His comparisons between Jewish and Indian rites can also be seen
as a precursor to practices that in time would become increasingly com-
mon. Historian Irene Silverblatt has exposed the many affinities and con-
nections that existed between inquisitorial discoursesabout conversos and
discourses about Native Americans: “Jews and Indians, according to seven-
teenth-century lore had their own special ties,” thanks to their “common
Semitic heritage”—an assumption in part derived from the theory that the
Indians were the lost tribes. Silverblatt shows howthe inquisitorial regis-
ters, particularly in New Spain, becameintertwined with regard to Jews and
Indians.^101 Inspecting Indians alongside or in contrast to Jews was a
common practice.
The connections among inquisitorial practices, Marranic Jews, Jewish
rites, and the ten tribes are reflected conspicuously in Montezinos’s story. It
is in prison, after being interrogated by the Inquisition, that Montezinos
concludes that the Indians are the ten tribes and that thecasiqueis hiding
something. Later on, his encounter with the ten tribes involves identification of
their rites. The idea that the ten tribes are hiding within another people or
hiding their identity is represented quite literally in the story. Now the question
was no longer “where are the ten tribes?” but also “who are the ten tribes?”
Finding the ten tribes had now become a matter of identifying them within
another group of people or as another group of people. Ethnology would
become another way, indeed, the most common way, of seeking them out
and finding them.^102
The Tribes’ Paths to America: Atlantis, Greenland,
and the Anian Straits
Diego Dura ́n’ s ( c. 1537 – 1588 )Historia de las Indias de Nueva-Espan ̃a y islas de Tierra
Firmewas an early central proponent of the ten tribes in America theory, a study
of the newly found continent, and a history of its natives. Virtually all studies of
America in this period dealt with the ten tribes question as a derivative of a larger
issue: how did the continent first become populated, and by whom? The question
of the Indians’ origins didn’t matter only for science’s sake. Determining who
they were was a serious concern of the Spanish Empire since its answer would
prescribe the way in which they should be treated.^103
Discussions about the ten tribes in America to which de Galindo’s study of
the Canaries pointed had been in place for decades. Already in the 1540 s, one
Dr. Rolda ́n, from Spain, used Esdras to argue that Native Americans were
the ten tribes.^104 Rolda ́n calculated that the tribes walked eastward from Nine-