Missionaries identified the Karen as a Lost Tribe of Israel via scriptural parallels

Evidence

The Karens’ account of their origins—that they were from the River of Running Sand—no doubt served as a springboard for all sorts of speculation. This was a people with a mysterious past. Quite clearly there were striking and seductive similarities between Karen legends and those of the Jewish Scriptures: one such example was the Karen story of creation, which “was almost parallel to the Mosaic account in Genesis.” The first to observe the Karen and to note the resemblances between them and the Israelites were the Baptist missionaries who had been forced to move to the Tenasserim coast of northern Burma with the outbreak of the first Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26). Francis Mason of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society arrived in Burma in 1814 and in time became convinced that the Karen were part of the Lost Tribes. He had certainly reached this conclusion by 1833: on December 6 of that year he communicated his beliefs to the British government from his headquarters at Tenasserim. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 324

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general thesis pattern that Lost Tribes speculation followed missionaries into frontier regions — parallels claims about Pashtuns, Lemba, and other Lost Tribe claimants worldwide.
• QUESTION: Did the Lost Tribes identification of the Karen actually gain currency among the Karen themselves, and does it persist in Karen nationalism today as a form of biblical self-understanding?