Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
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Mormon Studies Review

Keywords

Hebraic Indian theory, Lost Tribes of Israel, Book of Mormon

Abstract

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 American colonialism within Christian sacred history. After the 1830 publication of the Book of Mormon, she argues, narratives about the Lost Tribes were increasingly separated from narratives about Indigenous peoples. This removed Indigenous people from a place of significance in Christian sacred histories and led to the decline of Hebraic Indian theories. The overall argument of the book is compelling, but its limited engagement with early Mormon millennialism weakens its account of this theory’s decline.

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