Author: Douglas Becker

Since the unexpected discovery in 1492 of humans not accounted for in the Bible, Europeans were keen to find out where they had come from. An ingenious solution was proposed: they were the tribes of Israel that disappeared from history with the fall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the middle of the first millennium BC. A whole religion has been built on these foundations. There was also a movement in the late nineteenth century to identify the English with the same lost tribes. There are still traces of the ‘British-Israelite’ movement today.

The Israelite hypothesis

Very quickly after the discovery of the New World, Europeans began to treat its inhabitants as little more than their possessions. There was some debate about whether they were fully human and thus descendants of Adam. At first, few of their fellow Europeans protested, but in the early sixteenth century, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566) became a champion of the Native American cause. He spent many years trying to improve the conditions under which they lived in the Spanish colonies in the West Indies, Peru and Guatemala. Las Casas believed that the Native Americans should be converted to Christianity, as he was convinced that they originated in Ancient Israel and felt that the Bible contained the proof that they were members of the Lost Tribes of Israel. He was not alone and it was in no small measure thanks to his efforts that Pope Paul III (1468-1549; pope 1534-49) declared that the Native Americans were fully human, after all, in 1537.

A report by the seventeenth-century Portuguese traveller, António Montezinos (also known as Aharón Leví de Montezinos), published in 1644, reawakened interest in the subject. He claimed that there was a Jewish tribe living beyond the mountain passes of the Andes and that he had heard them recite the She‘ma Yisro‘el (the expression of the Jewish faith) and saw them observe Jewish rituals. Alas, Montezinos was a fantasist whose stories were accepted uncritically.

Having decided that some of the Native Americans practised Hebrew rites and were therefore ancient Canaanites or the lost tribes of Israel, this meant that they were in dire need of conversion. Thomas Thorowgood’s Jewes in America, or, Probabilities that the Americans are of that race, first published in 1650, was one of the first to argue for the need to convert these lost tribes. The second edition of 1660 quotes the authority of John Eliot (1604-1690), the “Apostle to the Indians”, who went on to publish a translation of the bible into the Massachusetts dialect of Algonquin in 1663. Groups like the Corporation for Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England were founded by English settlers who believed that the Native Americans were lost Jews who would need to be reconciled with Christ at the end of time. Although the belief that Indians were Hebrews quickly faded as knowledge of their languages, customs and beliefs increased, Edward Johnson (1598-1672), author of The Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour (published in 1654), argued that a mass conversion of Indians was necessary if America were to be the site of the new heaven and new earth.

Menasseh ben Israel (1604-1657), a respected Dutch Jewish scholar, was heavily influenced by the account of António Montezinos and wrote his best-selling book, The Hope of Israel, which he dedicated to the English Parliament. Meeting Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658; Lord Protector of England 1653-1658), he petitioned for the recall of the Jews (who had been expelled from England in 1290) and expressed his belief that the dispersion of Jews to all corners of the Earth was the beginning of the redemption. Certain Christian traditions claimed that when the Ten Tribes of Israel were found and restored to the Holy Land, the return of Christ to reign supreme was not far off, a belief that is still had by some, especially American, fundamentalist churches. There was thus a considerable vested interest among some believers to identify the Lost Tribes. Now that apparently Israelite tribes had been discovered in the Americas, ben Israel argued, Cromwell must readmit the Jews to England to bring about the Messianic era. Similar sentiments were expressed, albeit in more humanistic terms, in the second half of the eighteenth century during the American and French revolutions. Some abolitionists, for instance, claimed that the Messianic Age would be ushered in when the slaves were freed and when the native Americans, as descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes, were converted to Christianity. The sometimes eccentric religious beliefs of the pioneer settlers developed political overtones, with the production of bizarre propaganda works such as the Apocalypse de Chiokoyhikoy, chef des Iroquois (published in 1777 by the newly-formed Congress and condemned by the Inquisition in 1779). This purported to be an account of the end of the world by an Iroquois prophet, denigrating the English to support the cause for American independence by showing how the Iroquois would be better off under American rule.

This page was last updated on 23 July 2007
Written by: Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

Introduction

The British-Israelite movement was a sect within the Church of England that emerged in the 1870s and formed a relatively powerful and influential voice in British middle-class Christianity until its rapid decline after 1945. Amongst its numerous bizarre and amusing beliefs there is a consistent obsession with antiquities and alternative archaeologies of various kinds, ranging from Celtic and Arthurian myths to Biblical archaeology and Egyptology. The present day pseudoscience of pyramidology is in many respects an after-effect of British-Israelite efforts in the 1870s and 1920s, as we shall see.

