Missionaries justified colonizing by discovering biblical kinship in chosen native minorities

Evidence

Western Christians, perhaps most acutely British and American Evangelicals, were prone to see traces of the Bible everywhere. As missionaries and others encountered exotic peoples a discourse was generated that potentially served white, Western interests in a variety of ways. One tactic was to single out a particular minority from the mass of “natives,” to argue that this group was in some way connected with the ancient Israelites and to attribute to this minority moral characteristics rather close to the self-image held by the British or the Americans of the time. It should be noted that the supposed moral kinship of the British and the Jews has a long history. Suffice it to say that in Evangelical circles, particularly, a kind of philo-Semitism, allied with a fulsome self-regard, created the kind of idea expressed by James Finn (1806–72) who was British consul in Jerusalem from 1845 to 1862: “From the effect of their domestic morality,” he wrote, “and family affections, these [the Jews] were the people who could best afford to look an Englishman straight in the face.” Some Jews, and other minorities exhibiting these admirable traits, would then be targeted by missionaries and sometimes given educational help. These people could then, at least in principle, be used in the struggle against the majority. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 318

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the ‘grafting’ logic of finding use-value in native groups — connects to postcolonial readings of missionary discourse and 19th-century British self-image.
• SEED: An article angle: how ‘philo-Semitism as self-regard’ operated as a colonial recruitment mechanism — elevating a chosen minority to justify intervention.
• QUESTION: What were the actual political uses made of these ‘chosen minority’ converts in colonial administration? The passage asserts ‘at least in principle’ but is thin on concrete cases.