European explorers explained unfamiliar peoples as descendants of the Lost Tribes

Evidence

As Tudor Parfitt has rightly pointed out, “From the very beginning of European expansion Judaism was employed in the decipherment of religions and Jews were used as likely explanations for the peoples Europeans encountered.” This was certainly the case with the Americans in the New World. From the fifteenth century on, the idea that certain peoples were descended from ancient Israel or from some specific tribe of the Lost Tribes of Israel became astonishingly widespread and was attached to just about every corner of the globe and to a wide variety of peoples, from the Eskimos to the Australian aborigines. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 347

Categorization

• QUESTION: When and why did this Lost Tribes framework finally collapse as a serious ethnographic explanation? The decline itself is a history worth chasing.