Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America by Matthew W. Dougherty (review)

With Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty, a historian of Christianity at the University of Toronto, delivers a lost history. He chronicles the wide variety of Americans between the 1790s and the 1830s who represented Indigenous people as deriving from lost tribes of ancient Israel. White Protestant reformers who skewed northern and who favored staid denominations (Congregationalism, in particular); American Jewish thinkers such as Mordecai Manuel Noah; followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its holy book, the Book of Mormon, before 1847; and Indigenous intellectuals such as the Pequot/Wampanoag Methodist preacher William Apess (before 1833) and a handful of Christian Cherokees all linked Indigenous Americans to Biblical descriptions of God's chosen people.

Americans from each of these abovementioned groups told "Israelite Indian stories" (17) for particular, varying reasons. Influential white reformers from the Northeast, specifically the New Jersey author Elias Boudinot who wrote Star in the West (1816) (not to be confused with the later Cherokee editor of the same name) and the Connecticut poet Lydia Sigourney, concluded that additional conversions to Christianity and assimilation were needed from Indigenous people. Early Mormons beheld "Lamanites," potential allies in need of conversion, when they saw Indigenous people. The term Lamanites, from the Book of Mormon (itself set in ancient America), indicated "some of the descendants of a band of Israelites who had settled in North America around 600 BCE" (48). For Jews, specifically for Mordecai Manuel Noah, stories of Israelite-descended Indians served to challenge white Protestants' monopolistic claims to land, and to construct an important set of allies for Jews who aspired to build Jewish homelands in America, notably the stymied island colony of Ararat near Buffalo, New York. For William Apess, and for Cherokees on the brink of forced expulsion from Georgia to the Trail of Tears, Indigenous people's moral rectitude and their dark "complexion" (93), both shared in common with Biblical patriarchs including Adam (said Apess), served to challenge white Americans' denigrations of "Indian" status and seizure of Native land.

These wildly varying purposes of storytelling about Native people's Israelite roots show that the stories served the needs of their creators. Creators sometimes predicted continued coexistence and warm relations between Indigenous and white Christians; Apess envisioned the empowerment of Indigenous Christians. But Israelite Indian stories, as Dougherty states, ultimately constituted a losing argument. Starting in the 1830s, federal as well as state governments' punishing, explicitly racial, Jacksonian levels of Indian removal and reservation policy, and definitions of race grounded on ideas about nature and essence instead of convictions derived from faith effectively suppressed accounts of Israelite origins for Indigenous people. For the most part, Americans no longer found such accounts useful, and they went forgotten.

The innovations and strengths of Dougherty's history of ideas are many. Previous scholarship on the presumption of Biblical origins of Indigenous people has emphasized the Spanish Empire, American Jews separately, and Mormon faithful separately. But Dougherty's book is the first to consider Jewish and Mormon uses of Israelite Indian stories, together with white missionaries and reformers and Christian Natives who relayed these stories. Scholars of colonial and early modern periods have predominated among historians who study emotions. But in Lost Tribes Found, Dougherty moves the scrutiny of emotions forward in time to the early nineteenth-century United States, to mine the rich terrain of the early republic's religious ferment that historians often call the Second Great Awakening (he avoids that term) and the breakneck pace of settler colonization at the time. I commend Dougherty's sharp-eyed handling of original sources, such as when he notes errors, misunderstandings, or purposeful omissions in translations from Native languages to English, and when he notes that Israelite Indian beliefs attracted only small numbers within particular communities, such as Christian Cherokees. He is fully aware of...