not only Isaiah and other biblical prophets were on Columbus’s mind. Most
significantly, there was Esdras,^25 an important element in Columbus’s thought
and world, used even in making his case before Isabella and Ferdinand “to
prove how small was the ocean.”^26 In the letter he wrote about his third voyage
( 1498 ), Columbus spoke of it as a “godly pilgrimage to the prophetic tradition’s
ends of earth.”^27
Columbus had an “unmistakable... sense of his own apostolic and
providential election.”^28 As Kadir has shown, this sense of being a tool in the
fulfillment of prophecies was closely connected to later speculation concerning
the ten tribes in the Americas.^29 Columbus twice refers to the world he found
as “another world” (otro mundo).^30 Could it be that Columbus’s “another
world”—as opposed to Vespucci’sMundus Novus,or New World, coined in
150431 —is in fact Esdras’s “another land,” in turn theAretz aheretof Deuter-
onomy? In Hebrew,Aretzcould also mean “world/earth.” And after all, Co-
lumbus found this other world by “arriving at the end of the Orient [fin de
Oriente] where East and West meet.”^32
The geographical fact that the world is round (and therefore east and
west must meet) went hand in hand with the prophecy that another world—
another land—existed somewhere. A combination of geographic determinism
and interpretations of prophecy were at work. The newly acquired ability to
reach the “end of the east” and the “end of the earth” allowed one, if one looked
hard enough, to find the ten lost tribes. In addition to geographic search, an
active measure of consultation with and interpretation of prophetic texts was
necessary as well. The prospect of finding the ten tribes was very real. Both
prophecy and the exposed and revealed geography of the real world enabled
(but certainly did not mandate) it.
As Tudor Parfitt thoroughly documents, the Americas were the center of
what later came to be known as the “Jewish Indians theory,”^33 according to
which the Native Americans or some of them were the ten lost tribes. Other
versions had one or two tribes of the ten migrating to the Americas among
other groups—Egyptians, Phoenicians, or others. The Jewish Indians theory
generated heated debates that lasted for centuries, first in the Spanish world,
but particularly (later) in England and the American colonies. The notion that
the Indians were related to the ten tribes was a useful political tool, helping
Europeans to “possess” them, to borrow Stephen Greenblatt’s terminology,^34
and was often employed to justify conquest, colonization, and the deprivation
of property. At other times, it was employed to condemn these very same acts.
Among the many peculiar twists of this theory, one can count the conver-
sion to Christianity of Gallegina Watie ( 1802 – 1839 ), a Cherokee noble who was
adopted by Elias Boudinot ( 1740 – 1821 ), among other things a famous ten
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