Colonial missionaries mapped Zulu religion onto ancient Israelite customs

Evidence

John Colenso, a Cambridge-educated mathematician who was ordained bishop of Natal in 1853, was convinced that the two Zulu names for God embraced perfectly the notions of the divine “contained in the Hebrew words Elohim and Jehovah.” So close indeed were the resemblances, according to Colenso, that frequently the point was made that anyone who really wanted to understand the Bible had best study Zulu customs. Zulu “habits and even the nature of their country so nearly correspond to those of the ancient Israelites, that the very scenes are brought continually, as it were, before their eyes, and vividly realized in a practical point of view.” Practically everything about the Zulus from their lunar calendar to the order of religious feasts seemed to reflect an Israelite past. “The Zulu keeps his annual feasts, and observes the New Moons as the old Hebrew did. The very Zulus have their festivals at the beginning of the Southern Spring and at the end of their Autumn, corresponding to the ‘feast of the first fruits’ and the ‘feast of the ingathering’ of the ancient Hebrews.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 333

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the standing reading on how colonial classification projected Old Testament frameworks onto colonized peoples, in the spirit of Things Fall Apart’s account of missionary misreading of Igbo religion.