yon—a position that was, for instance, still maintained by Farissol only a
century before. In deserting the single-location theory and embracing this
new geography, Ben-Israel brought the globalization of the ten tribes to a
new height. They could potentially be everywhere, firmly fixed as the ultimate
world wanderers.
Ben-Israel articulated new, flexible ways of accommodating prophecy and
geography, while his history of wandering opened the opportunity of finding
the ten tribes virtually anywhere. The appearance of the apprehension that the
ten tribes had been “heathenized,” any indigenous population in the world
could now be a possible candidate for ten tribes ancestry. Many of these
elements had appeared in earlier sources. But only with Ben-Israel’s irenic
approach was the wealth of the Jewish and Christian writings on the ten tribes
organized and presented systematically as a coherent, unified body of knowl-
edge. Not only could the tribes now be anyone, they could also be anywhere—
and everywhere.
Thomas Thorowgood replicated the spirit of Ben-Israel’s global approach,
though he was first and foremost invested in the American theory. In 1652 , two
years after the publication of Ben-Israel’s book, Thorowgood producedDigitus
Dei: New Discoveryes with Sure Arguments to Prove that the Jews (a Nation) or
People Lost in the World for the Space of Near 200 Years, Inhabite Now in America.
While Thorowgood maintained the centrality of his American thesis, Ben-
Israel’s conclusions had clearly affected him. He now spoke of “bringing back
...the ten tribes from all the ends and corners of the earth.”^58 In fact,Digitus
Dei,the finger of God, was simply a new edition of the earlierIewes in America.
However, this new version included the correspondence between Durie and
Ben-Israel. By then,Hope of Israelitself was circulating widely, and Thorow-
good was clearly interested in linking his work to the authoritative book of the
famous “Chief Jewish Divine.” The Jewish identity of the author seemed to
lend further authority to Christian motivations and goals.
The Jewish Indian theory persisted, developed into many variations, and
resonated strongly on both sides of the Atlantic for centuries to come.^59 As
Colin Kidd puts it, “Amerindian ethnography was strongly inflected by theo-
logical anxieties about the real identity of the native Americans.” These theo-
logical anxieties were created chiefly by “scriptural parameters,” which
originally permitted only a monogenist explanation for the origins of humani-
ty.^60 This reasoning brought the ten tribes, through the use of scripture, into
the realm of racial thought on both sides of the Protestant Atlantic.
In the particular context of the ten tribes, these anxieties were fueled and
driven not only by scriptural parameters that mandated all humans to be of
Adamite and Noahid descent, but more acutely by the restorative promise
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