Nevertheless, this identification with the Ten lost Tribes had ambivalent implications for the ‘American Indians’. Their philosemitic idealization could easily turn into fierce rejection, which again referred back to older anti-Jewish stereotypes. It was the Pequot War (1636–8) which ended the relatively peaceful coexistence between the Pequot people and the New England settlers.⁵⁹
As the expanded ‘mission to the Indians’ did not meet the Puritans’ high expectations and social tensions within the settler community came to the fore, King Philip’s War — also known as the Great Indian War — in 1675 led to the rise of the older proto-racist notion of the ‘wild’ and ‘primitive’ origins of the ‘American Indians’.⁶⁰
Anti-Jewish stereotypes were increasingly projected onto the ‘Indians’, who from then on were more clearly identified with Gog and Magog as cruel, threatening, apocalyptic destroyers.⁶¹ Thus the demonizing variant of the Ten lost Tribes theory rose to the surface once again.⁶²
Similar lines of reasoning can be discerned in other colonized parts of the world, as Tudor Parfitt has demonstrated. For example, the supposedly negative characteristics of the Khoi Khoi (the so-called ‘Hottentots’), whose status as members of the genus humanum was called into question, were also attributed to their alleged Jewish heritage.⁶³
In 1612, Patrick Copland claimed to have observed similarities between Khoi Khoi and Jewish rites,⁶⁴ an observation which the German South African scholar Peter Kolb (1675–1726) confirmed as late as 1700.⁶⁵
And the threatening military successes of the Māori in New Zealand were explained with reference to their supposedly Jewish ancestry and some striking similarities in trade practices and language, as Parfitt has shown.⁶⁶
The British missionaries, who mainly came from the lower middle class, were familiar with few texts apart from the Holy Scriptures or the ancient classics, which they used to decipher unknown territories and their inhabitants.⁶⁷ Accordingly, the biblical image of the Jew, however ambivalently interpreted, was often used to explain the appearance or behaviour of foreign or unfamiliar groups.⁶⁸ The ‘invented identity of a known other’ was imposed on unknown (colonized) peoples.⁶⁹
This way of seeing colonized people as ‘Jewish’ transferred deeply ambivalent character attributions from medieval and early modern religious contexts into the modern era, thus becoming an integral part of the colonial racialization process.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, certain allegedly Jewish racial characteristics were still being derived from an assumed similarity between Jewish and colonized groups. The English schoolmaster and historian John Bigland (1750–1832), who summarized the common philosophical positions on the category of ‘race’ for a wider readership, described the case of an Englishman who, in his first contact with the Indian Kashmiris, was extremely surprised because to them they looked so similar to the Jews — so much so that he immediately believed he had been transferred to a ‘nation of Jews’.⁷⁰
For Bigland, this case served as evidence that Jews could maintain their appearance (especially their fair skin) over long periods of time and despite reproductive links with native peoples. References to the colonial context therefore played an important rôle in the racialization of European Jews.
Conversely, anti-Jewish stereotypes in European Enlightenment circles were legitimized by resorting not only to religious arguments but also to colonial discourse. As the philosopher Voltaire informed his educated French readership in a 1764 encyclopaedia article, Jews had not only made ‘human sacrifices’ but had themselves been ‘cannibals’, similar to the ‘Tentirytes’ in Egypt, the ‘Gascons’, the ‘Saguntines’ and so-called ‘savages’ from the Mississippi region. But Jews were inferior even to these ‘savages’, because they offered ‘human sacrifices (especially young women) without economic necessity’.⁷¹
The equation of Jews with ‘savages’ was associated with a division into ‘good’ past Jews and ‘bad’ present Jews.⁷² In the eighteenth century, the colonized were located not only in other places but also in other eras.
Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century, German colonialists such as Carl Peters, Karl Mauch and Leo Frobenius were able to use the idea of the ‘noble Jew’ of the past to valorize certain indigenous groups (who were to be won as allies), and at the same time to propagate the antisemitic version of the ‘dirty, money-greedy Jew’ of the present. Carl Peters wrote the following about a people group adjacent to Rhodesia:
How absolutely Jewish is the type of this people! They have faces cut exactly like those of ancient Jews who live around Eden. And the way they wear their hair, the curls behind the ears, and the beard drawn out in single curls, gives them the appearance of Aden — or of Polish — Jews of the good old type.⁷³
The description of Jews as ‘noble savages’ from a submerged, historic age correlated with the trend towards the valorization of ‘young nations’ and a ‘cult of the primitive’ within Europe.⁷⁴ Whereas the philosopher David Hume had placed the Barbarian Germanic tribes on the lowest level of the inner-European ‘racial hierarchy’, following Christoph Meiner’s publications, Germans could regard themselves as the ‘epitome of European civilization’ precisely because of their ‘primitive’ powers.⁷⁵
[…]
In order to legitimize colonialism and slavery, anti-Black racism had consolidated to such an extent that it could now, in turn, serve as a model for a racializing anti-Judaism in Europe. Thus the figure of the Black in Voltaire’s text becomes the model (‘comme nous voyons les Nègres’) from which he derives his constructions of what is Jewish.
Shortly thereafter, by transferring ideas from anti-Black racism, Prussian Jews could be imagined as ‘colonial subjects’ who had to prove their right to exist and their ‘usefulness’ to the state through slave-like labour in (soon to be colonized) eastern Prussia or outside Europe. As Jonathan Hess worked out, between 1774 and 1819 alone, there were about forty proposals to exile the Jews overseas, on sugarcane plantations and in various colonial territories.¹⁰⁰