Colonial Europeans projected Jewish identity onto distant peoples to legitimate divide and rule

Evidence

A hitherto unobserved feature of colonial discourse is the astonishing way in which a construction of Jews, quite unrelated to any objective feature pertaining to the Jews of the time, was used throughout the world as a means of explicating unknown or little-known peoples of wildly differing characteristics. This construction arose in part because past Europeans were so imbued with the Bible that it was the first thing they turned to when in doubt, and thus the ethnography of the Israelites was the most available. It arose also because Western and particularly Protestant missionaries longed for the return of the Christian Messiah, before which long-awaited event Jews had to be found in every corner of the globe; thus Jews were “invented” in the most remote regions to facilitate the Second Coming. Finally, it arose as a means of favoring certain “superior” peoples in the colonial enterprise of divide and rule. This stratagem, particularly in the African context, was a way of suggesting that anything fine or noble came from outside, from Europe or the Middle East. Thus many peoples who appeared to have a more advanced way of doing things or who had “noble” physical or social features were perceived of as coming from elsewhere—very frequently from “biblical lands.” The factors that were adduced in this discourse vary from place to place and from time to time but they generally include such features as the supposed similarity of certain languages to Hebrew and, from the seventeenth century on, the physical and moral resemblance of many different peoples to Jews. Religious features supposedly resembling aspects of the religious practices of Israelites were found among just about every society on earth. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 306

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how missionary eschatology (needing Jews everywhere to hasten the Second Coming) actively manufactured ethnic identity in the colonies — a theologically-driven fabrication of peoples.
• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism thesis about constructing the Other, and to the chapter’s framing on how biblical ethnography served as default template for classifying strangers.
• FICTION: A missionary or colonial administrator who genuinely believes an obscure mountain people are lost Israelites — the bureaucratic and interpersonal consequences of acting on that frame.