Seventeenth-century missionaries read unknown peoples as lost Hebrews to categorize them

Evidence

In a similar way the myth of the Lost Tribes became a useful channel for understanding unknown peoples and races, and as a means of categorizing human entities for whom there was no readily available label. It is extraordinary that in the seventeenth century a Congregationalist missionary, Cambridge educated, could announce that “fruitful India are Hebrewes, that famous civil (though Idolatrous) nation of China are Hebrewes, so Japonia, and those naked Americans are Hebrewes, in respect of those that planted first these parts of the world.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 313

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the reader’s chapter on burial/loss and to orientalist discourse generally; also echoes the misfit between old categories and new encounters seen in the Milgrom law-merchant material about institutions filling knowledge gaps.
• SEED: The missionary line that China, Japan, and America’s natives are all Hebrews offers an essay angle on how pre-scientific taxonomy forced every new discovery into biblical genealogies — a case study in cognitive conservatism.