange peoples’ lives and customs.  The use of the myth of the Lost Tribes as a means of understanding diverse others was no doubt mediated too by developing perspectives on European Jews.  It has already been remarked that Masonic lodges may be responsible to some extent  for the development of the image of the “noble Jew” and it is this construct very largely which dominates colonial discourse at the time.[16]

One colonial stratagem was to argue that in the absence of any direct and obvious connection between an indigenous group and the Jews there were morphological connections to be made, that one custom or another reflected ancient Jewish practice.  In the American context there are dozens of examples of this approach: perhaps the most important of these is the memoir of the Jesuit missionary to the Iroquois nation of Quebec, Joseph Lafitau’s Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains comparés aux moeurs des premiers temps, which set out to dissect the religious system of the Iroquois and made connections between the Indian practices he had observed and aspects both of Jewish and ancient Greek religious systems.  (He actually thought they were descended from an ancient Greek population.)  Lafitau’s work, which was published in 1724, had much to do with the development of the ideas of the Noble Savage in the eighteenth century that Voltaire and others were a little dismissive.  Lafitau’s basic comparative methodology was used widely throughout the colonized world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and became the predominant methodology in the discussion of little-known religions and peoples.

Western Christians, perhaps most acutely British and American Evangelicals, were prone to see traces of the Bible everywhere.  As missionaries and others encountered exotic peoples a discourse was generated which potentially served white, Western interests in a variety of ways. One tactic was to single out a particular minority from the mass of “natives”, to argue that this group was in some way connected with the ancient Israelites  and to attribute to this minority moral characteristics which were rather close to the self-image held by the British or the Americans of the time.  It should be noted that the supposed moral kinship of the British and the Jews has a long history.[17]  Suffice it to say that in Evangelical circles, particularly, a kind of philo-Semitism, allied with a fulsome self-regard, created the kind of idea expressed by James Finn (1806-72) who was British consul in Jerusalem from 1845-1862: “From the effect of their domestic morality,” he wrote, “and family affections, these [the Jews]were the people who could best afford to look an Englishman straight in the face.” [18]  Some Jews, and other minorities exhibiting these admirable traits, would then be targeted by missionaries and sometimes given educational help.  These people could then, at least in principle, be used in the struggle against the majority.

The discourse surrounding the Jews in China has recently been the subject of a fascinating book by Zhou Xun.[19]  One missionary wrote about some of his colleagues “whose rigorous training in Bible Studies, and lack of knowledge about social customs among other peoples, led them to imagine that they had found in West China significant survivals of the Biblical traditions that occupied so much of their thinking.  Particularly there was a missionary in Kweichow who believed he had found some old Hebrew practices among the Nosu and he also cited another one who claimed to have found among the Miao people an ancient song which described the Flood, the building of the Tower of Babel and the ensuing confusion of tongues and then went on to state their racial origin.”[20]  The most active zealot however was a devout Scots missionary by the name of Rev. Thomas Torrance[21] who was to devote much of his life attempting to prove that the Ch’iang people were Israelites.[22]  Torrance had first come across the Ch’iang in 1918.  In 1920 he wrote his first article about them where he described the time he had spent in western China working among, “a number of tribes who are little known to the outside world.  These are the great Rong with their five states, the wild Goloks, the sleek Sifan, the cross-bred Bolotsze, the thieving Hehshui people, the warlike Nosu or Lolos and the sturdy Ch’iang.”[23]

The Ch'iang, already in this opening description clearly his favourite group, were described by Torrance as a, “pastoral, farming folk, the remnant of a once great nation...they live in flat roofed, Biblical looking stone houses....the most wonderful thing about the Ch’iang, next to their long existence as a separate people, is their religion.  It is purely monotheistic and has remained so from time immemorial, in spite of the oppressions and contemptuous treatment of their idolatrous neighbors.... Despised, persecuted, broken, here are the residue of a race who have never bowed the knee to Baal, or forsaken the faith of their fathers.”  The difference between the Chinese and the Ch’iang, claimed Torrance, was “subtle but real.”  It might be compared with the difference of “spiritual conception” which separated “Esau from Jacob, King Saul from King David.”

In addition to being “manly” the Ch'iang were described as “cautious,” “responding to kindness,” “clean”, “moral”, “strong” and “free”.  But even more significantly the color white imbued them with a sense of awe.  “White,” he noted, “ is regarded as significant of good and black of evil.  A white man is their synonym for one who is just and upright; a black man literally denotes a blackguard.  Accordingly, their mode of worshipping God, they call THE WHITE RELIGION [capitals in original].”

His description of Ch’iang rituals, of the ritual sacrifice of animals “without spot and blemish”, of the sanctification of the lamb, of white sacrificial robes, sacred groves, purification rituals, moon festivals, of days of sacrifice “reckoned Sabbaths”, scapegoat ceremonies (he uses the Hebrew term “Amaze”), the use of unleavened bread, are all redolent of the Bible and of the religious practices of the ancient Israelites.  Somewhat inconveniently the Ch’iang neither abstained from pork and other non-kosher foods nor did they circumcise their young.  “Yet,” proclaimed Torrance, “their own judicial regulations often correspond to those in the Old Testament.”  Clearly he admires the Ch’iang (“the soul of the man is dead who cannot love them”) and thinks of them as special.  He knows that they are a people with an ancient lineage.

