circumcised. But other than this little detail, in his account everything Norse
seems to be of Hebrew origin. Ironically, the Laplanders and the Finns were
later famously the subject of intense research carried out by Himmler’s SS in
Germany. Just as Rudbeck Jr. had found them to be remnants of the Israelites,
the Nazis considered them remnants of the great primordial European races;
the Finns and the Laplanders had been assigned to very different ancestors.^107
Similar arguments were central in later Anglo-Israelist thought, which
looked to such northern precursors. There were several advantages to focusing
on the ten tribes: as part of Israel, they were chosen, blessed by God, and—
most important—they were not Jews. Exiled seven centuries before Jesus, they
could not be guilty for the Crucifixion. “The Ten Tribes, being the main mass of
the Hebrew Nation, were not in the land to share in this crowning crime,” ran
the argument.^108 This idea, despite its philo-Jewish beginnings, would later
pave the way for some radical forms of anti-Semitism within the various Anglo-
Israelist offshoots.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Israelism was a
popular “madness,” an “Anglomania.” Numerous people were tediously work-
ing to prove that the ancestors of the English were the ten lost tribes and to
solve the “Anglo-Saxon riddle” of origin.^109 One of the favorite slogans of
proponents was that the word “British” was in fact made of the two Hebrew
wordsbritandishand thus meant “man of the covenant.” (Instances of such
“primitive philology,” as one angry observer called this, were quite frequent.)^110
Thus, Britain alone, or the Anglo-Saxon race, was the sole inheritor of God’s
blessings to Israel.
A few examples are representative. Edward Hine, in 1880 the founder of
the British-Israel Identity Corporation, was particularly diligent, proving that
“Anglo-Celto-Saxons” were the ten lost tribes. By 1870 , he had found “seven-
teen positive identifications” that the “English nation” was “the Lost House of
Israel.” By 1874 , the number had stabilized at forty-seven identifications,
resting on no less than “five hundred” scriptural proofs. When his book was
republished in New York years later, Hine was careful to trade the phrase
“British Nation” for the more inclusive term “Anglo-Saxons.”^111 The Reverend
William H. Poole (fl. 1870 – 1890 s), a Canadian proponent of the theory, used
the same tactics in his influentialAnglo-Israel; or, The British Nation the Lost
Tribes of Israel,published in Toronto in 1879. When republished in Detroit a
decade later, it turned intoAnglo-Israel; or, The Saxon Race.^112 The theory’s
proponents were fanatical in their commitment. One gets the impression that
Hine, a bank teller, spent every single minute away from his bank combing the
Bible, matching verses with British historical and geographical facts, and
generating more and more “identifications.” Hine confessed his obsession:
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