British missionaries in the 1830s read Zulu customs as remnants of Jewish origin

Evidence

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. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 330

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Hamitic hypothesis and biblical Ham-as-progenitor-of-Africans tradition, and to how colonizers read indigenous cultures as degraded versions of their own sacred history.
• SEED: Angle: how the ‘vanished supreme deity’ trope let missionaries reconcile African religion with their own theology while still ranking it below Christianity and Judaism.