In the vast sea of Chinese the Rev. Torrance then had found common cause with a people professing “the white religion”, the forbears in his view of the religion of whites in his day.  With the publication of his book China's First Missionaries: Ancient Israelites (London, 1937) he took the view - one that he had skirted around in China - that the Ch’iang were actually descended from the Jews.  “The purpose of the following chapters” he wrote “is to describe the customs and religious observances of a colony of people descended from the Israelites settlers who came to the Western borderlands of China.”  In subsequent lectures he developed the idea further: the Jews had been appointed by the Almighty as missionaries to teach the world monotheism and those missionaries that got as far as China became the Ch’iang.  In his last article the Ch’iang  became, quite literally, “West China Jews:” photographs purport to show their Semitic features and a photograph of a Ch’iang village is captioned “A typical Jewish village.”

Torrance's 1937 book made quite a splash.  It was hailed as, “the greatest missionary book of the century” by the Scottish Geographical Magazine while The English Churchman and St. James' Chronicle opined, “these twentieth century tribes are perpetuating today the actual customs of the Israelites who were contemporary with Elijah, Amos and Hosea...How strange that we should have to go to the Chinese-Tibet borderland for the latest confirmation of the Divine Book.”  The Times Literary Supplement observed, somewhat chillingly in view of the fact that this was, after all, 1937. “A close study of their rites and customs has enabled Mr. Torrance to establish the identity of the Ch’iang people and to trace their history...Mr. Torrance’s conclusions are confirmed by the illustrations to the text which show convincingly Jewish types.”

Let me turn my gaze to Burma.  The first “authentic” Jew to spend any time in Burma, as far as I know, was a certain Shlomo Reinmann, a native of Galicia, who arrived in Rangoon in 1852 with the British army.  Within five years, however, there were sufficient Jews –(Baghdadis and Bene Israel from India) serving the Raj to warrant the construction of a small synagogue in the city, the Matzmiah Yeshurun congregation.[24]  But long before this actual Jewish presence had been established Western missionaries active in the country had formed the view that a particular Burmese ethnic group was itself of Jewish extraction.  The Burmese group which was subjected to this reading of local traditions was the Karen people.  Why  were the Karens supposed by missionaries and others to have anything to do with Jews?  Part of the answer, no doubt, has to do with the mechanics of colonization.  In much the same way as I have discussed in the case of the Chi’ang, a particular, often ‘loyal’, minority was picked out and was perceived to have strikingly ‘superior’ characteristics.  A way of explaining the group’s ‘superior’ ability was to imagine their origins outside the locus of the inferior majority and to place it in some sense within the sacred history of the colonial power.  Thus it was that, “the loyal Karens of Burma” as one British official of the Bengal Civil Service called them in a book of that name, achieved a special status in British eyes.  According to an Indian journalist writing several decades later, no doubt imbued with the ethos of the Raj, the loyal Karens had proved themselves in the most concrete of ways: proportionately they had contributed more troops to British forces during the First World War than any other group in Burma and later their irregulars were particularly active in the suppression of the Burmese rebellion in 1931-2.[25]  Their loyalty was mixed with nothing less than reverence for the white colonists.  As the first Karen convert to Christianity put it: “Through the goodness of God, my nation, sons of the forest and children of poverty, ought to praise thy nation, the white foreigners, exceedingly; and we ought to obey your orders...”[26]  This “favored group,” as the Bengali civil servant expressed it, was not of indigenous stock.  “The skin is naturally fair, like that of the Chinese; and the features of those of pure blood are Caucasian in type - a characteristic which has been deemed by some to support their claim to have been one of the lost tribes of Israel.”[27]  The Karen  were not only perceived as being racially superior; their very traditions seemed almost British in nature.  Their religious practices were considered so akin to British ones that they “could be recited with propriety in any Christian church in England.”  Their culture, too, was reminiscent of British culture: “their music is nearly all wild and plaintive like that of the Scottish and Welsh highlanders.”[28]

The Karens’ account  of their origins - that they were from the River of Running Sand - no doubt served as a springboard for all sorts of speculation.  This was a people with a mysterious past.  Quite clearly there were striking and seductive similarities between Karen legends and those of the Jewish scriptures: one such example was the Karen story of creation which “was almost parallel to the Mosaic account in Genesis.”  The first to observe the Karen and to note the resemblances between them and the Israelites were the Baptist missionaries who had been forced to move to the Tenasserim coast of northern Burma with the outbreak of the first Anglo-Burmese War (1824-6).  Francis Mason of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society arrived in Burma in 1814 and in time became convinced that the Karen were part of the Lost Tribes.  He had certainly reached this conclusion by 1833: on December 6th of that year he communicated his beliefs to the British Government from his headquarters at Tenasserim.[29]  The opening words of his account of his missionary endeavours among the Karen set the scene:  “Often perhaps had the Christian voyager gazed on the rocky promontories of Burmah, crowned with their whitened pagodas, that glow amid the eternal verdure of tropical climes; but he little thought that ‘the misty mountain tops’ in the distance, threw their shadow over the dwellings of a people that generation after generation had charged their posterity never to worship idols.”

