this study tracks the emergence and transformation in Anglophone America of the “Hebraic Indian theory”—that is, the idea that Indigenous people are descended from Israelites, most often members of the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel. In such theories, the European “discovery” of Indigenous peoples was an event of apocalyptic significance because the reemergence of the Lost Tribes was assumed to herald a new age of the world. Fenton approaches the material from the study of early American literature and brings perceptive and wide-ranging analyses to a variety of texts. She examines not only religious narratives—including the Book of Mormon—but also scientific literature and novels to show how this theory changed from its emergence in Anglophone literature during the seventeenth century to its flourishing in the nineteenth-century United States. Fenton shows how, at their height in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Hebraic Indian theories allowed their authors to frame...
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Book Review|
January 01 2023
Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel
Elizabeth Fenton.
Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel
. New York
: New York University Press
, 2020
.
Matthew W. Dougherty
Matthew W. Dougherty
Matthew W. Dougherty is assistant professor, teaching stream at Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto. Their research in the history of religion and empire in North America explores how religious emotions have solidified political and territorial claims. Their first book, Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2022.
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Mormon Studies Review (2023) 10: 101–105.
Citation
Matthew W. Dougherty; Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel. Mormon Studies Review 1 January 2023; 10 101–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/21568030.10.16
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