British Israelism
British Israelism is a pseudohistorical belief that the people of Great Britain are "genetically, racially, and linguistically the direct descendants" of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel. With roots in the 16th century, British Israelism was inspired by several 19th century English writings such as John Wilson's 1840 Our Israelitish Origin. From the 1870s onward, numerous independent British Israelite organizations were set up throughout the British Empire as well as in the United States; as of the early 21st century, a number of these organizations are still active. In the United States, the idea gave rise to the Christian Identity movement.
The central tenets of British Israelism have been regarded as pseudoscientific and refutable by archaeological, ethnological, genetic, and linguistic research by mainstream sources.
History
Earliest recorded expressions
According to Brackney and Fine, the French Huguenot magistrate M. le Loyer's The Ten Lost Tribes, published in 1590, provided one of the earliest expressions of the belief that the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Scandinavian, Germanic, and associated peoples are the direct descendants of the Old Testament Israelites. Anglo-Israelism has also been attributed to King James VI and I, who is reported to have believed he was the King of Israel. Adriaan van Schrieck, who influenced Henry Spelman and John Sadler, wrote in the early 17th century about his ideas on the origins of the Celtic and Saxon peoples. In 1649, Sadler published Rights of the Kingdom, "which argues for an 'Israelite genealogy for the British people'".Aspects of British Israelism and its influences have also been traced to Richard Brothers, who published A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times in 1794, John Wilson's Our Israelitish Origin, and John Pym Yeatman's The Shemetic Origin of the Nations of Western Europe.
Foundation
British Israelism arose in England, and then spread to the United States. Its adherents cite various supposedly-medieval manuscripts to claim an older origin, but British Israelism appeared as a distinct movement in the early 1880s:Peak of adherence to British Israelism – late 19th and early 20th centuries
The extent to which the British clergy became aware of the existence of the movement may be gauged by the comment which Cardinal John Henry Newman made when he was asked why he had left the Church of England in 1845 in order to join the Roman Catholic Church. He said that there was a very real danger that the movement "would take over the Church of England."In the late 19th century, Edward Hine, Edward Wheler Bird, and Herbert Aldersmith developed the British Israelite movement. Hine and Bird achieved a degree of "doctrinal coherence" by eliminating competing forms of the ideology: in 1878, the Anglo-Ephraim Association of London, which followed Wilson by accepting the broader community of western European Germanic peoples as fellow Israelites who were also favoured by God, was absorbed into Bird's Metropolitan Anglo-Israel Association, which espoused the Anglo-exclusive view promoted by Hine.
By 1886, the "Anglo-Israel Association" had 27 affiliated groups throughout Britain. Hine later departed for the United States, where he promoted the movement.
The 1906 edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia stated that British Israelism's adherents "are said to number 2,000,000 in England and the United States", an unreliable figure if association membership and journal subscription numbers are any guide; the number of passive Protestant sympathisers is almost impossible to determine.
Between 1899 and 1902, members of the British-Israel Association of London dug up parts of the Hill of Tara in the belief that the Ark of the Covenant was buried there, doing much damage to one of Ireland's most ancient royal and archaeological sites. At the same time, British Israelism became associated with various pseudo-archaeological pyramidology theories, such as the notion that the Pyramid of Khufu contained a prophetic numerology of the British peoples.
In 1914, the thirty-fourth year of its publication, the Anglo-Israel Almanack listed the details of a large number of Kingdom Identity Groups which were operating independently throughout the British Isles as well as in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and the United States of America.
In 1919, the British-Israel-World Federation was founded in London, and Covenant Publishing was founded in 1922. William Pascoe Goard was the first director of the publishing house. During this time, several prominent figures patronized the BIWF organization and its publisher; Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone was its Patron-in-chief prior to World War II. One of its highest-profile members was William Massey, then Prime Minister of New Zealand. Due to the expansive nature of the British Empire, believers in British Israelism spread worldwide and the BIWF expanded its organization to the British Commonwealth. Howard Rand promoted the teaching, and he became the National Commissioner of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America in 1928. He published The Bulletin, later renamed The Messenger of the Covenant. More recently, it was renamed Destiny.
A prolific author on British Israelism during the later 1930s and 40s was Alexander James Ferris.
Contemporary movement
The BIWF continues to exist, with its main headquarters in Bishop Auckland, County Durham. It also has chapters in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and South Africa.In 1968, one source estimated that there were between 3,000 and 5,000 British Israelists in Britain. There, a few small Pentecostal churches have taught British Israelism.