The exploration and colonization of the Pacific was attended by lively speculation about long-lost Jewish communities and the likely existence of the lost tribes in these remote islands.[30]  In the seventeenth century rumors abounded that there was a large island in the Pacific which was rich in gold and inhabited by Jews.  The Dutch East Indian Company sent Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603-c.1659) to investigate these rumors and to discover the ‘Great South Land’ but his voyage failed to cast light on the matter, although he did discover Tasmania and New Zealand.[31]  Right at the outset of British and French exploration Captain Edward Davis, skipper of the Bachelor's Delight, discovered a fabulously wealthy island.  This was taken to be “the coast of Terra Australis Incognita” which by this time had been endowed in the imagination of many people with unimaginable wealth.  Subsequent attempts to retrace Davis’s island were frustrated by a lack of more precise information.  Some, however, formed the view that the island of Tahiti was Davisland and on the island it was thought that a white-skinned people were to be found.[32]  George Robertson, master of the Dolphin, noted that, “this race of white people in my opinion has a great resemblance to the Jews, which are scattered through all the known parts of the Earth.”[33]  This rumor soon spread: in 1767 Jean-François-Marie de Surville set off from Port-Louis in Brittany and arrived the following year at the mouth of the Ganges.  His initial plan was to trade between the French settlements in India and China.  But then the rumor struck that a fabulously wealthy island had been discovered.  As one French observer to all this said, ”I was in Pondicherry in August 1769 when the rumor spread that an English vessel had found in the South Sea a very rich island where among other peculiarities a colony of Jews had been settled.”[34]  In the last two decades of the seventeenth century the great English explorer and adventurer William Dampier (1652-1715) crossed the Pacific twice.  According to John Campbell’s map of Dampier’s discoveries there was thought to exist a race of Jews in New Guinea, “suspected to be a remnant of the Ten Tribes of Israel.”[35]

The task of understanding the Maoris of New Zealand was not ignored.[36]  One way to explain the Maoris’ temporary military success against British troops was to argue that in fact the Maoris did have certain rather impressive innate, inherited racial characteristics after all and that they were descended from the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel.  An early champion of the Israelite theory was the Anglican clergyman Samuel Marsden (1765-1838).  As early as 1819, after his second visit to New Zealand, Marsden declared that the Maoris had Israelite lineage.  His study of the Maoris and of the Jews suggested to him certain striking similarities derived in some cases from a pretty negative view of both peoples: a shared trading prowess - the Maoris like the Jews would “buy and sell anything”; the Maori priest would exhort war parties “in a similar language to that of the Jewish High Priest of old”; a Maori chief would decapitate an opposing chief who was killed in battle, “as David did to the head of Goliath”; even cannibalism was evoked, on the grounds that Jesus had told the Jews, “he that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him.”  Marsden’s somewhat inchoate views became widely known and soon other missionaries listed dozens of points at which Jewish and Maori practice coincided, from menstruation -related ritual to burial practice.[37]  No doubt the reason for these efforts was to place the unfamiliar and unknown Maoris within the familiar context of Christian knowledge, to replace the unknown other with the known.  The attempt to re-type them took in features other than their religion.  The very social structure of the Maoris was seen as reflecting the tribal structure of ancient Israel.  Arthur Thomson,(1816-60) appointed assistant army surgeon in 1838, was convinced by his experience with them that the Maoris had Jewish physical characteristics, specifically “Jewish noses.”[38]  The idea was soon advanced that the Maoris’ languages were also derived from Semitic sources, perhaps from traders in the Malay peninsula, and various supposed lexical similarities were found.[39]  The general idea was further promoted in Te Ika a Maui: or New Zealand and Its Inhabitants,(1855) by the missionary Richard Taylor (1805-73).  Taylor compared the Maoris with a number of other groups including the Japanese, Polynesians and Malays and concluded

that the many points of resemblance in feature, general customs and manners may enable us to discover in the widely spread Polynesian race, a remnant of the long-lost tribes of Israel and when the time arrives for their restoration from all countries in which they have been dispersed from “Hamath and the isles of the sea” that, in that day, it will be found, even to these ends of the world, the fearful denunciation of Divine wrath has driven his apostate people, who forsaking the true light given them and preferring heathen darkness, here to be suffered to dwell in that darkness, until they had fulfilled their appointed times.  We have no reason to suppose that when the ten tribes were carried captive by Assyria that they were all placed in the same spot...on the contrary we have the denunciation that they should be scattered... and we cannot suppose that the mere taking them out of their  own land was the termination of their punishment but it that it was only the commencement of it...[40]

