Baptist missionaries originated the claim of Karen Israelite descent

Evidence

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 (1824–26). 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 6 of that year he communicated his beliefs to the British government from his headquarters at Tenasserim. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 324 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Missionaries ignored disconfirming evidence to prove Israelite origins of chosen peoples; Missionaries used the Israelite-r kinship trope to recruit allied minorities against native majorities; Missionaries identified the Karen as a Lost Tribe of Israel via scriptural parallels — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 324 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Missionaries identified the Karen as a Lost Tribe of Israel via scriptural parallels #expands (0.96) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 324