The notion that American Indians are the ten lost tribes of Israel is quaint today, but during the age of exploration, Europeans thought they had plenty of proof.

Thomas Thorowgood’s Iewes in America laid out dozens of resemblances between Judaism and Indian customs. As summarized by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, these included: “like the Jews, the Indians ‘constantly and strictly separate their women in a little Wigwam by themselves in their feminine seasons; they annoint their heads as did the Jews; they ‘wash themselves often, twice or thrice in the day . . . and the Jewes were frequent in this’ . . . ; ‘they eat no swine flesh its hateful to them, as it was among the Jewes’ . . . ; ‘they wash strangers feet, and are very hospitall to them, and this was the known commendation of old Israell’; they ‘compute their times by nights an use which Laet confesseth they had from the Hebrews’; ‘the Indian women are easily delivered of their children, without Midwives, as those in Exod. I.19.’” Kinship terminology is similar: “As the Jewes were wont to call them fathers and mothers, that were not their naturall parents, so the Indians give the same appellation to Unkle and Aunts’” (33).

Eilberg-Schwartz includes a long quotation from Thorowgood showing that Indian religion, like their social customs, was similar to Jewish. Both circumcise. Both say God created all things. Both tell stories about a global flood. Both believe that the world will end with fire. Indians affirm the immortality of the soul, and believe in a place of eternal torment, called “Popoguffo.” Indians have the triple office of prophet, priest, and king, a temple for worship and sacrifice, holy places where only priests could enter, an eternally burning altar-heart. Priests along offer sacrifice, and those sacrifices fill the Indians with hope of divine favor. In Peru, the Indians have a single temple, though, like the Jewish synagogues, they have other places for piety and devotion. The Indians observe Jubilee, as did Israel was to do (33-34).

Christians weren’t the only ones to see these common elements. Manasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam appealed to these similarities and argued that the Jews had settled America in his “attempt to persuade the Parliament of England to readmit the Jews to England” (34).

The notion that the Indians were ancient Jews was part of the inspiration for mission to the Indians, as hope for Indian conversion got tangled up with the hope for the conversion of the Jews, which would inaugurate the millennium. John’s Eliot’s “work of seeking the conversion of the ‘American Jews’ would help to inaugurate the end of days” (33).