The two main aspects of the classification of the unknown other were religious and racial.  In the context of Southern Africa the attempt to type the locals started at the outset of colonial intervention.  The Hottentots, for instance, while generally regarded in completely negative terms as being devoid of any of the characteristics that might have rendered them human, none the less had their very negativity expressed in terms which were culled from a Biblical source.  As Thomas Herbert put it in 1627, “The natives being propagated from Ham both in their Visages and Natures seem to inherit his malediction.”  Features specific to them, such as scarification, similarly were put in a Biblical context and in 1612 Patrick Copland observed that, “they cut their skinnes like Baals priests.”[41]  Not infrequently racial and religious classification merged.  This may be seen in the work of a German, Peter Kolb.  In 1705 Kolb was sent to the Cape to make astronomical observations, although he did not last long in this job.  Eventually he became blind and was dismissed.  According to his detractors he spent his time smoking and drinking although he claimed, as scholars often do when slandered in this way, to be doing research.  Regaining his vision, Kolb published a book.  The German edition was published in 1719 and was subsequently translated into Dutch, English and French.  The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope reached a very wide audience and for the next fifty years was the definitive account of the religion of the Hottentots.  Kolb claimed that the customs of the Hottentots were similar to those of the Jews.  He enumerated what he saw as the similarities between their sacrificial customs their moon festivals, circumcision rites and soon.  But he also asserted that the Hottentots could be counted among the children of Abraham, that they were of Jewish descent.  Specifically he maintained that they were descended from Abraham via the troglodytes, issue of his wife Ketura (Gen:25:1-4).  Further proof of this was adduced from the fact that, like the Jews, they were so resistant to Christianity.  An example of this obduracy was provided by an account of the Governor of the Cape, Simon van der Stel, who became the legal guardian of a Hottentot, raising the child as a Christian, only to be told by his ward that he would live and die, “in the Religion Manners and Customs of My Ancestors.”  Recalling this Kolb concluded that as well as everything else the Hottentots were as “stiff as the Jews.”

The Xhosa, one of the most important of the southern African tribes, were viewed in a similar way.  It was generally assumed that their religious structure had developed from some ancient Near-Eastern religious system.  Analysis of their customs, language and religion suggested to Europeans that the Xhosa were in fact the Arabs of Southern Africa.[42]  This view, that this nomadic and unsettled people were Arabs or “Ishmaelitish sons of Abraham,” was common.-  This designation was not always absolute.[43]  In 1827 an English settler in the eastern Cape noted that the Xhosa had religious traditions which included, “some Mahometan and Jewish rites.”[44]  A similar definition was provided by Robert Godlonton, editor of the Graham's Town Journal, who argued that it was possible to prove the origin of the Xhosa by reference to their language, which he said clearly showed, “traces of its eastern origin in the frequent occurrence of words which are plainly of Hebrew or Arabic extraction.”  He concluded that as their forefathers had been intruders into the area the Xhosa did not belong in South Africa.[45]

Following the British annexation of Natal in 1844 the largely British settlers were acutely aware that to the north there was a powerful Zulu state with a considerable military capacity, and as a result interest in Zulu customs and traditions was generated.  Serious interest in the Zulus however dates back to the 1830s when a Captain Allen Gardiner had started off from the Cape on a diplomatic mission to forge relations with the new Zulu king.  Using the opportunity to preach the Gospel Gardiner made every attempt to inform himself about this new mission field and particularly to find out about local religions.  As he explained in his book, Narrative of a Journey to the Zoolu Country in  South Africa, what struck him most about the religion of the Zulus was the immanent albeit almost forgotten presence of the memory of a supreme deity.  But immediately he took the customs of the Zulus to be “apparently  of Jewish origin.”  Some of the customs he enumerated included circumcision, the tradition of a younger brother marrying the widow of his deceased brother (levirate marriage), the daubing of the lintels of homes in times of sickness, the festival of the first-fruits and so on.  As a way of connecting them with Israelite sacred history while at the same time explaining their distance from the traditions set out in the Bible, he also mentioned that the name 'Ham' was a common one among the Zulus.  Ham, son of Noah, was taken to be the progenitor of the African peoples.[46] 

As British power was extended further east throughout the 1850s the Zulus continued to be identified as Jews.  Their settled, pastoral life and their religious and social customs were evidence enough of this.  G.R.Peppercorne , the magistrate of Pafana Location, observed to the Native Affairs Commission that in fact the Zulus practiced a sort of ancient Judaism: “A general type of the customs and laws of the Ama-Zulu may be found in the early history of the Hebrews.”[47]  Peppercorne suggested that any European who wanted

to understand Zulu customs had only to read the Old Testament.  Zulu polygamy, marriage customs, even attitudes towards work were all described in the appropriate Biblical passage.  Henry Francis Fynn who had established a small Zulu chieftaincy in the 1820s and who had spent decades living among them noted: “I was surprised to find a considerable resemblance between many of the [Zulu] customs and those of the Jews.”  These included: “War offerings; sin offerings; propitiatory offerings; Festival of first fruits...period s of uncleanness, on the decease of relatives and touching the dead; Circumcision; Rules regarding chastity; Rejection of swine's flesh.”

