The tribes are obscured in that they no longer exist as “Israel” and have lost the
“distinction of their tribe.”^93 Fletcher was deeply invested in the idea of the
reversal of fortune for the Jews and the Israelites—now in a state of punish-
ment. As they were once a “holy Nation elected by God, out of all Nations in the
World,” they would one day unite and “Palestine shall be famous in all
the world.” Employing the principle of the reversal of fortune, Fletcher argued
the best of futures for the Tartars, since they had been punished even more
than the Jews. Fletcher maintained that, since they had been degraded to be
“the most vile and barbarous nation of all the World,” because of their grave
sins and idolatry, they would be the most elevated. As Cogley explains, “the
greater the Israelites’ degradation, the more dramatic their eschatological
deliverance, and there was no greater degradation than being Tartars.”^94
We can already identify some of the elements—the great expectations of a
return to Palestine, the unique chosenness—that would surface later in
Brothers’ visions. However, another leap was needed to connect the Tartars to
the Britons. It is to be found in Uppsala, Sweden, where Olof Rudbeck Jr.
(Olaus Rudbeckius; 1660 – 1740 ) was inquiring into the origins of various
Scandinavian and Baltic peoples. Scandinavian philology had a considerable
influence on English romanticism and imagination, particularly in the context
of northern antiquities.^95 A polymath trained at Utrecht, Rudbeck held a
position as professor of medicine at Uppsala University and was a well-
known botanist and ornithologist. In 1695 , he went on a mission to study
nature in Lapland.^96 He was greatly interested in the possible connections
between Asian and Scandinavian languages and Hebrew.
Rudbeck inherited this interest, together with the position at Uppsala,
from his father, Olof Rudbeck Sr. ( 1630 – 1702 ), “the greatest Gothic patriot,”
who had also devoted attention to Norse mythologies and the Scandinavian
past. A proud Swede, Rudbeck Sr. was convinced that all European cultures
originated in the north and espoused ideas about a Northern European super-
race. The Scythians, long thought to be the putative ancestors of the Goths and
many European peoples, occupied a special role in his early quest for roots;
among the Scythian languages, Swedish is the oldest.^97 Rudbeck’s thought and
ideas about the origins of the European races came at precisely the time when
linguistics was intimately associated with the rise of the racial theory in
Europe. Linguistics in the eighteenth century opened a wide door for all sorts
of theories^98 that matured later into European forms of racial thought and
helped to shape the tragic racial pair—Aryans (Indo-Europeans) and Semites.
The pair was fully formed only during the nineteenth century, but as historian
Maurice Olender has shown, Rudbeck Sr. is one of its early fathers. The main
thrust of linguistics at the time was the search for theursprache—“the lost
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