European sailors interpreted white-skinned Pacific islanders as Jews

Evidence

George Robertson, master of the Dolphin, noted that, “this race of white people in my opinion has a great resemblance to the Jews, which are scattered through all the known parts of the Earth.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 325

Categorization

• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone into the history of early anthropology or Pacific exploration — the Whitby-sailor-eye view that Tahitians were the Jewish diaspora.
• DEFINE: Illustrates how ‘Jew’ functioned as a racial/exotic category in 18th-century maritime ethnography, not merely a religious one.