Fynn concluded that in view of, “the nature of semblance of many of their customs to those of the ancient Jews, as prescribed under the Levitical priesthood I am led to form the opinion that the [Zulu] tribes have been very superior to what they are at the present time.”  A more informed view was given by John Colenso, a Cambridge educated mathematician who was ordained Bishop of Natal in 1853.  Colenso was convinced that the two Zulu names for God embraced perfectly the notions of the divine “contained in the Hebrew words Elohim and Jehovah.”[48]

So close indeed were the resemblances, according to Colenso, that frequently the point was made that anyone who wanted to really understand the Bible had best study Zulu customs.  Zulu “habits and even the nature of their country so nearly correspond to those of the ancient Israelites, that the very scenes are brought continually, as it were, before their eyes, and vividly realized in a practical point of view.”  Practically everything about the Zulus from their lunar calendar to the order of religious feasts seemed to reflect an Israelite past.  “The Zulu keeps his annual feasts, and observes the New Moons as the old Hebrew did.  The very Zulus have their festivals at the beginning of the Southern Spring and at the end of their Autumn, corresponding to the ‘feast of the first fruits’ and the ‘feast of the ingathering’ of the ancient Hebrews.”

By the end of the nineteenth century the white conquest of what is today South Africa was practically complete and the Ndebele and Shona tribes of what was by then called Rhodesia had also succumbed.  As white settlers moved into the fertile lands north of the Limpopo River they were astonished to discover stone buildings, old mine workings and most of all the remarkable ruins known as the Great Zimbabwe complex.  These ruins had first been discovered by a German, Karl Mauch, in 1871.  Immediately Mauch declared his conviction that these ruins had been erected by the Queen of Sheba and were in fact a copy of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem and that this entire area was the Ophir of the Bible - Solomon’s gold lands.  It stood to reason therefore that Jews had once lived here and within a short time the Karanga-speaking Shona people and specifically the Lemba tribe were being defined in precisely the same way as the Hottentots, Xhosa and Zulus.  One settler writer, Richard Nicklin Hall, wrote a book about Great Zimbabwe in which he devoted considerable space to the Jewishness of the surrounding populations.  He made a list of twenty four supposed similarities of custom and belief and concluded:  “Additional parallelisms with Jewish customs could be stated, and all these peculiar practices, together with the lighter skin and the Jewish appearance of the Makalanga, distinctly point to the ancient impress of the Idumean Jews, which can also be traced on the present peoples of Madagascar and of the coasts of Mozambique and Sofala...the Lemba tribe of Makalanga is noted for the preservation and observance of these Jewish practices, which are distinctly pre-Koranic in origin.”[49]

Here we see how the supposedly Jewish appearance of the Makalanga was adduced in support of the ethnographic proofs.  The theme of the physical similarity of Jews to some Africans was frequent in this discourse: of course part of the project was racial classification.  Some of these constructions of the other emanate from anti-Semitic premises.  In a 1962 article Raphael Patai referred to the writings of the German scholar Frobenius about the Lemba tribe of southern Africa.  “I could not help being reminded of the impression made upon me by the Galician Jews,” wrote Frobenius, “Their glances can never detach themselves from the small heap of three-pence pieces which was built up before them as a stimulus for their narrative art..”  Karl Peters, the founder of German East Africa, who was forced to resign from the German Imperial Service accused of cruelty to the local population and who retired to British South Africa wrote some years earlier of a neighboring group in Rhodesia: “How absolutely Jewish is the type of this people!  They have faces cut exactly like those of ancient Jews who live around Aden.  Also the way they wear their hair, the curls behind the ears, and the beard drawn out in single curls, gives them the appearance of Aden - or of Polish - Jews of the good old type,”( as opposed to the assimilated and successful Jews of the Germany of his own time).

Rounding Africa we arrive at the great island of Madagascar.  A considerable literature was produced particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century on the supposed Jewish origin of some of the island’s population.  One  proponent of the idea was the French Madagascar expert Alfred Grandidier, another Augustus Keane, a one time professor of Hindustani at University College London.  They both claimed that there were great links between Madagascar and the ancient Jews.  In The Gold of Ophir, Whence Brought and by Whom (1901) Keane argued that Madagascar had been the off-shore base for the colony of Havilah with Tarshish its port of entry and that Madagascar had links with ancient Israel, “certainly as early as the time of Solomon and possibly even during the reign of his father David.”  Grandidier’s monumental work Histore Physique, Naturelle et Politique de Madagascar, also published in 1901, made similar claims arguing that the parts of the local population were descended from Jewish settlers of Biblical times.  Such views continued to be expressed throughout the twentieth century: a suggestion that substantial traces of Hebrew  were to be found in Malagasy was made in L'hébreu à Madagascar by Jospeh Briant, published in 1946![50]

A little further up the coast of Africa the European discourse enthusiastically endorsed this idea and added, as we have seen, that the Biblical land of gold Havilah was in fact, “the mineralized region between the Zambezi and the Limpopo,” and that, “the ancient gold workings of this region were first opened and the associated monuments erected by the South Arabian Himyarites, (that is Arabs) followed in the time of Solomon by the Jews and Phoenicians.”

