Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: June 20, 2019 07:47PM
BeenThereDunnThatExMo Wrote:
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> ...gleeful with Book of Mormon DNA results of the
> Amerinds showing absolutely NO Hebraic blood
> markers???
Fortuitously today, I have been working with a book (copyright 1990, Indiana University Press), which I have had for a long time (I don't remember how I got this book, but it has long been a part of my book collection): THE SAVAGE IN JUDAISM: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism, by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz.
Although I was looking for references to an entirely different subject [animal sacrifice], here is what I found:
[p.37] "...Sifting through the [European] writings on Judaism and heathenism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one finds striking similarities between the European conceptions of the Jew and the savage. ["savage" means, for these quoted words: Native Americans.]
"As a Christian anti-type, both were pictured as less than fully human, falling somewhere in the great chain of being between human and ape. The savage and the Jew presented similar problems to Christians. In what ways could these people be rescued from their idolatrous practices and converted to the truth faith? Not surprisingly, European writers relied on the same vocabulary and images to describe the religious practices of their Jewish contemporaries and the savages discovered in the New World....Judaism and savage religions both lacked any redeeming moral qualities.
"For these reasons, Europeans used similar language to describe Jewish and savage religious practices.
"The fact that Jews and savages were similarly stereotyped in the European imagination helped nourish the theory that the American Indians were originally of Jewish stock. Diego Duran, for example, concludes that the Indians must be descended from the Jews because of the similarities in their 'way of life, ceremonies, rites, and superstitions, omens, and hypocrisies.' Duran also writes that 'that which most forces me to believe that these Indians are of Hebrew lineage is the strange pertinacity they have in not casting away their idolatries and superstitions, living by them as did their ancestors, as David said in the 105th Psalm.'
"In a similar argument for their common ancestry, Garcia notes that both peoples were timid, liars, and prone to ceremony and idolatry."
With this [new to me] information, it is not surprising that, more than three centuries later, Joseph Smith made the "same" connection between Native Americans and Jews. This particular "fact" had been an established part of European academic thought since at least the 1500s.