Transnational Networks and Cross-Religious Exchange in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds
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Transnational Networks and Cross-Religious Exchange in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds

Sabbatai Sevi and the Lost Tribes of Israel

Brandon Marriott

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Transnational Networks and Cross-Religious Exchange in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds

Sabbatai Sevi and the Lost Tribes of Israel

Brandon Marriott

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About This Book

In 1644, the news that Antonio de Montezinos claimed to have discovered the Lost Tribes of Israel in the jungles of South America spread across Europe fuelling an already febrile atmosphere of messianic and millenarian expectation. By tracing the process in which one set of apocalyptic ideas was transmitted across the Christian and Islamic worlds, this book provides fresh insight into the origin and transmission of eschatological constructs, and the resulting beliefs that blurred traditional religious boundaries and identities. Beginning with an investigation of the impact of Montezinos's narrative, the next chapter follows the story to England, examining how the Quaker messiah James Nayler was viewed in Europe. The third chapter presents the history of the widely reported - but wholly fictitious - story of the sack of Mecca, a rumour that was spread alongside news of Sabbatai Sevi. The final chapter looks at Christian responses to the Sabbatian movement, providing a detailed discussion of the cross-religious and international representations of the messiah. The conclusion brings these case studies together, arguing that the evolving beliefs in the messiah and the Lost Tribes between 1648 and 1666 can only be properly understood by taking into account the multitude of narrative threads that moved between networks of Jews, Conversos, Catholics and Protestants from one side of the Atlantic to the far side of the Mediterranean and back again. By situating this transmission in a broader historical context, the book reveals the importance of early-modern crises, diasporas and newsgathering networks in generating the eschatological constructs, disseminating them on an international scale, and transforming them through this process of intercultural dissemination into complex new hybrid religious conceptions, expectations, and identities.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781317006725

Chapter 1
The Lost Tribes in the Americas: Judeo-Christian Reciprocity across the Atlantic World (1648–1666)

From the Jewes our faith began,
To the Gentiles then it ran,
To the Jewes returne it shall,
Before the dreadfull end of all.1
In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas archipelago, and his well-known voyage marks the beginning of transatlantic travel. But Columbus also started a lesser-known intellectual trend upon meeting the American aboriginals. Thinking he had arrived on the outskirts of Asia, he misidentified them. He called them indios.
The Iberians who followed Columbus cared little about the aboriginals’ origins. It was not until later, when Amerigo Vespucci first identified the Americas as a Mundus Novus that questions about the history of their inhabitants came to the fore.2 Saint Augustine had stated that even the most monstrous races came from Adam and Eve, and the pope had concurred. The indigenous peoples were fully human and therefore had to be connected to the biblical world. To deny them such an origin was to place them outside of scripture, which would make the holy book incomplete and inadequate.3
The lone survivors of the great flood were Noah and his family. If the indigenous peoples were descendants of Noah, how did they travel to the Americas in a manner that fit into the accepted chronology in the book of Genesis? Numerous theories emerged that linked the aboriginals to the Phoenicians, to the Arabians or to the people of the biblical Ophir. One of the more creative answers was offered by the French millenarian Isaac La Peyrere, who postulated that they came from men who existed before Adam.4 Yet even in his aptly titled Prae-Adamite (1655), La Peyrere tied his argument into the Bible. Indeed, no scholar before the seventeenth century put forth a hypothesis without biblical foundations.5
Eventually the question of the origins of the American indigenous peoples intersected with a separate and much older problem. Early modern scholars had never fully determined what had become of the Lost Tribes of Israel. The story of the Lost Tribes begins in the Bible with the ancient Hebrews, who had originally consisted of 12 tribes, descended from the 12 sons of Jacob. The 12 tribes were then divided into two camps. The two tribes of the southern kingdom of Judah and their descendants became the Jews who spread throughout the world, whereas the other 10 tribes were led into captivity by the Assyrian King Salmanassar and disappeared entirely from the biblical record. It was this group, the northern tribes or the 10 tribes, which became known as the Lost Tribes.
With the incorporation of the Hebrew scriptures into the Christian Bible, the Lost Tribes became enshrined in the Christian canon, and Christians too started to wonder about the whereabouts of the ancient Hebrews. Because many of the messianic promises of the Old Testament were addressed to the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, it was believed that God had preserved the Lost Tribes in some distant corner of the globe from which they would emerge before the end of the world.6
The question of the Lost Tribes’ location therefore remained in the background of theological and historical debate until the discovery of the inhabitants of the Americas provided a new answer to this old problem. Scholars began to search for evidence that proved the aboriginals were descendants of the Israelites, which became known as the Lost Tribes theory. Because most European scholars would never visit the Americas themselves, they simply compared descriptions of languages, habits and buildings in order to extrapolate upon the probability.
New England Puritans, such as the minister John Cotton, were among those who speculated on this hypothesis. The Cambridge-educated Cotton had preached millenarian doctrines to his congregation in England until he received word in 1632 that he was going to receive a summons to the Court of High Commission. Cotton reacted quickly. He packed up his belongings and left for New England before the summons arrived. Like the other 21,000 Puritans who fled England in the 1620s and 1630s,7 Cotton preferred to start a new life a continent away than face possible excommunication and punishment.8
While Cotton delivered sermons in England and New England in which he claimed that the Puritans were living in the last days,9 he did not think that the aboriginals were related to the Lost Tribes. Like Increase Mather, a Puritan minister involved in the governing of the Massachusetts Bay colony, Cotton thought that the ancient Hebrews were somewhere in Asia. Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island colony, concurred. He even labelled the indigenous population: ‘the Gentiles of America’.10
Although believed to dwell much farther away, the Lost Tribes were still important for American Christians who expected the world to end shortly. As Cotton explained in one of his sermons on the book of Revelation, the prophecies in the Bible pointed to three great events that had to occur before Jesus’ return: a mass conversion of gentiles, a mass conversion of Jews and the re-emergence of the Lost Tribes. Based on the biblical calculations of English theologians such as Thomas Brightman and John Archer, Cotton anticipated that the conversion of the Jews would happen first – sometime in the middle of the 1650s.11
John Eliot was a member of Cotton’s congregation in Boston and he had listened to many of these sermons. Eliot, who was born in England around 1604 and came to New England in 1631, first worked at the church in Boston before taking a job as the pastor of the new church in Roxbury.12 Eliot agreed with Cotton that the Lost Tribes were in Asia, which had important implications because Eliot became a missionary to the aboriginals in 1646. Since the indigenous peoples were believed to be gentiles and not Jews, any major missionary activity was useless because they would not convert en masse until after the Jews did.
While Eliot was originally satisfied with bringing the gospel to the ‘indigenous gentiles’ on a small scale, his views would evolve significantly over the next 20 years. By 1650, Eliot had changed his mind. He became an outspoken proponent of the Lost Tribes theory, believing that his own missionary work was helping to bring about Jesus’ millennial kingdom. Within a decade, however, Eliot had returned to his original position. Then, in 1666, his interest in the Lost Tribes re-emerged and would remain with him for the rest of his life. In sum, Eliot flip-flopped on this issue multiple times between 1648 and 1666.
During this period, the Puritan missionary lived in a developing town in North America that was separated from mainstream European intellectual life by an ocean. So, in such circumstances, who or what was responsible for repeatedly influencing Eliot’s beliefs?