If the underlying reasons for this discourse were gauntly secular and in part economic they were also associated with the views used to explain populations throughout Africa and the rest of the colonial world.[51]  Further yet up the coast similar views were expressed about the Masai, an East-African pastoral people of Kenya and northern Tanzania.  It is interesting to note that in the case of the Masai, the chief work exploring these ideas was written within a year or two of the main contributions on Madagascar and Zimbabwe mentioned above, and  were written by a German officer, M. Merker.  In his detailed and carefully researched work Merker believed that he had found significant parallels between the Masais’ myths and customs and those of the Biblical Hebrews.  Merker discovered parallels between the beliefs and customs of the ancient Jews including: similarities in the names of God; in circumcision; in a belief in the figure of Moses (whom Merker identified with the Masai Marumi or Musana); and in a variety of legends which included the stories of the creation of the world, Adam and Eve and the fall of man; the story of the flood; the theft of the birthright; the bronze serpent; the ten commandments.  He concluded that both the Masai and the “oldest” Hebrews originated from the same people.[52]

It is interesting to note that the high point of this discourse coincided with a change in the way Jews were being regarded in Europe.  I have discussed four German examples, Merker, Peters, Mauch and Frobenius which simultaneously suggest both an idea of the Noble Jew and an anti-Semitic vision of the dirty, money grabbing Jew.  It is known that at much the same time Treitschke derided the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz as an, “‘oriental’ who could never be expected to understand the German people.”[53]  This internal German trope of alterity was converted into a two edged means of explicating others in colonial circumstances.  This trope, while elevating certain native peoples, usually for some specific and self-serving reason, had the incidental effect of removing actual Jews from the frame of sacred history.  The Masai, remember, were linked with the “oldest Hebrews,” the Shona with “the good old Jews.”

One part of the  discourse imposed upon new and unknown societies was a  construction of the “other” which colonists had brought with them from Europe.  This, in essence, was to try and explain indigenous religions as well as indigenous racial types from the analogy of religious systems and racial types which were known to them.  To medieval Europe the two most obvious forms of the religious other were Jews and Muslims and to some extent this binary construct continued into the twentieth century.  The myth of the Moor (synonymous with Muslim in the European discourse) was one of its aspects and stood more or less for wild tribalism and a state of fairly but not entirely irredeemable savagery.  The Jew represented a number of features, of which we should note a bucolic traditional way of life, a certain nobility, a more developed intelligence than was to be found among other groups and so on. Frequently the idealization of groups who are given these invented identities contained reflections of the fine qualities of the colonist; here alterity merges with introspection.  Throughout this complex and long-running orientalist discourse are many diverse meanings hidden beneath the surface of the image, and  often the image is ambiguous and contradictory.  None the less, it is clear from this analysis that the imposition of the invented identity of a known other on colonized peoples in the form of the Jew or the Moor with attendant invented languages, cultures and religions was a feature of orientalist colonial discourse.  This not only involved colonial countries like Britain and America but others such as France and Germany  and  served Imperial needs throughout the world from Japan to Quebec from Peru to Zululand.

 


[1]. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, (New York: Routledge, 1995); Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, (London, New York: Routledge, 1995);  N. Armstrong, “‘The Occidental Alice’ in Differences, ” A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, no.2 (1990).  See Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1984, ed. Francis Barker, (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985); Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany:1770-1870, (Durham, North Carolina, 1997).

[2]. See for example, Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,”  Screen, 24, no.6, 1983.

[3]. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies.

[4]. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies.

[5]. See Edward Brerewood, Enquiries Tracing the Diversity of Languages and Religions through the Chief Parts of the World, (London: S.M.F.M. and H.H. and are to be sold by W. Kettilby, 1613).

[6]. Ananda, Hindu View of Judaism, (New Delhi: APC Publications, 1996), 2.  “The main purpose of this book is…to draw some parallelism between Hinduism and Judaism.”  In the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks on the United States a vast array of comment produced comparisons between Indian populations – notably the Pathans – and Jews.  See Tudor Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth, (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002).

[7]. J. Rhenius, Memoir of  C. T. E. Rhenius, by His Son, (London, 1841), 71.

[8]. Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society 1795-1895, (London: Henry Frowde, 1902), 24; John Adam, Memoir of John Adam, Late Missionary of Calcutta, (London, 1833), 225.

