Comparative missionary methodology across the colonized world descended from Lafitau’s 1724 treatise

Evidence

One colonial stratagem was to argue that in the absence of any direct and obvious connection between an indigenous group and the Jews there were morphological connections to be made, that one custom or another reflected ancient Jewish practice. In the American context there are dozens of examples of this approach: perhaps the most important of these is the memoir of the Jesuit missionary to the Iroquois nation of Quebec, Joseph Lafitau’s Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains comparés aux moeurs des premiers temps, which set out to dissect the religious system of the Iroquois and made connections between the Indian practices he had observed and aspects both of Jewish and ancient Greek religious systems. (He actually thought they were descended from an ancient Greek population.) Lafitau’s work, published in 1724, had much to do with the development of the ideas of the Noble Savage in the eighteenth century (ideas of which Voltaire and others were somewhat dismissive). Lafitau’s basic comparative methodology was used widely throughout the colonized world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and became the predominant methodology in the discussion of little-known religions and peoples. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 317

Categorization

• XREF: The morphological-connection stratagem echoes how Christian missionaries elsewhere mapped biblical categories onto local peoples; connects to the Lost Tribes theme in this book.
• SEED: Essay angle: how a single 1724 Jesuit treatise set the template for how Europeans ‘compared’ unfamiliar religions to Judaism across three centuries of empire.