Missionaries’ biblical training caused them to misread Chinese minorities as lost Israelites

Evidence

The discourse surrounding the Jews in China has recently been the subject of a fascinating book by Zhou Xun. One missionary wrote about some of his colleagues “whose rigorous training in Bible Studies, and lack of knowledge about social customs among other peoples, led them to imagine that they had found in West China significant survivals of the Biblical traditions that occupied so much of their thinking. Particularly there was a missionary in Kweichow who believed he had found some old Hebrew practices among the Nosu and he also cited another one who claimed to have found among the Miao people an ancient song which described the Flood, the building of the Tower of Babel and the ensuing confusion of tongues and then went on to state their racial origin.” The most active zealot however was a devout Scots missionary by the name of the Rev. Thomas Torrance, who was to devote much of his life attempting to prove that the Ch’iang people were Israelites. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 319

Categorization

• QUESTION: A classic example of confirmation bias — worth chasing Torrance’s actual evidence and how it was received or refuted.