[9]. See Lee Eldridge Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729, (Austin: Published for the Institute of Latin American Studies by the University of Texas Press, 1967); Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana e Islas de la Tierra Firme, 2 vols., Biblioteca Porrúa (México: Editorial Porrua, 1967); Diego Durán, Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar, trans. and ed. Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden, Civilization of the American Indian Series (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press,1971);Diego Durán, The Aztecs, the History of the Indies of New Spain, trans. and ed. Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden (New York: Orion Press, 1964); Tzevtan Todorov, The Conquest of America: the Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992) 210; Richard H. Popkin, “The rise and fall of the Jewish Indian Theory,” in Menasseh Ben Israel and His World, ed. Y. Kaplan, H. Méchoulan and R.H.Popkin, (Leiden, New York: E. J. Brill, 1989), 63; S. M. Lyman, ”Postmodernism and the Construction of Ethnocultural Identity: the Jewish-Indian Theory and the Lost Tribes of Israel,” Sociological Spectrum, 17:259ff.,1997; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

[10]. Roland Burrage Dixon, The Building of Cultures, (New York: Scribner, 1928; Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1982), 225.

[11]. See I. Christie-Miller,  “A Critical Analysis Of Jean Thenaud's Kabbalistic Manuscript Arsenal 5061” (PhD thesis, London University, 1997) which deals with the sixteenth century French Christian Hebraist Jean Thenaud.  The thesis describes the latter’s work La Margerite which argues that Phrygian was the first language.

12. See the fascinating work by Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge,Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,1992); and Maurice Olender, “Sur un ‘oubli’ linguistique” in La conscience de soi de la poésie: Poésie et Rhétorique: Colloque de la Fondation Hugot du Collège de France, ed. Yves Bonnefoy, (Paris: Lachenal & Ritter, 1997), 267.

[13]. Thomas Thorowgood, Iewes in America, or, Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race, (London, 1650), 17.

[14]. R. Elphick, “Africans and the Christian Campaign in Southern Africa,” in The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared ed. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1981), 270.

[15]. R. Elphick, “Africans and the Christian Campaign in Southern Africa,” 279.

[16]. See for example Ivan Kalmar, “Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews, and Synagogue Architecture,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society 7(3), 2001: 80-2.

[17]. See  David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England 1485-1850, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and the chapter entitled “Invisible Hebrews: a Myth of Albion” in Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: the History of a Myth.

[18]. James Finn, Stirring times, or, Records from Jerusalem consular chronicles of 1853 to 1856,ed. Elizabeth Finn, 2 vols., (London, 1878), 130.

[19]. Xun Zhou, Chinese perceptions of the Jews and Judaism: A history of the Youtai, (Richmond, England: Curzon Press, 2001).  There was an ancient Jewish community in China which has been exhaustively studied. See g. The Jews of China, ed. Jonathan Goldstein,, (Armonk New York: M. E. Sharpe,1999).  For a recent bibliography on the Jews of China see F. D. Shulman, “The Chinese Jews and the Jewish Diasporas in China from the Tang Period (A.D. 618-906) through the Mid-1990s: A Selected Bibliography,” in The Jews of China, 157-183.  See also Michael Pollack, Mandarins, Jews and Missionaries: The Jewish experience in the Chinese Empire, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1980).

[20]. S.Y.R. Cammann, “The Chi’ang People of Western Szechuan: The Miscalled ‘West China Jews’ in Faces of the Jewish experience in China, ed. Dennis A. Leventhal and Mary W. Leventhal, Monographs of the Jewish Historical Society of Hong Kong, vol. 3 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Jewish Chronicle,1990), 75-6.

[21]. Cammann, “The Chi’ang People of Western Szechuan,” 64-87.

[22]. I am much indebted to Dr. Xun Zhou of SOAS who first brought the work on the Chi’ang to my attention .

[23]. See Rev. T. Torrance, “The religion of the Ch’iang,” Journal of the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 54, (1923): 150.

[24]. J.Carel, With the scattered in the East ( Jerusalem, 1960) 35.

[25]. J.E. Joshua, “The lost Jews of Burma,”  The Jewish Tribune, (July, 1934): 8

[26]. Francis Mason, The Karen Apostle: or, Memoir of Ko Thah-Byu, ( London, 1846), 7.

[27]. Donald Mackenzie Smeaton, The Loyal Karens of Burma, ( London, 1887), 76.

[28]. Smeaton, The Loyal Karens of Burma, 66.

[29]. Missionary Magazine, (Dec.1833): 469, quoted in Harry Ignatius Marshall, The Karen People of Burma: a Study in Anthropology and Ethnology, (Columbus: The University, 1922), 10.

[30]. John Cawte Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook, (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1974).

[31]. See Ida Cowen, Jews in Remote Corners of the World, (Englewood, New Jersey: 1971), 26.

[32]. In 1841 a Jew called Alexander Salmon landed in Tahiti and married a princess of the Teva clan.  See Cowen, Jews in Remote Corners of the World, 4.