The post-Imperial era brought about a change in orientation for British Israelists, reflected in a corresponding change in the social class to which their membership predominantly belonged. During the years of its initial growth, it could depend on the spread of Christian fundamentalism within the country, the emotional appeal of imperialism, and a belief in the unrivaled power of the British economy to expand a middle-class membership that viewed it as the divine duty of the nation, as God's chosen people, to rule and civilize the world. By the mid-20th century, the dissipation of these factors changed the focus of the movement to one troubled by social and moral decline, including the degradation of class distinctions and of monarchical absolutism. Societal changes were viewed as portents of a coming apocalypse and as indications that the nation was in need of redemption. A fantasized society which practiced Victorian moral rectitude and imperialism, lacked socialism, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and income tax, would now come to be viewed by the movement which drew its support from the well-to-do as the ideal that modern British society should emulate.
Tenets
Most Israelites are not Jews
Adherents believe that the Twelve Tribes of Israel are the twelve sons of the patriarch Jacob. Jacob elevated the descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh to the status of full tribes in their own right, replacing the Tribe of Joseph.A division occurred among the twelve tribes in the days of Jeroboam and Rehoboam, with the three tribes of Judah, Benjamin, and, in part, Levi, forming the Kingdom of Judah, and the remaining ten tribes forming the Kingdom of Israel. Thus, they argue, "the great bulk of Israelites are not the Jews". W. E. Filmer, writing in 1964, suggested that the fact that some Jews continue to search for the Ten Lost Tribes implies that their representatives are not found among modern-day multi-ethnic Jews. A number of British Israelites quote Josephus in order to support their claim that the lost tribes of Israel are not Jews: "the entire body of the people of Israel remained in that country; wherefore there are but two tribes in Asia and Europe subject to the Romans, while the ten tribes are beyond the Euphrates till now, and are an immense multitude."
The British are the descendants of the Lost Tribes
The key component of British Israelism is its representation of the migrations of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Adherents suggested that the Scythians, Cimmerians, and Goths were representatives of these lost tribes, and the progenitors of the later invaders of Britain. John Wilson would argue for the inclusion of all Western European Gothic peoples among the descendants of the Israelites, but under the later influence of Edward Hine, the movement would come to view only the peoples of the British Isles as having this ancestry.Herodotus reported that the ancient Persians called all of the Scythians Sacae, but they called themselves Scoloti. However, a modern comparison of the forms which are given in other ancient languages suggests that Skuda was their name. Ancient writers, such as Josephus and Jerome would associate the Scythians with the peoples of Gog and Magog, but British Israelist etymologists would see in Sacae a name derived from the biblical "Isaac", claiming that the appearance of the Scythians where they claimed the Lost Tribes were last documented also supported a connection. Further, British Israelists find support in the superficial resemblance between King Jehu's pointed headdress and that of the captive Saka king seen to the far right on the Behistun Rock. They continued the chain of etymological identification leading from Isaac to the Sacae to the Saxons, who are portrayed as invading England from Denmark, the 'land of the Tribe of Dan'. They saw the same tribal name, left by the wanderers, in the Dardanelles, the Danube, Macedonia, Dunkirk, Dunglow in Ireland, Dundee in Scotland, Sweden, and London, and ascribed to this lost tribe the mythical Irish Tuatha Dé Danann. In the name of the British they see berithish, referring to the Hebrew covenant with God.
Bede had linked the Picts to the Scythians, but British Israelists suggested that he had confused the two tribes of Scotland, and that it was the Scotti who were one with the Scoloti of Herodotus. They drew particular support from the derivation of the Scots from the Scythians found in the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, reflecting a tradition related in the 9th-century Historia Brittonum that the Scots descended from the union of a Scythian exile with Scota, daughter of a Pharaoh, a tale found in some form in several other early-14th-century historical and poetic sources. The Declaration begins:
"Most Holy Father and Lord, we know and from the chronicles and books of the ancients we find that among other famous nations our own, the Scots, has been graced with widespread renown. They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous. Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today."
British-Israel Associations cite the Declaration as evidence for the link between the Scots and the Scythians, and hence the Lost Tribes, as had been proposed by the early British Israelist etymologists.
Other Celtic invaders would be given an analogous descent. In the Welsh the British Israelists would see a direct connection through the Cimbri to the Cimmerians, the Gimirri of Assyrian annals, a name sometimes also given by the ancient Babylonians to the Scythians and Saka. Perceived similarity between this and the name by which the Assyrian annals referred to Israel, Bit Khumri, would lead the British Israelists to claim that the Welsh too were members of the Lost Tribes.
According to the Anglo-Israelists, these claimed connections would make the British the literal descendants of the Lost Tribes, and thus inheritors of the promises made to the Israelites in the Old Testament.