Abstract
It is tempting to accuse Thomas Thorowgood’s Jewes in America, or, Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race (1650) of a narrow parochialism. ‘Britain’, he began, ‘has woon [sic] the gospel glory from all other countries … it was the first of all the provinces that established Christianity by law … our Lucius was the first Christian king … our K. Henry the Eight was the first of all princes who brake that yoke of Antichrist’.1 Aside from betraying its author’s high view of monarchy (Charles I’s execution forced Thorowgood to delay publication and choose a new dedicatee), the passage reveals confidence in a nation blessed by God and enjoying international pre-eminence in the gospel.2 It is easy to see how Thorowgood’s position could be used to support the idea of England as an elect nation, a new Israel leading the world into a Protestant utopia. Yet Thorowgood did not stop with Henry’s breaking of Antichrist’s yoke. Instead, he fixed his historical lens further into the past, reminding readers of the many European supports that English faith had received. The English were not natives of their own land, instead being a collection of Jutes and Angles who emigrated from Germany. It was in this continental setting that they were educated in the faith. Following the English Catholic antiquarian Richard Verstegan, Thorowgood reminded his readers that these original immigrants, who constituted a ‘first England’ in ancient Germany, were initially converted to Christianity through interactions with the Jewish community on the continent.
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Notes
Thomas Thorowgood, Iewes in America or, Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race (1650), sig. bv.
For example, Claire Jowitt, ‘Radical Identities? Native Americans, Jews and the English Commonwealth’, Seventeenth Century 10:1 (1995), pp. 101–19.
Ronnie Perelis, ‘‘Those Indians are Jews!”: Lost Tribes, Crypto-Jews, and Jewish Self-fashioning in Antonio de Montezinos’s Relatiμn of 1644’, in Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (eds), Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Converso and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore, 2009), pp. 195–9.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, 2006), pp. 83–119.
See Andrew Crome, The Restoration of the Jews: Early Modern Hermeneutics, Eschatology, and National Identity in the Works of Thomas Brightman (Cham, 2014), pp. 29–58.
David Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 90–126.
Robert O. Smith, More Desired than our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism (Oxford, 2013), pp. 47–69.
William Perkins, ‘A Fruitfull Dialogue … Concerning the End of the World’, in Works (1631), iii. 470.
See Richard W. Cogley, ‘The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Restoration of Israel in the “Judeo-Centric” Strand of Puritan Millenarianism’, Church History 72 (2003), pp. 304–22.
Andrew Crome, ‘‘The proper and naturall meaning of the prophets”: The Hermeneutic Roots of Judeo-centrism in Puritan Eschatology’, Renaissance Studies 24:5 (2010), pp. 725–41.
Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in post-Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013), pp. 281–92.
For details on the development of this tradition see Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682, second edition (Milton Keynes, 2008), pp. 21–58.
See Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors, pp. 24–6, 52–5, and Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA, 2005), pp. 76–9.
A thorough history of the Jewish and Christian attempts to locate the tribes can be found in Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Ten Tribes: A World History (Oxford, 2009).
For the history of Christian speculation in particular see Tudor Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth (London, 2002), pp. 1–25.
Giles Fletcher, Israel Redux or the Restauration of Israel (London, 1677).
see, for example, Thorowgood, Iewes in America (1650), p. 39.
Amy Sturgis, ‘Prophesies and Politics: Millenarians, Rabbis, and the Jewish Indian Theory’, Seventeenth Century 14 (1999), pp. 15–23. However, Lee Earnest Huddleston argues that Martyr did not fully espouse the theory; Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin, TX, 1967), p. 33. Acosta argued that the Indians were so far from Hebrew ceremonies that they could not be Jews, unless they had experienced a cataclysmic degeneration. Garcia was much more positive, granting the theory a great deal of space and attempting to rebut Acosta’s objections. He did not espouse one particular opinion above others, however. On this see Huddleston, Origins, pp. 48–76.
The most that Mede can hope for from the plantations is that the English will not degenerate and make up the hordes of Gog and Magog assaulting the New Jerusalem. This is laid out in a letter to William Twisse dated 23 March 1634/5; see Joseph Mede, The Works of the Pious and Profoundly Learned Joseph Mede (1672), pp. 798–803. On Torquemada’s influence see Canizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors, pp. 100–4.
A section of Brerewood’s work is dedicated to the question of the location of the tribes, and a denial of claims that they were amongst the Tartars, or that the Tartars (and thus tribes) had populated America. See Edward Brerewood, Enquiries Touching the Diversity of Languages and Religions through the Chiefe Parts of the World (1614), pp. 92–112.
Thomas Thorowgood, Moderation Justified, and the Lords being at Hand Emproved (1645).
Thorowgood, Iewes in America (1650), pp. 60–87.
Thorowgood, Jews in America (1660), sigs. *v-*2r.
Thorowgood, Jews in America (1660), sig. *2iir.
For more on this see Warren Johnston, Revelation Restored: The Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-century England (Woodbridge, 2011).
For an example see Arise Evans, Light for the Jews, or, the Means to Convert Them (1664).
John Dury, ‘Discourse’, in Thorowgood, Iewes in America (1650), sig. e2r. Thorowgood’s work was the first to print a translation of Montezinos’ report, taken from Menasseh’s French copy and translated by Dury; see ‘The Relation of Master Antonie Monterinos, translated out of the French copie sent by MANASEH BEN ISRAEL’, in Thorowgood, Iewes in America (1650), pp. 129–39.
Menassehben Israel, ‘The Relation of Master Antonie Monterinos’, in Thorowgood, Iewes in America (1650), p. 136.
For more on this see Richard H. Popkin, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory’, in Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan and Richard H. Popkin (eds), Menasseh ben Israel and his World (Leiden, 1989), pp. 68–71.
Michael Hoberman, New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America (Amherst, MA, 2011), pp. 13–17.
Carla Gardina Pestana, Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, PA, 2009), pp. 71–7.
Laura M. Stevens, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia, PA, 2004), pp. 62–83.
Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven, CT, 2007), and idem, Abandoning America: Life Stories from Early New England (Woodbridge, 2013).
John Sadler, Rights of the Kingdom (1649), pp. 37–8.
John Eliot in Henry Whitfield, The Light Appearing More and More Towards the Perfect Day, or a Further Discovery of the Present State of the Indians in New England (1650), p. 14.
Lisa Voigt, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (Chapel Hill, 2009), pp. 255–319.
John Eliot in Thorowgood, Jews in America (1660), p. 2.
For more on this see Crawford Gribben, Evangelical Millennialism in the Transatlantic World, 1500–2000 (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 20–36.
Carla Gardina Pestana, ‘Cruelty and religious justifciations for conquest in the mid-seventeenth century English Atlantic’, in Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster (eds), Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia, PA, 2011), pp. 37–57.
Thomas Gage in Thorowgood, Jews in America (1660), pp. 35–6.
Thorowgood, Jews in America (1660), pp. 21–2.
José de Acosta, The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies (1604), pp. 74–7.
David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 11–27.
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Crome, A. (2015). The Jewish Indian Theory and Protestant Use of Catholic Thought in the Early Modern Atlantic. In: Gribben, C., Spurlock, R.S. (eds) Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600–1800. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137368980_7
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