[33]. George Robertson, The Discovery of Tahiti: A Journal of the Second Voyage of H.M.S. Dolphin, ed. Hugh Carrington, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd series, (London: Hakluyt Society, 1948), 228.

[34]. John Dunmore, French Explorers in the Pacific, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 117.

[35]. The Journals of Captain Cook: Prepared from the Original Manuscripts by J.C. Beaglehole for the Hakluyt Society, ed. Philip Edwards (London, New York: Penguin, 1999), lxxvii.

[36]. See David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 9-10.  See also.George  Grey, Ko nga mahinga a nga tupuna Maori, / (London, 1853) [The Mythology and Traditions of the New Zealanders]; George Grey, Journal of an Expedition Overland from Auckland to Taraniki by way of Rotorus, Taupo, and the West Coast; Undertaken in the summer of 1849-50, by his Excellency the Governor-in-Chief of New Zealand, (London, 1851).

[37]. See John Rawson, Elder ed., Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden, 1765-1838, Senior Chaplain in the Colony of New South Wales and Superintendent of the Mission of the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand, (London: Dunedin Coulls, Somerville, Wilkie, and A.H. Reed, for the Otago University Council 1932).

[38]. See Arthur S. Thomson, The Story of New Zealand: Past and Present, Savage and Civilized, (London: J. Murray, 1859, reprint Christchurch, New Zealand: Capper Press, 1974).

[39]. See D. Cohen, “New Zealand’s Zion” The Jerusalem Report, 18.9 (1997): 28-9.  I am indebted to Dr. Norman Simms of the English Department of Waikato University, Hamilton, New Zealand for drawing this article to my attention.

[40]. Richard Taylor, Te Ika a Maui or New Zealand and its Inhabitants illustrating the Origin, Manners, Customs, Mythology, Religion, Rites, Songs, Proverbs, Fables, and Language of the Maori and Polynesian Races in General, Together with the Geology, Natural History, Productions, and Climate of the Country, (London: Wertheim and Macintosh, 1855), 190-1.

[41]. See Chidester, Savage Systems, 38.

[42]. See Chidester, Savage Systems, 88.

[43]. See Chidester, Savage Systems, 124.

[44]. See Chidester, Savage Systems, 95.

[45]. It would be as well to note here that frequently in the colonial discourse under review Arabs or Moors are alternative structures of otherness.  Although this chapter is concerned mainly with the way in which the Jewish element of the Semitic world acted on the European imagination, the Arabs or Moors as well as other ancient peoples, also played an important role.  In mediaeval Europe “Moorishness” like “Jewishness” was the essence of “otherness.”  The Arabic languages, like Hebrew (in France “c’est de l’hébreu pour moi” signifies an incomprehensible language) was the epitome of the unknown tongue.  When Columbus arrived in the New World on his fourth voyage he observed that the people of the islands each had a different language and that they, “do not understand one another any more than we understand the Arabs.” (ii.102)  In the Veneto, which has had a long history of symbiosis with Muslims to this day, parlar turco means to speak gobbledeygook, and cose turche implies things which can scarcely be imagined.  Even those not convinced by the Israelite or Moorish origins of strange people still saw Jews and Moors as archetypal others: Vespucci, at a loss to understand who the American Indians might be noted, “they cannot be called Moors nor Jews, but worse than gentiles...I judge their lives to be Epicurean.”  In other words, as Vespucci looked around for suitable “others” to express the strangeness of the Indians, the most automatic first choice was a twinning of Jews and Moors.  See Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel,  introduction.

[46]. Allen Francis Gardiner, Narrative of a Journey to the Zoolu Country in South Africa, (London, 1836, reprint Cape Town: C. Struik, 1966), 95.

[47]. See Chidester, Savage Systems, 125.

[48]. J. W. Colenso, “The Diocese of Natal,” The Monthly Record of the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 4, (November, 1853): 241-64.

[49]. See Tudor Parfitt, Journey to the Vanished City: the Search for a Lost Tribe of Israel, (London : Hodder & Stoughton, 1992),204-5.

[50]. J. Briant, L'hébreu à Madagascar,  (Antananarivo, 1946).

[51]. Williams reaches the conclusion that, “the Supreme Being not only of the Ashanti and allied tribes, but most probably of the whole of Negro Land as well, is not the God of the Christians which, at a comparatively recent date, was superimposed on the various tribal beliefs by ministers of the Gospel: but the Yahweh of the Hebrews, and that too of the Hebrews of pre-exilic times.” See: Raphael Patai, “Ritual Approaches;” Joseph John Williams, Hebrewisms of West Africa: From Nile to Niger with the Jews, (New York: MacVeagh, 1930).

[52]. From Raphael Patai, “The ritual approach to Hebrew -African Culture Contact,”; See also M. Merker. Die Masai. Ethnographische Monographie eines ostafrikanischen Semitenvolkes,  (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1904), 290-332.

[53]. Heinrich von Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” in Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, 2nd ed., ed. Walter Boehlich, (Frankfurt am Main, 1965), 45.

Notes to Chapter 5