Poorly educated missionaries read unfamiliar peoples out of the Bible.

Evidence

Such men had a good knowledge of the Bible, but not perhaps of much else. Practically all the Protestant missionaries explicitly believed in the Bible as an undifferentiated body of information and as their sole and infallible source of authority both for belief and praxis. It was, in every sense, their guide to life. It was natural then that they should have sought in its pages the explanation for the strange things they encountered. Their reading of the Bible was mediated by a European culture in which Enlightenment concepts were present; the Bible was an infallible source but the way it was understood was a way specific to a time and a class. In this case, specifically, ideas equating noble savages with Jews were extracted from Scripture and Scripture was mined to explain strange peoples’ lives and customs. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 305