embodied inHope of Israel.“There is a strong argument in favor of the Indians
being converted to Christianity, their being descended from the Jews,” wrote
Charles Crawford (b. 1752 ), a typical observer, in 1801.^61 Viewing the Native
Americans as lost brethren added more power to missionary zeal. The ten
tribes were terribly missed, and reuniting with them was the great hope of
many. A “Song Millennial,” sung in 1832 by preacher Harriet Livermore of
Massachusetts, expressed this sentiment well: “How happy is Judah to meet
his lost brethren / Tribes of the red man from forests afar; / ‘These were they
have been’ the long outcast Ephraim / We’ve missed them e’er since the
Assyrian war.”^62
The combination of the scholarly accommodation of prophecy and
geography supplied by Ben-Israel and Thorowgood’s theology of restoration
furthered knowledge produced on the ten tribes in the American context. The
sermons, news, reports, and attempts to prove the theory are too numerous
to count.
Of course, not everyone in America agreed with the notion that the ten
tribes were the ancestors of the Native Americans. Thomas Jefferson, a biblical
scholar in his own right, entered into a debate with his colleague Elias Boudi-
not over the issue. He was but the most prominent. More and more evidence
based on increasingly sophisticated and less passionate ethnography pointed to
the simple reality—the Indians were not Israelites. This was, as Popkin stated,
one of the most important reasons that the Jewish Indian theory eventually
died.^63 There was simply no plausible evidence for the claim. The only real
evidence found in America was a strange earthwork (a mound) discovered
in Philadelphia in 1772 , which, for a while, was taken to be the work of the
ten lost tribes. The debate gradually dissipated as increasingly sophisticated
archaeological and ethnographic research tied it to known Native American
practices.^64
On the whole, only those who initially set out to identify the Native
Americans as the lost tribes were able to do so, for example, Boudinot in his
A Star in the West; or, A Humble Attempt to Discover the Long Lost Ten Tribes of
Israel.Its very title bespoke a strong messianic ambition: Jesus’s birth, of
course, had been foretold by the star in the east. Discovering the tribes was
“preparatory to their return to their beloved city, Jerusalem”—as Christians, of
course. Boudinot later would serve as the president of the American Society for
Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, which sought to improve the circum-
stances of the Jews before their conversion to Christianity. Ultimately, he would
engage the discovery of the tribes at all levels: accommodating prophecy,
providing an ethnographic survey of Native American tribes, and discussing
global geography and migration, with special attention to recent discoveries
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