Antonio de Montezinos and the Conversos

To understand Eliot’s changing perspective, one must turn to a man with an incredible story whom he would never meet: Antonio de Montezinos, or Aaron Levi. Like Eliot, Montezinos was born around 1604. Unlike Eliot, Montezinos was an Iberian Converso.
Like other young Conversos, Montezinos fled Portugal for the West Indies, where he secretly returned to Judaism. According to Montezinos’ account, he came across an aboriginal named Franciscus somewhere in the Andes Mountains in 1639. Not concerned with Franciscus at first, Montezinos continued on his journey until he was arrested in Cartagena under suspicion of Judaising and locked away by the Inquisition for the next 18 months.13
Montezinos stated that, even though he was imprisoned, he held firm to his secret faith and at night quietly thanked God for not making him ‘a Barbarian, a Black-a-Moore, or an Indian’. But one night when he said, ‘Indian’, he became angry with himself and thought, ‘The Hebrews are Indians!’ Not sure what had come over him, Montezinos remembered Franciscus and the aboriginals in the Andes whom he had witnessed praying on a Friday evening. ‘Could they have been performing a Jewish service?’ he wondered.14
When Montezinos was released from prison in 1641, he claimed to track down Franciscus, identify himself as a Jew and ask Franciscus for help. Franciscus told Montezinos that he could only do so if the Converso promised to follow him wherever he may go. Montezinos agreed. The two men set out, hiking through the Peruvian jungles for a week, resting only on the Sabbath and eating only the maize that Franciscus carried on his back. Early one morning, they came to a river and, standing on the shore, Montezinos watched as a boat full of people with skin scorched by the sun, ornaments on their feet and linen cloths tied around their heads paddled across to see them. Upon reaching Montezinos, these mysterious people turned to him and, apparently speaking in Hebrew, they proclaimed, ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one’.15
Montezinos said that he and Franciscus arranged their camp and waited patiently as more of these people came across the river to see them. Every boatload, however, simply repeated the same things, including that their fathers were Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Israel. On the third day, Montezinos grew frustrated. He wanted to know more and tried to jump into their boat as it was leaving, but he almost drowned and the occupants warned him to stay away. Franciscus would inform him further, they said. When Montezinos asked Franciscus what they meant, Franciscus told him that these were the sons of Israel who were protected by God. Every time his people had tried to attack them, no one from their war party ever returned. Concluding in his own apocalyptic manner, Franciscus continued:
the God of those Children of Israel is the true God, that all that which is engraven upon their stones is true; that about the end of the World they shall be Lords of the world … and those ...

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