British-Israelism was primarily a movement of the upper middle classes, particularly within the military, the clergy and the colonial middle classes, although there were famous and prominent supporters including George VI, the poet Patience Strong and Princess Alice of Athlone. The core ideology of the movement is the belief that:

“The Jews are not the whole of God’s people Israel, as so many imagine, but only a small part of the chosen race – at the most two tribes out of twelve… and British-Israelites maintain that the Anglo-Saxon race embody, and are, the ten-tribed kingdom of Israel” (Dixon, 1915: 16, emphasis in original).

Racial Origin Myths

The British-Israelites’ attempts to integrate the fashionable race-science of the 1930s into their beliefs was fraught with difficulties. While they wished to prove their pure Aryan credentials, they were stymied by their frenzied hatred of Germany and their crude but endearing philo-semitism.

The solution to this thorny problem emerged when the Germans were declared to be the descendents of the Assyrians, oppressors of the Israelites and definite non-Aryans, while the Jews were proven to be Aryans by references to the supposedly Nordic-looking Jewish population of Palestine. This tortuous non-logic and appeals to vague bodies of evidence is typical of the ever-evolving British-Israelite ideology. “On this rock I will build my church” – The Stone of Scone Biblical literalism is a cornerstone of British-Israelite dogma, with obscure passages of scripture wielded as blunt instruments in religious debates. Their obsession with the Stone of Scone or coronation stone is a good example of this: in their paroxysms of patriotic fervour, such an obscure but resolutely British object as the coronation stone must be found at least one biblical provenance.

In the event they found two. The stone is (literally of course) ‘Jacob’s Pillow’, as attested by Scottish tradition: the stone on which Jacob rested his head, then blessed as a pillar in the temple of God. The second and more obscure connection is to the (clearly metaphorical) “stone that the builders rejected” in the Psalms, interpreted by later Christians as referring to the rejection of Jesus by humanity. For the British Israelites, this connects the stone of scone to the Great Pyramid (see below), as builder error in the construction of the pyramid allegedly meant that the intended capstone was unable to be fitted. This then became the coronation stone. This clumsy attempt to shoehorn vague materials and sites into equally vague or totally allegorical fragments of scripture is typical of bullshit biblical archaeology at its worst.

Tomb Raiders – Pyramidology

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the British-Israelites played a significant role in the creation and promulgation of the pseudoscience of pyramidology, which has remained one of the most popular and profitable branches of alternative archaeology ever since. Prominent British-Israelite pyramidologists include Charles Piazzi-Smyth (1819-1900), David Davidson, Colonel J Garnier, and James Bernard Nicklin (1881-?). Between them, these scholars (who included an engineer and an astronomer) created a rich and enduring tradition of prophecy and historical interpretation, based on the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Khufu in general and its interior measurements in particular.

For the British-Israelites, the pyramid is nothing less than “the Bible in Stone”, as important an aspect of their millenarian beliefs as the holy book itself. The main passage and the King’s chamber are, in this model, a timeline of British-Israelite history from the creation through the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, to the First World War and the start of the British Mandate in Palestine. Along the way, these measurements highlight such earth-shattering events as coronations, treaties and the end of the gold standard.

In the later stages, the measurements were taken with such accuracy that the start and end dates of the First World War were claimed to be accurate to the hour, assuming a scale of one pyramid inch = one month. The similarity between the imperial inch and the (invented) pyramid inch is another basis of the claim that the pyramid was built by the Israelites under divine supervision.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – The Hill of Tara

The British-Israelites only venture into field archaeology, aside from their obsessive measuring and re-measuring of the Pyramid, was a series of excavations carried out at the hill of Tara in Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century. Due to the usual combination of scriptural misinterpretation and blind acceptance of obscure fragments of folklore, the British-Israelites came to believe that Tara was the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant.

Allegedly brought to Ireland by an Israelite princess, the Ark had been buried for protection and for future use. In an archaeological initiative that makes Indiana Jones look professional, enthusiastic British-Israelites tore into the mound with picks and spades over several years. No Ark was found and the controversy around the desecration of the monument put a stop to further work, but the British-Israelites had made their mark in the long and inglorious history of mad, bad and otherwise god-crazed archaeology.

This page was last updated on 19 August 2007
Written by: Gabriel Moshenska for Bad Archaeology