Exhibition prepared by Dennis Landis, Curator of European Books.
Jewish Indians: The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel The earliest explorers identified the indigenous American peoples comfortably as far-flung east Asians. But as it became manifest that the Americas were a new and uncharted part of the world, new theories developed as to the origins of the “Indians”. The temptation was strong to find ancient connections, whether in the writings of classical antiquity or the mysteries of the Old Testament. Spanish observers were the first to begin cataloguing lists of practices by indigenous peoples that evoked Jewish customs. While the Spaniards turned away from the conclusion that Indians were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes, other colonial and old-world observers – including even Jews themselves – would continue to speculate on this topic through the end of the seventeenth century. Authors representing different religious traditions viewed the recovery of Judaic remnants in the New World as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, making possible the re-uniting of all the world’s Jews. |
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20. Bible. Polyglot. Biblia sacra. Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1569-1573. A consideration of New World geography was by no means out of bounds for biblical commentators in the Renaissance. The discovery of “new” lands presented an opportunity to reconsider old knowledge. Benedictus Arias, called Montanus (1527-1598), was one of those speculating that the descendants of Ophir, a son of Noah, could have settled in Peru or further north on what is now the coast of California. Ideas about the nature of the western coast of North America were at this time still entirely speculative. |
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21. José de Acosta. Ontdekking van West-Indien. Leyden: Pieter van der Aa, 1706. The Jesuit, José de Acosta’s careful study of the New World began with De natura Novi Orbis libro duo, published in Salamanca in 1588, which he expanded with further chapters in 1590 as The Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Acosta made extensive observations of the Native Americans he sought to convert to catholicism and noted, as others had, the numerous traits and customs they seemed to hold in common with the Jews. Acosta, however, authoritatively rejected the idea that the Indians were descended from the tribes of ancient Israel. Europeans would long continue to seek evidence of a Jewish identity in the New World population. |
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22. Manasseh ben Israel. [Mikveh Yisra’el] Esto es, Esperança de Israel. |
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23. Manasseh ben Israel. [Mikveh Yisra’el]. De hoop van Israël. Amsterdam : For Jozua Rex, 1666. |
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24. Manasseh ben Israel. [Mikveh Yisra’el]. [Sefer mikve Yisrael]. A posthumous Hebrew translation of the Hope of Israel. Purchased with the assistance of the Bloomingdale fund. |
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25. Thomas Thorowgood. Ievves in America, or, Probabilities that the Americans are of that race. London : W[illiam]. H[unt]. for Thomas Slater, 1650. Here, Thomas Thorowgood joins the argument, drawing much from the writings of Menasseh ben Israel. The possible rediscovery of “lost Jews” interested Thorowgood and others in a millennial context, and he also drew on the writings of the Puritan missionary John Eliot, who had spent time among the Indians at Roxbury, Massachusetts, outside Boston. |
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26. Hamon L'Estrange. Americans no Iewes, or Improbabilities that the Americans are of that race. London: W.[illiam] W.[ilson] for Henry Seile, 1652 [i.e., 1651]. L’Estrange’s reply to: Jewes in America by Thomas Thorowgood is a |
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27. Gottlieb Spitzel. Theophili Spizelii elevatio relationis Montezinianae de repertis in America tribubus Israeliticis. Basel: Johann König, 1661. This reply to Spes Israelis, the Latin edition of The Hope of Israel by Manasseh ben Israel, is a major contribution to the debate on the Jewish origins of the Native Americans. Dedicated to the great Basel Hebraist, Johannes Buxtorf, and to Johann Heinrich Hottinger, the book firmly refutes Manasseh ben Israel’s view of the origin of the Americans, particularly Montesino’s description of their Jewish customs, which Manasseh included in his famous plea to Cromwell. (Our copy of the book is bound in a fragment of a music manuscript possibly dating to the fourteenth century). |
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28. Diego Andrés Rocha. Tratado vnico, y singular del origen de los indios occidentales del Piru, Mexico, Santa Fè, y Chile. Lima: Manuel de los Olivos, for Ioseph de Contreras, 1681. Rocha provides extensive evidence that the rites, fashions, and ceremonies of the Indians of South America are in many ways akin to those of the Jews in both secular and sacred aspects of their life. He even cites Jewish names in use among the indigenous Peruvians. |
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Exhibition prepared by Dennis Landis, Curator of European Books.